The large generators used in hydro plants also tend to be multipole synchronous machines that run synchronously with the AC grid - eg., a 24-pole synchronous machine runs at a constant 300RPM for 60Hz generation, 250RPM for 50Hz generation.
If the turbine suddenly runs dry of water, the generator will suddenly become a motor and spin by itself using power from the AC grid. It won't run away, it'll just keep doing what it was doing.
(1) Grab fishing rod and tackle box. (2) Dig up a few worms from the garden (3) Walk to a nearby lake, 15-30 minute walk depending on where I go. (4) Fish. (5) Walk home.
If you need to burn 300 gallons of gas to go fishing, you're doing something seriously wrong.
Brewing your own beer/wine at home is also ridiculously easy, and you don't get taxed for that.
Plus it doesn't stink up your house or drive up your electrical bill, and you don't have to worry about your cat knocking over one of your HID lights and setting your house on fire.
(I'm not against homegrown, in fact it's better that people grow their own than buying it from organized crime, but damnit, make sure you have half a clue what you're doing...)
A NES could beat a Atari 2600 hands-down, but there's no way it was superior to the Commodore 64. Plus, us Commodore owners didn't have the Nintendo Seal of Qualitcrap, so we could play games that featured bloody decapitations.
This summarizes many years of my childhood:
(shoves Pitstop tape in 1530)
LOAD "*" PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
(goes and makes a sandwich) (sits in front of computer eating sandwich, waiting for game to load...)
Most radio transmitters are less power than that (usually in the 5KW-40KW range) but with antenna gain, you're sort-of right - ERP can reach 100KW.
FM radio antenna arrays tend to be mounted several hundred feet up a tower, and aimed towards the horizon. This means that the "closest" anyone could effectively be standing to the 100KW "source" would be thousands of feet.
At this distance the power is spread out over a very wide angle, so you'll only be exposed to nanowatts of power - not to mention that humans are relatively transparent to VHF so most of it will just pass through you. You'll get a substantially larger dose of RF from a cellphone transmitting ~10mW at 1800MHz two inches from your brain.
As for the article, I would *NOT* want to stand anywhere near this demonstration. Their coils are massive air-core inductors, driven with massive power at their resonance, which can produce massive EM fields that can seriously fuck you up. I hope these people wear full RF protective gear and field strength monitors. Wireless power is interesting, but this type of research is dangerous and well outside what's practical for real-world use. Not to mention inefficient.
(for the record, I'm an EE working in the broadcast industry.)
I wouldn't want any song I own placed in this movie...
It's not up to you.
I wouldn't want to set such a precedent against fair use. If a few horrible movies using 15-second clips of good songs is the price we have to pay for (slightly) saner copyright...
Don't worry, I'm not attacking fair use at all. I'm glad I'm able to copy a CD I own onto 10 different devices that I own, and that I can rickroll someone without getting sued because some 80's icon somehow lost a record sale because of it.
I'm just saying that if you see this movie, you'll certainly think to yourself that there should be exceptions to fair use. "All fair use of this music is allowed, except in the context of Expelled and gay porn. Thanks."
...well, I must admit I only partially saw it. It's such an angry, pointless, biased rant that it's almost impossible to watch the whole way through.
It's 1.5 hours of trashing the theory of evolution with well-thought-out reasons like "it's only a theory" and "certainly evolution, not a mustached psychopath, was responsible for the Holocaust".
I wouldn't want any song I own placed in this movie...
I bet it works better than my Logitech Harmony remote. Which decides at random to turn the TV off whenever I try to adjust the volume on my receiver, because it spontaneously thinks "wow, you're watching TV and trying to adjust the volume, and my brain-dead memory thinks the TV may be off, so lets turn it on!"
Though, I can see my girlfriend throwing Woz's unlabeled remote out the window for some reason.
What the world needs, IMO, is a good bidirectional IR or RF control standard where remotes can query capabilities and status from TV sets, DVR's, media players, receivers and whatnot. With this in place, I'm sure someone can make a universal remote that doesn't suck.
Convergence is nice except everyone seems to botch the implementation.
My Sony Ericsson W300i phone/camera/"Walkman" has quite possibly the worst user interface for playing MP3's that I've ever worked with. The 640x480 camera takes horrible pictures even in bright light outdoors, and indoors, it's worthless. It has an organizer, calendar, notepad, task list, etc. but I've never used any of that stuff. I've never run into the need to schedule a meeting on my cellphone, and entering a grocery list or something with a telephone keypad takes way too long. They've even managed to make a calculator hard to use.
But, the alarm clock is a handy feature and it actually works. I use it on the road, since 4 out of 5 hotel alarm clocks don't work and 4 out of 5 front desk staff don't remember that you asked for a wake-up call.
So, I'd like to thank Sony Ericsson for creating a fabulous convergence of cellphone and portable alarm clock.
They don't have better energy density. 160Wh/Kg for LiOn beats the pants off anything in production by Maxwell Technologies. EEStor claims ridiculously high energy density in their ultracapacitors, but I'm skeptical for now until their technology leaves the lab.
Another thing is, batteries tend to keep their voltage as you discharge them - a LiOn cell may drop from 4 to 3.5V from full to 10% charge. Capacitor voltage is set by E=0.5CV^2 - an ultracapacitor charged to 2V will be down to 1V at 25% charge.
Pulling "usable" energy (reasonably constant voltage) out of ultracapacitors requires wide-input-range switching power supplies. These require larger inductors, bigger transformer cores, etc. and are less efficient than narrow range SMPS. The charging circuitry for ultracapacitors will also be less efficient than LiOn charging circuitry for the same reason.
Unless you totally botch the implementation, I guarantee it would be cheaper.
Think - What's the cheapest x86 mass-market processor you can get? Secondly, what extra hardware (chipsets, clock generators, multiple power supplies, DIMM's, etc) do you have to also use to make this "mass-market" processor work? Thirdly, how much power is all of that going to suck?
A 70's computer is unbelievably simple. A 6502 has 4000 transistors and a single +5V core voltage, compare that to a Celeron. It doesn't require any cooling. To handle interfacing to RAM/ROM, the only "north bridge" required is a bit of 74xx logic to do address decoding.
Implementing all of this in an ASIC is laughable - modern microcontrollers implement many more RAM/ROM/peripherals/etc than a equivalent 6502 system, and you can get them for a couple of dollars. Plus, they draw milliwatts of power!
Overall, cloning an Apple II isn't a bad idea. About the only "modern convenience" I'd add to such a computer would be a SD card slot for moving files around. As much as I love retro computing, 5-1/4" floppies can stay dead.
I priced touchscreen LCD's and embedded motherboards, drew designs for metal boxes and a power supply to run the thing, thought about how I was going to set the thing up in the car without destroying the interior, then got frustrated with it all and gave up.
Now I have also gigs of music at my fingertips, but with much less fucking around.
You can get these old things for quite a bit cheaper than you can build a CarPC - mine cost $200 from a guy on empegbbs.com, plus $50 for a 80 gig laptop hard drive.
It doesn't do GPS, album art, drive-by wifi or anything fancy like that. It plays music and that's pretty much all it does, but it does that well.
There are a few pain-in-the-ass things about it - the "fastest" way to get music on it is 10BaseT ethernet, it doesn't have a built-in amplifier, and it only fits in cars which accept an aftermarket radio in one of those bendy metal DIN cage things. But if you don't mind those things, it's a pretty sweet solution for having music in your car.
I drive a Volkswagen, and have no problems sleeping at night despite the fact that VW was basically started at Hitler's orders, and was a big supplier to the Nazi war machine.
If anything, using ReiserFS means that the oxygen used by this douchebag isn't a total waste.
I've still got mine on a shelf, I haven't used the thing in years. Unfortunately no PC I currently own has a parallel port, and even if one did I'm sure the software probably doesn't even work on Windows XP. I'll load up an old craptop with Windows 98 and give it a go shortly.
Another Rio product that I still own, use and love is my Empeg Car player. It's since been upgraded from its factory 4GB up to 120GB of hard disk space - more than enough to hold my entire CD collection in FLAC and make it available at my fingertips. And yes, it runs Linux.:D
I'm 28 now, and my first recollection of video gaming (and one of the first recollections of my entire life!) is playing this game on my dad's IBM PCjr. I was probably 3-4 years old at the time.
I'll forever remember that dreadful loopy 'downward spiral' sound effect that happened when you hit a wall. Ugh.
Depends on the CD you're listening to.
In your vanilla modern CD, they record about 60 different tracks in the studio - every instrument is individually recorded, every singer is recorded individually. The drums are recorded with several mikes, and guitar rigs are recorded with a mic or more per amp so that the sound can be "tweaked" by scaling levels on the mixing board.
When there's not something active on the track, they mute it - they have to do this because the background noise of 60 tracks summed together is a hell of a racket. The result, however, is that CD's are missing background noise. Ironic, since the Spector "wall of sound" method of mastering that everyone follows is supposed to include a bit of everything so your ear doesn't notice anything missing.
But lots of CD's don't do this.
One of my favorite CD's is the Stevie Ray Vaughan "Soul to Soul" CD. The track "Little Wing / Third Stone from the Sun" is recorded with all instruments playing at the same time and no noise gating. You can hear the 60Hz buzz from SRV's amps the whole way through the track.
You can hear the band occasionally getting out of sync (drums being hit slightly too late, a couple wrong bass notes, etc) and you can hear other clatter throughout the track. And it's uncompressed - the quiet periods are quiet, the loud periods are loud, and the song goes all over the place between the two. If you're listening to the song in your car, you'll probably find yourself playing with your stereo's volume knob throughout the song - it's something to listen to in a chair on a home stereo. It's a great song, and a great recording of the song.
And taking this to the extreme, if you like background noise you must listen to "Jimi by Himself" - which is just Jimi Hendrix singing and playing guitar in a hotel room. It's noisy, the quality's terrible, and at one point the phone starts ringing in the background when he's playing. Despite all that, it's a very good, listenable, enjoyable recording.
There is absolutely nothing in this patent which is related to hard drives in any specific way. And there's nothing that hard drive makers themselves have uniquely done to violate this patent themselves. This patent applies to *ANY* semiconductor chip.
What they've patented here is part of the chip packaging process. When chips are packaged, the silicon die is placed in the center of the IC package, and wires are run between the individual leads on the outside of the package to bond areas on the silicon. These wires are welded at each end by ultrasonic welding using a tiny vibrating probe.
Now if you've got a probe flying around doing all this welding work, there's a slight chance it might accumulate some static electricity - and since the probe is touching the silicon die directly it might fry the chip you're trying to pacakge. This isn't a good thing so you ground the probe. But that's not a good thing either; if the chip itself becomes static charged, touching it with a grounded probe might fry it too. So you insert a bit of resistance to limit the discharge current - this is why static wrist straps and static mats, the ESD soldering iron on my desk and so forth have a certain amount of resistance.
Their patent is "make that resistance in the chip bonding probe out of ceramic". Which I suppose has some advantages. *shrug*
So the actual patent violation works like this:
- A semiconductor company (eg. ST, TSMC) fabricates semiconductor chips for hard drives. - A packaging company (eg. Amkor) takes these chips, cuts them off wafers and packages them. Perhaps they use a ceramic bond probe to do this, violating the patent. - The semiconductor company gets the chips back and sells them to the hard drive maker. - The hard drive manufacturer then builds hard drives out of these chips.
And somehow the hard drive manufacturer is at fault here, and hard drive imports suddenly have to stop. They don't even directly use the patent - I'm sure they don't give two shits about how the wires are bonded in the chips they use and until know they probably knew nothing about it. If the chip reads stuff off the heads and sends it out the (S)ATA interface, what else do they care about?
(But of course, I'm sure by some perverted interpretation of the law, hard drive makers are using the patent and they're liable...)
Of course, I'm next in line to get sued. I've sold electronics kits on the internet, and the last one used an ATMega48 microcontroller. If that chip was wirebonded in violation of this patent then I'm obviously the one at fault (not Atmel or whoever) and I gotta pay up! And after that, my friend who drives a cab part time will get sued for patent violation - his car's engine computer could contain a chip that was was wirebonded the same way, and he's making money driving the car and "using" the patent, right?
I read the patents.
There is absolutely nothing in this patent which is related to hard drives in any specific way. And there's nothing that hard drive makers themselves have uniquely done to violate this patent themselves. This patent applies to *ANY* semiconductor chip.
What they've patented here is part of the chip packaging process. When chips are packaged, the silicon die is placed in the center of the IC package, and wires are run between the individual leads on the outside of the package to bond areas on the silicon. These wires are welded at each end by ultrasonic welding using a tiny vibrating probe.
Now if you've got a probe flying around doing all this welding work, there's a slight chance it might accumulate some static electricity - and since the probe is touching the silicon die directly it might fry the chip you're trying to pacakge. This isn't a good thing so you ground the probe. But that's not a good thing either; if the chip itself becomes static charged, touching it with a grounded probe might fry it too. So you insert a bit of resistance to limit the discharge current - this is why static wrist straps and static mats, the ESD soldering iron on my desk and so forth have a certain amount of resistance.
Their patent is "make that resistance in the chip bonding probe out of ceramic". Which I suppose has some advantages. *shrug*
So the actual patent violation works like this:
- A semiconductor company (eg. ST, TSMC) fabricates semiconductor chips for hard drives.
- A packaging company (eg. Amkor) takes these chips, cuts them off wafers and packages them. Perhaps they use a ceramic bond probe to do this, violating the patent.
- The semiconductor company gets the chips back and sells them to the hard drive maker.
- The hard drive manufacturer then builds hard drives out of these chips.
And somehow the hard drive manufacturer is at fault here, and hard drive imports suddenly have to stop. They don't even directly use the patent - I'm sure they don't give two shits about how the wires are bonded in the chips they use and until know they probably knew nothing about it. If the chip reads stuff off the heads and sends it out the (S)ATA interface, what else do they care about?
(But of course, I'm sure by some perverted interpretation of the law, hard drive makers are using the patent and they're liable...)
Of course, I'm next in line to get sued. I've sold electronics kits on the internet, and the last one used an ATMega48 microcontroller. If that chip was wirebonded in violation of this patent then I'm obviously the one at fault (not Atmel or whoever) and I gotta pay up! And after that, my friend who drives a cab part time will get sued for patent violation - his car's engine computer could contain a chip that was was wirebonded the same way, and he's making money driving the car and "using" the patent, right?
fuck...
Having actually swept set of Bose 901's with Audio Precision gear and a calibrated mic, I can tell you that they've got one of the flattest responses I've seen. (Assuming of course you use the big equalizer box that comes with it...)
Problem is people nowadays have become accustomed to "XLOUDPHATDXBASS". People listen to portable radios with the "loudness" switch set to the on position. They listen to radio stations which heavily process their audio with excessive bass and treble, with their stereos which have the bass and treble settings maxed out. They listen to their MP3 player with the "Rock" EQ preset. And they buy home theater speaker systems with 2" cube speakers that only produce 200+ Hz and combine them with a subwoofer that's EQ'ed +10dB with the low pass set at 75Hz.
So now when people listen to a set of decent speakers and hear that "midrange" stuff they haven't heard in years, they think "WTF? oh gnoes! they stoled mah hiez and lowez!" Listen to a good set of studio monitors and you're in for the same disappointment.
That being said, I'm not 100% defending Bose here. "No highs, no lows" is inaccurate. Charging entirely too much money for stuff that isn't *that* great, now that's factual.
I actually found an old exercise book in a closet, from back when I played with that thing when I was 8 years old. I can't believe I was inventing circuits like this:
Two transistor oscillator -> third transistor amplifier to boost output to CMOS capable level -> 4000 series JK flip-flop -> two LEDs from complimentary outputs. Got a decision to make? push the button, the LEDs would toggle back and forth at ~1KHz. Let go of the button, you've got a decision. The following circuit in the notebook used the second half of the JK for two possible outcomes.
I also remember the thing hitting a lot of different subject areas - audio amplifiers (microphone in, speaker out), AM radio, and something using a photocell where the kit would let out a horrible shriek when there was no ambient light which I likely hid in my parents' bedroom. Good times.
Sure enough, I'm an electrical engineer now. I blame that kit:D
When I went to high school, we played with a Lego 'Dacta' system. It seems more than sufficient - I have fond memories of a 'gun' we made that would only shoot blue pieces, and only a distance of about a foot.;) I can't see why a Mindstorms kit isn't good enough for education.
But anyway, if you're doing microcontroller level education... Parallax BASIC STAMP.
They're ridiculously expensive for their capabilities, they have nowhere near as much I/O as your standard AVR or PIC chip... but they're probably the best thing on earth for educational use because they're ridiculously easy to work with and program. You can easily explain BASIC to kids on a chalkboard. "int main(void)", not so much. Assembly code? completely forget it.
I still think that MS should send a patch out Windows Update, which throws up a warning message up when a machine starts hammering a bunch of stuff out to port 25's.
"Software running on your machine is spamming half the fucking internet. Are you deliberately doing this, or are you confused why this window just popped up? Please click one of the following: [Yes, I'm sending this picture to everyone i know! SO CUET! ITZ A LAUGHING KITTAH! ROFL!] [What the fuck?]"
Of course, 10 seconds later the spamware authors will have figured a way to click the [OMG DOGGEH!] button automatically... or more likely, they've got Windows Update disabled.
Slashdot Mirror
"How does a newfie get his wife pregnant?" ... ...
"how?
"And you thought WE were stupid?"
The large generators used in hydro plants also tend to be multipole synchronous machines that run synchronously with the AC grid - eg., a 24-pole synchronous machine runs at a constant 300RPM for 60Hz generation, 250RPM for 50Hz generation.
If the turbine suddenly runs dry of water, the generator will suddenly become a motor and spin by itself using power from the AC grid. It won't run away, it'll just keep doing what it was doing.
Here's how I fish:
(1) Grab fishing rod and tackle box.
(2) Dig up a few worms from the garden
(3) Walk to a nearby lake, 15-30 minute walk depending on where I go.
(4) Fish.
(5) Walk home.
If you need to burn 300 gallons of gas to go fishing, you're doing something seriously wrong.
*gasp*
ahahahahahaaa!! ...
*sigh*
My PS3 has a paltry 40GB SATA drive in it. I'd be more than willing to get a "used" 120/160GB drive off someone and upgrade my system.
Damnit, then I have to figure out what to do with the 40GB drive...
Brewing your own beer/wine at home is also ridiculously easy, and you don't get taxed for that.
Plus it doesn't stink up your house or drive up your electrical bill, and you don't have to worry about your cat knocking over one of your HID lights and setting your house on fire.
(I'm not against homegrown, in fact it's better that people grow their own than buying it from organized crime, but damnit, make sure you have half a clue what you're doing...)
A NES could beat a Atari 2600 hands-down, but there's no way it was superior to the Commodore 64. Plus, us Commodore owners didn't have the Nintendo Seal of Qualitcrap, so we could play games that featured bloody decapitations.
This summarizes many years of my childhood:
(shoves Pitstop tape in 1530)
LOAD "*"
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
(goes and makes a sandwich)
(sits in front of computer eating sandwich, waiting for game to load...)
LOAD ERROR
"fuck!"
(gets yelled at by mom for cursing)
Most radio transmitters are less power than that (usually in the 5KW-40KW range) but with antenna gain, you're sort-of right - ERP can reach 100KW.
FM radio antenna arrays tend to be mounted several hundred feet up a tower, and aimed towards the horizon. This means that the "closest" anyone could effectively be standing to the 100KW "source" would be thousands of feet.
At this distance the power is spread out over a very wide angle, so you'll only be exposed to nanowatts of power - not to mention that humans are relatively transparent to VHF so most of it will just pass through you. You'll get a substantially larger dose of RF from a cellphone transmitting ~10mW at 1800MHz two inches from your brain.
As for the article, I would *NOT* want to stand anywhere near this demonstration. Their coils are massive air-core inductors, driven with massive power at their resonance, which can produce massive EM fields that can seriously fuck you up. I hope these people wear full RF protective gear and field strength monitors. Wireless power is interesting, but this type of research is dangerous and well outside what's practical for real-world use. Not to mention inefficient.
(for the record, I'm an EE working in the broadcast industry.)
I wouldn't want any song I own placed in this movie...
It's not up to you.
I wouldn't want to set such a precedent against fair use. If a few horrible movies using 15-second clips of good songs is the price we have to pay for (slightly) saner copyright...
Don't worry, I'm not attacking fair use at all. I'm glad I'm able to copy a CD I own onto 10 different devices that I own, and that I can rickroll someone without getting sued because some 80's icon somehow lost a record sale because of it.
I'm just saying that if you see this movie, you'll certainly think to yourself that there should be exceptions to fair use. "All fair use of this music is allowed, except in the context of Expelled and gay porn. Thanks."
...well, I must admit I only partially saw it. It's such an angry, pointless, biased rant that it's almost impossible to watch the whole way through.
It's 1.5 hours of trashing the theory of evolution with well-thought-out reasons like "it's only a theory" and "certainly evolution, not a mustached psychopath, was responsible for the Holocaust".
I wouldn't want any song I own placed in this movie...
I bet it works better than my Logitech Harmony remote. Which decides at random to turn the TV off whenever I try to adjust the volume on my receiver, because it spontaneously thinks "wow, you're watching TV and trying to adjust the volume, and my brain-dead memory thinks the TV may be off, so lets turn it on!"
Though, I can see my girlfriend throwing Woz's unlabeled remote out the window for some reason.
What the world needs, IMO, is a good bidirectional IR or RF control standard where remotes can query capabilities and status from TV sets, DVR's, media players, receivers and whatnot. With this in place, I'm sure someone can make a universal remote that doesn't suck.
Convergence is nice except everyone seems to botch the implementation.
My Sony Ericsson W300i phone/camera/"Walkman" has quite possibly the worst user interface for playing MP3's that I've ever worked with. The 640x480 camera takes horrible pictures even in bright light outdoors, and indoors, it's worthless. It has an organizer, calendar, notepad, task list, etc. but I've never used any of that stuff. I've never run into the need to schedule a meeting on my cellphone, and entering a grocery list or something with a telephone keypad takes way too long. They've even managed to make a calculator hard to use.
But, the alarm clock is a handy feature and it actually works. I use it on the road, since 4 out of 5 hotel alarm clocks don't work and 4 out of 5 front desk staff don't remember that you asked for a wake-up call.
So, I'd like to thank Sony Ericsson for creating a fabulous convergence of cellphone and portable alarm clock.
For MP3's, I'll hang onto my Sansa.
They don't have better energy density. 160Wh/Kg for LiOn beats the pants off anything in production by Maxwell Technologies. EEStor claims ridiculously high energy density in their ultracapacitors, but I'm skeptical for now until their technology leaves the lab.
Another thing is, batteries tend to keep their voltage as you discharge them - a LiOn cell may drop from 4 to 3.5V from full to 10% charge. Capacitor voltage is set by E=0.5CV^2 - an ultracapacitor charged to 2V will be down to 1V at 25% charge.
Pulling "usable" energy (reasonably constant voltage) out of ultracapacitors requires wide-input-range switching power supplies. These require larger inductors, bigger transformer cores, etc. and are less efficient than narrow range SMPS. The charging circuitry for ultracapacitors will also be less efficient than LiOn charging circuitry for the same reason.
Unless you totally botch the implementation, I guarantee it would be cheaper.
Think - What's the cheapest x86 mass-market processor you can get? Secondly, what extra hardware (chipsets, clock generators, multiple power supplies, DIMM's, etc) do you have to also use to make this "mass-market" processor work? Thirdly, how much power is all of that going to suck?
A 70's computer is unbelievably simple. A 6502 has 4000 transistors and a single +5V core voltage, compare that to a Celeron. It doesn't require any cooling. To handle interfacing to RAM/ROM, the only "north bridge" required is a bit of 74xx logic to do address decoding.
Implementing all of this in an ASIC is laughable - modern microcontrollers implement many more RAM/ROM/peripherals/etc than a equivalent 6502 system, and you can get them for a couple of dollars. Plus, they draw milliwatts of power!
Overall, cloning an Apple II isn't a bad idea. About the only "modern convenience" I'd add to such a computer would be a SD card slot for moving files around. As much as I love retro computing, 5-1/4" floppies can stay dead.
I thought about building a CarPC a few years ago.
I priced touchscreen LCD's and embedded motherboards, drew designs for metal boxes and a power supply to run the thing, thought about how I was going to set the thing up in the car without destroying the interior, then got frustrated with it all and gave up.
Now I have also gigs of music at my fingertips, but with much less fucking around.
http://www.riocar.org/
You can get these old things for quite a bit cheaper than you can build a CarPC - mine cost $200 from a guy on empegbbs.com, plus $50 for a 80 gig laptop hard drive.
It doesn't do GPS, album art, drive-by wifi or anything fancy like that. It plays music and that's pretty much all it does, but it does that well.
There are a few pain-in-the-ass things about it - the "fastest" way to get music on it is 10BaseT ethernet, it doesn't have a built-in amplifier, and it only fits in cars which accept an aftermarket radio in one of those bendy metal DIN cage things. But if you don't mind those things, it's a pretty sweet solution for having music in your car.
And yes, it runs Linux.
Meh.
I drive a Volkswagen, and have no problems sleeping at night despite the fact that VW was basically started at Hitler's orders, and was a big supplier to the Nazi war machine.
If anything, using ReiserFS means that the oxygen used by this douchebag isn't a total waste.
(That being said, I use ext2.)
I've still got mine on a shelf, I haven't used the thing in years. Unfortunately no PC I currently own has a parallel port, and even if one did I'm sure the software probably doesn't even work on Windows XP. I'll load up an old craptop with Windows 98 and give it a go shortly.
:D
Another Rio product that I still own, use and love is my Empeg Car player. It's since been upgraded from its factory 4GB up to 120GB of hard disk space - more than enough to hold my entire CD collection in FLAC and make it available at my fingertips. And yes, it runs Linux.
I'm 28 now, and my first recollection of video gaming (and one of the first recollections of my entire life!) is playing this game on my dad's IBM PCjr. I was probably 3-4 years old at the time.
I'll forever remember that dreadful loopy 'downward spiral' sound effect that happened when you hit a wall. Ugh.
Depends on the CD you're listening to. In your vanilla modern CD, they record about 60 different tracks in the studio - every instrument is individually recorded, every singer is recorded individually. The drums are recorded with several mikes, and guitar rigs are recorded with a mic or more per amp so that the sound can be "tweaked" by scaling levels on the mixing board. When there's not something active on the track, they mute it - they have to do this because the background noise of 60 tracks summed together is a hell of a racket. The result, however, is that CD's are missing background noise. Ironic, since the Spector "wall of sound" method of mastering that everyone follows is supposed to include a bit of everything so your ear doesn't notice anything missing. But lots of CD's don't do this. One of my favorite CD's is the Stevie Ray Vaughan "Soul to Soul" CD. The track "Little Wing / Third Stone from the Sun" is recorded with all instruments playing at the same time and no noise gating. You can hear the 60Hz buzz from SRV's amps the whole way through the track. You can hear the band occasionally getting out of sync (drums being hit slightly too late, a couple wrong bass notes, etc) and you can hear other clatter throughout the track. And it's uncompressed - the quiet periods are quiet, the loud periods are loud, and the song goes all over the place between the two. If you're listening to the song in your car, you'll probably find yourself playing with your stereo's volume knob throughout the song - it's something to listen to in a chair on a home stereo. It's a great song, and a great recording of the song. And taking this to the extreme, if you like background noise you must listen to "Jimi by Himself" - which is just Jimi Hendrix singing and playing guitar in a hotel room. It's noisy, the quality's terrible, and at one point the phone starts ringing in the background when he's playing. Despite all that, it's a very good, listenable, enjoyable recording.
I read the patents.
There is absolutely nothing in this patent which is related to hard drives in any specific way. And there's nothing that hard drive makers themselves have uniquely done to violate this patent themselves. This patent applies to *ANY* semiconductor chip.
What they've patented here is part of the chip packaging process. When chips are packaged, the silicon die is placed in the center of the IC package, and wires are run between the individual leads on the outside of the package to bond areas on the silicon. These wires are welded at each end by ultrasonic welding using a tiny vibrating probe.
Now if you've got a probe flying around doing all this welding work, there's a slight chance it might accumulate some static electricity - and since the probe is touching the silicon die directly it might fry the chip you're trying to pacakge. This isn't a good thing so you ground the probe. But that's not a good thing either; if the chip itself becomes static charged, touching it with a grounded probe might fry it too. So you insert a bit of resistance to limit the discharge current - this is why static wrist straps and static mats, the ESD soldering iron on my desk and so forth have a certain amount of resistance.
Their patent is "make that resistance in the chip bonding probe out of ceramic". Which I suppose has some advantages. *shrug*
So the actual patent violation works like this:
- A semiconductor company (eg. ST, TSMC) fabricates semiconductor chips for hard drives.
- A packaging company (eg. Amkor) takes these chips, cuts them off wafers and packages them. Perhaps they use a ceramic bond probe to do this, violating the patent.
- The semiconductor company gets the chips back and sells them to the hard drive maker.
- The hard drive manufacturer then builds hard drives out of these chips.
And somehow the hard drive manufacturer is at fault here, and hard drive imports suddenly have to stop. They don't even directly use the patent - I'm sure they don't give two shits about how the wires are bonded in the chips they use and until know they probably knew nothing about it. If the chip reads stuff off the heads and sends it out the (S)ATA interface, what else do they care about?
(But of course, I'm sure by some perverted interpretation of the law, hard drive makers are using the patent and they're liable...)
Of course, I'm next in line to get sued. I've sold electronics kits on the internet, and the last one used an ATMega48 microcontroller. If that chip was wirebonded in violation of this patent then I'm obviously the one at fault (not Atmel or whoever) and I gotta pay up! And after that, my friend who drives a cab part time will get sued for patent violation - his car's engine computer could contain a chip that was was wirebonded the same way, and he's making money driving the car and "using" the patent, right?
fuck...
I read the patents. There is absolutely nothing in this patent which is related to hard drives in any specific way. And there's nothing that hard drive makers themselves have uniquely done to violate this patent themselves. This patent applies to *ANY* semiconductor chip. What they've patented here is part of the chip packaging process. When chips are packaged, the silicon die is placed in the center of the IC package, and wires are run between the individual leads on the outside of the package to bond areas on the silicon. These wires are welded at each end by ultrasonic welding using a tiny vibrating probe. Now if you've got a probe flying around doing all this welding work, there's a slight chance it might accumulate some static electricity - and since the probe is touching the silicon die directly it might fry the chip you're trying to pacakge. This isn't a good thing so you ground the probe. But that's not a good thing either; if the chip itself becomes static charged, touching it with a grounded probe might fry it too. So you insert a bit of resistance to limit the discharge current - this is why static wrist straps and static mats, the ESD soldering iron on my desk and so forth have a certain amount of resistance. Their patent is "make that resistance in the chip bonding probe out of ceramic". Which I suppose has some advantages. *shrug* So the actual patent violation works like this: - A semiconductor company (eg. ST, TSMC) fabricates semiconductor chips for hard drives. - A packaging company (eg. Amkor) takes these chips, cuts them off wafers and packages them. Perhaps they use a ceramic bond probe to do this, violating the patent. - The semiconductor company gets the chips back and sells them to the hard drive maker. - The hard drive manufacturer then builds hard drives out of these chips. And somehow the hard drive manufacturer is at fault here, and hard drive imports suddenly have to stop. They don't even directly use the patent - I'm sure they don't give two shits about how the wires are bonded in the chips they use and until know they probably knew nothing about it. If the chip reads stuff off the heads and sends it out the (S)ATA interface, what else do they care about? (But of course, I'm sure by some perverted interpretation of the law, hard drive makers are using the patent and they're liable...) Of course, I'm next in line to get sued. I've sold electronics kits on the internet, and the last one used an ATMega48 microcontroller. If that chip was wirebonded in violation of this patent then I'm obviously the one at fault (not Atmel or whoever) and I gotta pay up! And after that, my friend who drives a cab part time will get sued for patent violation - his car's engine computer could contain a chip that was was wirebonded the same way, and he's making money driving the car and "using" the patent, right? fuck...
"No highs, no lows..."
Having actually swept set of Bose 901's with Audio Precision gear and a calibrated mic, I can tell you that they've got one of the flattest responses I've seen. (Assuming of course you use the big equalizer box that comes with it...)
Problem is people nowadays have become accustomed to "XLOUDPHATDXBASS". People listen to portable radios with the "loudness" switch set to the on position. They listen to radio stations which heavily process their audio with excessive bass and treble, with their stereos which have the bass and treble settings maxed out. They listen to their MP3 player with the "Rock" EQ preset. And they buy home theater speaker systems with 2" cube speakers that only produce 200+ Hz and combine them with a subwoofer that's EQ'ed +10dB with the low pass set at 75Hz.
So now when people listen to a set of decent speakers and hear that "midrange" stuff they haven't heard in years, they think "WTF? oh gnoes! they stoled mah hiez and lowez!" Listen to a good set of studio monitors and you're in for the same disappointment.
That being said, I'm not 100% defending Bose here. "No highs, no lows" is inaccurate. Charging entirely too much money for stuff that isn't *that* great, now that's factual.
Nice! I grew up on the same electronics kit.
:D
I actually found an old exercise book in a closet, from back when I played with that thing when I was 8 years old. I can't believe I was inventing circuits like this:
Two transistor oscillator -> third transistor amplifier to boost output to CMOS capable level -> 4000 series JK flip-flop -> two LEDs from complimentary outputs. Got a decision to make? push the button, the LEDs would toggle back and forth at ~1KHz. Let go of the button, you've got a decision. The following circuit in the notebook used the second half of the JK for two possible outcomes.
I also remember the thing hitting a lot of different subject areas - audio amplifiers (microphone in, speaker out), AM radio, and something using a photocell where the kit would let out a horrible shriek when there was no ambient light which I likely hid in my parents' bedroom. Good times.
Sure enough, I'm an electrical engineer now. I blame that kit
When I went to high school, we played with a Lego 'Dacta' system. It seems more than sufficient - I have fond memories of a 'gun' we made that would only shoot blue pieces, and only a distance of about a foot. ;) I can't see why a Mindstorms kit isn't good enough for education.
But anyway, if you're doing microcontroller level education... Parallax BASIC STAMP.
They're ridiculously expensive for their capabilities, they have nowhere near as much I/O as your standard AVR or PIC chip... but they're probably the best thing on earth for educational use because they're ridiculously easy to work with and program. You can easily explain BASIC to kids on a chalkboard. "int main(void)", not so much. Assembly code? completely forget it.
I still think that MS should send a patch out Windows Update, which throws up a warning message up when a machine starts hammering a bunch of stuff out to port 25's.
"Software running on your machine is spamming half the fucking internet. Are you deliberately doing this, or are you confused why this window just popped up? Please click one of the following: [Yes, I'm sending this picture to everyone i know! SO CUET! ITZ A LAUGHING KITTAH! ROFL!] [What the fuck?]"
Of course, 10 seconds later the spamware authors will have figured a way to click the [OMG DOGGEH!] button automatically... or more likely, they've got Windows Update disabled.