Our raytracing engine is the finest available! For all your sphere-on-chessboard game needs! If your game is going to involve spheres, chessboards, reflective spheres, or possibly spheres floating on water - raytracing is the way to go!
In the US the residential pole transformers are 240VAC center tapped. For 120 volt outlets neutral is referenced to the center tap of the transformer, with a 3rd socket direct to earth ground for safety. For 240 volt operation hot is taken to be one side of the center tap, and neutral the other side, and since the voltages are out of phase on opposite sides of a center-tapped transformer you have 240 volts phase-to-phase.
I wish I could find a SMART utility that supported diagnostics on drives on a RAID controller, as it is now with all the tools I'm aware of I have to backup the array and then disable RAID from the BIOS to get the software to acknowledge the drives.
And said war crimes were promptly allowed to be forgotten by just about everyone except the parties involved, because it was politically expedient to do so. Japan can rewrite its history books as much as it pleases, and Amnesty International, the ADL, SPLC, and Human Rights Watch will stay as silent as a bunch of stone heads on Easter Island.
I think much of it has to do with psychology. In the US we can rationalize attacks by people like the Unabomber, or school shootings, as "Well, this is an isolated incident by a fellow American who has lost it." Perhaps similarly in the UK (I'm just guessing here so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) there was a feeling that while the IRA attacks were devastating, they were done by "fellow Europeans" who believed in a cause so strongly that it led them 'round the bend. The same argument could be applied to the Aym Shinryoko cultists responsible for the subway attack.
But when you present to people the concept of Islamic terrorism - the concept of an entirely alien group of people with whom you supposedly cannot rationalize with, identify with, or even attempt to reason with, then it brings in the psychology of xenophobia and "the other" which starts people thinking that drastic measures have to be taken.
That hospital experience doesn't sound much different than the last one I had _with_ health insurance, the differences being that there were more than 2 other people in the queue, and I suppose the people at County-USC saw a doctor at some point after their 10 hour wait.
Government run healthcare systems seem to work well enough for Britain, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Japan, Taiwan Switzerland, et cetera, et cetera. Government run power is why France gets 80% of its energy from nuclear plants and can tell the Middle East to get bent. Do you think a private corporation is ever going to invest in a nuclear plant, given the length of construction time and delay of ROI, when you can slap up a coal-burner and start raking in the bucks immediately? And airlines? FedGov has been bailing them out for decades - they might as well be nationalized, it's not like they could get any worse.
As an American I've come to the conclusion that the reason that these socialized programs work in other countries and not in the U.S. is not due to some fundamental problem of ideology, but that a majority of the American _people_ in both the public and private sector are myopic, mentally defective and terminally incompetent.
I'd like to add that I'm not disagreeing that the Shuttle is a stupendously expensive, overly complex system. What I'm saying is that the blame for this can be laid squarely upon the federal government (particularly the DOD) for the requirements they had. I'm sure there was a time in the early 80s when to the military the Shuttle was the greatest thing ever; it should have been at least considering a great deal of its requirements were set in stone by the DOD. The luster soon faded when the military realized that the STS would never have the kind of turnaround time that they wanted. When you have requirements laid down by Homer Simpson, for example, an engineer is going to build the Homer Simpson car. Whether it turns out to be good by anyone else's standards is another story.
Engineering isn't about solving a problem with the least amount of resources, it's about meeting your design requirements. Saying that you want to do this while using the least amount of resources is pretty much a tautology - that's why budgets exist. Comparing the engineering of the Soyuz capsule to the engineering of the Shuttle is the the definition of apples to oranges; that "they go into space and they carry some number of people" is about the only functional description that the two systems share.
"Sometimes" because simple and robust are relative terms. A rock is simple and robust, you could even use it to hammer a nail in a pinch. A hammer is a little more complex and vastly more efficient. A nailgun is much more complex than a hammer, but you can't put 50 nails a minute into a roof with a hammer. When you then start trying to ask questions like "Is a nailgun better than a hammer" or "Is the Soyuz better than the Space Shuttle" without any qualifications the questions are meaningless.
The shuttle accidents, however, were the results of fundamental design blunders which cannot be fixed (strapping a manned vehicle with no escape system below a cryogenic ice-spewing tank and next to uncontrollable multi-ton firework sticks with seams).
I think many Shuttle engineers would disagree that the Shuttle's _design_ was fundamentally flawed - the Shuttle was built to fit the design requirements that were handed down to NASA from FedGov and particularly the DOD; that is to build a reusable manned launch vehicle that has a 1000 nautical mile landing crossrange and can take a 15'x80' 60,000 pound payload to LEO. When you have those design requirements and start looking at the problem with the late 1960s early 1970s tech you have available, whatever way you start out you pretty much converge on a design of a vehicle that is essentially the STS. You could try putting the liquid fuel onboard the orbiter, but that's going to kill your payload size and weight. You could try putting the reusable return vehicle on top of the stack, but then you're not going to have wings, hence no crossrange. You could say "Let's try horizontal takeoff and landing and do single stage to orbit" and realize that in the 1970s the technology isn't there, and still isn't until someone comes up with an engine with an order of magnitude greater specific impulse than chemical rockets.
You could certainly make the argument that the _implementation_ of many parts of the Shuttle's design were both poorly executed; for example the fact that O-ring ablation was noticed and a non-nominal behavior was allowed to become nominal is inexcusable. The engineers had the big requirements handed down to them by the powers that be: 1000 mile crossrange, 15'x80' payload length, 60,000 pound weight, manned vehicle, reusable. These things were mandatory - the government said "This is what we want, make it or make nothing." So with the technology they had at the time they did their best, and my hypothesis is that with those requirements you'll get convergent evolution to something pretty much like the Shuttle every time. The reason the Buran looks so much like the Shuttle isn't so much that they copied our engineering: it was different in many substantial ways. It looks so much like the Shuttle because they copied some of the requirements NASA had.
I believe I have found the solution to my particular issue - I checked the PCI latency timer for the audio card and noticed its latency was set to a very high value, something like 192 clocks. Lowering it seems to have improved performance considerably. I believe the reason may be that under XP the audio card was using hardware acceleration, i.e. transferring audio data from system memory to an onboard buffer and letting the sound card's hardware handle it from there. Since hardware acceleration is disabled by Vista it no longer has that buffer available, and so it's hogging the PCI bus for far too long, trying to transfer data from main memory into a buffer that's deactivated; in the meantime there could have been some kind of blocking situation where hogging the bus for that many clocks was preventing the drive from transferring data to main memory. This is just a guess, without a schematic and explanation from Echo Audio how their hardware acceleration system worked it's impossible to know for sure.
In this particular situation I feel it is hard to say who is "responsible" for the issue - Echo Audio may know about the problem but not be able to do much as PCI latency timings are a tricky thing and just dropping "if OS = Vista set latency low" into the drivers might break systems that had managed to work before, and I imagine Vista programmers might not want to mess with the settings for the same reasons. However,I would disagree with your Hypothesis B above that nearly everyone has failed to mention audio problems with Vista, a search on Google for "pro recording in Vista" will show that opinions have been thoroughly mixed. Ironically it seems the high end hardware are the devices that have the most problems, perhaps because of poorly written drivers, and perhaps when the development cycle of those products began back in the Win 98 days the engineers said "Well, the Windows audio stack is crap, but we're going to focus on making a rock-solid product by having the hardware do the heavy lifting." If it is true that the Vista audio stack makes that sort of thing unnecessary then these long-lifecycle products may just be the broken eggs of progress - but of course nobody is going to like it when it's their eggs.
I've never gotten a deer in the headlights look from a Radio Shack employee before - at the store near me if I ask for a product which they are not familiar with they shrug and say "Maybe we have it, maybe not, take a look around." For the 13 cent commission they're entitled to on the sale of an XLR plug they completely couldn't care less.
Microphone arrays, speaker response curves, etc. is all well and good, but for myself and others I know Vista is unusable because it often cannot play a single stream of audio at 16/44.1 without glitching, even on brand new hardware with high end PCI audio cards. I can't remember the last time audio glitching was a consistent problem in windows, it has "just worked" for as long as I recall.
I think that either it's a driver problem and that while driver programmers don't have to choose a DRM protected audio path there are subtleties and undocumented behaviors to the new API that they can't get their heads around, or that this "awesome new audio stack" is an ugly hack to move the drivers out of kernelspace. On my current PC audio worked perfectly in XP and glitched in Vista with no difference in hardware or configuration, so it really has to be either the audio card drivers or Vista, yes? And if it _is_ Vista, I'd like to know how exactly it is possible for the audio stack to not be able to send data over a PCI bus fast enough to playback one audio stream without glitching on a 2.4 Ghz machine otherwise at idle?
All those features really look great, but what I'd really like is to be able to leave my Vista machine alone for a few minutes, maximize iTunes or Firefox, and not get continual cracks and pops using the super-duper WaveRT drivers for my audio card on a 1 year old machine that had flawless audio under XP. Is anyone working on that?
The grandparent poster may be using the word "toilet" in reference to the entire room, not just the toilet fixture. The term "restroom" isn't used much outside of the United States.
It's quite possible that some poorly-made CFLs hum - there's a small SMPS in there which is generating a square wave at a supposedly ultrasonic frequency. However, they're not exactly made with tight tolerances, and if the frequency or a subharmonic gets down into the audible range and couples into some mechanical resonance it could happen. It would probably sound more like a screen backlight whine than a hum, though.
This reminds me of a problem that I don't think anyone has brought up - CFLs generate a huge amount of RF noise; they're not the shielded in the least. I like listening to shortwave sometimes, and I can't operate a radio on basically any AM or shortwave band in the same room with a CFL. It's not that big a deal for me, but if everyone in the US is mandated to switch to CFLs, and they're all spewing out RF interference and back-injecting it into the power line? There are going to be some unhappy radio operators I bet. I also wonder if anyone has checked out what the consequences to power grid stability might be - all CFLs use reactive components to limit bulb current and I don't think the majority of them do any kind of power factor correction.
The two most common failure modes for CFLs are the small high voltage capacitors used for limiting current to the tube, and the switching transistors for generating the high frequency high voltage. Those parts are expensive and are probably the ones that get skimped on. There's actually quite a bit of circuitry in every CFL that could be of interest to an impoveri...I mean frugal experimenter when the components are good, like said high voltage transistors and capacitors, and transformer cores. One guy even built most of a small ham transmitter out of the parts: http://mjrainey.googlepages.com/dasderelicht
If you have two series strings of LEDs connected in reverse parallel, all the current is going to go through the series string whose PN junctions are forward biased, so long as the reverse breakdown threshold of the other string isn't exceeded. Another advantage of using AC is that if you don't want to use the amount of LEDs it takes to sum up to the voltage of your AC source, you can use reactive elements to drop the excess voltage instead of power-wasting resistors.
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Our raytracing engine is the finest available! For all your sphere-on-chessboard game needs! If your game is going to involve spheres, chessboards, reflective spheres, or possibly spheres floating on water - raytracing is the way to go!
You got something against denatonium benzoate?
In the US the residential pole transformers are 240VAC center tapped. For 120 volt outlets neutral is referenced to the center tap of the transformer, with a 3rd socket direct to earth ground for safety. For 240 volt operation hot is taken to be one side of the center tap, and neutral the other side, and since the voltages are out of phase on opposite sides of a center-tapped transformer you have 240 volts phase-to-phase.
Math is nothing but self-congruent axioms.
And Godel proved it's not even that!
I wish I could find a SMART utility that supported diagnostics on drives on a RAID controller, as it is now with all the tools I'm aware of I have to backup the array and then disable RAID from the BIOS to get the software to acknowledge the drives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
And said war crimes were promptly allowed to be forgotten by just about everyone except the parties involved, because it was politically expedient to do so. Japan can rewrite its history books as much as it pleases, and Amnesty International, the ADL, SPLC, and Human Rights Watch will stay as silent as a bunch of stone heads on Easter Island.
I posted that as AC by accident, which is unfortunate as I'll gladly put my name to the sentiment.
I think much of it has to do with psychology. In the US we can rationalize attacks by people like the Unabomber, or school shootings, as "Well, this is an isolated incident by a fellow American who has lost it." Perhaps similarly in the UK (I'm just guessing here so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) there was a feeling that while the IRA attacks were devastating, they were done by "fellow Europeans" who believed in a cause so strongly that it led them 'round the bend. The same argument could be applied to the Aym Shinryoko cultists responsible for the subway attack.
But when you present to people the concept of Islamic terrorism - the concept of an entirely alien group of people with whom you supposedly cannot rationalize with, identify with, or even attempt to reason with, then it brings in the psychology of xenophobia and "the other" which starts people thinking that drastic measures have to be taken.
That hospital experience doesn't sound much different than the last one I had _with_ health insurance, the differences being that there were more than 2 other people in the queue, and I suppose the people at County-USC saw a doctor at some point after their 10 hour wait.
Government run healthcare systems seem to work well enough for Britain, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Japan, Taiwan Switzerland, et cetera, et cetera. Government run power is why France gets 80% of its energy from nuclear plants and can tell the Middle East to get bent. Do you think a private corporation is ever going to invest in a nuclear plant, given the length of construction time and delay of ROI, when you can slap up a coal-burner and start raking in the bucks immediately? And airlines? FedGov has been bailing them out for decades - they might as well be nationalized, it's not like they could get any worse.
As an American I've come to the conclusion that the reason that these socialized programs work in other countries and not in the U.S. is not due to some fundamental problem of ideology, but that a majority of the American _people_ in both the public and private sector are myopic, mentally defective and terminally incompetent.
A base trim-line 2004 Ford Taurus with about 120,000 miles. :)
I'd like to add that I'm not disagreeing that the Shuttle is a stupendously expensive, overly complex system. What I'm saying is that the blame for this can be laid squarely upon the federal government (particularly the DOD) for the requirements they had. I'm sure there was a time in the early 80s when to the military the Shuttle was the greatest thing ever; it should have been at least considering a great deal of its requirements were set in stone by the DOD. The luster soon faded when the military realized that the STS would never have the kind of turnaround time that they wanted. When you have requirements laid down by Homer Simpson, for example, an engineer is going to build the Homer Simpson car. Whether it turns out to be good by anyone else's standards is another story.
Engineering isn't about solving a problem with the least amount of resources, it's about meeting your design requirements. Saying that you want to do this while using the least amount of resources is pretty much a tautology - that's why budgets exist. Comparing the engineering of the Soyuz capsule to the engineering of the Shuttle is the the definition of apples to oranges; that "they go into space and they carry some number of people" is about the only functional description that the two systems share.
"Sometimes" because simple and robust are relative terms. A rock is simple and robust, you could even use it to hammer a nail in a pinch. A hammer is a little more complex and vastly more efficient. A nailgun is much more complex than a hammer, but you can't put 50 nails a minute into a roof with a hammer. When you then start trying to ask questions like "Is a nailgun better than a hammer" or "Is the Soyuz better than the Space Shuttle" without any qualifications the questions are meaningless.
And I almost forgot the most important requirement: "You have $13 billion in 1972 dollars."
The shuttle accidents, however, were the results of fundamental design blunders which cannot be fixed (strapping a manned vehicle with no escape system below a cryogenic ice-spewing tank and next to uncontrollable multi-ton firework sticks with seams).
I think many Shuttle engineers would disagree that the Shuttle's _design_ was fundamentally flawed - the Shuttle was built to fit the design requirements that were handed down to NASA from FedGov and particularly the DOD; that is to build a reusable manned launch vehicle that has a 1000 nautical mile landing crossrange and can take a 15'x80' 60,000 pound payload to LEO. When you have those design requirements and start looking at the problem with the late 1960s early 1970s tech you have available, whatever way you start out you pretty much converge on a design of a vehicle that is essentially the STS. You could try putting the liquid fuel onboard the orbiter, but that's going to kill your payload size and weight. You could try putting the reusable return vehicle on top of the stack, but then you're not going to have wings, hence no crossrange. You could say "Let's try horizontal takeoff and landing and do single stage to orbit" and realize that in the 1970s the technology isn't there, and still isn't until someone comes up with an engine with an order of magnitude greater specific impulse than chemical rockets.
You could certainly make the argument that the _implementation_ of many parts of the Shuttle's design were both poorly executed; for example the fact that O-ring ablation was noticed and a non-nominal behavior was allowed to become nominal is inexcusable. The engineers had the big requirements handed down to them by the powers that be: 1000 mile crossrange, 15'x80' payload length, 60,000 pound weight, manned vehicle, reusable. These things were mandatory - the government said "This is what we want, make it or make nothing." So with the technology they had at the time they did their best, and my hypothesis is that with those requirements you'll get convergent evolution to something pretty much like the Shuttle every time. The reason the Buran looks so much like the Shuttle isn't so much that they copied our engineering: it was different in many substantial ways. It looks so much like the Shuttle because they copied some of the requirements NASA had.
I believe I have found the solution to my particular issue - I checked the PCI latency timer for the audio card and noticed its latency was set to a very high value, something like 192 clocks. Lowering it seems to have improved performance considerably. I believe the reason may be that under XP the audio card was using hardware acceleration, i.e. transferring audio data from system memory to an onboard buffer and letting the sound card's hardware handle it from there. Since hardware acceleration is disabled by Vista it no longer has that buffer available, and so it's hogging the PCI bus for far too long, trying to transfer data from main memory into a buffer that's deactivated; in the meantime there could have been some kind of blocking situation where hogging the bus for that many clocks was preventing the drive from transferring data to main memory. This is just a guess, without a schematic and explanation from Echo Audio how their hardware acceleration system worked it's impossible to know for sure.
In this particular situation I feel it is hard to say who is "responsible" for the issue - Echo Audio may know about the problem but not be able to do much as PCI latency timings are a tricky thing and just dropping "if OS = Vista set latency low" into the drivers might break systems that had managed to work before, and I imagine Vista programmers might not want to mess with the settings for the same reasons. However,I would disagree with your Hypothesis B above that nearly everyone has failed to mention audio problems with Vista, a search on Google for "pro recording in Vista" will show that opinions have been thoroughly mixed. Ironically it seems the high end hardware are the devices that have the most problems, perhaps because of poorly written drivers, and perhaps when the development cycle of those products began back in the Win 98 days the engineers said "Well, the Windows audio stack is crap, but we're going to focus on making a rock-solid product by having the hardware do the heavy lifting." If it is true that the Vista audio stack makes that sort of thing unnecessary then these long-lifecycle products may just be the broken eggs of progress - but of course nobody is going to like it when it's their eggs.
I've never gotten a deer in the headlights look from a Radio Shack employee before - at the store near me if I ask for a product which they are not familiar with they shrug and say "Maybe we have it, maybe not, take a look around." For the 13 cent commission they're entitled to on the sale of an XLR plug they completely couldn't care less.
Microphone arrays, speaker response curves, etc. is all well and good, but for myself and others I know Vista is unusable because it often cannot play a single stream of audio at 16/44.1 without glitching, even on brand new hardware with high end PCI audio cards. I can't remember the last time audio glitching was a consistent problem in windows, it has "just worked" for as long as I recall.
I think that either it's a driver problem and that while driver programmers don't have to choose a DRM protected audio path there are subtleties and undocumented behaviors to the new API that they can't get their heads around, or that this "awesome new audio stack" is an ugly hack to move the drivers out of kernelspace. On my current PC audio worked perfectly in XP and glitched in Vista with no difference in hardware or configuration, so it really has to be either the audio card drivers or Vista, yes? And if it _is_ Vista, I'd like to know how exactly it is possible for the audio stack to not be able to send data over a PCI bus fast enough to playback one audio stream without glitching on a 2.4 Ghz machine otherwise at idle?
All those features really look great, but what I'd really like is to be able to leave my Vista machine alone for a few minutes, maximize iTunes or Firefox, and not get continual cracks and pops using the super-duper WaveRT drivers for my audio card on a 1 year old machine that had flawless audio under XP. Is anyone working on that?
The grandparent poster may be using the word "toilet" in reference to the entire room, not just the toilet fixture. The term "restroom" isn't used much outside of the United States.
It's quite possible that some poorly-made CFLs hum - there's a small SMPS in there which is generating a square wave at a supposedly ultrasonic frequency. However, they're not exactly made with tight tolerances, and if the frequency or a subharmonic gets down into the audible range and couples into some mechanical resonance it could happen. It would probably sound more like a screen backlight whine than a hum, though.
This reminds me of a problem that I don't think anyone has brought up - CFLs generate a huge amount of RF noise; they're not the shielded in the least. I like listening to shortwave sometimes, and I can't operate a radio on basically any AM or shortwave band in the same room with a CFL. It's not that big a deal for me, but if everyone in the US is mandated to switch to CFLs, and they're all spewing out RF interference and back-injecting it into the power line? There are going to be some unhappy radio operators I bet. I also wonder if anyone has checked out what the consequences to power grid stability might be - all CFLs use reactive components to limit bulb current and I don't think the majority of them do any kind of power factor correction.
The two most common failure modes for CFLs are the small high voltage capacitors used for limiting current to the tube, and the switching transistors for generating the high frequency high voltage. Those parts are expensive and are probably the ones that get skimped on. There's actually quite a bit of circuitry in every CFL that could be of interest to an impoveri...I mean frugal experimenter when the components are good, like said high voltage transistors and capacitors, and transformer cores. One guy even built most of a small ham transmitter out of the parts: http://mjrainey.googlepages.com/dasderelicht
If you have two series strings of LEDs connected in reverse parallel, all the current is going to go through the series string whose PN junctions are forward biased, so long as the reverse breakdown threshold of the other string isn't exceeded. Another advantage of using AC is that if you don't want to use the amount of LEDs it takes to sum up to the voltage of your AC source, you can use reactive elements to drop the excess voltage instead of power-wasting resistors.