Re:Internet on TV? Really?
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 1
Which is more money than my mother will be spending on anything television related, and far more than a set top box would have to be.
Re:Internet on TV? Really?
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have an HTPC and watch internet television services (hulu and netflix, primarily) all the time. The HTPC will never penetrate the my-mother market (too much setup, cost), so a set top box which functions in such a way has great potential. Oh, and don't say the Wii already provides this functionality: my mother does not have one of those, either:)
You are basically saying "something which exists implies that something caused it to exist". This is not what the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" addresses at all. People assume that if fat people are more likely to have heart attacks, that their fat causes heart attacks. A correlation between A and B does not imply that A causes B or B causes A, when all confounding variables C have not been ruled out (ie diet, exercise, accounting the sum of which completely remove correlation between weight and life expectancy, despite what the gossip media might imply).
PS the vast majority of LED lamps are (and will be) non-dimmable. The dimming ballast circuit (just like in CFLs) is significantly more complex than the on-off ballast circuit. For this reason dimming lamps will always be an added cost, and features such as color changing and particularly low dimming will be extra expensive.
Most commercial dimming CFLs go to 10% or 20% brightness. If you have one with a minimum 80%, it must be pretty junky. See the Advance Mark 7 and Mark 10 ballasts, which are very popular.
The real bummer is that the color doesn't change when you dim them:)
I actually removed all of the dimming switches from my apartment in order to use standard CFLs. There are some relatively (~$1 US) dimming CFL options with spiral bulbs, although IMO dimming CFLs leave much to be desired as they don't change color as you dim them. This is one big advantage to LED, as they often include multiple colors of LEDs and can dim different colors differently to mimic incandescent dimming.
I always specify lighting with 3-4 light levels (using two switches) in offices. When someone in office environments wants dimming in a recessed can I usually tell them to replace the whole fixture for one with a dimming ballast and a PL-C or PL-T type lamp holder. This is a fairly expensive option, though, so probably not great for a residential project with several fixtures. In those cases I either go with the CFL w/ integral dimming ballast, or remove the dimming.
Anyway, good point. CFL is no replacement for incandescent in dimming purposes. The main argument is that your dimmed incandescent are still using more power than the CFLs that could take their place. However, power savings don't exactly "set the mood":) LEDs will be valuable for dimming purposes. Currently most LED ballasts are non-dimming, though, and I just don't get all the excitement!
Why does the ACLU get robots, death rays, and metals? Poor, poor US military industrial complex. Or did you mean Lawyers v Robots? Then the lawyers are on the offensive!
I was very accustomed to typing a keyword into Google, knowing the top result, and hitting tab+tab+space (which activates "I am feeling lucky"). Sadly their auto completion feature and fade-in stuff have ruined my method of speedy navigation.:(
I work in the lighting field and have a few comments: 1)The reason you can't find bright LEDs to go in your A19 fixtures is that they cannot be properly heat-sinked. Shedding heat is really important for LEDs, and requires some very nice heavy duty fixtures to keep the lamps at full output (heat wears the LEDs out faster, and they dim gradually rather than burning out). 2) I refused to use CFLs in my house for years. You should buy several varieties and try them out, though. Some are actually very pleasing now. Sadly the choices for non-standard bulbs are still mostly terrible (I have yet to find a cheap R20 CFL I don't hate). Some of the Fiet lamps are for sale at walgreens for cheap and look pretty good. Seek lamps that say 3500K for the color temperature. (5000k will be very blue, 3000k or less will be reddish) 3) Reading is an activity which ideally should have good lighting. Don't strain your eyes:)
LED is a bunch of hype with very few advantages over fluorescents. They are not much more efficient, and while they have advantages if you have extremely tight beam requirements (ie for LEED outdoor purposes), they cost so much more than fluorescents that no one with a normal budget should even be considering. The best trait of LEDs is how small they are, which is not usefull in typical home and office lighting (but is for task lighting, flashlights, etc). LED is a very powerful world in today's faux-green marketplace, so the LEDs-are-great myth will live on.
There is a reason why LED lighting products are always compared to incandescent for ROI purposes. LED to CFL is not impressive at all. Maybe a 30 year ROI for the same lumens output. And if you try to go the cheap LED route, they will not be properly heat-sinked and you will end up with very dim LEDs in no time.
Great. Next time I am designing an autonomous intelligent agent for 400m dives, I will include a balloon for ballasting. No examples from SCUBA equipment are relevant at the depths involved. Even with industrial dives using special gas mixes (low N2 & O2, high helium) unenclosed divers don't go anywhere near this depth. The point remains that the pressures involved make air unusable. Oh, and valves are a great point of failure in a high pressure environment.
The small business I work for pays six figures annually for three keys for software with no competitors in AC interference modeling. It seems shocking to me, because for that, we could hire a great software guy, or two fresh college coders, and write our own program. The software we use is absolutely awful. It is riddled with bugs (which I frequently have to call them about to get resolved), a terrible UI (which is extremely conducive to user error), and poor I/O options. Despite the fact that I am an electrical engineering grad having only taken two non-assembly programming courses, I have totally changed where all of our time goes by not using their stupid interface for UI (and instead writing a GUI with Python that lets you use KML files to specify paths and to do various tedious model modifications). Worst software ever. Most expensive I've ever heard of./rant
I said this elsewhere but I'll say it here too:
Thermal bias != Maxwell's Demon.
The second law does not require that heat flow from hot to cold, only that there is a net increase in heat. Obviously this requires an external energy source, though.
And the water example is not a thermal bias, no, but it is a neat case. The water actually DOES transmit heat through a vertical column much faster in an upward direction via convection, than cooling (which is only aided by convection under 4C, which is an inflection point in the T/D curve for water). In steady state the water will approach thermal equilibrium, but the rate at which equilibrium is reached is vastly different depending on the direction of the thermal gradient.
I'm not sure that I actually see a biased thermal potential as totally demonic. Granted I don't see any real-world possibility for it (what is a thermo-phyllic material?), but a thermal bias is not an entropy-beating system if the net thermal change is positive.
I realize that your post was in jest, but I'd like to point out that laser communication is not as insecure as you make it sound. Presumably the laser will have a tight beam pattern and a near 100% absorbtion rate at the receiver, so there should be relatively little refraction (except that which occurs through the air). Assuming that a band is used which exists in normal sunlight, the reflection of said sunlight off the environment would overwhelm any refracted signal you are try to recover from next door, let alone from a hill 10km away. Even if you could detect it, the number of photos available would only give you an incomplete image of the signal, even from a few meters away, unless you were almost directly in the beam path, which (presumably) will not be pointed at a window.
If the author includes it in any contract in which he releases copyright, then yes, we should. The short stories are the artistic creation of their creator, and they get to say in what context they are (re)produced. The only thing you can claim against this is that it will hurt the creator or the work, and again, this seems like the creator's choice.
I'll concede that their songs "meet" each other rather than just fading out and back in, but the lyrics? Really? Also, Pink Floyd did so much more interesting easter-egging:) "Isn't this where...... we came in?"
Slashdot Mirror
Which is more money than my mother will be spending on anything television related, and far more than a set top box would have to be.
I have an HTPC and watch internet television services (hulu and netflix, primarily) all the time. The HTPC will never penetrate the my-mother market (too much setup, cost), so a set top box which functions in such a way has great potential. Oh, and don't say the Wii already provides this functionality: my mother does not have one of those, either :)
Shortcomings of statistics? More like shortcomings of humans *attempting* to use statistics.
You are basically saying "something which exists implies that something caused it to exist". This is not what the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" addresses at all. People assume that if fat people are more likely to have heart attacks, that their fat causes heart attacks. A correlation between A and B does not imply that A causes B or B causes A, when all confounding variables C have not been ruled out (ie diet, exercise, accounting the sum of which completely remove correlation between weight and life expectancy, despite what the gossip media might imply).
PS the vast majority of LED lamps are (and will be) non-dimmable. The dimming ballast circuit (just like in CFLs) is significantly more complex than the on-off ballast circuit. For this reason dimming lamps will always be an added cost, and features such as color changing and particularly low dimming will be extra expensive.
Most commercial dimming CFLs go to 10% or 20% brightness. If you have one with a minimum 80%, it must be pretty junky. See the Advance Mark 7 and Mark 10 ballasts, which are very popular.
:)
The real bummer is that the color doesn't change when you dim them
I actually removed all of the dimming switches from my apartment in order to use standard CFLs. There are some relatively (~$1 US) dimming CFL options with spiral bulbs, although IMO dimming CFLs leave much to be desired as they don't change color as you dim them. This is one big advantage to LED, as they often include multiple colors of LEDs and can dim different colors differently to mimic incandescent dimming. I always specify lighting with 3-4 light levels (using two switches) in offices. When someone in office environments wants dimming in a recessed can I usually tell them to replace the whole fixture for one with a dimming ballast and a PL-C or PL-T type lamp holder. This is a fairly expensive option, though, so probably not great for a residential project with several fixtures. In those cases I either go with the CFL w/ integral dimming ballast, or remove the dimming. Anyway, good point. CFL is no replacement for incandescent in dimming purposes. The main argument is that your dimmed incandescent are still using more power than the CFLs that could take their place. However, power savings don't exactly "set the mood" :) LEDs will be valuable for dimming purposes. Currently most LED ballasts are non-dimming, though, and I just don't get all the excitement!
I guarantee cost of living is much higher in the USA, and they would be sharing housing elsewhere too. I'll give you the $5+, though.
Why does the ACLU get robots, death rays, and metals? Poor, poor US military industrial complex. Or did you mean Lawyers v Robots? Then the lawyers are on the offensive!
You are not including cost of living. And an illegal won't be getting $5/hr.
All those things are why I no longer use facebook. That and creepy young/old people.
I was very accustomed to typing a keyword into Google, knowing the top result, and hitting tab+tab+space (which activates "I am feeling lucky"). Sadly their auto completion feature and fade-in stuff have ruined my method of speedy navigation. :(
You clearly have not been buying the right lamps :)
I work in the lighting field and have a few comments: :)
1)The reason you can't find bright LEDs to go in your A19 fixtures is that they cannot be properly heat-sinked. Shedding heat is really important for LEDs, and requires some very nice heavy duty fixtures to keep the lamps at full output (heat wears the LEDs out faster, and they dim gradually rather than burning out).
2) I refused to use CFLs in my house for years. You should buy several varieties and try them out, though. Some are actually very pleasing now. Sadly the choices for non-standard bulbs are still mostly terrible (I have yet to find a cheap R20 CFL I don't hate). Some of the Fiet lamps are for sale at walgreens for cheap and look pretty good. Seek lamps that say 3500K for the color temperature. (5000k will be very blue, 3000k or less will be reddish)
3) Reading is an activity which ideally should have good lighting. Don't strain your eyes
LED is a bunch of hype with very few advantages over fluorescents. They are not much more efficient, and while they have advantages if you have extremely tight beam requirements (ie for LEED outdoor purposes), they cost so much more than fluorescents that no one with a normal budget should even be considering. The best trait of LEDs is how small they are, which is not usefull in typical home and office lighting (but is for task lighting, flashlights, etc). LED is a very powerful world in today's faux-green marketplace, so the LEDs-are-great myth will live on.
There is a reason why LED lighting products are always compared to incandescent for ROI purposes. LED to CFL is not impressive at all. Maybe a 30 year ROI for the same lumens output. And if you try to go the cheap LED route, they will not be properly heat-sinked and you will end up with very dim LEDs in no time.
There has been dimmable LED lighting for years. Good luck finding quality LED fixtures for under $400, though.
Great. Next time I am designing an autonomous intelligent agent for 400m dives, I will include a balloon for ballasting. No examples from SCUBA equipment are relevant at the depths involved. Even with industrial dives using special gas mixes (low N2 & O2, high helium) unenclosed divers don't go anywhere near this depth. The point remains that the pressures involved make air unusable. Oh, and valves are a great point of failure in a high pressure environment.
The small business I work for pays six figures annually for three keys for software with no competitors in AC interference modeling. It seems shocking to me, because for that, we could hire a great software guy, or two fresh college coders, and write our own program. The software we use is absolutely awful. It is riddled with bugs (which I frequently have to call them about to get resolved), a terrible UI (which is extremely conducive to user error), and poor I/O options. Despite the fact that I am an electrical engineering grad having only taken two non-assembly programming courses, I have totally changed where all of our time goes by not using their stupid interface for UI (and instead writing a GUI with Python that lets you use KML files to specify paths and to do various tedious model modifications). Worst software ever. Most expensive I've ever heard of. /rant
I said this elsewhere but I'll say it here too:
Thermal bias != Maxwell's Demon.
The second law does not require that heat flow from hot to cold, only that there is a net increase in heat. Obviously this requires an external energy source, though. And the water example is not a thermal bias, no, but it is a neat case. The water actually DOES transmit heat through a vertical column much faster in an upward direction via convection, than cooling (which is only aided by convection under 4C, which is an inflection point in the T/D curve for water). In steady state the water will approach thermal equilibrium, but the rate at which equilibrium is reached is vastly different depending on the direction of the thermal gradient.
I'm not sure that I actually see a biased thermal potential as totally demonic. Granted I don't see any real-world possibility for it (what is a thermo-phyllic material?), but a thermal bias is not an entropy-beating system if the net thermal change is positive.
I realize that your post was in jest, but I'd like to point out that laser communication is not as insecure as you make it sound. Presumably the laser will have a tight beam pattern and a near 100% absorbtion rate at the receiver, so there should be relatively little refraction (except that which occurs through the air). Assuming that a band is used which exists in normal sunlight, the reflection of said sunlight off the environment would overwhelm any refracted signal you are try to recover from next door, let alone from a hill 10km away. Even if you could detect it, the number of photos available would only give you an incomplete image of the signal, even from a few meters away, unless you were almost directly in the beam path, which (presumably) will not be pointed at a window.
Because chapters have information relevant to the story lines? Not all Floyd songs off of a given album have information related to each other.
False.
If the author includes it in any contract in which he releases copyright, then yes, we should. The short stories are the artistic creation of their creator, and they get to say in what context they are (re)produced. The only thing you can claim against this is that it will hurt the creator or the work, and again, this seems like the creator's choice.
I'll concede that their songs "meet" each other rather than just fading out and back in, but the lyrics? Really? Also, Pink Floyd did so much more interesting easter-egging :) "Isn't this where ... ... we came in?"
PS What they called RAM back then we call cache, and it never left the die.