The nice thing about the british system is that you are far less tied down. If I want to use a 3KW electric fire or other big appliance in my lounge I just plug it into an ordinary socket.
Every time you buy a computer in the UK you get a BS 1363 to IEC lead and a Schuko to IEC lead. That's how cheap they are: manufacturers throw them away rather than be bothered to have two different SKUs. Who do you buy your computers from? I have seen equipment come with both from time to time but most of the computer equipment i've bought has just come with the british lead.
mmm, double the voltage and you multiply the power into a given resistance by four. Afaict motor speed is usually rougly linearly proportional to voltage.
so probablly double the airflow and four times the heat output which should give about double the temperature rise over ambiant as normal. Thats as your friend discovered likely to be painful.
I bet they learnt to check voltages before using adaptors after that incident.
but couldn't you do that with the ground off a polarized connection instead of adding a new different ground? You could use the neutral for grounding but it's not considered safe in most situations (there are a few exceptions where special precautions are taken but that is outside of the scope of this discussion) because if the neutral breaks then it will rise up to a dangerous voltage. Using the neutral as earth wouldn't solve the ground loop problem anyway, it is caused by the interaction between stray magnetic fields, mains earth wiring and earths in signal cables.
For the rest of your questions see the article that "Eric^2" linked
and have to almost guarantee that tripping/yanking on a wire will result in the entire flippin outlet getting ripped out of the wall with it. I live in the UK and can tell you this is incorrect, usually the plug pops out without damaging anything, very occasionally plug or socket may be damaged. I don't think i've ever seen one ripped out of the wall.
The plug was designed so that as well as unfolding to plug into british sockets it could plug into special sockets while still folded.
Not that I think they have much chance of getting it past the regulators and produced in sufficiant quantities to make a difference. The article doesn't even make it clear if they have a functioning prototype yet or just mockups.
BTW an American plug can handle 15 amps easily; it's how I run my spare heater. But the voltage is only 120V giving 1.8KW.
Pretty weedy compared to the british 2.99KW (assuming you believe them when they tell use the nominal voltage is now 230V but thats another argument) and continental 3.68KW
Here is my opinion
UK: 8/10: good points: fused, firm fit, cable conventially exits at right angles making it lie flat to the wall, little in the way of dangerous semi-compatibilities (unless someone sticks a tool in the earth hole but if you have to go that far to make something fit it's abuse and doesn't count IMO) Bad points: bulky australian: 7/10, pretty similar to UK but lacks the fusing. Schuko/french and danish: 2/10, good points: high current capcity. bad points: bulky, suffers a lot from dangerous semi-compatibilites (schuko and french plugs will go into danish and some italian outlets without picking up an earth and will also go into many old unearthed sockets), schuko unlike the others is also unpolarised. italian: 3/10, good points: compact. bad points: non-polarised. some variants will accept schuko and/or french plugs without earthing them. Europlug: 5/10, good points: compatible with lots of socket types. bad points: obviously not suitable for larger appliances, may be quite a loose fit. US: 4/10, good points: 110V is less likely to kill you if you do get a shock, fairly compact. bad points: low power availible, loose fit, no system for preventing users touching pins on a partly withdrawn plug.
My ideal plug would be something like a neutrik powercon but designed so it couldn't be dismantled without tools and fitted with a fuse.
What I hate are those blanking plates that are sold as a child safety device. It depends which ones.
When I was growing up we had some mothercare branded ones that had all three pins made of full length solid plastic, getting them out was an effort even for an adult or older child and since all three holes were filled fully there was no issue with them making the live and neutral toucable.
OTOH some that I have seen more recently have been downright dangerous.
* The danish system and some variants of the italian system have the dangerous characteristic of accepting german and french earthed plugs but not earthing them! * There is no mention of the german and french earthed plugs at all * Putting europlugs into british sockets is NOT TO BE RECCOMENDED. They may well be protected by only a 30A rewirable fuse
a smartphone with some custom software and waterproofed somehow would probablly be the cheapest way to do it on a small scale. as someone who has done custom electronics stuff before I know that small scale manufacturing of something as complex as a mobile phone will not be cheap.
problems:
1: would the bulk and weight of a smartphone be acceptable for a pet tracker? This would particulally be an issue on cats and small dogs. 2: would a battery life comparable to a mobile phone left switched on but not used (a few days afaict) be acceptable? if not start adding battery bulk/weight
doing custom integration could bring the bulk and weight down a bit and maybe save a bit of battery but you would need to sell huge volume and/or charge a lot more than £1000 per device to make that economically viable and the reductions in bulk and weight would probablly be less than a factor of 2.
I doubt it had anything to do with win7, the fact is that ubuntu has made itself a slave to the 6 month release cycle, especially with the way they make the LTS releases part of the normal cycle (so if the normal cycle slips it causes problems for the LTS).
At least it's possible for someone who knows what they are doing to recover from a failed upgrade which is more than can be said of many systems.
Funny, and all this time I thought the majority of the reason people use Windows is because it comes pre-installed on all the computers that they buy. The fact it 'just works' is because the people who make the systems have already prebuilt the systems with a tested and verified image that works on that specific hardware being purchased.
If they did the same with Linux, which some distributions do, then it would 'just work' as well. Lets assume they install the current release of ubuntu LTS (and in reality they won't always do that, it takes time for OEMs to adopt a new release of an OS). That means you have 1-3 years of security updates before you have to upgrade to a new release (either by upgrading in place or by reinstalling).
If we assume the typical lifecycle of a desktop PC is three years (which is conservative) then most machines will either have to be upgraded to a new release of ubuntu during thier lifetime or will be left without security updates (which I do not consider acceptable for machines that will be used for general use online).
Security updates for desktop stuff on ubuntu 10.04 LTS (which hasn't been released yet) will end in april 2013. Security updates for windows XP (which is now two versions behind current) will end in april 2014.
Heck MS offers more security update overlap on service packs than ubuntu offers on complete releases.
I mean, get real. Can you imagine grandma getting a barebone system and installing Windows 7/Vista/Xp from cd, then having to search the internet for the drivers required for the hardware that isn't automatically recognized?>
My experiance is that linux supports more out of the box than windows but when it doesn't things are a lot more painfull.
On windows I go to the hardware manufacturers site, look up my peice of hardware, grab the drivers (or grab the CD that came with the haand install them through a nice simple GUI. On linux I have to either replace the kernel (and hope the new version gets on with the rest of the distro and doesn't break any other hardware) or try to find a version of the driver that works with the kernel I have (often very difficult).
I still don't use a new Ubuntu release for at least a few weeks though. There is always a flood of package upgrades for a few weeks after a release. What this screams to me is INADEQUATE BETA TESTING.
One of the good things about debian is that there are a lot of people who run testing all the time and there is a relatively long period between freeze and release which is essentially beta testing time (though debian don't use that name for it). Debian spent longer on thier last freeze than ubuntu spends on a whole release cycle.
and many rely on a combination of factors. The claim of many scams can be summarised as
I have access to $(largeammount) of money from $(source) and need to get it out of $(country) before it is taken by $(people who want to use it for something else, often something evil). If you help me I will let you keep $(notquitesolarge) ammount of the proceeeds.
This preys on both the greedy and on those who beleive that the money will be diverted from evil and/or used for philanthropy if they help get it out of the senders country.
Well the same would happen if your throttle cable broke on a conventional system or your engine cut out for any other reason.
Afaict usually cars have enough momentum in such situations to steer them off to the hard shoulder.
Afaict throttle stuck on is in the vast majority of situations far more dangerous than throttle stuck off so it makes sense to fail to throttle stuck off.
"the system's ingress protection is less than perfect. While the XFR did remain operational after we doused it with water, when we returned the next day the system wouldn't boot.Opening up the various 'sealed' doors revealed that some moisture (we're not talking torrents here) had seeped in, particularly in the large battery compartment at the rear, which isn't isolated from the system board! We left the system to dry for a day and sure enough it did boot up, but it's hardly an ideal scenario to deal with if your system ever does get exposed to the elements. "
I suspect the likely outcome of letting other carriers deliver mail and letting the USPS die is that you would get serveral competing mail services in high profit areas (commercial and maybe dense residential) and either none at all or a very slow service (one BIG way to reduce the overhead of a postal service in the face of low buisness is to reduce delivery frequency) in low profit (rural) areas.
Courier delivery* of letter would probablly be availible to areas with no or very slow postal service but would probablly cost nearly as much as having a package delivered does today.
*I consider courier delivery where routes are determined by demand on the day and how much the sender is willing to pay and where the delivery density is low to be distinct from a postal service where a postman does regular rounds and delivers mail to a substantial fraction of the properties along his route each day.
The question remains though as to when and if they will deal with the floating point issue.
Different arm chips have different (incompatible) FPUs. The old arm port was compiled for an old FPU that is virtually nonexistant nowadays leaving it using very slow FPU emulation.
Armel improves the situation by allowing binary compatibility between code compiled with different FPU settings. The debian armel port builds for softfloat, there was talk of making special versions of floating point critical packages for various fpus but I don't think anything much came of it.
Maybe but the longer wintel netbooks remain the main type of netbook on the market the more the "netbook as a cut down laptop" perception rather than the "netbook as a souped up smartphone" perception will become seated in the minds of netbook users.
Which isn't to say that there is no market for "smartphones on steriods" I just think that marketing them as netbooks will lead to dissapointed customers.
Slashdot Mirror
That should have said a lot more than £100 per device, £1000 per device may be reasonable in moderate volume.
The nice thing about the british system is that you are far less tied down. If I want to use a 3KW electric fire or other big appliance in my lounge I just plug it into an ordinary socket.
Every time you buy a computer in the UK you get a BS 1363 to IEC lead and a Schuko to IEC lead. That's how cheap they are: manufacturers throw them away rather than be bothered to have two different SKUs.
Who do you buy your computers from? I have seen equipment come with both from time to time but most of the computer equipment i've bought has just come with the british lead.
mmm, double the voltage and you multiply the power into a given resistance by four. Afaict motor speed is usually rougly linearly proportional to voltage.
so probablly double the airflow and four times the heat output which should give about double the temperature rise over ambiant as normal. Thats as your friend discovered likely to be painful.
I bet they learnt to check voltages before using adaptors after that incident.
but couldn't you do that with the ground off a polarized connection instead of adding a new different ground?
You could use the neutral for grounding but it's not considered safe in most situations (there are a few exceptions where special precautions are taken but that is outside of the scope of this discussion) because if the neutral breaks then it will rise up to a dangerous voltage. Using the neutral as earth wouldn't solve the ground loop problem anyway, it is caused by the interaction between stray magnetic fields, mains earth wiring and earths in signal cables.
For the rest of your questions see the article that "Eric^2" linked
on most uk sockets a screwdriver in the earth pin.
I don't know of anyone who has managed to open the MK "3 pin operated shutters" without inserting a plug
P.S. just in case anyone is stupid enough to be taking this seriously stuffing bare wires into sockets is dangerous.
and have to almost guarantee that tripping/yanking on a wire will result in the entire flippin outlet getting ripped out of the wall with it.
I live in the UK and can tell you this is incorrect, usually the plug pops out without damaging anything, very occasionally plug or socket may be damaged. I don't think i've ever seen one ripped out of the wall.
The plug was designed so that as well as unfolding to plug into british sockets it could plug into special sockets while still folded.
Not that I think they have much chance of getting it past the regulators and produced in sufficiant quantities to make a difference. The article doesn't even make it clear if they have a functioning prototype yet or just mockups.
BTW an American plug can handle 15 amps easily; it's how I run my spare heater.
But the voltage is only 120V giving 1.8KW.
Pretty weedy compared to the british 2.99KW (assuming you believe them when they tell use the nominal voltage is now 230V but thats another argument) and continental 3.68KW
Here is my opinion
UK: 8/10: good points: fused, firm fit, cable conventially exits at right angles making it lie flat to the wall, little in the way of dangerous semi-compatibilities (unless someone sticks a tool in the earth hole but if you have to go that far to make something fit it's abuse and doesn't count IMO) Bad points: bulky
australian: 7/10, pretty similar to UK but lacks the fusing.
Schuko/french and danish: 2/10, good points: high current capcity. bad points: bulky, suffers a lot from dangerous semi-compatibilites (schuko and french plugs will go into danish and some italian outlets without picking up an earth and will also go into many old unearthed sockets), schuko unlike the others is also unpolarised.
italian: 3/10, good points: compact. bad points: non-polarised. some variants will accept schuko and/or french plugs without earthing them.
Europlug: 5/10, good points: compatible with lots of socket types. bad points: obviously not suitable for larger appliances, may be quite a loose fit.
US: 4/10, good points: 110V is less likely to kill you if you do get a shock, fairly compact. bad points: low power availible, loose fit, no system for preventing users touching pins on a partly withdrawn plug.
My ideal plug would be something like a neutrik powercon but designed so it couldn't be dismantled without tools and fitted with a fuse.
What I hate are those blanking plates that are sold as a child safety device.
It depends which ones.
When I was growing up we had some mothercare branded ones that had all three pins made of full length solid plastic, getting them out was an effort even for an adult or older child and since all three holes were filled fully there was no issue with them making the live and neutral toucable.
OTOH some that I have seen more recently have been downright dangerous.
Now only if they could be used for power instead of just for audio/video.
did you even read the second sentance article you just linked?
Frankly this article is appaling
* The danish system and some variants of the italian system have the dangerous characteristic of accepting german and french earthed plugs but not earthing them!
* There is no mention of the german and french earthed plugs at all
* Putting europlugs into british sockets is NOT TO BE RECCOMENDED. They may well be protected by only a 30A rewirable fuse
You might want to check the laws on animal cruelty in your state/jurisdiction first.
a smartphone with some custom software and waterproofed somehow would probablly be the cheapest way to do it on a small scale. as someone who has done custom electronics stuff before I know that small scale manufacturing of something as complex as a mobile phone will not be cheap.
problems:
1: would the bulk and weight of a smartphone be acceptable for a pet tracker? This would particulally be an issue on cats and small dogs.
2: would a battery life comparable to a mobile phone left switched on but not used (a few days afaict) be acceptable? if not start adding battery bulk/weight
doing custom integration could bring the bulk and weight down a bit and maybe save a bit of battery but you would need to sell huge volume and/or charge a lot more than £1000 per device to make that economically viable and the reductions in bulk and weight would probablly be less than a factor of 2.
I doubt it had anything to do with win7, the fact is that ubuntu has made itself a slave to the 6 month release cycle, especially with the way they make the LTS releases part of the normal cycle (so if the normal cycle slips it causes problems for the LTS).
At least it's possible for someone who knows what they are doing to recover from a failed upgrade which is more than can be said of many systems.
Funny, and all this time I thought the majority of the reason people use Windows is because it comes pre-installed on all the computers that they buy. The fact it 'just works' is because the people who make the systems have already prebuilt the systems with a tested and verified image that works on that specific hardware being purchased.
If they did the same with Linux, which some distributions do, then it would 'just work' as well.
Lets assume they install the current release of ubuntu LTS (and in reality they won't always do that, it takes time for OEMs to adopt a new release of an OS). That means you have 1-3 years of security updates before you have to upgrade to a new release (either by upgrading in place or by reinstalling).
If we assume the typical lifecycle of a desktop PC is three years (which is conservative) then most machines will either have to be upgraded to a new release of ubuntu during thier lifetime or will be left without security updates (which I do not consider acceptable for machines that will be used for general use online).
Security updates for desktop stuff on ubuntu 10.04 LTS (which hasn't been released yet) will end in april 2013. Security updates for windows XP (which is now two versions behind current) will end in april 2014.
Heck MS offers more security update overlap on service packs than ubuntu offers on complete releases.
I mean, get real. Can you imagine grandma getting a barebone system and installing Windows 7/Vista/Xp from cd, then having to search the internet for the drivers required for the hardware that isn't automatically recognized?>
My experiance is that linux supports more out of the box than windows but when it doesn't things are a lot more painfull.
On windows I go to the hardware manufacturers site, look up my peice of hardware, grab the drivers (or grab the CD that came with the haand install them through a nice simple GUI. On linux I have to either replace the kernel (and hope the new version gets on with the rest of the distro and doesn't break any other hardware) or try to find a version of the driver that works with the kernel I have (often very difficult).
I still don't use a new Ubuntu release for at least a few weeks though. There is always a flood of package upgrades for a few weeks after a release.
What this screams to me is INADEQUATE BETA TESTING.
One of the good things about debian is that there are a lot of people who run testing all the time and there is a relatively long period between freeze and release which is essentially beta testing time (though debian don't use that name for it). Debian spent longer on thier last freeze than ubuntu spends on a whole release cycle.
and many rely on a combination of factors. The claim of many scams can be summarised as
I have access to $(largeammount) of money from $(source) and need to get it out of $(country) before it is taken by $(people who want to use it for something else, often something evil). If you help me I will let you keep $(notquitesolarge) ammount of the proceeeds.
This preys on both the greedy and on those who beleive that the money will be diverted from evil and/or used for philanthropy if they help get it out of the senders country.
Well the same would happen if your throttle cable broke on a conventional system or your engine cut out for any other reason.
Afaict usually cars have enough momentum in such situations to steer them off to the hard shoulder.
Afaict throttle stuck on is in the vast majority of situations far more dangerous than throttle stuck off so it makes sense to fail to throttle stuck off.
No that was not the only problem
"the system's ingress protection is less than perfect. While the XFR did remain operational after we doused it with water, when we returned the next day the system wouldn't boot.Opening up the various 'sealed' doors revealed that some moisture (we're not talking torrents here) had seeped in, particularly in the large battery compartment at the rear, which isn't isolated from the system board! We left the system to dry for a day and sure enough it did boot up, but it's hardly an ideal scenario to deal with if your system ever does get exposed to the elements. "
I suspect the likely outcome of letting other carriers deliver mail and letting the USPS die is that you would get serveral competing mail services in high profit areas (commercial and maybe dense residential) and either none at all or a very slow service (one BIG way to reduce the overhead of a postal service in the face of low buisness is to reduce delivery frequency) in low profit (rural) areas.
Courier delivery* of letter would probablly be availible to areas with no or very slow postal service but would probablly cost nearly as much as having a package delivered does today.
*I consider courier delivery where routes are determined by demand on the day and how much the sender is willing to pay and where the delivery density is low to be distinct from a postal service where a postman does regular rounds and delivers mail to a substantial fraction of the properties along his route each day.
The question remains though as to when and if they will deal with the floating point issue.
Different arm chips have different (incompatible) FPUs. The old arm port was compiled for an old FPU that is virtually nonexistant nowadays leaving it using very slow FPU emulation.
Armel improves the situation by allowing binary compatibility between code compiled with different FPU settings. The debian armel port builds for softfloat, there was talk of making special versions of floating point critical packages for various fpus but I don't think anything much came of it.
Maybe but the longer wintel netbooks remain the main type of netbook on the market the more the "netbook as a cut down laptop" perception rather than the "netbook as a souped up smartphone" perception will become seated in the minds of netbook users.
Which isn't to say that there is no market for "smartphones on steriods" I just think that marketing them as netbooks will lead to dissapointed customers.
IIRC it is not possible to skip a release ;)
It's not supported, that doesn't mean it isn't possible
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid main
Not that i'd reccomend trying to upgrade to it just yet ;)