The problem is if you don't let the sweat evaporate you will have to cool the body in some other way, that is likely to be complex and take quite a lot of energy.
Ironically, some of my textbooks I never even opened, since the prof's lecture was sufficient. So why did you buy them?
I'm a student (though i'm in britan), and I find when I need a book I can usually get something suitable from the library for free, I think i've only bought one textbook in a desperate moment (for a module I was shit at but forced to take and the library was seriously short on copies given the number of people from various departments who were taking this module)
I do remember once though spending a lot of time using an eraser to clean up a library book because I was finding the incoherent scrawls of a previous user too destracting.
how did these bloody things become so complex. because we moved away from impact printing to inkjet printing due to it's far better handing of images that had more than one bit per color channel.
but inkjet printing requires ink to be delivered in a very pricise and bubble free manner. That means either integrating the printhead in the cartridge (HP style) or having relatively complex systems for ensuring bubbles don't block the printhead (epson style)
The "Euro" plug that is now standard in the EU (except for UK) is polarized and will only mate in one orientation. If you mean a CEE 7/7 plug which is as far as I can tell the most common earthed plug in europe nowadays it is polarised when used with a french socket but unpolarised when used with a german socket.
If you mean some other plug type please specify exactly which plug type you mean (link to a picture if needed).
Which wire is hot is well defined for three-pin plugs That may be true for some types but it is not true in the general case. German plugs use side clips for earth and are not polarised. Italian plugs use three pins in a straight line and again aren't polarised. French plugs are polarised but from what I can gather the french aren't very carefull about which way round they wire them.
So any UPS sold for use accross europe will have to be able to tolerate the incoming live and neutral either way arround. Given that I would be very surprised if it did not also tolerate the american 240V system.
This difference requires a different UPS design if a bypass relay is included Afaict in most of europe there is no gaurantee which wire is live and which wire is neutral so a UPS designed for european use would have to be able to tolerate either side of it's input being live, given this I would not expect there to be a problem running it on american 240V
I would suggest you review the information in the paper you linked regarding HV DC distribution. They show it to be significantly (for the values that pass for sig. in this case) more efficient than conventional AC power distribution, and help simplify the PSU design. But it also says the "high voltage ac" option which appears to the the european 230/400V three phase system is almost as good and that is a system that should be easilly deployable in datacenters worldwide without needing any special kit (PC power supplies have been dual voltage for many years).
They also briefly mention that there is a safety issue with DC distribution at higher voltages. The problem is DC at a given voltage is much more prone to arcing than AC, that means all switches and circuit protection devices would need to be redesigned (and would end up considerablly more expensive) for such a system.
FWIW, I think that DC would have lower losses than AC in the ultra high voltage transmission lines It does but the cost (both in terms of the capital cost and in terms of the losses while running) mean it is only worth it in special circumstances (very long distance transmission, undersea transmission, transmission between grids that can't be syncronised for political or frequency reasons)
Do you really belive moon mining is viable? Is there really something on the moon that is so rare and valuable that it is worth the huge energy cost of bringing it back here to earth?
Some have suggested helium-3 but iirc that is only usefull for a fusion process that is even harder to make work than the D-T fusion the research agencies are struggling with at them moment.
Packages with RC bugs can either be fixed or removed or ignored, just because someone has marked a bug as serious or higher severity doesn't nessacerally mean the release team consider it critical to fix before release.
And before you bring out the tired old argument that the sopurce is available, you can just hire somebody, think about how much that costs. Maintaining software is expensive. Very expensive. Forking your own version of a major open source project would cost in the millions of a dollars per year. I think that really depends on what you plan to do with the fork. If you plan to do major feature support then sure, if you only plan to fix a few bugs that are causing problems for use of your software then no.
It seems to me the main thing the likes of facebook offer is the ability to restablish contact.
A lot of people seem to change thier contact info at the drop of a hat for no apparent reason. This means that unless you are in regular contact with them when you try and contact them again your information will not work.
yeah, unfortunately while MS would like app developers to use "dialog units" lots of developers don't so changing the windows DPI setting often results in messed up user interfaces.
Remember that Windows NT, upon which all modern versions of Windows are based, was originally available for a number of architectures. Indeed the current version of windows (vista/server 2K8) supports three architectures, x86, x64 and ia64.Ms also supports some subset of windows components on the xbox 360 which is a powerpc based platform.
Historically the big problem with windows on non-x86 architectures has been support from other software vendors. The big advantage of windows is it runs all your normal software but that advantage is lost if it isn't binary compatible with x86 windows. There is the possibility of using emulation (as windows NT for the alpha did and the ia64 windows does today) but using that means sacrificing a lot of performance.
The submitter is in britan. Typicaly in britan the meter is conencted to the consumer unit using double insulated single core tails which are usually exposed for at least long enough to get a clamp on them.
LCDs have a few big downsides over CRTS as far as i'm concerned.
Firstly most 19 inch squarish (4:3 or 5:4) LCDs seem to top out at 1280x1024. That is just crap, I could get that on a 15 inch CRT. If I want to match the 1600x1200 I can get on a 19 inch CRT I have to go up to over 20 inches.
Secondly there is the whole widescreen con. Widescreen means you get a worse screen area for a headline size and you also get considerablly worse utilisation of desk space. 4:3 LCDs are availible but they are expensive. Looking at dabs.com the cheapest 1600x1200 LCD is £244.38 while the chepest 1920x1200 LCD is 173.84)
Thirdly there is the resoloution change issue. For things like the windows desktop LCDs look like crap out of thier native resoloution. The subtle blur of the scaling realy tires the eyes. Unfortunately GUIs have generally not moved on from pixel based design so just increasing the size of GUI elements without increasing the resoloution is generally not very practical. In other words you have to decide how small you want your GUI to be when you buy the monitor and afterwards are basically stuck with that choice.
BTW does anyone make either a decent monitor with TV functionality (note: most HDTVs i've seen are crap as monitors, sometimes you can't even drive them from a PC in thier native resoloution, sometimes the VGA port is incrediblly fussy about resoloution and generally the native resoloution is too low to be a good monitor) or an external box to provide it to my PC monitor of choice.
TV functionality being defined as * DVB-T tuner * Analog pal tuner (not so vital but nice to have just in case) * Composite or scart input supporting 576i 50hz and 480i 60hz * Component input supporting all the normal pal and NTSC SD and HD resoloutions (in particular it MUST support 576i because for many virtual console games that is all the PAL wii will output). * HDMI input supporting all the normal pal and NTSC SD and HD resoloutions. * Upscaling to either the monitors native resoloution (if built into the monitor) or a resoloution/refresh combination most PC monitors will accept (if seperate)
In my experiance that depends what you want to do with the lego bricks. If you just want to build houses or similar then yes, if you want to do anything more complex then no. I've had plenty of designs fail to work correctly because of tooth marks making the effective size of the bricks ever so slightly taller and thereby jamming things up.
I notice modern lego technic/mindstorms seems to have largely abandoned the brick together design and I wonder if this is the reason.
While they were obviously thinking about size compatibility with lego from the start mega blocks original product (now called maxi) was actually a size that as far as I can tell lego never produced, then they moved down the sizes first to duplo size, then to lego size.
Well, I'm surprised they were able to have anything like that this long. They haven't, this is just a failed appeal, no big news.
Basically after legos patents ran out they have tried and failed to use trademarks to squash clones of the lego brick.
Legos soloution has been largely to diversify, while they do still make the basic bricks their main buisness nowadays seems to be themed sets with lots of special peices.
Afaict they do already have some special bits made in china but thier main factories are still in countries where trade secrets can be protected. Afaict the exact dimensions and formulas used to make the lego bricks are a tightly kept secret and they are very carefull about the desposal of thier moulds.
Will there really be cheaper Lego-like blocks available at the toy stores? There already are. Afaict this is just lego losing (or failing to be granted, I can't really tell from the poor translations) an appeal.
Mega blocks are the main competitor and is typically a bit cheaper than lego. I've also seem some really cheap unbranded basic bricks.
Now if lego had won this lawsuit that would have been really big news.
mega blocks have been selling thier products (which are IMO probablly the best of the clones but still inferior to real lego) for many years accross the world.
While i'm sure lego would love to kill mega blocks thier failure to do so does not seem to have killed them so far and I somewhat doubt it will going forward.
In short, power is easy to send over Very Long Distances without making it useless. High speed data is harder to send over long distances. ROFL
Afaict to get power more than a kilometer or so without crippling losses or insane cable costs you have to run at voltages in the kilovolts, that means either very heavilly insulated cables or tall poles with ceramic insulators on them holding bare wires then lots of small transformers dotted arround (more in the US than europe because the US uses a lower voltage for final distribution to properties)
Data could easilly use a similar system. You install a box that is designed to be pole or outdoor cabinet mounted that terminates a fiber run and distributes services to local houses over DSL.
The trouble is the incumbent telcos can't be bothered doing this because there isn't much money in it and when some locals want to do it theselves they can have problems working with the telco to use the final distribution subloops
take a look at http://www.rric.net/ , a lot of the detail seems to have dissapeared now but IIRC they started off using SDSL over dedicated distribution subloops, then qwest tripled the price of those so they had little choice but to move to shared distrbution subloops (requiring complete new equipment), then iirc qwest for a while took away the ability for them to provision new shared subloops forcing them back to dedicated subloops. I consider that some serious messing arround.
One is compiler bugs/dubious optimisations, like it or not compilers often have bugs. They also sometimes make optimisations that are ok per the standard but break your assumptions. Being able to turn off optmisations on a per function basis would allow such issues to be worked arround easilly without knocking the entire source file down to a lower optimisation level.
Another is size vs speed, in an embedded application both memory and cpu time are often in short supply and being able to decide which to prioritise on a per function level could be very usefull.
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The problem is if you don't let the sweat evaporate you will have to cool the body in some other way, that is likely to be complex and take quite a lot of energy.
that depends on if they had the color elements next to each other or on top of each other.
Trying to use CMYK with color elements next to each other would result in a very washed out image.
E-ink with color elements on top of each other is an interesting idea but i'm not sure how practical it is.
Ironically, some of my textbooks I never even opened, since the prof's lecture was sufficient.
So why did you buy them?
I'm a student (though i'm in britan), and I find when I need a book I can usually get something suitable from the library for free, I think i've only bought one textbook in a desperate moment (for a module I was shit at but forced to take and the library was seriously short on copies given the number of people from various departments who were taking this module)
I do remember once though spending a lot of time using an eraser to clean up a library book because I was finding the incoherent scrawls of a previous user too destracting.
how did these bloody things become so complex.
because we moved away from impact printing to inkjet printing due to it's far better handing of images that had more than one bit per color channel.
but inkjet printing requires ink to be delivered in a very pricise and bubble free manner. That means either integrating the printhead in the cartridge (HP style) or having relatively complex systems for ensuring bubbles don't block the printhead (epson style)
The "Euro" plug that is now standard in the EU (except for UK) is polarized and will only mate in one orientation.
If you mean a CEE 7/7 plug which is as far as I can tell the most common earthed plug in europe nowadays it is polarised when used with a french socket but unpolarised when used with a german socket.
If you mean some other plug type please specify exactly which plug type you mean (link to a picture if needed).
Which wire is hot is well defined for three-pin plugs
That may be true for some types but it is not true in the general case. German plugs use side clips for earth and are not polarised. Italian plugs use three pins in a straight line and again aren't polarised. French plugs are polarised but from what I can gather the french aren't very carefull about which way round they wire them.
So any UPS sold for use accross europe will have to be able to tolerate the incoming live and neutral either way arround. Given that I would be very surprised if it did not also tolerate the american 240V system.
This difference requires a different UPS design if a bypass relay is included
Afaict in most of europe there is no gaurantee which wire is live and which wire is neutral so a UPS designed for european use would have to be able to tolerate either side of it's input being live, given this I would not expect there to be a problem running it on american 240V
I would suggest you review the information in the paper you linked regarding HV DC distribution. They show it to be significantly (for the values that pass for sig. in this case) more efficient than conventional AC power distribution, and help simplify the PSU design.
But it also says the "high voltage ac" option which appears to the the european 230/400V three phase system is almost as good and that is a system that should be easilly deployable in datacenters worldwide without needing any special kit (PC power supplies have been dual voltage for many years).
They also briefly mention that there is a safety issue with DC distribution at higher voltages. The problem is DC at a given voltage is much more prone to arcing than AC, that means all switches and circuit protection devices would need to be redesigned (and would end up considerablly more expensive) for such a system.
FWIW, I think that DC would have lower losses than AC in the ultra high voltage transmission lines
It does but the cost (both in terms of the capital cost and in terms of the losses while running) mean it is only worth it in special circumstances (very long distance transmission, undersea transmission, transmission between grids that can't be syncronised for political or frequency reasons)
afaict firefox renders image data as it receives it and the windows bitmap format puts the bottom of the file first.
Do you really belive moon mining is viable? Is there really something on the moon that is so rare and valuable that it is worth the huge energy cost of bringing it back here to earth?
Some have suggested helium-3 but iirc that is only usefull for a fusion process that is even harder to make work than the D-T fusion the research agencies are struggling with at them moment.
Packages with RC bugs can either be fixed or removed
or ignored, just because someone has marked a bug as serious or higher severity doesn't nessacerally mean the release team consider it critical to fix before release.
And before you bring out the tired old argument that the sopurce is available, you can just hire somebody, think about how much that costs. Maintaining software is expensive. Very expensive. Forking your own version of a major open source project would cost in the millions of a dollars per year.
I think that really depends on what you plan to do with the fork. If you plan to do major feature support then sure, if you only plan to fix a few bugs that are causing problems for use of your software then no.
It seems to me the main thing the likes of facebook offer is the ability to restablish contact.
A lot of people seem to change thier contact info at the drop of a hat for no apparent reason. This means that unless you are in regular contact with them when you try and contact them again your information will not work.
yeah, unfortunately while MS would like app developers to use "dialog units" lots of developers don't so changing the windows DPI setting often results in messed up user interfaces.
Remember that Windows NT, upon which all modern versions of Windows are based, was originally available for a number of architectures.
Indeed the current version of windows (vista/server 2K8) supports three architectures, x86, x64 and ia64.Ms also supports some subset of windows components on the xbox 360 which is a powerpc based platform.
Historically the big problem with windows on non-x86 architectures has been support from other software vendors. The big advantage of windows is it runs all your normal software but that advantage is lost if it isn't binary compatible with x86 windows. There is the possibility of using emulation (as windows NT for the alpha did and the ia64 windows does today) but using that means sacrificing a lot of performance.
The submitter is in britan. Typicaly in britan the meter is conencted to the consumer unit using double insulated single core tails which are usually exposed for at least long enough to get a clamp on them.
LCDs have a few big downsides over CRTS as far as i'm concerned.
Firstly most 19 inch squarish (4:3 or 5:4) LCDs seem to top out at 1280x1024. That is just crap, I could get that on a 15 inch CRT. If I want to match the 1600x1200 I can get on a 19 inch CRT I have to go up to over 20 inches.
Secondly there is the whole widescreen con. Widescreen means you get a worse screen area for a headline size and you also get considerablly worse utilisation of desk space. 4:3 LCDs are availible but they are expensive. Looking at dabs.com the cheapest 1600x1200 LCD is £244.38 while the chepest 1920x1200 LCD is 173.84)
Thirdly there is the resoloution change issue. For things like the windows desktop LCDs look like crap out of thier native resoloution. The subtle blur of the scaling realy tires the eyes. Unfortunately GUIs have generally not moved on from pixel based design so just increasing the size of GUI elements without increasing the resoloution is generally not very practical. In other words you have to decide how small you want your GUI to be when you buy the monitor and afterwards are basically stuck with that choice.
BTW does anyone make either a decent monitor with TV functionality (note: most HDTVs i've seen are crap as monitors, sometimes you can't even drive them from a PC in thier native resoloution, sometimes the VGA port is incrediblly fussy about resoloution and generally the native resoloution is too low to be a good monitor) or an external box to provide it to my PC monitor of choice.
TV functionality being defined as
* DVB-T tuner
* Analog pal tuner (not so vital but nice to have just in case)
* Composite or scart input supporting 576i 50hz and 480i 60hz
* Component input supporting all the normal pal and NTSC SD and HD resoloutions (in particular it MUST support 576i because for many virtual console games that is all the PAL wii will output).
* HDMI input supporting all the normal pal and NTSC SD and HD resoloutions.
* Upscaling to either the monitors native resoloution (if built into the monitor) or a resoloution/refresh combination most PC monitors will accept (if seperate)
In my experiance that depends what you want to do with the lego bricks. If you just want to build houses or similar then yes, if you want to do anything more complex then no. I've had plenty of designs fail to work correctly because of tooth marks making the effective size of the bricks ever so slightly taller and thereby jamming things up.
I notice modern lego technic/mindstorms seems to have largely abandoned the brick together design and I wonder if this is the reason.
While they were obviously thinking about size compatibility with lego from the start mega blocks original product (now called maxi) was actually a size that as far as I can tell lego never produced, then they moved down the sizes first to duplo size, then to lego size.
Well, I'm surprised they were able to have anything like that this long.
They haven't, this is just a failed appeal, no big news.
Basically after legos patents ran out they have tried and failed to use trademarks to squash clones of the lego brick.
Legos soloution has been largely to diversify, while they do still make the basic bricks their main buisness nowadays seems to be themed sets with lots of special peices.
Afaict they do already have some special bits made in china but thier main factories are still in countries where trade secrets can be protected. Afaict the exact dimensions and formulas used to make the lego bricks are a tightly kept secret and they are very carefull about the desposal of thier moulds.
Will there really be cheaper Lego-like blocks available at the toy stores?
There already are. Afaict this is just lego losing (or failing to be granted, I can't really tell from the poor translations) an appeal.
Mega blocks are the main competitor and is typically a bit cheaper than lego. I've also seem some really cheap unbranded basic bricks.
Now if lego had won this lawsuit that would have been really big news.
mega blocks have been selling thier products (which are IMO probablly the best of the clones but still inferior to real lego) for many years accross the world.
While i'm sure lego would love to kill mega blocks thier failure to do so does not seem to have killed them so far and I somewhat doubt it will going forward.
which would probablly cost considerablly more than just running a bloody fiber along the power poles/through the power ducts.
In short, power is easy to send over Very Long Distances without making it useless. High speed data is harder to send over long distances.
ROFL
Afaict to get power more than a kilometer or so without crippling losses or insane cable costs you have to run at voltages in the kilovolts, that means either very heavilly insulated cables or tall poles with ceramic insulators on them holding bare wires then lots of small transformers dotted arround (more in the US than europe because the US uses a lower voltage for final distribution to properties)
Data could easilly use a similar system. You install a box that is designed to be pole or outdoor cabinet mounted that terminates a fiber run and distributes services to local houses over DSL.
The trouble is the incumbent telcos can't be bothered doing this because there isn't much money in it and when some locals want to do it theselves they can have problems working with the telco to use the final distribution subloops
take a look at http://www.rric.net/ , a lot of the detail seems to have dissapeared now but IIRC they started off using SDSL over dedicated distribution subloops, then qwest tripled the price of those so they had little choice but to move to shared distrbution subloops (requiring complete new equipment), then iirc qwest for a while took away the ability for them to provision new shared subloops forcing them back to dedicated subloops. I consider that some serious messing arround.
I can think of at least a couple of big ones
One is compiler bugs/dubious optimisations, like it or not compilers often have bugs. They also sometimes make optimisations that are ok per the standard but break your assumptions. Being able to turn off optmisations on a per function basis would allow such issues to be worked arround easilly without knocking the entire source file down to a lower optimisation level.
Another is size vs speed, in an embedded application both memory and cpu time are often in short supply and being able to decide which to prioritise on a per function level could be very usefull.