Actually i'd say if anything it requires a beefier grid. When the wind isn't blowing in your locality you either have to fall back to conventional generation (in which case you need a grid pretty much the same capacity as before) or import power from somewhere where it is blowing (which will require extra grid capacity).
If an object is hotter than it's surroundings in still air a volume of air arround it will start to heat up reducing the rate of heat transfer. Similarlly if a wet object is in still air a volume of air arround it will increase in humidity reducing the rate of evaporation. Moving air means the air has moved away from the hot/moist object before it has a chance to increase in tempreature or humidity much.
In cool climates the temperature is lower than body temperature so both heat transfer and evaporation will be working to cool your body.
In a hot climate though the direct heat transfer will be warming the body and the only cooling from the wind will be through evaporation.
One thing to consider is that those who consider the electricity grid too unreliable will put backup generators in place. In the US and western europe europe power cuts are sufficiently rare that only datacenters, hospitals and similar consider such arrangements worthwhile. In countries with less reliable power presumablly the economics shift and more people buy generators.
What you can't do anything about so easilly is expensive and/or unreliable communications. Sattelite services are frightfully expensive, have terrible latency and likely also poor bandwidth. So you are largely stuck with what the local telecom/internet providers can provide.
The Xbox 360 added HDMI, but hasn't removed anything as far as I can tell.
The S models no longer have the slots for memory units. They also require different hard drive modules from the originals.
They did release a no-hard-drive model but only after they started letting you use USB sticks instead.
In the west (japan didn't get it until a bit later) the xbox 360 was available without a hard drive form the start.
The first no-hard-drive model was the xbox 360 core system. It came with no user storage at all so if you wanted to save your games you had to buy a hard drive or memory unit seperately. It was later replaced by the arcade which came with 256MB or 512MB of storage*. This in turn was replaced by the 4GB S model.
Support for USB sticks didn't come until april 2010 and was presumably done in preparation for the release of the S models in june 2010.
* Initially this was a 256MB memory unit, later replaced by 256MB onboard and then 512MB onboard.
having skimmed the spec defeating the cable type interlocks is trivial, just use a short "USB power delivery cable" and a coupler (yes couples aren't supposed to exist but we all know that they do). However there is also supposed to be protection that shuts down the power delivery system if excessive volt drop is detected.
Will be interesting to see how this pans out, still I don't think fire is a likely outcome, far more likely is that the cable will melt and either short the power feed (not so bad) or short the power wire to the data wire (that could do some serious damage).
The problem is AIUI the goal was to make things work on shitty webhosts. So working in up to date apache/php with the right settings is not enough, you have to work on whatever old version of apache/php and whatever crummy config the webhost offers.
IMO there is a middle ground between "put every game on the SSD" and "put no games on the SSD" some games have really annoying load times that can be considerablly shortened by putting them on a SSD, with others it doesn't really matter. Also many people have a large collection of games but only actually play a handful of them regularly.
A 120GB SSD is affordable and should be enough to hold the OS, the non-game apps, the most frequently played games and the games that have the most annoying loading times. Other games can go on the HDD (as a sibling poster said steam makes this a bit more of a pain but there is a soloution called "steammover" which mostly solves that problem).
Sometimes it's possible to ressurect a dead drive by swapping the controller board with another from the same model (or a very close model from the same range). Unfortunately with modern drives there is often information stored on the controller board which is needed for the drive to start. This information seems to be stored on a serial memory chip (usually an 8-pin device in a SOIC or similar package) on the controller board.
What i've found you can do is remove the serial memory chip from the dead controller board and solder it to the donor controller board. Provided you have a hot air rework station it's pretty easy to remove and re-fit the serial memory chips. So-far i've tried this twice and it's worked both times, YMMV of course.
That's pretty much what UFO seers claim to have often seen
That is because they don't understand their own eyes and brain.
It is true that humans have two eyes and it is true that we combine the information from them to get depth perception. However this only works over short distances. Over longer distances the information between the eyes becomes too similar to get depth information this way.
So what our eyes actually see is an object that takes up some angle of vision. The angle of vision for an object (in radians) is approximately [size of object]/[distance to object]. We subconsciously guess what size the object should be and estimate the distance to the object. Most of the time this works pretty well, many objects have at least roughly fixed sizes and based on that we can approximate the distance to them and the size of other objects nearby.
However with a flying saucer this all breaks down. There are no other nearby objects to give size clues and our perception of the size a flying saucer "should" be is shaped by movies. So people will percive a massive flying saucer at high altitude and high speed when the real saucer was much smaller, lower in altitude and lower in speed.
20V isn't exactly common in a PC (especially at 5A).
But it IS pretty much the de-facto standard for laptop power adaptors. I suspect we will only see 20V support in dedicated power adaptors, not in ports on computers.
It's only a matter of time until someone accidentally misprograms their USB descriptors and then *bang*!
AIUI Power negotiation is seperate from USB enumeration but still it will certainly be interesting to see how many vendors screw it up.
So what happens when people plug normal usb cables and devices into it?
No negotiation happens and the port stays at 5V.
As long as you stay with compliant USB devices and cables there should be no problems. They have also tried to reduce the risk of damage from noncompliant stuff but there are certainly some combinations of noncompliant stuff that could cause damage.
I'm sure your TV is great for watching video and probablly ok for playing 3D games. However as a monitor for desktop use it's going to be no better than a smaller 1080p monitor and may well actually be worse (some HDTVs make really shitty monitors due to inappropriate processing between input and screen).
Didn't the Ethernet specs solve some problems such as collision sensing, retrys, etc.?
Ethernet came up with a relatively cheap and effective soloution to buidling local networks but it was far from the only soloution.
P.S. Note that modern ethernet is very different from traditional ethernet. Traditional ethernet used a shared medium and CSMA/CD. Modern ethernet uses point to point full duplex links interconnected by switches. Modern ethernet gear still supports the legacy way of doing things but it only actually does it if you either force it to through an admin interface or wire it up to legacy gear.
Apps loaded from the store are ridiculously DRMed but you can sideload too?
The problem with that is it only takes ONE person to crack and strip the DRM and you have an unprotected copy floating arround in the wild that anyone can sideload.
Quite a lot of your average household *could* soon run at more like 12V
Sure it could but why would you want it to?
You'd be adding another conversion step, mains -> ~12V -> whatever the device actually needs internally rather than mains -> whatever the device needs internally and lossy distribution wiring (if you reduce the voltage by a factor of 10 and want to keep the losses the same you need to increase the wire size by a factor of 100).
For the moment they are still shipping with wall warts. Usually the wall warts have a type A socket on them rather than a captive cable so you can unplug the cable from the wall wart and plug it into your PC to use for data (and charging).
AIUI the goal is that once USB wall warts are everywhere (right now they are the norm on new phones but plenty of phone purchasers will still be buying their first device that uses one) that phone vendors will stop needing to ship them with new phones.
why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet?
There WERE commercial publicly accessible networks before the internet but afaict they mostly failed to gain significant traction because every company running such systems wanted to lock in users and nickle and dime them.
While afaict the Internet was built by researchers who cared about interoperability and getting the data through rather than lockin and billing. Eventually when commercial ISPs got involved they had to come up with a billing model but afaict it has generally been a fairly simplistic one along the lines of "pay X per minuite connected" or "pay X per unit of data, we don't really care where it's going" or "pay X for a connection of speed Y".
Basically there are two main ways for a home user to get internet in the UK*. DSL on their BT phone line** or cable modem on their virgin media cable. Most households in the UK can get the former, about half can get the latter.
With DSL down the phone line you have lots of options for internet service, you can buy internet service from BT, you can buy it from a provider who uses BT wholesale's network or in some areas you can buy it from a local loop unbundling provider who run their own DSL signals down the physical line. FTTC and FTTH complicate this a bit but the principle that BT have to offer the service to competitors still holds.
OTOH if you want internet service down your virgin media cable then AFAICT you have no choice but to buy it from virgin media.
* Some small areas are exceptions to this. ** This part of the operation is now run under the brand name openreach and run somewhat seperately from the rest of BT but it's still owned by BT group.
IP itself doesn't really need broadcast or multicast, they can be nice to have but you don't really need them.
What you do need if running IP over an addressable underlying medium is a means of translating IP addresses to medium addresses. Broadcasting lookup packets is one way of automating that but it's far from the creation of translation tables does not strictly have to be automated.
The problem is doing it properly yourself requires at least a basic understanding of networks (so you can find the IP addresses involved, let stuff through the firewalls or NATS involved etc) and crypto (so you can manage keys without letting the software do it for you).
While using centralised software is as easy as installing a program and creating an account with a username and password.
BTW if you are serious about security for voice or video coms make sure you use a constant bitrate system. Otherwise they may be able to infer stuff from the size of your packets.
The power system has it's own communications protocol (modulated on the power lines), having USB connectivity is optional.
As for attack vendor it really depends on how your laptop manufacturer and/or OS handles the port, it could be just a "dumb" charging port that only implements the charger communication or it could be a full-on USB device port, if it's the latter then the OS vendor will have to think about handling device ports. This is not a new issue though, it's already present with phones that use USB charging, most android phones seem to give the user the option of what mode to run in when they detect a host.
maybe someone will market a "safe" cable that allows through the power negotiation but blocks the USB data signals.
It is true that current through the body and time for which that current is delivered are what generaly determine how much damage is done.
However it really makes no difference whether the short circuit current of your 12V source is 1A or 1000A, because 12V isn't nearly enough to push that much current through your skin under normal conditions.
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Actually i'd say if anything it requires a beefier grid. When the wind isn't blowing in your locality you either have to fall back to conventional generation (in which case you need a grid pretty much the same capacity as before) or import power from somewhere where it is blowing (which will require extra grid capacity).
If an object is hotter than it's surroundings in still air a volume of air arround it will start to heat up reducing the rate of heat transfer. Similarlly if a wet object is in still air a volume of air arround it will increase in humidity reducing the rate of evaporation. Moving air means the air has moved away from the hot/moist object before it has a chance to increase in tempreature or humidity much.
In cool climates the temperature is lower than body temperature so both heat transfer and evaporation will be working to cool your body.
In a hot climate though the direct heat transfer will be warming the body and the only cooling from the wind will be through evaporation.
One thing to consider is that those who consider the electricity grid too unreliable will put backup generators in place. In the US and western europe europe power cuts are sufficiently rare that only datacenters, hospitals and similar consider such arrangements worthwhile. In countries with less reliable power presumablly the economics shift and more people buy generators.
What you can't do anything about so easilly is expensive and/or unreliable communications. Sattelite services are frightfully expensive, have terrible latency and likely also poor bandwidth. So you are largely stuck with what the local telecom/internet providers can provide.
The Xbox 360 added HDMI, but hasn't removed anything as far as I can tell.
The S models no longer have the slots for memory units. They also require different hard drive modules from the originals.
They did release a no-hard-drive model but only after they started letting you use USB sticks instead.
In the west (japan didn't get it until a bit later) the xbox 360 was available without a hard drive form the start.
The first no-hard-drive model was the xbox 360 core system. It came with no user storage at all so if you wanted to save your games you had to buy a hard drive or memory unit seperately. It was later replaced by the arcade which came with 256MB or 512MB of storage*. This in turn was replaced by the 4GB S model.
Support for USB sticks didn't come until april 2010 and was presumably done in preparation for the release of the S models in june 2010.
* Initially this was a 256MB memory unit, later replaced by 256MB onboard and then 512MB onboard.
having skimmed the spec defeating the cable type interlocks is trivial, just use a short "USB power delivery cable" and a coupler (yes couples aren't supposed to exist but we all know that they do). However there is also supposed to be protection that shuts down the power delivery system if excessive volt drop is detected.
Will be interesting to see how this pans out, still I don't think fire is a likely outcome, far more likely is that the cable will melt and either short the power feed (not so bad) or short the power wire to the data wire (that could do some serious damage).
The problem is AIUI the goal was to make things work on shitty webhosts. So working in up to date apache/php with the right settings is not enough, you have to work on whatever old version of apache/php and whatever crummy config the webhost offers.
IMO there is a middle ground between "put every game on the SSD" and "put no games on the SSD" some games have really annoying load times that can be considerablly shortened by putting them on a SSD, with others it doesn't really matter. Also many people have a large collection of games but only actually play a handful of them regularly.
A 120GB SSD is affordable and should be enough to hold the OS, the non-game apps, the most frequently played games and the games that have the most annoying loading times. Other games can go on the HDD (as a sibling poster said steam makes this a bit more of a pain but there is a soloution called "steammover" which mostly solves that problem).
If you do that you want to put a dessicant in the bag with the drive. Otherwise you are just sealing the humid air in.
Sometimes it's possible to ressurect a dead drive by swapping the controller board with another from the same model (or a very close model from the same range). Unfortunately with modern drives there is often information stored on the controller board which is needed for the drive to start. This information seems to be stored on a serial memory chip (usually an 8-pin device in a SOIC or similar package) on the controller board.
What i've found you can do is remove the serial memory chip from the dead controller board and solder it to the donor controller board. Provided you have a hot air rework station it's pretty easy to remove and re-fit the serial memory chips. So-far i've tried this twice and it's worked both times, YMMV of course.
That's pretty much what UFO seers claim to have often seen
That is because they don't understand their own eyes and brain.
It is true that humans have two eyes and it is true that we combine the information from them to get depth perception. However this only works over short distances. Over longer distances the information between the eyes becomes too similar to get depth information this way.
So what our eyes actually see is an object that takes up some angle of vision. The angle of vision for an object (in radians) is approximately [size of object]/[distance to object]. We subconsciously guess what size the object should be and estimate the distance to the object. Most of the time this works pretty well, many objects have at least roughly fixed sizes and based on that we can approximate the distance to them and the size of other objects nearby.
However with a flying saucer this all breaks down. There are no other nearby objects to give size clues and our perception of the size a flying saucer "should" be is shaped by movies. So people will percive a massive flying saucer at high altitude and high speed when the real saucer was much smaller, lower in altitude and lower in speed.
20V isn't exactly common in a PC (especially at 5A).
But it IS pretty much the de-facto standard for laptop power adaptors. I suspect we will only see 20V support in dedicated power adaptors, not in ports on computers.
It's only a matter of time until someone accidentally misprograms their USB descriptors and then *bang*!
AIUI Power negotiation is seperate from USB enumeration but still it will certainly be interesting to see how many vendors screw it up.
So what happens when people plug normal usb cables and devices into it?
No negotiation happens and the port stays at 5V.
As long as you stay with compliant USB devices and cables there should be no problems. They have also tried to reduce the risk of damage from noncompliant stuff but there are certainly some combinations of noncompliant stuff that could cause damage.
As long as it's properly packaged it should be ok. Do you really think the likes of UPS take any better care of your stuff than the airlines do?
Two different devices for two different markets.
I'm sure your TV is great for watching video and probablly ok for playing 3D games. However as a monitor for desktop use it's going to be no better than a smaller 1080p monitor and may well actually be worse (some HDTVs make really shitty monitors due to inappropriate processing between input and screen).
Didn't the Ethernet specs solve some problems such as collision sensing, retrys, etc.?
Ethernet came up with a relatively cheap and effective soloution to buidling local networks but it was far from the only soloution.
P.S. Note that modern ethernet is very different from traditional ethernet. Traditional ethernet used a shared medium and CSMA/CD. Modern ethernet uses point to point full duplex links interconnected by switches. Modern ethernet gear still supports the legacy way of doing things but it only actually does it if you either force it to through an admin interface or wire it up to legacy gear.
Apps loaded from the store are ridiculously DRMed but you can sideload too?
The problem with that is it only takes ONE person to crack and strip the DRM and you have an unprotected copy floating arround in the wild that anyone can sideload.
Quite a lot of your average household *could* soon run at more like 12V
Sure it could but why would you want it to?
You'd be adding another conversion step, mains -> ~12V -> whatever the device actually needs internally rather than mains -> whatever the device needs internally and lossy distribution wiring (if you reduce the voltage by a factor of 10 and want to keep the losses the same you need to increase the wire size by a factor of 100).
For the moment they are still shipping with wall warts. Usually the wall warts have a type A socket on them rather than a captive cable so you can unplug the cable from the wall wart and plug it into your PC to use for data (and charging).
AIUI the goal is that once USB wall warts are everywhere (right now they are the norm on new phones but plenty of phone purchasers will still be buying their first device that uses one) that phone vendors will stop needing to ship them with new phones.
why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet?
There WERE commercial publicly accessible networks before the internet but afaict they mostly failed to gain significant traction because every company running such systems wanted to lock in users and nickle and dime them.
While afaict the Internet was built by researchers who cared about interoperability and getting the data through rather than lockin and billing. Eventually when commercial ISPs got involved they had to come up with a billing model but afaict it has generally been a fairly simplistic one along the lines of "pay X per minuite connected" or "pay X per unit of data, we don't really care where it's going" or "pay X for a connection of speed Y".
Basically there are two main ways for a home user to get internet in the UK*. DSL on their BT phone line** or cable modem on their virgin media cable. Most households in the UK can get the former, about half can get the latter.
With DSL down the phone line you have lots of options for internet service, you can buy internet service from BT, you can buy it from a provider who uses BT wholesale's network or in some areas you can buy it from a local loop unbundling provider who run their own DSL signals down the physical line. FTTC and FTTH complicate this a bit but the principle that BT have to offer the service to competitors still holds.
OTOH if you want internet service down your virgin media cable then AFAICT you have no choice but to buy it from virgin media.
* Some small areas are exceptions to this.
** This part of the operation is now run under the brand name openreach and run somewhat seperately from the rest of BT but it's still owned by BT group.
IP itself doesn't really need broadcast or multicast, they can be nice to have but you don't really need them.
What you do need if running IP over an addressable underlying medium is a means of translating IP addresses to medium addresses. Broadcasting lookup packets is one way of automating that but it's far from the creation of translation tables does not strictly have to be automated.
The problem is doing it properly yourself requires at least a basic understanding of networks (so you can find the IP addresses involved, let stuff through the firewalls or NATS involved etc) and crypto (so you can manage keys without letting the software do it for you).
While using centralised software is as easy as installing a program and creating an account with a username and password.
BTW if you are serious about security for voice or video coms make sure you use a constant bitrate system. Otherwise they may be able to infer stuff from the size of your packets.
The power system has it's own communications protocol (modulated on the power lines), having USB connectivity is optional.
As for attack vendor it really depends on how your laptop manufacturer and/or OS handles the port, it could be just a "dumb" charging port that only implements the charger communication or it could be a full-on USB device port, if it's the latter then the OS vendor will have to think about handling device ports. This is not a new issue though, it's already present with phones that use USB charging, most android phones seem to give the user the option of what mode to run in when they detect a host.
maybe someone will market a "safe" cable that allows through the power negotiation but blocks the USB data signals.
It's not the voltage, it's the current.
This if oft-quoted but highly misleading.
It is true that current through the body and time for which that current is delivered are what generaly determine how much damage is done.
However it really makes no difference whether the short circuit current of your 12V source is 1A or 1000A, because 12V isn't nearly enough to push that much current through your skin under normal conditions.