Wheatstone Bridge-based "lie" detector. Two resistors, a pot, some wire (you can use paperclips with bends in them to hold people's fingers and reduce slightly the ease with which this can be gamed.) Either measure directly across the bridge with a voltmeter or amplify with a transistor and drive an LED. You could use the more traditional galvanometer but that breaks your $5 budget. But everyone loves something that allows them to ask you rude questions to try and make you sweat.
There's always the good old motor made of a coil of magnet wire, a battery, and a magnet.
For a little more than $5, you can buy a bag of cheap laser diodes off ebay, a couple of 1k-to-8ohm audio transformers, and a photodiode or photovoltaic cell (keep it as small as possible) and build something that plugs into an mp3 player phono jack and transmits sound via laser. Here's one implementation, and many others exist. I've built these and they're pretty easy.
For that matter, since laser diodes are so cheap, you can also make a pretty good seismometer with a laser diode, some cheap crappy fiber optic cable in a tangle, and a photodiode. The fiber optic could even be glass you've drawn, if I recall correctly.
I've made several coilguns, but those are a little more exciting. Wind up a good coil of magnet wire, around a core of lots of welding rod cut at different lengths. Put a hoop of metal, preferably aluminum, around it on top of the coil, and briefly connect the coil to 110v, and watch your metal hoop fly. With some care in coil inductance and adding some caps for tuning, you can put a ring through a piece of plywood.
>I just don't understand why so many people are so addicted to these computer based types of social networks when to an outsiders perspective many of the posts seem either phony or useless.
Quick bit of pop psych, just from reading your post: you're basically an introvert. If you don't have anything to say, you don't say anything, because for you silence beats mindless conversation. She and her friends are extroverts. If they don't have anything to say, they say something to try and get a conversationg going, because for them, any conversation is more interesting than silence.
People who would rather think than talk stare at twitter and facebook and think they're pretty much incomprehensible, but that's because they have different premises for their social interaction patterns.
>I love people that are so utterly self-absorbed and oblivious to their surroundings that they can do something this foolish.
Ya know, I'm not sure it's being self-absorbed that's the problem. I know people who just can't multitask, like the old saw about people who can't walk and chew gum at the same time. My grandfather and aunt are/were like this: they just couldn't do two things at once. It wasn't for lack of smarts, either: he was a self-taught organic chemist with a dozen patents, some quite successful, and she's a graphic designer in high demand. But they were/are what you'd call oblivious unless you know them, and then you realize that some people seem to be mentally incapable of rapid task switching even after (in granddad's case) 90 years of trying. My aunt stopped using her cellphone after months of running into doors while trying to talk and walk at the same time, and on the rare occasions where she drives, she says at the beginning of the drive "I cannot talk while I'm driving or I'm likely to have a crash, so please don't talk." She's learned this from experience (and a couple of wrecked cars) after 40 years of trying. Maybe the woman who fell into the manhole just hasn't figured this out about herself yet.
For that matter, I've seen half a dozen guys walk straight into walls or trip over chairs because they were too busy checking out my gf's butt to watch where they were going. Smart people can realize when their priorities have shifted and they're about to do something stupid, but even smart people need some experience to develop the skill to notice when they're about to do something stupid.
>If you are asked to do something you think is wrong then it's time to start making suggestions as to how to improve the task rather than running away from the situation.
I have two friends who were fired for doing exactly this, which I think looks worse on your resume than quitting when you realize that your management has already decided to do something you think is a bad idea.
Mountain flying is technically challenging -- as challenging for an experienced pilot, as just flying is for a person who doesn't know how to fly. There are a lot of things you do when you train in mountain flying to minimize your risk, but if you're in a small piston-engined plane, there are a lot of places where you just don' t know what the best plan is, so you have to make a quick decision and hope you were right.
First off: fly down valleys, not up them. That's not always possible, though: you sort of have to fly up one valley to go over the pass and fly down the next.
Another is you don't fly up the middle of a valley. You fly up one side, so that you have room to make a quick turn if you find that you're in a narrow bit of the valley and you need to get out. But here's the tradeoff: there are sometimes strong upslope/downslope winds along the valley sides, so by preserving your ability to turn, you might run into an intense downdraft. (Generally, winds are faster, the higher you go, but in valley conditions, downslope winds known as foehn or scirroco winds tend to be intense right around the valley itself, particularly if you're flying up an old glacial valley with hanging valleys intersecting it: there are these big cold air currents flowing down them just like water would and pouring down into the main valley.)
Likewise, once you're in a downdraft you have to make some hard decisions. You pull the nose up to best angle of climb, full power, and you hold it. What if you're aiming right towards a big rock? If you turn, your stall speed increases, and you're already fairly close to stall speed, so you have to weigh reducing your angle of climb (which in a microburst or downdraft means increasing your speed towards the ground) to make the turn, vs. trying to ride out your current heading and hoping you'll miss that big object. You don't know, a priori, which one is going to work. Maybe you'll break out of the downdraft. Maybe it's worse over there where you're about to turn. That's where skill, experience, and lots and lots of luck come into play.
Where I live, sometimes the clouds from the mountain waves are visible in long rows at over 25,000 feet elevation, in lines for a hundred miles downwind of the mountains themselves, and every one of those is strong enough to shake a plane like a ragdoll. A B-52 bomber had its vertical tail ripped off and lost part of a wing in clear air turbulence 5000 feet above the nearest mountain.
Case in point: Steinmetz Solids, or mouhefanggai, that appear to be spherical from some angles, and hexagonal from other angles. Or the solid letters on the cover of the book Godel, Escher, Bach, that only make sense if viewed isometrically: a picture along any axis gives a completely different set of information than the other axes.
So what have I bought when I buy something from iTunes? It's not a physical copy, I haven't bought the music (insofar as I'm not allowed to copy and redistribute it) and if I haven't bought a license either, what do I own? I know what I *get*, but from a legal standpoint, what do I *own*? As far as I know -- which, admittedly isn't very much -- either I own a license for use of the object, or I own the object. Otherwise it's a lease, and that's a whole different set of issues which don't seem to apply here.
My guess is that this doesn't fit well into the traditional supply/demand model because the service is nominally free. If the cost is zero, there is no reason for people to not demand infinite product. Since Pandora has some revenue coming in through ads, they can subsidize the not-actually-zero supply to meet the zero cost demand, up to a point; after that, they have to start charging to discourage infinite demand. This makes sense if most of their listeners only listen a short while, and a few listen constantly (like my girlfriend's mother, who turns on the TV and leaves it running all day, whether she's in the room or not: aiee!) I don't see this as being entirely different from 95 percentile bandwidth charging that some ISP's use (except this is more fair, since it's a fixed and well-known boundary.)
Can you or anyone else explain why I can't download a song that I already have purchased a license for (by buying the CD)? I'd always thought that once I'd bought a license for a piece of music, I could safely download as many copies as I wanted, and I'm curious how/why this is illegal.
They are. Almost all the drivers my company builds have a DIM input pin that takes a PWM signal from an external source (I've used a 555, as it so happens) or from another similar driver chip (so you can control multiple lights with a single signal) and it works extremely well. They can be driven by a computer, by music, by anything you'd like, and can handle PWM frequencies into the megahertz range. We'd love it if someone were already making a PWM light controller that we could piggyback on, rather than having to design clever input circuitry to figure out what a cheap dimmer is trying to tell the lightbulb and translating that into a PWM signal. (Again: extra parts.)
Wait a second.
What does the OS, *any* OS, have to do with playing back menuing items from a DVD? Where I come from, that's called an application, and applications are available for purchase for Windows, Linux, Mac, and other OS's, that handle DVD's quite well. The issue at hand is running a free/Free DVD playback program, and that is a recurring problem with what's available on Linux -- and on Windows; I have the same problem when I try and play this DVD under VLC on Windows. In other words, it's the application, not the OS.
However, security problems *are* generally an OS problem. That, I can't fix, especially in Windows. And, as you say, that's something that shouldn't've been broken in the first place, and generally *isn't* in Linux, but generally *is*, in Windows.
And just to make sure, are you actually saying that I'm not allowed to tell them what OS they're allowed to use, but I am allowed to tell them what websites they're allowed to use?
I think you are about as backwards as it is possible to be, in both your arguments.
Oh, now that's a very interesting idea. I was trying this on an 8 year old Sony Vaio, a 5 year old Dell Latitude, and a 6 year old homebuilt desktop. I don't *have* anything newer, but maybe I'll borrow one from a friend and give it a run. Thanks for the suggestion.
Re:Better DVD menu support?
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>Charge them for the service, even something small like $5-per-issue works.
For the record, this works *incredibly* poorly with my (aforementioned) girlfriend.
I'd probably use a 555 as a PWM generator, yeah. They're cheap and easy. The problem is you have to use that to switch +/- 170V, which the 555 can't handle, so then you have to design level shifters (for bipolars) or use gate drivers (for FETs) and you run into several chips and discrete components. I don't think it's easy to do in less than 2 chips and 8 discretes, or 3 chips and 5 discretes. That gets very expensive compared to the diac/triac/RC solution, and it's difficult to convince consumers to buy such things.
FWIW there are plenty of states (Colorado being one I know about) in which it *is* specifically illegal to drive in the left lane if you're not passing someone in the right lane. It is not currently generally a primary offense (meaning the cops won't pull you over just for doing that) but it is certainly a ticketable offense and I know people who have been ticketed for doing so when pulled over for something else. I've heard reports that cops have pulled people over for only this, but I don't know this for sure.
And, as far as I can tell, having been on Lambda since 1993, it didn't do a single bit of good: we went back to fascism once it was clear that A: nobody cared about government except for people who were pushing a specific agenda and B: it didn't seem to be possible to build a system that got people to want to care about political participation or involved deterrents sufficient to stop griefing.
It was like real-life politics with even more apathy and special-interest maneuvering. (Which is a huge shame because I love the place.)
Thanks for the recommendation: I'll give it a try tonight.
Re:Better DVD menu support?
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Sigh, because I'd like it to work for them so I don't have to keep trying to fix their Windows machines that *do* play DVD's and also get filled with viruses and horribleness.
That doesn't do what they want, either.
This is something that's changing very rapidly, although it's not (in my opinion, as an LED lighting systems designer) actually fixed yet. NEXT year, however...
There are now some nice warm white LED's, and it's likely that what will be sellling fairly soonish will be a mix of warm white LED's and red LED's -- or even (my preference) bulbs with sensors, that can vary multiple LED outputs to produce a specified light color. (This is kinda cool because you can make your room look the same even under different sunshine conditions.)
But right now, many or most of the LED's being sold are incredibly primitive, both from the driver side (inefficient) and from the LED side (just a string of cheap UV LED's with some cheap phosphors that are very blue and yellow heavy, giving a weird and not awfully pleasant output spectrum.)
Not that this matters much, but I work in lighting design, specifically with dimmers, and I've never seen a 'variable resistance' dimmer.
What I have seen are older ones that use a standard triac, using a diac and an RC pair to trigger the triac, and newer "electronic dimmer" ones that turn off the AC early, rather than turning it on late like the older ones. I haven't seen anyone selling PWM dimmers, if by that you mean converting the AC sine wave into a square wave and varying the on/off time. That'd be a very nice way to run a dimmer, but it would be a bit complicated and expensive and consumers are unbelievably unwilling to pay extra for anything.
If you have seen any actual PWM dimmers I'd be interested in knowing the brand name so I could get some and take them apart.
Better DVD menu support?
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If anyone has tried this and played around with its menu support I'd love to hear about it. I have several newer DVD's that won't play on VLC, Ogle, or mplayer. Oh, they'll play: the stupid previews, the trailers, the additional material. But the intro screen with a menu item that says 'play movie', crashes any of them when I try to actually play the movie. This is happening on a brand-new copy of Stardust and another of Letters from Iwo Jima, and it's making my linux sell really difficult for my girlfriend and my roommate, who both say "if it can't play a DVD, I'm not using it".
Sigh
I'm not sure this makes sense.
As I understand it, damage done to roads rises roughly as the square of the weight applied -- or at least that's what my civil engineering friend claimed when we were talking about this. Clearly loading 2000 kilos into one square centimeter will do more damage than loading it into 100 square centimeters, but his claim was that roads were designed to stand up to some loading indefinitely, and most cars were well within that loading envelope. (There's a section of US287 in my hometown that was put down in concrete in 1938, according to the concrete form marks, and four years later the road was routed a couple km away; the concrete is still in near-perfect condition despite being used daily by several dozen cars, while the current highway gets rebuilt every 10 years when it's beat to pieces.)
So his claim was that a well-engineered roadbed with a concrete surface would last essentially forever under normal car traffic, no matter what the wheel size or pressure, because the cars just weren't heavy enough to make the roadbed crack. (In metals terms, the stress they apply doesn't exceed the material yield strength.) Larger cars, and trucks, are what do damage, and that damage is increased considerably when they use high-pressure tires to reduce their rolling resistance -- which is what you're saying: that a big load supported on a smaller cross-sectional area will do more damage. But with that said, you should be able to run Honda Insights and old VW Beetles and Mini Coopers, with their 13" wheels, forever across a US Interstate without damaging it.
If you're working in Silicon Valley, there are lots of places where you can bike as fast as you can drive.
I live in a rural area in Colorado, and work 25 miles away. It takes me 45 minutes to drive in, and 1 hour 20 minutes to ride my bike in: by adding an hour onto my commute time, I get 3 hours' exercise in. When I was going to school, my commute was 12 miles and taking into account the traffic and parking situations it took me 5 minutes less to ride my bike than to drive.
This may not be the case for you, especially when you first start riding: you'll be riding much more slowly than you'd drive. However, you might consider driving in, biking home, then biking in the next day and driving home. It's hard to get in a decent workout when you've spent several hours working at your job and then have to switch gears over and go lift weights or do pushups for your entire break, and then go back to work -- not impossible, obviously, but I find it difficult. But the time spent driving to work is truly wasted: that's part of your life that you're just burning. You're paying for it and getting nothing. If you can turn some portion of that time into exercise you win twice: you turn time you have to pay to waste, into time that's useful. It'd be even better if you could move closer to work, obviously, but that might not be possible.
And as everyone else says: that lifestyle will eat you alive. I don't think anyone should be working 60 hours a week unless they're making over 120K and saving more than half that every year, because then they'll be able to retire at 50 instead of 70, and when they die at 70 from the after-effects of all the stress, they will have had nearly as reasonable a retirement as people who lived lower-stress lives.
Most notably that Anderson bases most of his argument on the idea that there is an enormous difference between 'extremely cheap' and 'free' ("the magic of the word 'free' creates instant demand among consumers" that is vastly higher than the increase in demand seen between charging $0.10 and $0.01) but, as Gladwell points out, at no point does Anderson say that information/data storage is actually free, just that it is heading that direction asymptotically. As such, it is still, always, $0.01 or thereabouts, and not actually 'free'. So by Anderson's own argument, all the advantages that you get from free information and a post-scarcity society, don't ever happen.
I might be wrong but I thought this was the case most everywhere. I pay state sales tax to Colorado. I add to that the city tax I pay to Denver. I add to that the special improvement district tax I pay in specific areas that are doing road improvement projects or buying a new fire engine, and in the greater Denver area I pay tax to offset the construction cost of the stupid Broncos stadium. That seems to be the way most states and cities run sales taxes. Since most of those sales taxes are very small -- the stupid Broncos tax, for instance, is 0.05% -- they disappear into the grand total of "oh, yeah, everything costs 6% more than its price sticker indicates."
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There's always the good old motor made of a coil of magnet wire, a battery, and a magnet.
For a little more than $5, you can buy a bag of cheap laser diodes off ebay, a couple of 1k-to-8ohm audio transformers, and a photodiode or photovoltaic cell (keep it as small as possible) and build something that plugs into an mp3 player phono jack and transmits sound via laser. Here's one implementation, and many others exist. I've built these and they're pretty easy.
For that matter, since laser diodes are so cheap, you can also make a pretty good seismometer with a laser diode, some cheap crappy fiber optic cable in a tangle, and a photodiode. The fiber optic could even be glass you've drawn, if I recall correctly.
I've made several coilguns, but those are a little more exciting. Wind up a good coil of magnet wire, around a core of lots of welding rod cut at different lengths. Put a hoop of metal, preferably aluminum, around it on top of the coil, and briefly connect the coil to 110v, and watch your metal hoop fly. With some care in coil inductance and adding some caps for tuning, you can put a ring through a piece of plywood.
>I just don't understand why so many people are so addicted to these computer based types of social networks when to an outsiders perspective many of the posts seem either phony or useless.
Quick bit of pop psych, just from reading your post: you're basically an introvert. If you don't have anything to say, you don't say anything, because for you silence beats mindless conversation. She and her friends are extroverts. If they don't have anything to say, they say something to try and get a conversationg going, because for them, any conversation is more interesting than silence.
People who would rather think than talk stare at twitter and facebook and think they're pretty much incomprehensible, but that's because they have different premises for their social interaction patterns.
>I love people that are so utterly self-absorbed and oblivious to their surroundings that they can do something this foolish.
Ya know, I'm not sure it's being self-absorbed that's the problem. I know people who just can't multitask, like the old saw about people who can't walk and chew gum at the same time. My grandfather and aunt are/were like this: they just couldn't do two things at once. It wasn't for lack of smarts, either: he was a self-taught organic chemist with a dozen patents, some quite successful, and she's a graphic designer in high demand. But they were/are what you'd call oblivious unless you know them, and then you realize that some people seem to be mentally incapable of rapid task switching even after (in granddad's case) 90 years of trying. My aunt stopped using her cellphone after months of running into doors while trying to talk and walk at the same time, and on the rare occasions where she drives, she says at the beginning of the drive "I cannot talk while I'm driving or I'm likely to have a crash, so please don't talk." She's learned this from experience (and a couple of wrecked cars) after 40 years of trying. Maybe the woman who fell into the manhole just hasn't figured this out about herself yet.
For that matter, I've seen half a dozen guys walk straight into walls or trip over chairs because they were too busy checking out my gf's butt to watch where they were going. Smart people can realize when their priorities have shifted and they're about to do something stupid, but even smart people need some experience to develop the skill to notice when they're about to do something stupid.
>If you are asked to do something you think is wrong then it's time to start making suggestions as to how to improve the task rather than running away from the situation.
I have two friends who were fired for doing exactly this, which I think looks worse on your resume than quitting when you realize that your management has already decided to do something you think is a bad idea.
Mountain flying is technically challenging -- as challenging for an experienced pilot, as just flying is for a person who doesn't know how to fly. There are a lot of things you do when you train in mountain flying to minimize your risk, but if you're in a small piston-engined plane, there are a lot of places where you just don' t know what the best plan is, so you have to make a quick decision and hope you were right.
First off: fly down valleys, not up them. That's not always possible, though: you sort of have to fly up one valley to go over the pass and fly down the next. Another is you don't fly up the middle of a valley. You fly up one side, so that you have room to make a quick turn if you find that you're in a narrow bit of the valley and you need to get out. But here's the tradeoff: there are sometimes strong upslope/downslope winds along the valley sides, so by preserving your ability to turn, you might run into an intense downdraft. (Generally, winds are faster, the higher you go, but in valley conditions, downslope winds known as foehn or scirroco winds tend to be intense right around the valley itself, particularly if you're flying up an old glacial valley with hanging valleys intersecting it: there are these big cold air currents flowing down them just like water would and pouring down into the main valley.)
Likewise, once you're in a downdraft you have to make some hard decisions. You pull the nose up to best angle of climb, full power, and you hold it. What if you're aiming right towards a big rock? If you turn, your stall speed increases, and you're already fairly close to stall speed, so you have to weigh reducing your angle of climb (which in a microburst or downdraft means increasing your speed towards the ground) to make the turn, vs. trying to ride out your current heading and hoping you'll miss that big object. You don't know, a priori, which one is going to work. Maybe you'll break out of the downdraft. Maybe it's worse over there where you're about to turn. That's where skill, experience, and lots and lots of luck come into play.
Where I live, sometimes the clouds from the mountain waves are visible in long rows at over 25,000 feet elevation, in lines for a hundred miles downwind of the mountains themselves, and every one of those is strong enough to shake a plane like a ragdoll. A B-52 bomber had its vertical tail ripped off and lost part of a wing in clear air turbulence 5000 feet above the nearest mountain.
Case in point: Steinmetz Solids, or mouhefanggai, that appear to be spherical from some angles, and hexagonal from other angles. Or the solid letters on the cover of the book Godel, Escher, Bach, that only make sense if viewed isometrically: a picture along any axis gives a completely different set of information than the other axes.
So what have I bought when I buy something from iTunes? It's not a physical copy, I haven't bought the music (insofar as I'm not allowed to copy and redistribute it) and if I haven't bought a license either, what do I own? I know what I *get*, but from a legal standpoint, what do I *own*? As far as I know -- which, admittedly isn't very much -- either I own a license for use of the object, or I own the object. Otherwise it's a lease, and that's a whole different set of issues which don't seem to apply here.
My guess is that this doesn't fit well into the traditional supply/demand model because the service is nominally free. If the cost is zero, there is no reason for people to not demand infinite product. Since Pandora has some revenue coming in through ads, they can subsidize the not-actually-zero supply to meet the zero cost demand, up to a point; after that, they have to start charging to discourage infinite demand. This makes sense if most of their listeners only listen a short while, and a few listen constantly (like my girlfriend's mother, who turns on the TV and leaves it running all day, whether she's in the room or not: aiee!) I don't see this as being entirely different from 95 percentile bandwidth charging that some ISP's use (except this is more fair, since it's a fixed and well-known boundary.)
Can you or anyone else explain why I can't download a song that I already have purchased a license for (by buying the CD)? I'd always thought that once I'd bought a license for a piece of music, I could safely download as many copies as I wanted, and I'm curious how/why this is illegal.
They are. Almost all the drivers my company builds have a DIM input pin that takes a PWM signal from an external source (I've used a 555, as it so happens) or from another similar driver chip (so you can control multiple lights with a single signal) and it works extremely well. They can be driven by a computer, by music, by anything you'd like, and can handle PWM frequencies into the megahertz range. We'd love it if someone were already making a PWM light controller that we could piggyback on, rather than having to design clever input circuitry to figure out what a cheap dimmer is trying to tell the lightbulb and translating that into a PWM signal. (Again: extra parts.)
Wait a second.
What does the OS, *any* OS, have to do with playing back menuing items from a DVD? Where I come from, that's called an application, and applications are available for purchase for Windows, Linux, Mac, and other OS's, that handle DVD's quite well. The issue at hand is running a free/Free DVD playback program, and that is a recurring problem with what's available on Linux -- and on Windows; I have the same problem when I try and play this DVD under VLC on Windows. In other words, it's the application, not the OS.
However, security problems *are* generally an OS problem. That, I can't fix, especially in Windows. And, as you say, that's something that shouldn't've been broken in the first place, and generally *isn't* in Linux, but generally *is*, in Windows.
And just to make sure, are you actually saying that I'm not allowed to tell them what OS they're allowed to use, but I am allowed to tell them what websites they're allowed to use?
I think you are about as backwards as it is possible to be, in both your arguments.
Oh, now that's a very interesting idea. I was trying this on an 8 year old Sony Vaio, a 5 year old Dell Latitude, and a 6 year old homebuilt desktop. I don't *have* anything newer, but maybe I'll borrow one from a friend and give it a run. Thanks for the suggestion.
For the record, this works *incredibly* poorly with my (aforementioned) girlfriend.
I'd probably use a 555 as a PWM generator, yeah. They're cheap and easy. The problem is you have to use that to switch +/- 170V, which the 555 can't handle, so then you have to design level shifters (for bipolars) or use gate drivers (for FETs) and you run into several chips and discrete components. I don't think it's easy to do in less than 2 chips and 8 discretes, or 3 chips and 5 discretes. That gets very expensive compared to the diac/triac/RC solution, and it's difficult to convince consumers to buy such things.
FWIW there are plenty of states (Colorado being one I know about) in which it *is* specifically illegal to drive in the left lane if you're not passing someone in the right lane. It is not currently generally a primary offense (meaning the cops won't pull you over just for doing that) but it is certainly a ticketable offense and I know people who have been ticketed for doing so when pulled over for something else. I've heard reports that cops have pulled people over for only this, but I don't know this for sure.
And, as far as I can tell, having been on Lambda since 1993, it didn't do a single bit of good: we went back to fascism once it was clear that A: nobody cared about government except for people who were pushing a specific agenda and B: it didn't seem to be possible to build a system that got people to want to care about political participation or involved deterrents sufficient to stop griefing.
It was like real-life politics with even more apathy and special-interest maneuvering. (Which is a huge shame because I love the place.)
Thanks for the recommendation: I'll give it a try tonight.
Sigh, because I'd like it to work for them so I don't have to keep trying to fix their Windows machines that *do* play DVD's and also get filled with viruses and horribleness.
That doesn't do what they want, either.
This is something that's changing very rapidly, although it's not (in my opinion, as an LED lighting systems designer) actually fixed yet. NEXT year, however...
There are now some nice warm white LED's, and it's likely that what will be sellling fairly soonish will be a mix of warm white LED's and red LED's -- or even (my preference) bulbs with sensors, that can vary multiple LED outputs to produce a specified light color. (This is kinda cool because you can make your room look the same even under different sunshine conditions.)
But right now, many or most of the LED's being sold are incredibly primitive, both from the driver side (inefficient) and from the LED side (just a string of cheap UV LED's with some cheap phosphors that are very blue and yellow heavy, giving a weird and not awfully pleasant output spectrum.)
Not that this matters much, but I work in lighting design, specifically with dimmers, and I've never seen a 'variable resistance' dimmer.
What I have seen are older ones that use a standard triac, using a diac and an RC pair to trigger the triac, and newer "electronic dimmer" ones that turn off the AC early, rather than turning it on late like the older ones. I haven't seen anyone selling PWM dimmers, if by that you mean converting the AC sine wave into a square wave and varying the on/off time. That'd be a very nice way to run a dimmer, but it would be a bit complicated and expensive and consumers are unbelievably unwilling to pay extra for anything.
If you have seen any actual PWM dimmers I'd be interested in knowing the brand name so I could get some and take them apart.
If anyone has tried this and played around with its menu support I'd love to hear about it. I have several newer DVD's that won't play on VLC, Ogle, or mplayer. Oh, they'll play: the stupid previews, the trailers, the additional material. But the intro screen with a menu item that says 'play movie', crashes any of them when I try to actually play the movie. This is happening on a brand-new copy of Stardust and another of Letters from Iwo Jima, and it's making my linux sell really difficult for my girlfriend and my roommate, who both say "if it can't play a DVD, I'm not using it". Sigh
I'm not sure this makes sense.
As I understand it, damage done to roads rises roughly as the square of the weight applied -- or at least that's what my civil engineering friend claimed when we were talking about this. Clearly loading 2000 kilos into one square centimeter will do more damage than loading it into 100 square centimeters, but his claim was that roads were designed to stand up to some loading indefinitely, and most cars were well within that loading envelope. (There's a section of US287 in my hometown that was put down in concrete in 1938, according to the concrete form marks, and four years later the road was routed a couple km away; the concrete is still in near-perfect condition despite being used daily by several dozen cars, while the current highway gets rebuilt every 10 years when it's beat to pieces.)
So his claim was that a well-engineered roadbed with a concrete surface would last essentially forever under normal car traffic, no matter what the wheel size or pressure, because the cars just weren't heavy enough to make the roadbed crack. (In metals terms, the stress they apply doesn't exceed the material yield strength.) Larger cars, and trucks, are what do damage, and that damage is increased considerably when they use high-pressure tires to reduce their rolling resistance -- which is what you're saying: that a big load supported on a smaller cross-sectional area will do more damage. But with that said, you should be able to run Honda Insights and old VW Beetles and Mini Coopers, with their 13" wheels, forever across a US Interstate without damaging it.
If you're working in Silicon Valley, there are lots of places where you can bike as fast as you can drive.
I live in a rural area in Colorado, and work 25 miles away. It takes me 45 minutes to drive in, and 1 hour 20 minutes to ride my bike in: by adding an hour onto my commute time, I get 3 hours' exercise in. When I was going to school, my commute was 12 miles and taking into account the traffic and parking situations it took me 5 minutes less to ride my bike than to drive.
This may not be the case for you, especially when you first start riding: you'll be riding much more slowly than you'd drive. However, you might consider driving in, biking home, then biking in the next day and driving home. It's hard to get in a decent workout when you've spent several hours working at your job and then have to switch gears over and go lift weights or do pushups for your entire break, and then go back to work -- not impossible, obviously, but I find it difficult. But the time spent driving to work is truly wasted: that's part of your life that you're just burning. You're paying for it and getting nothing. If you can turn some portion of that time into exercise you win twice: you turn time you have to pay to waste, into time that's useful. It'd be even better if you could move closer to work, obviously, but that might not be possible.
And as everyone else says: that lifestyle will eat you alive. I don't think anyone should be working 60 hours a week unless they're making over 120K and saving more than half that every year, because then they'll be able to retire at 50 instead of 70, and when they die at 70 from the after-effects of all the stress, they will have had nearly as reasonable a retirement as people who lived lower-stress lives.
Most notably that Anderson bases most of his argument on the idea that there is an enormous difference between 'extremely cheap' and 'free' ("the magic of the word 'free' creates instant demand among consumers" that is vastly higher than the increase in demand seen between charging $0.10 and $0.01) but, as Gladwell points out, at no point does Anderson say that information/data storage is actually free, just that it is heading that direction asymptotically. As such, it is still, always, $0.01 or thereabouts, and not actually 'free'. So by Anderson's own argument, all the advantages that you get from free information and a post-scarcity society, don't ever happen.
I might be wrong but I thought this was the case most everywhere. I pay state sales tax to Colorado. I add to that the city tax I pay to Denver. I add to that the special improvement district tax I pay in specific areas that are doing road improvement projects or buying a new fire engine, and in the greater Denver area I pay tax to offset the construction cost of the stupid Broncos stadium. That seems to be the way most states and cities run sales taxes. Since most of those sales taxes are very small -- the stupid Broncos tax, for instance, is 0.05% -- they disappear into the grand total of "oh, yeah, everything costs 6% more than its price sticker indicates."