Primary advantage is that you lose the ~10cm slice you need to take off one side of the oven.
Secondary advantage is you can wind up the microwave power, while not going over the limit of the plug power, or reduce electricity consumption.
Tertiary advantage is that it makes small ovens easier - for example, I'd quite like a 300W desktop microwave, with just enough volume for a large burger, or cup of coffee. Current magnetrons don't really scale well.
Quaternary advantage is it's 'new!' and something marketing can sell on.
Fifth advantage (I am not going to wikipedia to work out the proper word) it makes emitting in multiple areas over the cavity possible, which can even food heating, and reduce or eliminate the need for a turntable.
If you can get the efficiency up (from the current 60%), you may even be able to reduce the fan a bit.
Finally, the driver will be cost, as it's cheaper. Also - in principle, you can eliminate
For the next few years, sure. Given that they are at best 60% efficient, and rather physically large and heavy, they would be a great candidate to swap with an inexpensive silicon part. Even in the best inverter microwaves, the magnetron uses up a large slice of the cabinet.
This is not likely to happen soon, but in my lifetime, I'd be surprised if it diddn't.
Don't count on microwave ovens for too much longer. I've just been doing as a hobby project a simple design of semiconductor only microwave. It has major advantages - it can have a _much_ larger fraction of the cabinet as cooking volume - especially in small units. It can be smoothly varied easily in power.
Of course, it has the disadvantage that instead of $20 for a 900W magnetron, the semiconductors to power it would at the moment cost around $1500 for the dozen or so devices needed. (in quantity)
I would expect to see the first solid state microwaves on the market perhaps in 2020 or so. At which time, the days of the vacuum tube will be numbered. Already in a moderate fraction of homes, the second to last valve has gone away. (the cathode ray tube)
An interesting test would be to do a similar study on violent rapists. (excluding those in pre-existing relationships with the victim). Are they less affected, or even aroused, by the same signals?
I seem to recall a long time ago - ~2000 - a nice website, with full transcripts of all the apollo missions, including commentary, in a nice text searchable format - not PDF.
I've forgotten the name though. I don't think it was a NASA project.
There is no 'safety mechanism' as such that stops it heating hands.
The coil can safely be energised with no load. It won't get too hot, or anything, and it won't noticably heat your hand, or a duck, or anything non-metallic.
(well, it would heat graphite blocks and such, but that's cheating).
The reason for the device not turning on with no load is to prevent it heating up forks and other metallic implements that have been placed on the surface.
For much the same reason - 'magnetic stainless' is typically said to be OK for induction cooking, and 'non-magnetic' not.
This is due to the 'skin depth' (look at wikipedia) being thinner in magnetic materials.
This means that in both steel and iron pans, which are magnetic, in addition to the high resistance of the pan material, the electricity doesn't go very deeply, so it's only passing through a thin skin of the pan.
However - with very thin containers, non-magnetic stainless works just fine. I regularly heat up a large (non-magnetic) stainless washing up bowl that's maybe 0.5mm thick on my induction cooker.
Any thicker and it doesn't work.
My favourite utensil to use with it is actually a cheap 0.8mm or so thick steel wok.
Heats up in seconds, and once seasoned, is quite non-stick.
My second favourite is a large steel plate 6mm thick, again seasoned.
You have a massive auto company that has been making cars, trucks, and motorbikes that go 17MPH for the last 40 years. ($10000/Kg launched into low-earth orbit).
They occasionally make noises that faster vehicles would be nice, but are impossible at the current state of technology. They hold periodic excersizes to make a faster vehicle, which results in nothing, as they decide to make it from single-crystal diamond or similar materials, and they can't get the production running.
You have a requirement for a large cargo vehicle, and you can just about live with 17MPH.
Suddenly, a comparatively small company pops up with a motorbike that goes 84MPH - but they can't make cargo vehicles yet.
This kinda punctures the argument that vehicles that go >17MPH are impossible, and calls into question huge future orders from the big company.
SpaceX in this case is the small company with the faster (well - cheaper per pound) vehicle to low-earth-orbit. (they also plan geostationary orbit too)
If spacex's growth works well - they have incremental boostrers that can lift really quite large payloads at once.
The falcon 9 heavy has a comparable payload to the shuttle.
Cheap launches into low-earth-orbit basically enable a moon mission. Or indeed anything else. 32 ton modules - from falcon 9 heavy - are not too small to realistically assemble large craft that can head for the moon, or wherever.
Low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere, energetically. A Large fraction of the total energy you need to put into a spacecraft is just to get it to LEO. This is the same if it's going to GEO, or to the moon.
The key is two parts. One part is a computation/randomly chosen key. The second part is a copyrighted sample of music. The input key on-disk is hashed against the music, before being verified. This way you cannot decrypt the data without both the secret key and the music - which is protected under the DCMA and other copyright legislation. This way - even if your key leaks, it is impossible to decode the data on disk without the copyrighted song.
This is of course why you should use a longer key. One with a sample of a major artists work in, so the DCMA can be used to suppress copies of the key.
'A system for displaying geographic information comprising: an input device for selecting a geographic area of interest; a display device for displaying geographic information corresponding to at least a portion of the selected geographic area, w... , and the display device may sequentially display the geographic information relating to the same position in the selected geographic area from the different times.'
I'm pretty sure I recall that in ~2000 it had - in some places - a slider to select amongst times. And yes, IMO this is entirely what's wrong with software patents.
This is not a 'I invented something clever', but a 'I had a problem, I solved it in the obvious way, and I patented it'.
It's important to note that a prostitute, who is transported (for gain of course) by another to a third country, of her own choice, and is informed that she will be a prostitute there, but earning more than she is currently, if all of the promises to her are kept, is by the definitions of the above report 'A victim of human trafficking'.
Speaking as an electronics engineer, it is a complex process to design a decent GPS simulator that will allow you to simulate arbitrary movements accurately.
It is not however impossible.
If there was a market for it - which might be as small as one person approaching a skilled engineer and offering 50K so they can go and... while having an alibi - then creating one that slips on top of the existing antenna is quite possible.
The OSM project also cannot handle large amounts of traffic.
The server connections are on donated bandwidth, which are about flat out.
Bing runs their own servers, to serve up the map tiles, and uses almost no OSM resources, while promoting OSM at least a little with the attribution link.
Bing is donating hardware to the project through providing their own servers.
They could indeed donate to increase the bandwidth or size of the OSM servers, but at the moment, these are not real bottlenecks to the service. The main bottleneck is the lack of skilled coders to help with the infrastructure.
Some of the software infrastructure could be improved by an order of magnitude or two.
Tag Statistics could be improved, so people could see what tags were used in a given locality, as well as globally. Nominatim, though much improved, to locate addresses on the map could be improved and have features added. The API server could do with work enabling it to be segmented over countries or region, while remaining consistent. The XAPI - large near-line data request server could do with being able to be largely in RAM. It's possible to fit the whole DB - more or less - in RAM using efficient binary representation. It's just not been done, as it's a lot of work. More video guides, and howtos would be good too. Of course large servers, huge disk farms, and a ten gigabit link to the net would help too, but that's not an immediate bottleneck.
Re:I really need to get my walkstation set up
on
Sit Longer, Die Sooner
·
· Score: 3, Informative
To quote from the summary of the original article referenced. (alas, I don't have $40 to spare to read the paer)
"Evidence supports that reducing time spent sitting, regardless of activity, may improve the metabolic consequences of obesity"
The FA is a report of a study. The excersize at your desk recommendations are simply the result of a journalist googling for a couple of minutes to pad out the article.
There is no proof in the study that this would help at all.
It might for example be an effect due to cranial blood pressure being lower when standing, leading to reduced strokes.
It might be small clots forming in the legs during prolonged sitting, and this impacting health.
It might be that the wheel bearings on office chairs emit a really toxic vapour.
Or even the real effect is lying down for too long, and people that lie longer tend to sit longer.
Or a combination of all of these factors.
This sort of statistical study is almost useless taken alone.
You might reduce this effect with blood pressure drugs, better seat design, changing lubricant, or getting out of bed.
It seems logical that the excersizes listed would help - but absenting another large study - it's hard to prove.
The _most_ important thing when determining what to do 'green' wise is to start out with a spreadsheet that lists how much heat is going out of (or into) the structure.
Now, you work out how much it'd cost you to heat/cool.
If this is more than you like, you can take several approaches.
A) Geothermal heat pump.
For perhaps $10000 or so, you can get a heat pump that may, if you're lucky, last a decade before needing replacement. Admittedly the replacement will be cheaper, as probably only the pump will need replaced.
It will use from 1/3 to 1/4 of your 'normal' heating system.
B) Insulate the fuck out of the structure.
This provides 'free' energy, by reducing the expenditure of energy to heat or cool it.
C) Lifestyle changes. Wear more clothes.
In short - anyone who does 'energy efficiency' upgrades to their home, without actually enumerating cost/benefit is insane.
My home is a 1700s cottage, with 100m^2 of wall surface, and around 10m^2 of windows, and 100m^2 of ceiling and floor area. The roof was insulated in the 1970s.
The majority of the heat is going out of the walls, very - comparatively - little - out the windows - and a large slice of the remaining out the floor.
I have a heating demand of around 10Kw in winter to maintain the property at 20C.
For around the same cost as the heatpump - I can insulate the structure to a level where it will use significantly less power than the heatpump, and these improvements largely do not age. They will be mostly as energy efficient in 70 years, at which time, I shall likely be dead. (Or ruler of the known universe - depending on how things go.)
Indeed, the heating is reduced to the point that 'passive' gains from cooking or refrigeration or... contribute along with solar to most of the heating demand.
When it's finished, I expect only to heat slightly - a couple of kilowatts - when the external temperature drops much below 0.
Geothermal can be better than this in some cases. If you need cooling, and you're in an area with an average temperature year-round that's under your desired air-temperature, there are solutions that involve no heat pumps at all - simply pumped transfer of coolant to underground.
PV is almost always insane. Spending the price of the panels on extra insulation significantly exceeds the benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
Primary advantage is that you lose the ~10cm slice you need to take off one side of the oven.
Secondary advantage is you can wind up the microwave power, while not going over the
limit of the plug power, or reduce electricity consumption.
Tertiary advantage is that it makes small ovens easier - for example, I'd quite like a 300W desktop microwave, with just enough volume for a large burger, or cup of coffee.
Current magnetrons don't really scale well.
Quaternary advantage is it's 'new!' and something marketing can sell on.
Fifth advantage (I am not going to wikipedia to work out the proper word) it makes emitting in multiple areas over the cavity possible, which can even food heating, and reduce or eliminate the need for a turntable.
If you can get the efficiency up (from the current 60%), you may even be able to reduce the fan a bit.
Finally, the driver will be cost, as it's cheaper.
Also - in principle, you can eliminate
For the next few years, sure.
Given that they are at best 60% efficient, and rather physically large and heavy, they would be a great candidate to swap with an inexpensive silicon part.
Even in the best inverter microwaves, the magnetron uses up a large slice of the cabinet.
This is not likely to happen soon, but in my lifetime, I'd be surprised if it diddn't.
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/index.php?topic=1958.0 or not.
(lego Antikythera)
The smoke enema machines used to resussitate drowning victims.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoke_enema
Don't count on microwave ovens for too much longer.
I've just been doing as a hobby project a simple design of semiconductor only microwave.
It has major advantages - it can have a _much_ larger fraction of the cabinet as cooking volume - especially in small units.
It can be smoothly varied easily in power.
Of course, it has the disadvantage that instead of $20 for a 900W magnetron, the semiconductors to power it would at the moment cost around $1500 for the dozen or so devices needed. (in quantity)
I would expect to see the first solid state microwaves on the market perhaps in 2020 or so.
At which time, the days of the vacuum tube will be numbered.
Already in a moderate fraction of homes, the second to last valve has gone away. (the cathode ray tube)
An interesting test would be to do a similar study on violent rapists.
(excluding those in pre-existing relationships with the victim).
Are they less affected, or even aroused, by the same signals?
Did anyone else have the urge to obtain a hare, shave it, and tattoo the periodic table onto it?
I seem to recall a long time ago - ~2000 - a nice website, with full transcripts of all the apollo missions, including commentary, in a nice text searchable format - not PDF.
I've forgotten the name though.
I don't think it was a NASA project.
It might leave governmental action.
Department of Homeland security gave them a 'switch off, or you're going to jail' order.
Bring back 1.0.
Not really.
There is no 'safety mechanism' as such that stops it heating hands.
The coil can safely be energised with no load.
It won't get too hot, or anything, and it won't noticably heat your hand, or a duck, or anything non-metallic.
(well, it would heat graphite blocks and such, but that's cheating).
The reason for the device not turning on with no load is to prevent it heating up forks and other metallic implements that have been placed on the surface.
www.st.com/stonline/books/pdf/docs/12443.pdf
For much the same reason - 'magnetic stainless' is typically said to be OK for induction cooking, and 'non-magnetic' not.
This is due to the 'skin depth' (look at wikipedia) being thinner in magnetic materials.
This means that in both steel and iron pans, which are magnetic, in addition to the high resistance of the pan material, the electricity doesn't go very deeply, so it's only passing through a thin skin of the pan.
However - with very thin containers, non-magnetic stainless works just fine.
I regularly heat up a large (non-magnetic) stainless washing up bowl that's maybe 0.5mm thick on my induction cooker.
Any thicker and it doesn't work.
My favourite utensil to use with it is actually a cheap 0.8mm or so thick steel wok.
Heats up in seconds, and once seasoned, is quite non-stick.
My second favourite is a large steel plate 6mm thick, again seasoned.
To continue with the car analogy.
You have a massive auto company that has been making cars, trucks, and motorbikes that go 17MPH for the last 40 years.
($10000/Kg launched into low-earth orbit).
They occasionally make noises that faster vehicles would be nice, but are impossible at the current state of technology.
They hold periodic excersizes to make a faster vehicle, which results in nothing, as they decide to make it from single-crystal diamond or similar materials, and they can't get the production running.
You have a requirement for a large cargo vehicle, and you can just about live with 17MPH.
Suddenly, a comparatively small company pops up with a motorbike that goes 84MPH - but they can't make cargo vehicles yet.
This kinda punctures the argument that vehicles that go >17MPH are impossible, and calls into question huge future orders from the big company.
SpaceX in this case is the small company with the faster (well - cheaper per pound) vehicle to low-earth-orbit. (they also plan geostationary orbit too)
If spacex's growth works well - they have incremental boostrers that can lift really quite large payloads at once.
The falcon 9 heavy has a comparable payload to the shuttle.
Cheap launches into low-earth-orbit basically enable a moon mission. Or indeed anything else.
32 ton modules - from falcon 9 heavy - are not too small to realistically assemble large craft that can head for the moon, or wherever.
Low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere, energetically. A Large fraction of the total energy you need to put into a spacecraft is just to get it to LEO.
This is the same if it's going to GEO, or to the moon.
And if she's wrong - well - you needed that raccoon suit anyway.
It cites http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0195-9255(02)00025-2 which is a 2002 paper, behind a paywall for Environmental Impact Assessment Review - anyone have a subscription?
The '25 items or less' seems debatable, especially in areas where the delivery vehicle will be delivering to one area with optimised routing.
'Just'.
It really does cost quite a lot to make flash.
For example, a fab capable of the latest geometries will set you back over a billion dollars.
This fab is only cutting edge for a yearish before needing retooled, or moving down the value chain to make cheaper - less profitable - stuff.
The key is two parts.
One part is a computation/randomly chosen key.
The second part is a copyrighted sample of music.
The input key on-disk is hashed against the music, before being verified.
This way you cannot decrypt the data without both the secret key and the music - which is protected under the DCMA and other copyright legislation.
This way - even if your key leaks, it is impossible to decode the data on disk without the copyrighted song.
This is of course why you should use a longer key.
One with a sample of a major artists work in, so the DCMA can be used to suppress copies of the key.
Diddn't terraserver do exactly this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraserver.com
'A system for displaying geographic information comprising: an input device for selecting a geographic area of interest; a display device for displaying geographic information corresponding to at least a portion of the selected geographic area, w... , and the display device may sequentially display the geographic information relating to the same position in the selected geographic area from the different times.'
I'm pretty sure I recall that in ~2000 it had - in some places - a slider to select amongst times.
And yes, IMO this is entirely what's wrong with software patents.
This is not a 'I invented something clever', but a 'I had a problem, I solved it in the obvious way, and I patented it'.
It's important to note that a prostitute, who is transported (for gain of course) by another to a third country, of her own choice, and is informed that she will be a prostitute there, but earning more than she is currently, if all of the promises to her are kept, is by the definitions of the above report 'A victim of human trafficking'.
There already exist GPS test transmitters.
http://www.meguro.co.jp/english/product/category/category_01/msg2051a_eng.html for example.
These units broadcast a false GPS position.
Speaking as an electronics engineer, it is a complex process to design a decent GPS simulator that will allow you to simulate arbitrary movements accurately.
It is not however impossible.
If there was a market for it - which might be as small as one person approaching a skilled engineer and offering 50K so they can go and ... while having an alibi - then creating one that slips on top of the existing antenna is quite possible.
The OSM project also cannot handle large amounts of traffic.
The server connections are on donated bandwidth, which are about flat out.
Bing runs their own servers, to serve up the map tiles, and uses almost no OSM resources, while promoting OSM at least a little with the attribution link.
Bing is donating hardware to the project through providing their own servers.
They could indeed donate to increase the bandwidth or size of the OSM servers, but at the moment, these are not real bottlenecks to the service.
The main bottleneck is the lack of skilled coders to help with the infrastructure.
Some of the software infrastructure could be improved by an order of magnitude or two.
Tag Statistics could be improved, so people could see what tags were used in a given locality, as well as globally.
Nominatim, though much improved, to locate addresses on the map could be improved and have features added.
The API server could do with work enabling it to be segmented over countries or region, while remaining consistent.
The XAPI - large near-line data request server could do with being able to be largely in RAM. It's possible to fit the whole DB - more or less - in RAM using efficient binary representation. It's just not been done, as it's a lot of work.
More video guides, and howtos would be good too.
Of course large servers, huge disk farms, and a ten gigabit link to the net would help too, but that's not an immediate bottleneck.
To quote from the summary of the original article referenced. (alas, I don't have $40 to spare to read the paer)
"Evidence supports that reducing time spent sitting, regardless of activity, may improve the metabolic consequences of obesity"
So - the study only addresses obese people.
The FA is a report of a study.
The excersize at your desk recommendations are simply the result of a journalist googling for a couple of minutes to pad out the article.
There is no proof in the study that this would help at all.
It might for example be an effect due to cranial blood pressure being lower when standing, leading to reduced strokes.
It might be small clots forming in the legs during prolonged sitting, and this impacting health.
It might be that the wheel bearings on office chairs emit a really toxic vapour.
Or even the real effect is lying down for too long, and people that lie longer tend to sit longer.
Or a combination of all of these factors.
This sort of statistical study is almost useless taken alone.
You might reduce this effect with blood pressure drugs, better seat design, changing lubricant, or getting out of bed.
It seems logical that the excersizes listed would help - but absenting another large study - it's hard to prove.
Geothermal heating is not magic.
In most cases, it uses significant energy.
The _most_ important thing when determining what to do 'green' wise is to start out with a spreadsheet that lists how much heat is going out of (or into) the structure.
Now, you work out how much it'd cost you to heat/cool.
If this is more than you like, you can take several approaches.
A) Geothermal heat pump.
For perhaps $10000 or so, you can get a heat pump that may, if you're lucky, last a decade before needing replacement. Admittedly the replacement will be cheaper, as probably only the pump will need replaced.
It will use from 1/3 to 1/4 of your 'normal' heating system.
B) Insulate the fuck out of the structure.
This provides 'free' energy, by reducing the expenditure of energy to heat or cool it.
C) Lifestyle changes. Wear more clothes.
In short - anyone who does 'energy efficiency' upgrades to their home, without actually enumerating cost/benefit is insane.
My home is a 1700s cottage, with 100m^2 of wall surface, and around 10m^2 of windows, and 100m^2 of ceiling and floor area.
The roof was insulated in the 1970s.
The majority of the heat is going out of the walls, very - comparatively - little - out the windows - and a large slice of the remaining out the floor.
I have a heating demand of around 10Kw in winter to maintain the property at 20C.
For around the same cost as the heatpump - I can insulate the structure to a level where it will use significantly less power than the heatpump, and these improvements largely do not age. They will be mostly as energy efficient in 70 years, at which time, I shall likely be dead.
(Or ruler of the known universe - depending on how things go.)
Indeed, the heating is reduced to the point that 'passive' gains from cooking or refrigeration or ... contribute along with solar to most of the heating demand.
When it's finished, I expect only to heat slightly - a couple of kilowatts - when the external temperature drops much below 0.
Geothermal can be better than this in some cases.
If you need cooling, and you're in an area with an average temperature year-round that's under your desired air-temperature, there are solutions that involve no heat pumps at all - simply pumped transfer of coolant to underground.
PV is almost always insane.
Spending the price of the panels on extra insulation significantly exceeds the benefit.