Fiber doesn't generally have that same kind of problems (unless you foolishly installed cheap plastic optical fibers.) There isn't a special "greased lightning fiber" people can turn to that carries more data.
Speak for yourself - I just picked up a $5000 S/PDIF cable from Monster Cable that moves those bits so much faster than any other cable on the market. When you hear the results, you can just tell that the 1's and 0's have so much more definition and crispness than ordinary commodity cables.
So, as has always been the case: use optimizers with caution, and verify the results. This is standard software development procedure. Some aspects of optimization are deterministic and straightforward, and are therefore pretty low risk; others optimizations can have unpredictable results that can break code.
Second, it wouldn't hurt to have monitoring/instrumentation so that you can monitor the efficiency of your system and tell when things are wrong
I can agree with that: I've personally outfit my furnace with various sensors as part of a homemade datalogging system. I couldn't find aftermarket products that did what I wanted for anything more than one or two zones. However, I don't think that the average consumer is interested in that kind of thing - not to the point of paying extra for it, anyway. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong, but when it comes to energy and efficiency I've found that most people couldn't care less.
Plus: HVAC equipment has a service life of 10-30 years. It may be that, by the time a problem does arise and the information would be useful, there isn't a computer system that knows how to talk to it. USB and Ethernet, as hardware layers, will probably still be around, but will the average computer in the future know how to talk to the furnace?
For information back on how often a boiler is actually burning when "on"
I built an Arduino-based datalogger for my 5-zone heating system for exactly this purpose. It senses the states of the 24VAC and 120VAC relays and converts them into timestamped logical On and Off. The output is a CSV files on an SD card. I didn't go the extra step of putting it on the network, although that'd be pretty easy. The tricky part is the visualization of the data: I spent almost as many hours developing scripts to (offline) post-process and display the data as I did laying out the custom shield and writing the firmware. It'd be swell if I could accomplish that on a Raspberry Pi, serving up a furnace dashboard and interactive history. But, really, I'm not interested enough to go that extra step, nor do I have the time.
So, yes, it would be neat if this functionality were already built into the HVAC equipment, but such a tiny minority of customers would be interested in it that no manufacturer would add the cost of it.
build heaters and or air conditioners that can be controlled by USB or ethernet
Heaters and air conditions are largely operated by a single On/Off switch, controlling a 24VAC relay. It doesn't get much simpler than that. What would you want USB or ethernet for?
Monopolies are bad. Government makes a monopoly. Results are bad. Are you surprised?
But infrastructure is a situation where true competition is difficult if not impossible. Are you proposing that several companies compete to lay identical sets of natural gas pipes down every street to serve every building? What a waste of capital! The business-case math on that just doesn't work out. (N companies, each investing C capital, to compete for X customers. Compared to the caes where there's just one company (N=1), each company either has to accept 1/N return on investment, or the customers have to pay the expected ROI on N*C, rather than just C.)
As with telcos, the barrier to entry is really hard, meaning that whoever gets there first tends to become a de-facto monopoly. Would you prefer that private monopoly to one granted by a municipality that, at least theoretically, can flex some muscle as the grantor? Even better would be for the municipality to build and own the infrastructure outright, just like roads, and then allow lots of companies to compete on providing the service. The municipality charges any service provider the same rate (toll, lease, whatever) to cover the costs of operating and maintaining the infrastructure. This results in a single fixed costs that is publicly borne, while letting competition rule for the variable costs.
Having a large accident would be a large liability for an energy company, and they would naturally take steps to avoid it
If you had bothered to RTFA, you would have noted that dangerous leaks are usually addressed immediately; just as you say, it's a liability thing.
But the thousands of smaller leaks (ones that don't affect buildings or subterranean infrastructure, for instance, just leaking gas into the ground), because they don't pose an immediate safety risk, are largely ignored and never fixed. From a climate change standpoint (hell, even from a horticultural standpoint - gas kills plants), these are costs that don't show up as liabilities to the company. In other words, another example of an externality that the magical hand of capitalism has failed to account for. If the gas company were charged a premium rate for lost gas (i.e., the difference between what they take delivery of and the sum of all they deliver to customers) to account for those methane emissions, or were charged $5,000 to replace a tree killed by a gas leak, then they might take it more seriously. So why don't we?
If you have a LED connected to the microphone circuit, someone could train a telescope on your phone and analyze its flicker to remotely overhear what you're saying
And if they have a microphone with a parabolic dish, they can hear it directly. And if they are standing next to you they can hear you outright. At some point you have to live life. If your paranoia extends that far, may as well never leave the house.
Or because they've lost the source code, or because the only person who knew the software has long since left the company, or they've tried three times since 2003 but each time was over budget and did not deliver usable code, or development has been at a standstill since they offshored the development team. Or because they don't have the budget to push out new hardware in a down economy. Or, yes, ok, because they never will.
I used a Gen1 iPhone for over three years before upgrading to an iPhone 4, which I am still using 3+ years later.
I used a 12" powerbook for 4 years before replacing it with a 15" macbook pro, which I'm still using as my primary home machine 6 years later. Over a similar timeframe, I've gone through about 5 computers at work.
Using a very small but powerful micro compressor, it compresses oxygen and stores the extracted oxygen in storage tank.
The micro compressor operates through micro battery.
Considering that the "micro compressor" and "micro battery" only exist as nondescript blocks in one CAD rendering, I'd say that it is too good to be true. A "microbattery" not much larger than a CR2032 that's "a next-generation technology with a size 30 times smaller than current battery that can quickly charge 1,000 times faster" no less? I'm suuuuure that I can pick one of those up any day now, just like in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drug store. A micro compressor with the volume of a 9-V battery that can handle oxygen at breathable rates? Yup, I installed one of those in my free energy harvester just yesterday.
I'm not sure if you are trolling, making a bad joke, or are just on the anti-gub'mint bandwagon. But I'll ask anyway: would you feel better if the NRL scrapped it for the $3000 worth of steel it contains, and then built something new from scratch? I'm sure fathers and grandfathers would appreciate that repurposing is often a money-saving technique.
if someone can hack your phone to turn the camera on, they can also turn the LED off
This is not necessarily true if you design this feature into the board. For instance, you can have the LED hard-wired to the camera's power supply - anytime the camera has power, the LED will be on. When the firmware wants to save power by turning the camera off, it must well and truly be off (i.e., no power applied), and not just a sleep mode.
Alternately, depending on the communications bus between the camera chip and the SoC, you can have an LED tied to one of the communications lines through some sort of buffer circuit - chip select, camera Tx, etc.
One would think that this was the way it was always done - some unambiguous way to know when the camera is active that was baked in at the board level - but apparently not.
Phone -> Web server CGI -> soft-relay on PCI card (or use an Arduino board) -> higher voltage relay wired to make/break certain wires between the t-stat and the air handler (usually a "split system" or a "fan powered box")
and you have now eliminated 95% of the world, either because 1) they lack the requisite skillset to pull it off or 2) they recognize that their time has value - it doesn't take many hours of frustration to add up to Nest that "just works".
To a certain extent, storage density isn't a particularly great concern; the real metric to look for is cost/capacity. If the energy density of this new method is only one half, or one tenth, of liquid metal batteries, but the $/kWh is likewise one half or one tenth, then who cares if you need twice or ten times as much semi-industrial space for a comparable amount of storage?
Well, what this really means is that states such as Idaho and Kentucky can suddenly make it rich in renewable energy, as they're well positioned on the power grid
Now that they've leveled off their mountains, Kentucky and West Virginia have got plenty of flat land to build on!
As long as it's in controlled environment and they know what they're doing
The same might have been said before Chernobyl 1986. A power plant is supposedly a controlled environment, and the people there certainly thought they knew what they were doing...
I'm not knockin' the Japanese for wanting to conduct this test. I agree that it is a test that should be conducted (well, should have been conducted, decades ago), and they'll probably do it properly. Doing it with a single fuel rod, rather than an entire reactor, seems a prudent move. The "what could possibly go wrong" alarm immediately flashed into my head nevertheless.
"The password is in the book"; "Moby Dick"; "Page 27, Line 6"
What if you end up with a different edition or printing of said book? Instead of "Moby Dick", make it a specific ISBN, then the page and line number should be unambiguous.
3D printing has been used for complex parts in aircraft for years. Specifically, some turbine blades have been 3D printed in metal, because they can have internal passages for cooling. It's not quite a net part - the airfoil shape and the retaining dovetail need to be post-machined, but it's a lot faster than the investment casting it replaced.
Slashdot Mirror
Speak for yourself - I just picked up a $5000 S/PDIF cable from Monster Cable that moves those bits so much faster than any other cable on the market. When you hear the results, you can just tell that the 1's and 0's have so much more definition and crispness than ordinary commodity cables.
So, as has always been the case: use optimizers with caution, and verify the results. This is standard software development procedure. Some aspects of optimization are deterministic and straightforward, and are therefore pretty low risk; others optimizations can have unpredictable results that can break code.
Well, of course he bollocksed the interview - he wasn't speaking English!
That's because I just can't tolerate intolerance!
I can agree with that: I've personally outfit my furnace with various sensors as part of a homemade datalogging system. I couldn't find aftermarket products that did what I wanted for anything more than one or two zones. However, I don't think that the average consumer is interested in that kind of thing - not to the point of paying extra for it, anyway. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong, but when it comes to energy and efficiency I've found that most people couldn't care less.
Plus: HVAC equipment has a service life of 10-30 years. It may be that, by the time a problem does arise and the information would be useful, there isn't a computer system that knows how to talk to it. USB and Ethernet, as hardware layers, will probably still be around, but will the average computer in the future know how to talk to the furnace?
I built an Arduino-based datalogger for my 5-zone heating system for exactly this purpose. It senses the states of the 24VAC and 120VAC relays and converts them into timestamped logical On and Off. The output is a CSV files on an SD card. I didn't go the extra step of putting it on the network, although that'd be pretty easy. The tricky part is the visualization of the data: I spent almost as many hours developing scripts to (offline) post-process and display the data as I did laying out the custom shield and writing the firmware. It'd be swell if I could accomplish that on a Raspberry Pi, serving up a furnace dashboard and interactive history. But, really, I'm not interested enough to go that extra step, nor do I have the time.
So, yes, it would be neat if this functionality were already built into the HVAC equipment, but such a tiny minority of customers would be interested in it that no manufacturer would add the cost of it.
Heaters and air conditions are largely operated by a single On/Off switch, controlling a 24VAC relay. It doesn't get much simpler than that. What would you want USB or ethernet for?
But infrastructure is a situation where true competition is difficult if not impossible. Are you proposing that several companies compete to lay identical sets of natural gas pipes down every street to serve every building? What a waste of capital! The business-case math on that just doesn't work out. (N companies, each investing C capital, to compete for X customers. Compared to the caes where there's just one company (N=1), each company either has to accept 1/N return on investment, or the customers have to pay the expected ROI on N*C, rather than just C.)
As with telcos, the barrier to entry is really hard, meaning that whoever gets there first tends to become a de-facto monopoly. Would you prefer that private monopoly to one granted by a municipality that, at least theoretically, can flex some muscle as the grantor? Even better would be for the municipality to build and own the infrastructure outright, just like roads, and then allow lots of companies to compete on providing the service. The municipality charges any service provider the same rate (toll, lease, whatever) to cover the costs of operating and maintaining the infrastructure. This results in a single fixed costs that is publicly borne, while letting competition rule for the variable costs.
If you had bothered to RTFA, you would have noted that dangerous leaks are usually addressed immediately; just as you say, it's a liability thing.
But the thousands of smaller leaks (ones that don't affect buildings or subterranean infrastructure, for instance, just leaking gas into the ground), because they don't pose an immediate safety risk, are largely ignored and never fixed. From a climate change standpoint (hell, even from a horticultural standpoint - gas kills plants), these are costs that don't show up as liabilities to the company. In other words, another example of an externality that the magical hand of capitalism has failed to account for. If the gas company were charged a premium rate for lost gas (i.e., the difference between what they take delivery of and the sum of all they deliver to customers) to account for those methane emissions, or were charged $5,000 to replace a tree killed by a gas leak, then they might take it more seriously. So why don't we?
And if they have a microphone with a parabolic dish, they can hear it directly. And if they are standing next to you they can hear you outright. At some point you have to live life. If your paranoia extends that far, may as well never leave the house.
Which, when combined with your sig, makes for a veeery disturbing notion.
Which is Microsoft's problem...how?
Please bear in mind that there are only a few things I that want to be bare in my mind.
I used a Gen1 iPhone for over three years before upgrading to an iPhone 4, which I am still using 3+ years later.
I used a 12" powerbook for 4 years before replacing it with a 15" macbook pro, which I'm still using as my primary home machine 6 years later. Over a similar timeframe, I've gone through about 5 computers at work.
Considering that the "micro compressor" and "micro battery" only exist as nondescript blocks in one CAD rendering, I'd say that it is too good to be true. A "microbattery" not much larger than a CR2032 that's "a next-generation technology with a size 30 times smaller than current battery that can quickly charge 1,000 times faster" no less? I'm suuuuure that I can pick one of those up any day now, just like in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drug store. A micro compressor with the volume of a 9-V battery that can handle oxygen at breathable rates? Yup, I installed one of those in my free energy harvester just yesterday.
I'm pretty sure Mary said the same to Jesus...when he was 14 years old. It probably didn't mean the same thing back then.
I'm not sure if you are trolling, making a bad joke, or are just on the anti-gub'mint bandwagon. But I'll ask anyway: would you feel better if the NRL scrapped it for the $3000 worth of steel it contains, and then built something new from scratch? I'm sure fathers and grandfathers would appreciate that repurposing is often a money-saving technique.
This is not necessarily true if you design this feature into the board. For instance, you can have the LED hard-wired to the camera's power supply - anytime the camera has power, the LED will be on. When the firmware wants to save power by turning the camera off, it must well and truly be off (i.e., no power applied), and not just a sleep mode.
Alternately, depending on the communications bus between the camera chip and the SoC, you can have an LED tied to one of the communications lines through some sort of buffer circuit - chip select, camera Tx, etc.
One would think that this was the way it was always done - some unambiguous way to know when the camera is active that was baked in at the board level - but apparently not.
and you have now eliminated 95% of the world, either because 1) they lack the requisite skillset to pull it off or 2) they recognize that their time has value - it doesn't take many hours of frustration to add up to Nest that "just works".
To a certain extent, storage density isn't a particularly great concern; the real metric to look for is cost/capacity. If the energy density of this new method is only one half, or one tenth, of liquid metal batteries, but the $/kWh is likewise one half or one tenth, then who cares if you need twice or ten times as much semi-industrial space for a comparable amount of storage?
Now that they've leveled off their mountains, Kentucky and West Virginia have got plenty of flat land to build on!
The same might have been said before Chernobyl 1986. A power plant is supposedly a controlled environment, and the people there certainly thought they knew what they were doing...
I'm not knockin' the Japanese for wanting to conduct this test. I agree that it is a test that should be conducted (well, should have been conducted, decades ago), and they'll probably do it properly. Doing it with a single fuel rod, rather than an entire reactor, seems a prudent move. The "what could possibly go wrong" alarm immediately flashed into my head nevertheless.
What if you end up with a different edition or printing of said book? Instead of "Moby Dick", make it a specific ISBN, then the page and line number should be unambiguous.
Until a grizzled Woody Harrelson tells me it is so!
3D printing has been used for complex parts in aircraft for years. Specifically, some turbine blades have been 3D printed in metal, because they can have internal passages for cooling. It's not quite a net part - the airfoil shape and the retaining dovetail need to be post-machined, but it's a lot faster than the investment casting it replaced.