The iPhone (and I assume the Touch), have the headphone jack slightly recessed the plug won't work
The headphone jack for the iPod Touch is flush with the bottom bezel, right next to the dock connector (visible in this 360 view). You should be able to plug in any set of headphones.
The Wiimote, like any device that tried to figure out position and velocity from an accelerometer, needs some outside reference that it can reset itself to. This is because of the practical difficulties in making a reliable inertial navigation unit. In order to get position data from an acceleration measurement, you need to integrate twice. In both analog and digital implementations, errors creep into the calculations and gradually accumulate - a phenomenon called inertial drift. The only thing that can be done about it is to occassionally reset your position and velocity against some known reference, like GPS or, in the case of Wiimote, the IR bar.
I would be very keen to know how this company has handled the problem of inertial drift. I'm sure the Air Force and Navy, who have invested millions into low-drift IMUs, would like to know, too. Nuclear submarines spend weeks cruising underwater, relying on their IMUs to tell them location and heading - if they're wrong they can end up running into things. Maybe this company has just made the system good enough so that, over the course of several hours of game-play, the drift isn't too bad.
I guess how shady the accounting is depends, in part, on how large a presence Microsoft has in Nevada. Is MS shipping DVDs of Windows and Office from some warehouse in the desert? Do they have servers based there that distribute authorized soft copies to OEMs? Are their sales and volume-customer relations based there?
Microsoft isn't going to leave Redmond - just accept it. Consider what it would take to relocate to someplace else: you'd have to build an entirely new campus for 35k+ employees, then you'd have to convince them all to come with you sight unseen, then you'd have to hire thousands of new employees to replace the ones who didn't come with you.
If taxation and cost of doing business were the deciding factor of where a company locates, Silicon Valley would not exist, and the World Trade Center would be in rural Idaho.
Wait, so in order to use the friggin' *PHONE* I am forced to have a computer??
Obviously you have a computer, or have access to one, so it's not like Apple is forcing your to buy a computer. Yes, you need a computer to activate the phone...the first time. Keep in mind, however, that there's more to the iPhone than just the phone. You've got 8 GB's worth of storage on that phone that you're to fill up with content. How are you going to get that content onto your phone, if not from a computer? Where is that content residing in the first place, if not on your computer? Are you going to download it all from the Internet?
If all you want is a phone, there are hundreds of models out there that you can buy, and never have to interface with a computer. Hell, you can buy them without an exclusive carrier, too. Getting your underpants in a twist because the iPhone requires a computer is just disingenuous.
Amusing. But cars are actual material goods, things made from refined raw materials and purchased components - a couple of tons' worth. There are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of design hours tied up in a car, a few hours or days on an assembly line staffed with people who are compensated, and robots that were purchased. Car parts need to be transported to the plant, and finished cars need to be transported to the showroom. In short, cars cost a lot because there's a lot tied up in them.
In contrast, what are the actual costs, to Verizon or AT&T, of sending a text message? Aside from a little bit of network traffic in the backbone and compute cycles in the billing infrastructure, there are no direct costs. Indirect costs, like the amortized cost of the infrastructure, service techs, and a few hundred million in executive pay (I'm not exaggerating, Ed Whitacre alone makes $20mil/yr). Even all those put together can't equal 5% of the price that they charge for a text message,. Most of the price to consumers is profit for the company. Rather than paying for a durable good, people are paying for a service.
So, while Adam Smith is right, and the cost of text messages remain high because people are still willing to be gouged (or are just plain ignorant that they are being gouged), the cost of cars remain high because, well, the cost of components, design, and manufacturing remain high.
The cost to launch something to the ISS's orbit is something like $10,000/lb. Let's say they make it from typical 20-lb bonded paper - the kind you'd pull from a copier.A 500-sheet ream of 20-lb actually weighs about 5 lbs, or 1/100th of a pound per sheet. Do out the math, and it works out to about $100/sheet of paper.
* Under the new rules, you can bring batteries with up to 8-gram equivalent lithium content. All lithium ion batteries in cell phones are below 8 gram equivalent lithium content. Nearly all laptop computers also are below this quantity threshold.
* You can also bring up to two spare batteries with an aggregate equivalent lithium content of up to 25 grams, in addition to any batteries that fall below the 8-gram threshold. Examples of two types of lithium ion batteries with equivalent lithium content over 8 grams but below 25 are shown below.
They point out that 8-gram equivalent lithium content is approximately 100 W-hr, 25-gram equivalent is about 300 W-hr. Laptop batteries these days are usually in the 30-50 W-hr range, so under the new rules you'd be able to bring your laptop, with its primary battery, plus two rather large spare batteries, and still be under their limits. It is basically a non-issue for 99.9% of travelers that bring and user their computer. The TSA limitations are mostly on lithium and lithium-ion batteries in checked baggage, where it wouldn't do you any good anyway.
It shouldn't be necessary to leave machines up and running all the time just to be able to push updates or run virus scans (etc., etc.). That's what Wake-On-LAN is for. It allows you to put a computer to sleep, then wake it remotely when it is specifically addressed to (say, by a remote administrator). Sure, it needs to be hardware supported on the motherboard, and the BIOS needs to be set up just so, but it isn't that hard to implement on a new machine that you need to configure for the company anyway.
I wanted to set up Wake-on-LAN on my work computer - so that I could put it to sleep, but still access a shared drive when I was away from the desk or remoting from home. I got zero help from IT - the first two people I spoke to hadn't even heard of it. I guess they didn't want one oddball network device out of 40,000 on campus.
Any sysadmins want to chime in on the pros and cons of implementing Wake-On-LAN company-wide?
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple stupidity
Yes, but for something as important as this - is stupidity or incompetence any better than malice? Put differently: is there a meaningful difference between the two in this case? Is one more understandable or forgivable than the other? Should the penalties for those responsible be different?
[these are actual questions - I'm not throwing them out there to just rag on incompetents.]
FireWire is a fairly general-purpose specification, designed so that devices that require a fixed (and quite large) amount of bandwidth can be guaranteed it, and designed with device-to-device communication in mind. Its maximum bandwidth is 400Mbps (unless you count FW800, which I will as soon as I see a device that supports it).
One other thing that Firewire has going for it is its power spec, which (when using the full-sized connector) can provide up to 45 W. That compares to only 2.5 W for a (powered) USB port. There are 2.5" external hard drives that you can power through the USB port, but certainly not 3.5" external drives.
For reasons I can't fathom, however, I haven't ever seen an external 3.5" hard drive that can pull its power from Firewire, even though it would only require 12-15 W. Hell, my first iPod synced and recharged over Firewire, why not my external hard drive?
If you made the case all black, the Apple logo on the back of the screen would shine all the brighter.
Re:Dirty Jobs, Mythbusters, First 48, Daily Show..
on
33 MegaPixel TV in 2015
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· Score: 0, Redundant
I would love to, but my cable company won't sell me just Discovery Channel and Comedy Central. I'd need to purchase the extended cable package which, without even being digital, costs another $40/mo. Digital or HD feeds of the same push it up another boatload.
Digital stethoscopes have been around for a while, and I don't think anyone is questioning the value of being able to record heart sounds for later re-examination, training, etc. The main question is: being such a simple device (recording audio, transferring it to a computer later), why put an OS on it at all? You could do the same with a $.50, 8-bit microcontroller and a bit of C - no OS needed.
How much are you paying for that service? For $30,000-40,000, you can buy a handheld x-ray fluorescence analyzer. These things got started in testing for lead paint, and now get used to test and check for lots of things - including alloy composition verification. An XRF shines x-rays of a known energy at the test sample, then detects and analyzes the spectrum that is reflected back. Each element has a characteristic x-ray emission spectrum based on the energy of electrons dropping into lower shells. In 10-20 seconds, you can get a really good breakdown of the elements in the test sample.
Most steels are magnetic to various degrees. However, when designing some stuff that would be used in an MRI suite, I did some research and found that some grades of stainless steel - specifically, 300-series stainless steels (302, 304, 316, etc.) - are more or less nonmagnetic. They can't be used inside the bore of the scanner, but that's mostly because it screws up the uniformity or the magnetic and RF fields necessary for imaging. This was a handy discovery for me, because sometimes aluminum and plastics aren't strong enough, and titanium is a lot harder to work with.
It's sort of the weather. It's cold and windy during the winter, sure. But, it's also dark - completely and utterly dark for months at a time during the dead of winter. There aren't any lights on the runway, or air traffic radar either, so there's a good chance the plane will smack onto the snow rather than land. It's very difficult to compact and maintain the snow/ice runway during the winter. If a plane were to land, they would have to keep the engines revved up and the plane moving - if they were to stop and shutdown the skis would freeze to the runway and the engines would refuse to restart.
also bear in mind that any plane they sent up there would almost certainly have to go through McMurdo. They generally use modified C-130s for their heavy transport, and they don't have tremendous range on one tank of gas. So, you'd need to get a plane first to McMurdo, which has its own difficulties of winter flying, and then head to the South Pole.
None of this is to say that they can't fly in during the winter. If the station were to blow up, for instance, they'd get some daring pilots to head in for a rescue. A few years back there was someone on the over-winter crew that needed treatment for breast cancer (it was the doctor, ironically enough), and they did some dicey flights for that (to send supplies, then for an early extraction). It's mostly that they prefer to not have to, because it's logistically difficult and mighty risky.
The reason the guy keeps referring to his people back in Denver is because logistics and support for the South Pole station (and McMurdo, too, I think) are run by Raytheon Polar Services, which is based in Colorado. The Antarctic program is run out of Washington by the National Science Foundation, but they contract out the actual infrastructure, operations, and other support.
Pumped hydroelectric is much better and currently used to store power. Always thought wind powered generators near a pumped hydroelectric would be a good thing.
Unfortunately, the places where wind energy is a great resource generally aren't great places for pumped hydro storage - geographically speaking. Wind energy is most available and steady in large flat expanses - the American midwest, near shore ocean, etc. Pumped hydro storage is most available in places that have large natural height differences that can be easily exploited - hilly terrain.
I actually like pumped hydro storage a great deal - it tends to be a very efficient way to storage utility-scale energy and is very fast and responsive. But, batteries can be nearly as efficient, respond almost instantaneously, and have much greater energy density. Even lead-acid batteries, which have a low energy density among batteries, can store 30-40 Whr/kg, or 108-144 kJ/kg. A pumped hydro storage system would need to exploit a height difference of 10-13 kilometers to have the same energy density (on a mass basis). In terms of volume energy density, lead acid batteries score 60-75 Whr/L, or 216-270 kJ/L. A pumped hydro storage system would need to exploit a height difference of 21-27 kilometers to be claim the same.
My approach is to say that all of these technologies have a roll to play in our energy infrastructure, certainly much more than they have now. The more the better - it breeds system complexity, but it can also breed agility and redundancy. What is used on a regional basis will depend a lot on what's available naturally, and how much infrastructure needs to be built around any one solution
A party's obligation to provide the grounds of his entitlement to relief requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do.
Maybe it's the lack of coffee this morning, maybe it's the fact that I didn't get a degree in Legalese Obfuscation, but: What on Earth is this sentence trying to say? Of all the things to say about this motion dismissal, why include this in the summary?
A little further research seems to indicate that the anti-trust charges were kicked out not because the judge ruled that the RIAA isn't an anti-trust organization - the argument didn't get that far. Instead, the judge ruled that Limewire hadn't really given much cause (i.e., hadn't provided enough factual argument) to investigate the matter further. Any lawyers on the group want to delve deeper?
The current issue of Make magazine has a short article on a rapid prototyper some guys built that does selective sintering of powdered sugar! Instead of a laser or electron beam to do the sintering, they created a jet of hot air to carmelize the powder. They've turned it open-source and called it the CandyFab project.
As for using chocolate, I don't know of anyone dabbling in that. But, I suppose there's no reason you couldn't build a fused deposition modeler that uses chocolate chips in a hopper as the raw material. What would you use for support structure?
Working with RE [lessthan] C, Google.org will make strategic investments and grants that demonstrate a path toward producing energy at an unsubsidized cost below that of coal-fired power plants.
Google isn't interested in subsidized power generation, because as you point out, subsidies don't scale to the whole energy economy. They do actually have some intelligent policy people at Google (.com/.org).
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The headphone jack for the iPod Touch is flush with the bottom bezel, right next to the dock connector (visible in this 360 view). You should be able to plug in any set of headphones.
The Wiimote, like any device that tried to figure out position and velocity from an accelerometer, needs some outside reference that it can reset itself to. This is because of the practical difficulties in making a reliable inertial navigation unit. In order to get position data from an acceleration measurement, you need to integrate twice. In both analog and digital implementations, errors creep into the calculations and gradually accumulate - a phenomenon called inertial drift. The only thing that can be done about it is to occassionally reset your position and velocity against some known reference, like GPS or, in the case of Wiimote, the IR bar.
I would be very keen to know how this company has handled the problem of inertial drift. I'm sure the Air Force and Navy, who have invested millions into low-drift IMUs, would like to know, too. Nuclear submarines spend weeks cruising underwater, relying on their IMUs to tell them location and heading - if they're wrong they can end up running into things. Maybe this company has just made the system good enough so that, over the course of several hours of game-play, the drift isn't too bad.
Yaarrrrr! When be they making one to resemble me cutlass? When do we pirates get our'n?
I guess how shady the accounting is depends, in part, on how large a presence Microsoft has in Nevada. Is MS shipping DVDs of Windows and Office from some warehouse in the desert? Do they have servers based there that distribute authorized soft copies to OEMs? Are their sales and volume-customer relations based there?
Microsoft isn't going to leave Redmond - just accept it. Consider what it would take to relocate to someplace else: you'd have to build an entirely new campus for 35k+ employees, then you'd have to convince them all to come with you sight unseen, then you'd have to hire thousands of new employees to replace the ones who didn't come with you.
If taxation and cost of doing business were the deciding factor of where a company locates, Silicon Valley would not exist, and the World Trade Center would be in rural Idaho.
Amusing. But cars are actual material goods, things made from refined raw materials and purchased components - a couple of tons' worth. There are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of design hours tied up in a car, a few hours or days on an assembly line staffed with people who are compensated, and robots that were purchased. Car parts need to be transported to the plant, and finished cars need to be transported to the showroom. In short, cars cost a lot because there's a lot tied up in them.
In contrast, what are the actual costs, to Verizon or AT&T, of sending a text message? Aside from a little bit of network traffic in the backbone and compute cycles in the billing infrastructure, there are no direct costs. Indirect costs, like the amortized cost of the infrastructure, service techs, and a few hundred million in executive pay (I'm not exaggerating, Ed Whitacre alone makes $20mil/yr). Even all those put together can't equal 5% of the price that they charge for a text message,. Most of the price to consumers is profit for the company. Rather than paying for a durable good, people are paying for a service.
So, while Adam Smith is right, and the cost of text messages remain high because people are still willing to be gouged (or are just plain ignorant that they are being gouged), the cost of cars remain high because, well, the cost of components, design, and manufacturing remain high.
Back of the envelope time:
The cost to launch something to the ISS's orbit is something like $10,000/lb. Let's say they make it from typical 20-lb bonded paper - the kind you'd pull from a copier.A 500-sheet ream of 20-lb actually weighs about 5 lbs, or 1/100th of a pound per sheet. Do out the math, and it works out to about $100/sheet of paper.
Ouch! That's an expensive paper airplane!
They point out that 8-gram equivalent lithium content is approximately 100 W-hr, 25-gram equivalent is about 300 W-hr. Laptop batteries these days are usually in the 30-50 W-hr range, so under the new rules you'd be able to bring your laptop, with its primary battery, plus two rather large spare batteries, and still be under their limits. It is basically a non-issue for 99.9% of travelers that bring and user their computer. The TSA limitations are mostly on lithium and lithium-ion batteries in checked baggage, where it wouldn't do you any good anyway.
It shouldn't be necessary to leave machines up and running all the time just to be able to push updates or run virus scans (etc., etc.). That's what Wake-On-LAN is for. It allows you to put a computer to sleep, then wake it remotely when it is specifically addressed to (say, by a remote administrator). Sure, it needs to be hardware supported on the motherboard, and the BIOS needs to be set up just so, but it isn't that hard to implement on a new machine that you need to configure for the company anyway.
I wanted to set up Wake-on-LAN on my work computer - so that I could put it to sleep, but still access a shared drive when I was away from the desk or remoting from home. I got zero help from IT - the first two people I spoke to hadn't even heard of it. I guess they didn't want one oddball network device out of 40,000 on campus.
Any sysadmins want to chime in on the pros and cons of implementing Wake-On-LAN company-wide?
Yes, but for something as important as this - is stupidity or incompetence any better than malice? Put differently: is there a meaningful difference between the two in this case? Is one more understandable or forgivable than the other? Should the penalties for those responsible be different?
[these are actual questions - I'm not throwing them out there to just rag on incompetents.]
One other thing that Firewire has going for it is its power spec, which (when using the full-sized connector) can provide up to 45 W. That compares to only 2.5 W for a (powered) USB port. There are 2.5" external hard drives that you can power through the USB port, but certainly not 3.5" external drives.
For reasons I can't fathom, however, I haven't ever seen an external 3.5" hard drive that can pull its power from Firewire, even though it would only require 12-15 W. Hell, my first iPod synced and recharged over Firewire, why not my external hard drive?
If you made the case all black, the Apple logo on the back of the screen would shine all the brighter.
I would love to, but my cable company won't sell me just Discovery Channel and Comedy Central. I'd need to purchase the extended cable package which, without even being digital, costs another $40/mo. Digital or HD feeds of the same push it up another boatload.
Digital stethoscopes have been around for a while, and I don't think anyone is questioning the value of being able to record heart sounds for later re-examination, training, etc. The main question is: being such a simple device (recording audio, transferring it to a computer later), why put an OS on it at all? You could do the same with a $.50, 8-bit microcontroller and a bit of C - no OS needed.
How much are you paying for that service? For $30,000-40,000, you can buy a handheld x-ray fluorescence analyzer. These things got started in testing for lead paint, and now get used to test and check for lots of things - including alloy composition verification. An XRF shines x-rays of a known energy at the test sample, then detects and analyzes the spectrum that is reflected back. Each element has a characteristic x-ray emission spectrum based on the energy of electrons dropping into lower shells. In 10-20 seconds, you can get a really good breakdown of the elements in the test sample.
Most steels are magnetic to various degrees. However, when designing some stuff that would be used in an MRI suite, I did some research and found that some grades of stainless steel - specifically, 300-series stainless steels (302, 304, 316, etc.) - are more or less nonmagnetic. They can't be used inside the bore of the scanner, but that's mostly because it screws up the uniformity or the magnetic and RF fields necessary for imaging. This was a handy discovery for me, because sometimes aluminum and plastics aren't strong enough, and titanium is a lot harder to work with.
Does it have anything to do with this Wakefield Accelerator?
How'd they manage to shrink down and clone him, I wonder?
It's sort of the weather. It's cold and windy during the winter, sure. But, it's also dark - completely and utterly dark for months at a time during the dead of winter. There aren't any lights on the runway, or air traffic radar either, so there's a good chance the plane will smack onto the snow rather than land. It's very difficult to compact and maintain the snow/ice runway during the winter. If a plane were to land, they would have to keep the engines revved up and the plane moving - if they were to stop and shutdown the skis would freeze to the runway and the engines would refuse to restart.
also bear in mind that any plane they sent up there would almost certainly have to go through McMurdo. They generally use modified C-130s for their heavy transport, and they don't have tremendous range on one tank of gas. So, you'd need to get a plane first to McMurdo, which has its own difficulties of winter flying, and then head to the South Pole.
None of this is to say that they can't fly in during the winter. If the station were to blow up, for instance, they'd get some daring pilots to head in for a rescue. A few years back there was someone on the over-winter crew that needed treatment for breast cancer (it was the doctor, ironically enough), and they did some dicey flights for that (to send supplies, then for an early extraction). It's mostly that they prefer to not have to, because it's logistically difficult and mighty risky.
The reason the guy keeps referring to his people back in Denver is because logistics and support for the South Pole station (and McMurdo, too, I think) are run by Raytheon Polar Services, which is based in Colorado. The Antarctic program is run out of Washington by the National Science Foundation, but they contract out the actual infrastructure, operations, and other support.
I actually like pumped hydro storage a great deal - it tends to be a very efficient way to storage utility-scale energy and is very fast and responsive. But, batteries can be nearly as efficient, respond almost instantaneously, and have much greater energy density. Even lead-acid batteries, which have a low energy density among batteries, can store 30-40 Whr/kg, or 108-144 kJ/kg. A pumped hydro storage system would need to exploit a height difference of 10-13 kilometers to have the same energy density (on a mass basis). In terms of volume energy density, lead acid batteries score 60-75 Whr/L, or 216-270 kJ/L. A pumped hydro storage system would need to exploit a height difference of 21-27 kilometers to be claim the same.
My approach is to say that all of these technologies have a roll to play in our energy infrastructure, certainly much more than they have now. The more the better - it breeds system complexity, but it can also breed agility and redundancy. What is used on a regional basis will depend a lot on what's available naturally, and how much infrastructure needs to be built around any one solution
A little further research seems to indicate that the anti-trust charges were kicked out not because the judge ruled that the RIAA isn't an anti-trust organization - the argument didn't get that far. Instead, the judge ruled that Limewire hadn't really given much cause (i.e., hadn't provided enough factual argument) to investigate the matter further. Any lawyers on the group want to delve deeper?
The current issue of Make magazine has a short article on a rapid prototyper some guys built that does selective sintering of powdered sugar! Instead of a laser or electron beam to do the sintering, they created a jet of hot air to carmelize the powder. They've turned it open-source and called it the CandyFab project.
As for using chocolate, I don't know of anyone dabbling in that. But, I suppose there's no reason you couldn't build a fused deposition modeler that uses chocolate chips in a hopper as the raw material. What would you use for support structure?
Google isn't interested in subsidized power generation, because as you point out, subsidies don't scale to the whole energy economy. They do actually have some intelligent policy people at Google (.com/.org).