The air interface may be "free" in a marginal-cost sense. SMSCs (and the associated charging solutions in the case of real-time billing systems) aren't, and companies like Acision make their fortunes selling these.
To be fair, some behavio(u)rs of the original game were less than reasonable, to the point that taking advantage of them felt like an exploit. One of these was "collective sight", which meant that if anyone on your side (even a controlled alien) can see someone, everyone can target it. You could do the Cydonia mission without leaving the craft by spotting one alien and chain-controlling as many as needed to reach the hive-brain. Others were: stuffing someone (dead/unconscious) in your "backpack" and only suffering some weight encumbrance; unconscious characters not being targetable (I saved more than one soldier by knocking him out); and (this one's debatable) your soldiers' collective "memory" of the map, which e.g. allows any of them to guide the ridiculously fun Blaster Bomb like a Tomahawk Out Of Hell.
Still, those design flaws are more forgivable in their historical context than the needless restrictions that put me off XCOM:EU. Didn't have a chance to enjoy the teleporting Greys.
I tried Firaxis's XCOM as soon as I could, seeking the flexibility of the first two games; the devilish plays you could pull when in a tight spot (prime alien grenade - toss at buddy - buddy picks it up - buddy lobs at alien), shooting or running as your speed (TUs per turn) allowed, switching equipment on the field, breaching walls for your teammates... all were fond memories worthy of revisiting with a modern engine.
The first cinematic of the landing scene gave me a huge grin, and it was mostly disappointing from then on. Its walk-shoot-shoot; you die with the gear you brought; you can't shoot at walls because they've done nothing to you. I played four missions and didn't get to experiment with classes or see whether you could ever learn Mind Control.
My hopes are now on UFO: Alien Invasion. Bit rough around the edges but coming along nicely. If you share my feelings, give it a go.
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'"
-- Henry Ford (unsourced)
You don't write on books because it's permanent and possibly damaging; Post-Its caught on as a way to work around that.
The (e-ink) Kindle solves the speed+versatility vs power+weight compromise by specializing in a task that requires little of the first two. Arguably, virtual Post-Its don't require a change to that compromise; a better, more interoperable implementation doesn't cost extra.
PC integration? Sure, just sync in a simple, flexible way (i.e., not iTunes) to a PC/Mac app or to your account through the WiFi link you already have on board.
Speech recognition? Now that's expensive, even more if done offline. At that point you should consider a tablet.
I could mention a few things that I've enjoyed, but for every show there's a crowd that'll deem it too crass, too silly, or not smart enough; and then there are those who simply enjoy lamenting the state of things.
Anyway, there's dumb, dumber and dumberer. There's something to be said against a show that can be recognized at a distance by the train of canned laughter pulses (yes I know, "filmed in front of a live audience", just like your gummy candy is "made with real fruit").
The Venezuelan government hasn't published violence statistics for years, so NGOs and journalists query the morgues every week. But that doesn't stop the nomenklatura from denouncing the state governed by the most prominent opposition candidate as having "the most murders" (it's not clear, and not too relevant, whether they mean count or rate).
Normally you'd wait for the inspector to come, then make your proposition. If you can't even see him, you'd have to find out who he is and pay him a visit, o bribe his boss, which costs more.
Arguably less than the reduction in the factories it'd catch during its service life? Even if it were a pick-up truck the tradeoff is just silly.
But the thing here is that it's easier to check on a big industrial park or mining operation from the air, and a lot cheaper if the aircraft doesn't have to carry a pilot and an observer.
The regulators are there - you can see the 'big' coils in TFA. The capacitance for a simple "drain till you drop" scheme would have to be a lot here - very roughly 2*Energy/efficiency/(Vddmax^2 - Vddmin^2). So, step the voltage up optionally, keep the caps charged as high as practical, squeeze them dry when needed through a step-down converter.
TFA also says that the drive periodically monitors the "status" of the caps; I'm not sure if that means charge level or charge-holding capacity but it could test-discharge one cap at a time.
* This is effectively regenerative braking, which I'm not sure you can do with a stepper motor. * The arm servo needs extra energy; not sure the platter+rotor have enough. * What if it's stopped, heads unloaded, when the power fails?
The caps only need to supply enough juice to sync the RAM buffers to flash to ensure consistency of its internal block-mapping metadata (the filesystem should handle the rest through journaling and whatnot). The caps are rated at 35v but let's assume that they're kept at 12v: E = (12 v)^2 * 47 uF / 2 = 3.4 mJoules. Even at full operating load that should last for half a millisecond counting losses, but when power goes out the drive is going to stop serving requests and all it has to do is write that 1 GB buffer to a few flash blocks. More than enough, methinks.
tl;dr: these are storage caps, which don't endure the ripple currents that kill filter caps.
Electrolyte decomposition is usually caused by high ripple current, which is why caps pop mostly (only?) when used as filters, as in motherboard DC-DC converters and gadgets powered by wall-wart adapters. In this particular application, the PSU impedance is quite low and the caps are handled by on-board regulators (V=Q/C and all that), so there's no load ripple and the caps just have to sit pretty and charged with insignificant heat losses until the computer is shut down or outage occurs. Maybe that's why Intel didn't even bother to use the solid (polymer) kind.
If these caps dry out due to age or bad quality they just won't hold as much charge for emergency sync'ing, which is still better than ordinary SSDs/HDDs with no caps.
Slashdot Mirror
The air interface may be "free" in a marginal-cost sense. SMSCs (and the associated charging solutions in the case of real-time billing systems) aren't, and companies like Acision make their fortunes selling these.
The term "resolution" predates raster images, and thus it means more than "pixel count":
Optical resolutionÂdescribes the ability of an imaging e system to resolve detail in the object that is being imaged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
The term "resolution" predates raster images, and thus it means more than "pixel count":
Optical resolutionÂdescribes the ability of an imaging e system to resolve detail in the object that is being imaged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
To be fair, some behavio(u)rs of the original game were less than reasonable, to the point that taking advantage of them felt like an exploit. One of these was "collective sight", which meant that if anyone on your side (even a controlled alien) can see someone, everyone can target it. You could do the Cydonia mission without leaving the craft by spotting one alien and chain-controlling as many as needed to reach the hive-brain. Others were: stuffing someone (dead/unconscious) in your "backpack" and only suffering some weight encumbrance; unconscious characters not being targetable (I saved more than one soldier by knocking him out); and (this one's debatable) your soldiers' collective "memory" of the map, which e.g. allows any of them to guide the ridiculously fun Blaster Bomb like a Tomahawk Out Of Hell.
Still, those design flaws are more forgivable in their historical context than the needless restrictions that put me off XCOM:EU. Didn't have a chance to enjoy the teleporting Greys.
I tried Firaxis's XCOM as soon as I could, seeking the flexibility of the first two games; the devilish plays you could pull when in a tight spot (prime alien grenade - toss at buddy - buddy picks it up - buddy lobs at alien), shooting or running as your speed (TUs per turn) allowed, switching equipment on the field, breaching walls for your teammates... all were fond memories worthy of revisiting with a modern engine.
The first cinematic of the landing scene gave me a huge grin, and it was mostly disappointing from then on. Its walk-shoot-shoot; you die with the gear you brought; you can't shoot at walls because they've done nothing to you. I played four missions and didn't get to experiment with classes or see whether you could ever learn Mind Control.
My hopes are now on UFO: Alien Invasion. Bit rough around the edges but coming along nicely. If you share my feelings, give it a go.
Because e- is for Electronic. Unless the Internet (or, <deity> forbid, Apple) had something to do with it.
Also, obligatory "yeah, that'll work".
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'"
-- Henry Ford (unsourced)
You don't write on books because it's permanent and possibly damaging; Post-Its caught on as a way to work around that.
The (e-ink) Kindle solves the speed+versatility vs power+weight compromise by specializing in a task that requires little of the first two. Arguably, virtual Post-Its don't require a change to that compromise; a better, more interoperable implementation doesn't cost extra.
PC integration? Sure, just sync in a simple, flexible way (i.e., not iTunes) to a PC/Mac app or to your account through the WiFi link you already have on board.
Speech recognition? Now that's expensive, even more if done offline. At that point you should consider a tablet.
At the risk of being modded into the ground, how is this Slashdot material?
My method takes six steps, tops: http://i.imgur.com/Ot0mJHf.jpg
I could mention a few things that I've enjoyed, but for every show there's a crowd that'll deem it too crass, too silly, or not smart enough; and then there are those who simply enjoy lamenting the state of things.
Anyway, there's dumb, dumber and dumberer. There's something to be said against a show that can be recognized at a distance by the train of canned laughter pulses (yes I know, "filmed in front of a live audience", just like your gummy candy is "made with real fruit").
The Chinese Ministry of Culture reports a 3-point increase in the average urban IQ.
It appears you missed a (silly) reference there: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik...
The Venezuelan government hasn't published violence statistics for years, so NGOs and journalists query the morgues every week. But that doesn't stop the nomenklatura from denouncing the state governed by the most prominent opposition candidate as having "the most murders" (it's not clear, and not too relevant, whether they mean count or rate).
https://dl.dropboxusercontent....
Try this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent....
https://dl.dropboxusercontent....
Normally you'd wait for the inspector to come, then make your proposition. If you can't even see him, you'd have to find out who he is and pay him a visit, o bribe his boss, which costs more.
Arguably less than the reduction in the factories it'd catch during its service life? Even if it were a pick-up truck the tradeoff is just silly.
But the thing here is that it's easier to check on a big industrial park or mining operation from the air, and a lot cheaper if the aircraft doesn't have to carry a pilot and an observer.
- Egon Spengler
(obligatory nod to the memory of Harold Ramis)
A Scooter would be "GoBot-style". *scoots away*
The regulators are there - you can see the 'big' coils in TFA. The capacitance for a simple "drain till you drop" scheme would have to be a lot here - very roughly 2*Energy/efficiency/(Vddmax^2 - Vddmin^2). So, step the voltage up optionally, keep the caps charged as high as practical, squeeze them dry when needed through a step-down converter.
TFA also says that the drive periodically monitors the "status" of the caps; I'm not sure if that means charge level or charge-holding capacity but it could test-discharge one cap at a time.
* This is effectively regenerative braking, which I'm not sure you can do with a stepper motor.
* The arm servo needs extra energy; not sure the platter+rotor have enough.
* What if it's stopped, heads unloaded, when the power fails?
The caps only need to supply enough juice to sync the RAM buffers to flash to ensure consistency of its internal block-mapping metadata (the filesystem should handle the rest through journaling and whatnot). The caps are rated at 35v but let's assume that they're kept at 12v: E = (12 v)^2 * 47 uF / 2 = 3.4 mJoules. Even at full operating load that should last for half a millisecond counting losses, but when power goes out the drive is going to stop serving requests and all it has to do is write that 1 GB buffer to a few flash blocks. More than enough, methinks.
tl;dr: these are storage caps, which don't endure the ripple currents that kill filter caps.
Electrolyte decomposition is usually caused by high ripple current, which is why caps pop mostly (only?) when used as filters, as in motherboard DC-DC converters and gadgets powered by wall-wart adapters. In this particular application, the PSU impedance is quite low and the caps are handled by on-board regulators (V=Q/C and all that), so there's no load ripple and the caps just have to sit pretty and charged with insignificant heat losses until the computer is shut down or outage occurs. Maybe that's why Intel didn't even bother to use the solid (polymer) kind.
If these caps dry out due to age or bad quality they just won't hold as much charge for emergency sync'ing, which is still better than ordinary SSDs/HDDs with no caps.