"And unless you really need 3-phase, split phase is easier to deal with - with 3-phase you need to monitor all three phases to ensure they are working (failure of one phase is a common failure mode that requires immediate shutdown of the other two phases lest any dangerous currents develop)."
Losing a phase will not result in dangerous currents in the supply system. The most common three phase load is a motor. If you start a three phase motor and remove one of the phases the motor will continue to run on a single phase BUT it will try to draw more current to compensate for the loss of the phase. You now have overloaded windings and the motor will quickly burn itself out. You use phase protection relays on your motors to open the contactor when a phase loss is detected. So you only need to protect your motors.
A DC power supply that runs on three phase won't be affected much but the bridge rectifier can be overloaded and output ripple will increase. It will also attempt to pull more current through the remaining phase and blow a fuse or breaker. So again, its only dangerous to the load. If a 3 phase heater loses a phase, then guess what? You get less heat. That's it. Resistive heater loads can tolerate a phase loss with zero electrical problems. Your process will be affected but thats about it.
A three phase alternator does not care what the load balance on any of its phases is as long as they aren't overloaded. Same goes for a transformer. Many homes are ran off of a three phase 120/208 Y (sometimes spelled wye). Homes still get single phase 120/208 but are connected to the supply (phases A, B, C and Neutral) as follows: A-N-B B-N-C C-N-A
The split is repeated for homes and they balance out the grid nicely. Splitting each of the three high voltage legs from a feeder into a neighborhood and stepping it down using center tapped 120/240 transformers makes balancing a problem. You can't interconnect any of the three separate 120/240 lines as the neutral or center taps must be grounded. Now you have 3 sets of 3 wires to deal with and you have to ensure you even distribute loads across three separate 120/240 supplies. Are you going to run 7-9 wires down a block to balance out that mess? No, of course not. So now you have individual blocks of 120/240 which may be unevenly loaded. Three phase is much easier as three houses in a row can easily balance out a 3 phase feeder. Both systems are used in residential neighborhoods (and at random might I add) but anything new is always three phase fed.
My home in Queens NY is serviced by a 120/240 center tapped 100kVA transformer that feeds only our street from corner to corner. The neutral connects to the other poles but everyone else in the surrounding area is on three phase. The poles do have 2400/4160 three phase feeders on top so getting three phase is not an issue. How we became a 120/240 island is beyond me but it might have been a leftover from old practices, never upgraded or left alone for a specific reason. Out on long island the neighborhood I lived in for a short while has 120/240 and only a single high voltage leg running along the pole. So they have to balance out the load on the feeder side.
I would worry more about condensation of the cool steam in the turbine itself. The only way this would be good for a turbine is if the steam can be further heated via a solar super heater.
This is why power plant boilers have a superheater which passes the steam from the boilers steam drum through a heat exchanger in the hot exhaust stream of the boiler. This brings the steam temperature up well past the boiling point of water and prevents steam from condensing in the turbine. Imagine a turbine spinning at 3600 RPM (for a 2 pole 60Hz alternator) in which droplets of water form and begin to collide with the blades. All you need is one blade to fail from getting pummeled with water and it's game over for the turbine. The steam is condensed once it exits the turbine exhaust which creates a vacuum effect which increases the turbines efficiency, you pull steam through it. The steam is condensed using cooling towers, water cooled heat exchangers or fed to a district heating system and customers pay to do some of the condensing (and maintain the infrastructure while increasing efficiency).
This was discussed already and the general conclusion was the restaurant had very poor service. Poor service will kill a reputation faster than anything else. I remember going to a restaurant that was short staffed. They were trying to accommodate people, and were nice about it. But after waiting 30 minutes for bread, we left. You can always expect bad reviews based on food, you can't please everyone.
Plus I don't think Google information can kill a place in just a few weeks. People have phones and call ahead to confirm hours, seating availability, location and even directions. I know I always call. It's lazy people who just browse Google and believe everything they see without confirmation.
Most of the reviews complain about very poor service. Waiters not checking up on the tables, one guest said they had to wander around to find a water pitcher and refill it themselves. People have waited 30+ minutes to receive the menu and bread. One guest claimed they were there for over 3 hours in total waiting for various courses. Guests would arrive only to find there was not host/hostess at the podium to seat them. Guests complained about rude staff both in person and over the phone. And these aren't recent complaints, they go back to 2010.
They would have to have data recorded 24/7 about load distribution throughout the entire country. And if the person leaves the country to rendezvous with a reporter? Are they recording the electrical loads in Mexico? Brazil? Poland?
Perhaps they are monitoring EMF using receivers around the country, recording them and using triangulation. But how does this help them? If I blow the whistle to a reporter I am not doing it in my home town. Most people would go somewhere else to a neutral location. So then the tape surfaces weeks or months later and the NSA or whoever triangulated the location to a parking lot without any surveillance. They could do some old fashioned sleuthing but hopefully a whistle blower will try to cover their tracks.
I had shelves of that P2/3 stuff. Threw a lot of it out as giving it away or selling it was a non starter. Pained me to do so but being a pack rat isn't an option anymore.
Though I did keep a lot of my more interesting hardware: Dual Pentium 233 on an Tyan Tomcat IVD w/128MB EDO RAM, Abit BP6 w/dual Celeron 333's OC'd to 450 MHz and 768MB RAM. And my First real PC, a Micron 486DX2 66 w 16MB RAM. I replaced the 486 Motherboard with the Tyan Tomcat but I still have the 486 Board with a pentium overdrive and the 486 chip stuck on some ESD foam. I also have some interesting vintage systems and hardware I got from work, mainly 286/386 hardware.
Really cool stuff: MITS Altair 8800b, Franklyn ACE 1200 (Apple IIe clone), NeXt Station (no monitor), Sparcstation IPC, ATT PC7300 and 3B2 (Unix PC's, I got a video on Youtube of one booting), IBM System 80, SGI Octane 2, SGI Origin 300 rack and a non working SGI Origin 2000. Also a few Vintage dumb Terminals namely an old ADM 32 and two VT100 terminals who's mfr escapes me. I am also starting to collect some Apple Gear as well, have a dual G5 tower which won't boot due to a bad motherboard/CPU (boots only when the 2nd CPU is removed). Now I realize I have too much crap lol.
Old hardware is your best bet. Anything new would be unsupported by the older 2.2/2.4 kernels, PCIe, SATA, chipsets etc. *Slot 2 Pentium II or III CPU's and Socket 370 CPU's are perfect. If you want multiprocessor, a Tyan or Supermicro dual slot/board is a good bet but stay away from any board with RDRAM using the i820 or i840 chipsets. They did however realize how big a mistake RDRAM was and Intel made SDRAM->RDRAM bridge chips so those chipsets could use PC-100/133 SDRAM. Tyan made a dual processor i840 board with dual slot 1 and SDRAM using the bridge chips. *At least 256 meg of ram, 512MB - 1GB is ideal. Make sure your board supports the RAM you have. *An AGP Riva TNT card or better yet, a Geforce 1, 2 or 3 graphics card. 3D support may not be available* *Sound Blaster Live!, Ensoniq, Turtle Beach or Aureal sound cards should all work. Though the Sound Blaster Live! is probably your best bet. *You are also going to need an ATA hard disk (2+GB) and CD/DVD rom drive, I am unaware of any P2/3 board that supported USB booting so you need the optical drive. *If no onboard LAN card is present (most common scenario) you want a PCI 3Com 3c905B/C, or any PCI card based on the DEC Tulip chipset (21040/21041/21140/21142/21143). Many older Netgear FA311 cards also worked flawlessly, based on a well supported National semi chip that I think was a tulip clone) *Bonus: decent 19"+ Trinitron CRT monitor. I still have a 21" Sun Trinitron.
Stay away from ISA cards as much as you can. I had a hell of a time getting my old ISA Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold sound card running under Mandrake back in the day. And that was a "plug and play" card without jumpers. As for why to use Pentium 2/3 boards and not a pentium 4, the p4's after socket 432 willamette generation might not run a 2.2 or early 2.4 kernel. Socket 478 gained things like SATA and PCIe so its a crap shoot. Pentium 2/3 is a guarantee.
*Nvidia hardware 3D support does not appear to be supported on 2.2 kernels. I checked the README for the oldest Linux Driver and 2.4 and 2.6 kernels were mentioned. Have a look here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-71.86.15-driver.html and check the hardware issues section in the README!
I thought the same thing, it should be its own phone. But then it isn't an accessory but a standalone smart phone that you wear on your wrist. But in addition to calls and time, navigation and sports apps would be a great addition. GPS readouts, music player interface, etc.
Taking my phone with me on a bike ride is annoying as I want to travel as light as possible. I only take a bit of cash, drivers license (for id) and phone. It would be nice If I can glance at my watch and see that I have ridden for x miles, current speed, weather and trip time. I don't need maps or graphics. Same would go for distance sports/activities in addition to a pedometer (accelerometers). I can leave my phone in the little pouch on my bike frame and keep it off the handlebars or pocket. It should also be waterproof so I don't care if I get caught in a downpour.
The problem is a cop does not consider him/herself to be a citizen. They are cops, we are citizens. It's an "us vs them" mentality in which the cops are a privileged class of people who think they are the law and sometimes pretend they are above it. That mentality also leads them to form tight bonds in which they will cover for each other and outright lie about anything to keep their jobs and freedoms. And internal panels for review are just as bad often letting cops off the hook for perjury, assault and outright murder with little more than a slap on the wrist.
If you ask me law enforcement should retrain itself (pipe dream, I know but hopefully not) to see itself as citizens who are tasked with enforcing the law. They are not the law, they are not above it and they are subject to the very law they help enforce as everyone else is. They simply have a job to do though it is a very important one.
The Samsung did die an early death but the sample size is too low to be conclusive. Though, this does not worry me at all since my SSD is only for games. Plus I make backups:-)
200 rpm is in the slow speed category (300RPM). Those speeds are typically reserved for very large ship diesel engines (search for Wartsila). Even medium speed diesels are not very fast, in the 300-1000 RPM range. Most Diesel gensets for backup, or portable power tend to be high speed units running at 1500 RPM for 50 Hz and 1800 RPM for 60 Hz. I doubt there are any 200 RPM generators unless they are one of those old Listeroid type engines. And those are belt driven to increase the speed to 1500 or 1800 RPM at the generator shaft.
The frequency of a generator is determined by the speed of the shaft and the number of poles in the alternator. The formula is f = (p*RPM)/120, f is the frequency, p is the number of poles, and RPM is the shaft speed of the armature. Also, the number of poles is always even. So a 4 pole alternator spinning at 1800 RPM will yield 60Hz. The same 4 pole spinning at 1500 RPM will yield 50Hz.
At 200 rpm, the alternator would need 36 poles to produce 60Hz or 30 poles for 50Hz. That is a lot of poles and makes construction a bit more complex.
I love the idea of a laptop that is a portable hardware hacking platform. Its a trifecta of PC + FPGA dev board + open source design in one portable box. I can carry one system and it has everything I need. But the limitation that seems to hamstring it is the ARM CPU which is unable to run the Xilinx tools. This means we have to lug an x86 laptop to run the Xilinx tools if we want to make changes to the HDL code. That or use a remote server/workstation to build and download the bit files which might not be practical if there is no net connection available. If the Novena had an x86 CPU, we could do all of the development on it.
I would love to see a Novena with a 2GHz quad-core AMD G series SoC. We could then run the Xilinx tools and be able to do all of the development work on the same machine. It has a load of I/O, GPU, supports more RAM (up to 16GB) and features virtualization so we could run Windows in a VM if need be. Power consumption would be higher but no higher than most laptops. The only issue would be connecting an FPGA as I don't believe the G SoC sports a local bus like the i.MX 6. So a more costly Spartan 6 LXT FPGA with gigabit transceivers and PCIe would be needed, not that its a bad thing;-). If a board like this were available my response would be "Shut up and take my money!"
Seriously, why would the name turn you off to his work? I know bunnie is a cutesy-wootsy name but it has no bearing on who he is or what he does. Maybe he likes rabbits. Maybe its what his mother calls him. Maybe it was a nickname he earned on the mean streets of Boston during his time at MIT. Either way, who really cares?
Eh, a single piston at 200 RPM would be a bit shaky unless perfectly balanced. Most high speed diesel engines (every road going diesel) typically idle at around 600 RPM. Perhaps a small flat or boxer type 2-4 cylinder with an alternator bolted right to the flywheel.
A better idea would be to have a variable speed engine paired with a DC generator that has a wide operating range. So as you put your foot on the accelerator, the engines speed regulator would increase the RPM's to match the needed current output. As you get up to speed, the computer can slow the engine down to the minimum needed to sustain the vehicle's speed. The benefit would be that the engine only has to work as hard as it needs to and does not need to run at a constant speed.
The only reason generators (we are talking alternators producing mains power) are constant speed is because the frequency is directly proportional to the shaft speed. A 4 pole 60Hz alternator needs to spin at a constant 1800RPM. To avoid this newer small portable generators use inverters connected to an alternator. As the current demand increases, the voltage sags and the computer speeds the engine up. It works great for really small generators (4kW) but becomes more costly after that as you need more/bigger MOSFETS/IGBT's in the inverter. BUT if your target output is DC like an electric car would need, then you don't need the inverter, just the speed regulator.
I am not at all shocked that the Kinect eats GPU power. Machine vision isn't exactly computationally light, there is a lot of math to run on each frame plus the I/O overhead. They have to run those algorithms on something and my guess is they used DirectCompute to utilize the GPU to save money on hardware.
They could use a dedicated DSP in the Kinect but that would drive up the cost of the Kinect making it an overpriced and unappealing accessory. A quick check on Digikey for the Analog Devices Sharc DSP reveals that even a 450MHz chip costs about $32 in quantity. Perhaps there is a higher performance DSP that is cheaper but you also have to factor in the cost of memory for it and other ancillary components. It can easily add $50+ to the hardware cost. I know its a VERY rough guesstimate but it illustrates why dedicated processing in the Kinect is not utilized. Another thing to consider is using the GPU gives more flexibility in designing newer and better algorithms which might be constrained by a DSP with limited performance.
I have always said that if everyone who gets a ticket pled not guilty, the system would collapse under the weight in a matter of days.
I fight every ticket I get because its not only within my right, its also within my best interest. I have fought a number of tickets and beat getting points or having fines reduced. I just recently beat a speeding ticket, I plead to a lesser offence, illegal parking. It only cost me $200 and no points. At an old job a co worker was busted driving a van with improper registration. It was a checkpoint and they were targeting vans. They gave him 7 tickets totaling $1500. He took it to court and got every single ticket thrown out.
Sitting in court you will hear one moving violation after another being pled down to a lesser offenses. Things like no seatbelt and parking violations. They keep the price tag of the moving violation but let you avoid getting points which jack up your insurance rate. They just want your money.
Most of the Apple fanboys out there now are such because, when they were in highschool, apple was the only computer in the school... and therefor the only computer they had access to.
I kind of doubt that. When I was in grade school the standard was the Apple IIx. In high school we had PC's running Windows 3.x or 95. At home we first had a Franklyn Ace 1200 and later various PC's. Yea this isn't the 80's/90's anymore but there is a bit more to this than Macs at schools.
Apple only rose to its current height after the assault of trendy advertisement and product placements of the early-mid 2000's. The iPod was the first piece of hardware that really brought them attention and it was everywhere including being worn by prominent musicians in music videos of the day. Everyone had to have an iPod. It was not only a piece of technology but a fashion statement and a status symbol. Oh you still listen to burned CD's, that like so 90's! The iPod's success along with OSX and sleek product design began the Apple ecosystem of iPod+Mac. The iPhone further cemented that and people to this day prefer to buy iPhones because its about status, not technology. Its only natural for them to buy a Mac instead of a PC.
I will also say that their saving grace was OSX which finally got them out of the OS dark ages and gave people a real alternative to Windows. They marketed it to geeks as a Unix OS (which it really isn't) and even managed to lure in a significant portion of developers. Hell at my brothers place of work everyone has a Mac mini or Macbook Pro for web development. They are embedded in a multi million dollar marketing firm which is all Mac. If they need to test on Windows they fire up VMware. A friend who works for Disney mobile switched to a Macbook years ago. Another friend also does all his game coding in C/C++ on a Mac. Go to any Maker fair and look at how many people are sporting Macbooks. And yes, going back to your original statement, Macs are in a lot of schools but many have Windows servers on the backend running Active Directory and everything else. I bought my old Lenovo Thinkpad running Debian to my brothers work place of work and was laughed at for having a PC until they saw Xmonad on the fucking screen. Then they were like "oh shit you're hardcore", which I really am not but its easy to impress half assed geeks I suppose.
I have been doing some contract work for my brothers place of work. I asked to use of of the Mac books so I don't have to lug my "ugly" thinkpad in. I will say this, OSX is a pretty neat OS. Xcode is free and lets you write just about anything you want compared to Microsoft's Visual Studio which requires a costly license to do any real work (to be fair Apple charges 99/yr for app store publishing but otherwise its free). I can open terminals and do all the unixy stuff I need (scp, rsync, ssh, git, etc) while having a shiny GUI on top that runs most of the software I already use. And the best part is the sane method for software installation. A DMG image containing a single file you drag into the programs directory. Done. At first I thought I was doing it wrong but no it was the way it worked. No files thrown all over creation (Linux) and no stupid idiotic registry (Windows). At one point I almost considered buying a Macbook myself. Apple really did their homework and made a nice, simple OS.
What is with this obsession for using pedophiles to justify the erosion of rights and privacy? No, don't answer that, it was a rhetorical question.
Pedophiles are no worse than rapists, murderers and other criminals that cause physical harm to others. In fact I would rate them as a lower threat than murderers. How come we consider pedophiles so reprehensible that we go out of our way to ruin their lives forever yet we don't think twice about doing the same for a murderers or serially violent criminals? Should I have the right to know if my neighbor was in jail for killing someone? Shouldn't I be aware that someone in my neighborhood was jailed for beating a man to within an inch of his life? They don't respect life any more than a pedophile.
And the most idiotic aspect of registering sex offenders is we just lump everyone together. Sex offences can be everything from getting caught pissing on the bushes (your willy is hanging out), mooning someone (yes it is indecent exposure), a 16 y/o having consensual sex with an 18 y/o (statutory rape), right up to full blown violent 1978 "I spit on your grave" rape. So registry maps are full of useless noise.
Lets take it a step further and also make public a list of people who have: been arrested for drug possession, burglary, prostitution, and assault. This way we can all live in fear of our neighbors. Sounds great right?
I realize the EU is probably different than the US but every time this crap rolls around idiots start yammering about pedophiles and children.
I suppose I am the stereotypical geek (hate the label but whatever) and most of this is my opinion and perception of being a geek. So here goes...
Geeks are frustrated because they don't have good luck with women. Rejection and loneliness results in the misogyny and creepiness lamented here. As a matter of mental self-defense, geeks decide that women are turned off by intelligence, and they (despite themselves) go around demanding that women should smarten-up and start finding intelligence sexy. Well, this is incorrect.
I don't think many of us geeks really try to talk to enough girls to even begin to call it luck. Its hard to explain but ill try. Geeks are mostly very intelligent people. And our intelligence usually means we probably have some sort of disorder which makes us obsess over our hobbies. Its a good thing in that we have the drive to go after very complex problems. We use our knowledge and skills to solve those complex problems that many people cant even begin to understand. And sometimes it leads to a feeling of superiority: "I can design a 3 phase brushless motor drive in my sleep but these fucking pudding brained jocks get all the girls! WTF!" The problem isn't the jocks or the girls, its you. You spent all of your time obsessing over your hobbies that you never bothered to even try to say "Hey, aren't you in my class with professor Bumblebee? bla bla bla nice day today... bla bla... btw I love that book your reading there bla bla bla..." But often it is also that we aren't exactly alpha males either. So we have a poor self image and feel that we don't stand a chance. That or we are too shy/awkward/anxious etc. So we internalize and build more motor drives, software and whatnot to try and prove ourselves without ever actually proving anything to anyone but ourselves. (Am I making any sense here?) Bottom line is we need to suck it up and just go and talk to girls. Even if its just to make some small talk. But even small talk eludes us as small talk for us is Terry Pratchett, Why X programming language sucks/rules or that we bought a new FPGA dev board to implement a damn motor drive. We have to put our crazy hobbies aside and think simple. Not because the girl is simple but to give you a more common ground to lead into a conversation. Maybe it will lead to something very interesting. But that maybe wont come if we don't try.
Women aren't turned off by intelligence. They are turned off by constantly being made to feel stupid. They are also turned off by bad social skills, bad physical health, and the inclination to play video games and study all day every day (rather than going out and doing something fun with friends).
This is part of the superiority complex that develops when we get mad at ourselves for not trying. So we blame them instead of admitting we are the fuck ups. Bad social skills aren't bad social skills. We can socialize with each other just fine as we share common hobbies and therefor can comfortably talk to each other. What we consider interesting might be boring, looked down upon (the whole "this shit is for nerds" nonsense, a social problem) or beyond most peoples understanding. The sloppy hygiene is a result of poor parenting, period. I was raised to brush my teeth daily, shower regularly, wear clean clothes etc. I do let myself get a little sloppy looking but that is when I am just doing whatever. When I go out I clean up, fix my hair and try to dress nice. Most of the time us geeks look at fashion and hygiene as a nuisance that just gets in the way of another 100 lines of code or 20 more pages in a good book. We just need a little discipline.
If you want to get a real girlfriend, you are going to have to get over your sense of superiority, practice authentic humility, and be ready to give up a lot of your video-game time and study-time to instead go out on social events with a group of mutual friends, on a regular basis. Clean up your act, become what women want, and
Could have been the shitty card edge connector in the console. They remedied that with the vertical design after the SNES came out but it was too little, too late. And it always puzzled me as to why they made the boneheaded decision to change from the Japanese vertical cart load to the slot mess they made for the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
"And unless you really need 3-phase, split phase is easier to deal with - with 3-phase you need to monitor all three phases to ensure they are working (failure of one phase is a common failure mode that requires immediate shutdown of the other two phases lest any dangerous currents develop)."
Losing a phase will not result in dangerous currents in the supply system. The most common three phase load is a motor. If you start a three phase motor and remove one of the phases the motor will continue to run on a single phase BUT it will try to draw more current to compensate for the loss of the phase. You now have overloaded windings and the motor will quickly burn itself out. You use phase protection relays on your motors to open the contactor when a phase loss is detected. So you only need to protect your motors.
A DC power supply that runs on three phase won't be affected much but the bridge rectifier can be overloaded and output ripple will increase. It will also attempt to pull more current through the remaining phase and blow a fuse or breaker. So again, its only dangerous to the load. If a 3 phase heater loses a phase, then guess what? You get less heat. That's it. Resistive heater loads can tolerate a phase loss with zero electrical problems. Your process will be affected but thats about it.
A three phase alternator does not care what the load balance on any of its phases is as long as they aren't overloaded. Same goes for a transformer. Many homes are ran off of a three phase 120/208 Y (sometimes spelled wye). Homes still get single phase 120/208 but are connected to the supply (phases A, B, C and Neutral) as follows:
A-N-B
B-N-C
C-N-A
The split is repeated for homes and they balance out the grid nicely. Splitting each of the three high voltage legs from a feeder into a neighborhood and stepping it down using center tapped 120/240 transformers makes balancing a problem. You can't interconnect any of the three separate 120/240 lines as the neutral or center taps must be grounded. Now you have 3 sets of 3 wires to deal with and you have to ensure you even distribute loads across three separate 120/240 supplies. Are you going to run 7-9 wires down a block to balance out that mess? No, of course not. So now you have individual blocks of 120/240 which may be unevenly loaded. Three phase is much easier as three houses in a row can easily balance out a 3 phase feeder. Both systems are used in residential neighborhoods (and at random might I add) but anything new is always three phase fed.
My home in Queens NY is serviced by a 120/240 center tapped 100kVA transformer that feeds only our street from corner to corner. The neutral connects to the other poles but everyone else in the surrounding area is on three phase. The poles do have 2400/4160 three phase feeders on top so getting three phase is not an issue. How we became a 120/240 island is beyond me but it might have been a leftover from old practices, never upgraded or left alone for a specific reason. Out on long island the neighborhood I lived in for a short while has 120/240 and only a single high voltage leg running along the pole. So they have to balance out the load on the feeder side.
I would worry more about condensation of the cool steam in the turbine itself. The only way this would be good for a turbine is if the steam can be further heated via a solar super heater.
This is why power plant boilers have a superheater which passes the steam from the boilers steam drum through a heat exchanger in the hot exhaust stream of the boiler. This brings the steam temperature up well past the boiling point of water and prevents steam from condensing in the turbine. Imagine a turbine spinning at 3600 RPM (for a 2 pole 60Hz alternator) in which droplets of water form and begin to collide with the blades. All you need is one blade to fail from getting pummeled with water and it's game over for the turbine. The steam is condensed once it exits the turbine exhaust which creates a vacuum effect which increases the turbines efficiency, you pull steam through it. The steam is condensed using cooling towers, water cooled heat exchangers or fed to a district heating system and customers pay to do some of the condensing (and maintain the infrastructure while increasing efficiency).
Hey! They paid a lot of money for that idiocy.
If you look at the pinout diagram from here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/#introducing-raspberry-pi-model-b-plus
You will notice GPIO_GEN0->6. Perhaps those are 7 hardware PWM's.
But if not then go grab a PWM breakout board such as http://www.adafruit.com/products/1455?gclid=CN6MjrTKxb8CFSwS7AodhDYAcw
I have used their 16 channel PWM breakout and it was a pleasure to use.
This was discussed already and the general conclusion was the restaurant had very poor service. Poor service will kill a reputation faster than anything else. I remember going to a restaurant that was short staffed. They were trying to accommodate people, and were nice about it. But after waiting 30 minutes for bread, we left. You can always expect bad reviews based on food, you can't please everyone.
Plus I don't think Google information can kill a place in just a few weeks. People have phones and call ahead to confirm hours, seating availability, location and even directions. I know I always call. It's lazy people who just browse Google and believe everything they see without confirmation.
Website: http://www.serbiancrown.com/
Yelp Reviews: http://www.yelp.com/biz/serbian-crown-restaurant-great-falls
Trip Advisor reviews: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g57783-d497915-Reviews-The_Serbian_Crown_Restaurant-Great_Falls_Fairfax_County_Virginia.html
Google Maps entry: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Serbian+Crown+Restaurant/@38.97349,-77.295876,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x89b6360d0a8fbba5:0x79a2bbe49b2f3a1e
Most of the reviews complain about very poor service. Waiters not checking up on the tables, one guest said they had to wander around to find a water pitcher and refill it themselves. People have waited 30+ minutes to receive the menu and bread. One guest claimed they were there for over 3 hours in total waiting for various courses. Guests would arrive only to find there was not host/hostess at the podium to seat them. Guests complained about rude staff both in person and over the phone. And these aren't recent complaints, they go back to 2010.
They would have to have data recorded 24/7 about load distribution throughout the entire country. And if the person leaves the country to rendezvous with a reporter? Are they recording the electrical loads in Mexico? Brazil? Poland?
Perhaps they are monitoring EMF using receivers around the country, recording them and using triangulation. But how does this help them? If I blow the whistle to a reporter I am not doing it in my home town. Most people would go somewhere else to a neutral location. So then the tape surfaces weeks or months later and the NSA or whoever triangulated the location to a parking lot without any surveillance. They could do some old fashioned sleuthing but hopefully a whistle blower will try to cover their tracks.
I had shelves of that P2/3 stuff. Threw a lot of it out as giving it away or selling it was a non starter. Pained me to do so but being a pack rat isn't an option anymore.
Though I did keep a lot of my more interesting hardware: Dual Pentium 233 on an Tyan
Tomcat IVD w/128MB EDO RAM, Abit BP6 w/dual Celeron 333's OC'd to 450 MHz and 768MB RAM. And my First real PC, a Micron 486DX2 66 w 16MB RAM. I replaced the 486 Motherboard with the Tyan Tomcat but I still have the 486 Board with a pentium overdrive and the 486 chip stuck on some ESD foam. I also have some interesting vintage systems and hardware I got from work, mainly 286/386 hardware.
Really cool stuff: MITS Altair 8800b, Franklyn ACE 1200 (Apple IIe clone), NeXt Station (no monitor), Sparcstation IPC, ATT PC7300 and 3B2 (Unix PC's, I got a video on Youtube of one booting), IBM System 80, SGI Octane 2, SGI Origin 300 rack and a non working SGI Origin 2000. Also a few Vintage dumb Terminals namely an old ADM 32 and two VT100 terminals who's mfr escapes me. I am also starting to collect some Apple Gear as well, have a dual G5 tower which won't boot due to a bad motherboard/CPU (boots only when the 2nd CPU is removed). Now I realize I have too much crap lol.
Old hardware is your best bet. Anything new would be unsupported by the older 2.2/2.4 kernels, PCIe, SATA, chipsets etc.
*Slot 2 Pentium II or III CPU's and Socket 370 CPU's are perfect. If you want multiprocessor, a Tyan or Supermicro dual slot/board is a good bet but stay away from any board with RDRAM using the i820 or i840 chipsets. They did however realize how big a mistake RDRAM was and Intel made SDRAM->RDRAM bridge chips so those chipsets could use PC-100/133 SDRAM. Tyan made a dual processor i840 board with dual slot 1 and SDRAM using the bridge chips.
*At least 256 meg of ram, 512MB - 1GB is ideal. Make sure your board supports the RAM you have.
*An AGP Riva TNT card or better yet, a Geforce 1, 2 or 3 graphics card. 3D support may not be available*
*Sound Blaster Live!, Ensoniq, Turtle Beach or Aureal sound cards should all work. Though the Sound Blaster Live! is probably your best bet.
*You are also going to need an ATA hard disk (2+GB) and CD/DVD rom drive, I am unaware of any P2/3 board that supported USB booting so you need the optical drive.
*If no onboard LAN card is present (most common scenario) you want a PCI 3Com 3c905B/C, or any PCI card based on the DEC Tulip chipset (21040/21041/21140/21142/21143). Many older Netgear FA311 cards also worked flawlessly, based on a well supported National semi chip that I think was a tulip clone)
*Bonus: decent 19"+ Trinitron CRT monitor. I still have a 21" Sun Trinitron.
Stay away from ISA cards as much as you can. I had a hell of a time getting my old ISA Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold sound card running under Mandrake back in the day. And that was a "plug and play" card without jumpers. As for why to use Pentium 2/3 boards and not a pentium 4, the p4's after socket 432 willamette generation might not run a 2.2 or early 2.4 kernel. Socket 478 gained things like SATA and PCIe so its a crap shoot. Pentium 2/3 is a guarantee.
*Nvidia hardware 3D support does not appear to be supported on 2.2 kernels. I checked the README for the oldest Linux Driver and 2.4 and 2.6 kernels were mentioned. Have a look here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-71.86.15-driver.html and check the hardware issues section in the README!
Have fun kickin it old school.
Thank you for that medically astute observation Dr sribe.
I thought the same thing, it should be its own phone. But then it isn't an accessory but a standalone smart phone that you wear on your wrist. But in addition to calls and time, navigation and sports apps would be a great addition. GPS readouts, music player interface, etc.
Taking my phone with me on a bike ride is annoying as I want to travel as light as possible. I only take a bit of cash, drivers license (for id) and phone. It would be nice If I can glance at my watch and see that I have ridden for x miles, current speed, weather and trip time. I don't need maps or graphics. Same would go for distance sports/activities in addition to a pedometer (accelerometers). I can leave my phone in the little pouch on my bike frame and keep it off the handlebars or pocket. It should also be waterproof so I don't care if I get caught in a downpour.
The problem is a cop does not consider him/herself to be a citizen. They are cops, we are citizens. It's an "us vs them" mentality in which the cops are a privileged class of people who think they are the law and sometimes pretend they are above it. That mentality also leads them to form tight bonds in which they will cover for each other and outright lie about anything to keep their jobs and freedoms. And internal panels for review are just as bad often letting cops off the hook for perjury, assault and outright murder with little more than a slap on the wrist.
If you ask me law enforcement should retrain itself (pipe dream, I know but hopefully not) to see itself as citizens who are tasked with enforcing the law. They are not the law, they are not above it and they are subject to the very law they help enforce as everyone else is. They simply have a job to do though it is a very important one.
I prefer idfa as getting the keys with the ammo/weapons made the game pointless.
Have a 250GB Samsung 840 which so far has been reliable. Then again it has only been a year since installing it.
Have a look at this article: https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte
The Samsung did die an early death but the sample size is too low to be conclusive. Though, this does not worry me at all since my SSD is only for games. Plus I make backups :-)
There are five lights. How many do you see now? - ZZZZAP!
200 rpm is in the slow speed category (300RPM). Those speeds are typically reserved for very large ship diesel engines (search for Wartsila). Even medium speed diesels are not very fast, in the 300-1000 RPM range. Most Diesel gensets for backup, or portable power tend to be high speed units running at 1500 RPM for 50 Hz and 1800 RPM for 60 Hz. I doubt there are any 200 RPM generators unless they are one of those old Listeroid type engines. And those are belt driven to increase the speed to 1500 or 1800 RPM at the generator shaft.
The frequency of a generator is determined by the speed of the shaft and the number of poles in the alternator. The formula is f = (p*RPM)/120, f is the frequency, p is the number of poles, and RPM is the shaft speed of the armature. Also, the number of poles is always even. So a 4 pole alternator spinning at 1800 RPM will yield 60Hz. The same 4 pole spinning at 1500 RPM will yield 50Hz.
At 200 rpm, the alternator would need 36 poles to produce 60Hz or 30 poles for 50Hz. That is a lot of poles and makes construction a bit more complex.
Do you plan to use an x86 CPU in a future design?
I love the idea of a laptop that is a portable hardware hacking platform. Its a trifecta of PC + FPGA dev board + open source design in one portable box. I can carry one system and it has everything I need. But the limitation that seems to hamstring it is the ARM CPU which is unable to run the Xilinx tools. This means we have to lug an x86 laptop to run the Xilinx tools if we want to make changes to the HDL code. That or use a remote server/workstation to build and download the bit files which might not be practical if there is no net connection available. If the Novena had an x86 CPU, we could do all of the development on it.
I would love to see a Novena with a 2GHz quad-core AMD G series SoC. We could then run the Xilinx tools and be able to do all of the development work on the same machine. It has a load of I/O, GPU, supports more RAM (up to 16GB) and features virtualization so we could run Windows in a VM if need be. Power consumption would be higher but no higher than most laptops. The only issue would be connecting an FPGA as I don't believe the G SoC sports a local bus like the i.MX 6. So a more costly Spartan 6 LXT FPGA with gigabit transceivers and PCIe would be needed, not that its a bad thing ;-). If a board like this were available my response would be "Shut up and take my money!"
What's in a name?
Seriously, why would the name turn you off to his work? I know bunnie is a cutesy-wootsy name but it has no bearing on who he is or what he does. Maybe he likes rabbits. Maybe its what his mother calls him. Maybe it was a nickname he earned on the mean streets of Boston during his time at MIT. Either way, who really cares?
Eh, a single piston at 200 RPM would be a bit shaky unless perfectly balanced. Most high speed diesel engines (every road going diesel) typically idle at around 600 RPM. Perhaps a small flat or boxer type 2-4 cylinder with an alternator bolted right to the flywheel.
A better idea would be to have a variable speed engine paired with a DC generator that has a wide operating range. So as you put your foot on the accelerator, the engines speed regulator would increase the RPM's to match the needed current output. As you get up to speed, the computer can slow the engine down to the minimum needed to sustain the vehicle's speed. The benefit would be that the engine only has to work as hard as it needs to and does not need to run at a constant speed.
The only reason generators (we are talking alternators producing mains power) are constant speed is because the frequency is directly proportional to the shaft speed. A 4 pole 60Hz alternator needs to spin at a constant 1800RPM. To avoid this newer small portable generators use inverters connected to an alternator. As the current demand increases, the voltage sags and the computer speeds the engine up. It works great for really small generators (4kW) but becomes more costly after that as you need more/bigger MOSFETS/IGBT's in the inverter. BUT if your target output is DC like an electric car would need, then you don't need the inverter, just the speed regulator.
I am not at all shocked that the Kinect eats GPU power. Machine vision isn't exactly computationally light, there is a lot of math to run on each frame plus the I/O overhead. They have to run those algorithms on something and my guess is they used DirectCompute to utilize the GPU to save money on hardware.
They could use a dedicated DSP in the Kinect but that would drive up the cost of the Kinect making it an overpriced and unappealing accessory. A quick check on Digikey for the Analog Devices Sharc DSP reveals that even a 450MHz chip costs about $32 in quantity. Perhaps there is a higher performance DSP that is cheaper but you also have to factor in the cost of memory for it and other ancillary components. It can easily add $50+ to the hardware cost. I know its a VERY rough guesstimate but it illustrates why dedicated processing in the Kinect is not utilized. Another thing to consider is using the GPU gives more flexibility in designing newer and better algorithms which might be constrained by a DSP with limited performance.
I have always said that if everyone who gets a ticket pled not guilty, the system would collapse under the weight in a matter of days.
I fight every ticket I get because its not only within my right, its also within my best interest. I have fought a number of tickets and beat getting points or having fines reduced. I just recently beat a speeding ticket, I plead to a lesser offence, illegal parking. It only cost me $200 and no points. At an old job a co worker was busted driving a van with improper registration. It was a checkpoint and they were targeting vans. They gave him 7 tickets totaling $1500. He took it to court and got every single ticket thrown out.
Sitting in court you will hear one moving violation after another being pled down to a lesser offenses. Things like no seatbelt and parking violations. They keep the price tag of the moving violation but let you avoid getting points which jack up your insurance rate. They just want your money.
Most of the Apple fanboys out there now are such because, when they were in highschool, apple was the only computer in the school... and therefor the only computer they had access to.
I kind of doubt that. When I was in grade school the standard was the Apple IIx. In high school we had PC's running Windows 3.x or 95. At home we first had a Franklyn Ace 1200 and later various PC's. Yea this isn't the 80's/90's anymore but there is a bit more to this than Macs at schools.
Apple only rose to its current height after the assault of trendy advertisement and product placements of the early-mid 2000's. The iPod was the first piece of hardware that really brought them attention and it was everywhere including being worn by prominent musicians in music videos of the day. Everyone had to have an iPod. It was not only a piece of technology but a fashion statement and a status symbol. Oh you still listen to burned CD's, that like so 90's! The iPod's success along with OSX and sleek product design began the Apple ecosystem of iPod+Mac. The iPhone further cemented that and people to this day prefer to buy iPhones because its about status, not technology. Its only natural for them to buy a Mac instead of a PC.
I will also say that their saving grace was OSX which finally got them out of the OS dark ages and gave people a real alternative to Windows. They marketed it to geeks as a Unix OS (which it really isn't) and even managed to lure in a significant portion of developers. Hell at my brothers place of work everyone has a Mac mini or Macbook Pro for web development. They are embedded in a multi million dollar marketing firm which is all Mac. If they need to test on Windows they fire up VMware. A friend who works for Disney mobile switched to a Macbook years ago. Another friend also does all his game coding in C/C++ on a Mac. Go to any Maker fair and look at how many people are sporting Macbooks. And yes, going back to your original statement, Macs are in a lot of schools but many have Windows servers on the backend running Active Directory and everything else. I bought my old Lenovo Thinkpad running Debian to my brothers work place of work and was laughed at for having a PC until they saw Xmonad on the fucking screen. Then they were like "oh shit you're hardcore", which I really am not but its easy to impress half assed geeks I suppose.
I have been doing some contract work for my brothers place of work. I asked to use of of the Mac books so I don't have to lug my "ugly" thinkpad in. I will say this, OSX is a pretty neat OS. Xcode is free and lets you write just about anything you want compared to Microsoft's Visual Studio which requires a costly license to do any real work (to be fair Apple charges 99/yr for app store publishing but otherwise its free). I can open terminals and do all the unixy stuff I need (scp, rsync, ssh, git, etc) while having a shiny GUI on top that runs most of the software I already use. And the best part is the sane method for software installation. A DMG image containing a single file you drag into the programs directory. Done. At first I thought I was doing it wrong but no it was the way it worked. No files thrown all over creation (Linux) and no stupid idiotic registry (Windows). At one point I almost considered buying a Macbook myself. Apple really did their homework and made a nice, simple OS.
Because it doesn't have the wow-wee factor compared to raw clock speed numbers.
What is with this obsession for using pedophiles to justify the erosion of rights and privacy? No, don't answer that, it was a rhetorical question.
Pedophiles are no worse than rapists, murderers and other criminals that cause physical harm to others. In fact I would rate them as a lower threat than murderers. How come we consider pedophiles so reprehensible that we go out of our way to ruin their lives forever yet we don't think twice about doing the same for a murderers or serially violent criminals? Should I have the right to know if my neighbor was in jail for killing someone? Shouldn't I be aware that someone in my neighborhood was jailed for beating a man to within an inch of his life? They don't respect life any more than a pedophile.
And the most idiotic aspect of registering sex offenders is we just lump everyone together. Sex offences can be everything from getting caught pissing on the bushes (your willy is hanging out), mooning someone (yes it is indecent exposure), a 16 y/o having consensual sex with an 18 y/o (statutory rape), right up to full blown violent 1978 "I spit on your grave" rape. So registry maps are full of useless noise.
Lets take it a step further and also make public a list of people who have: been arrested for drug possession, burglary, prostitution, and assault. This way we can all live in fear of our neighbors. Sounds great right?
I realize the EU is probably different than the US but every time this crap rolls around idiots start yammering about pedophiles and children.
I suppose I am the stereotypical geek (hate the label but whatever) and most of this is my opinion and perception of being a geek. So here goes...
I don't think many of us geeks really try to talk to enough girls to even begin to call it luck. Its hard to explain but ill try. Geeks are mostly very intelligent people. And our intelligence usually means we probably have some sort of disorder which makes us obsess over our hobbies. Its a good thing in that we have the drive to go after very complex problems. We use our knowledge and skills to solve those complex problems that many people cant even begin to understand. And sometimes it leads to a feeling of superiority: "I can design a 3 phase brushless motor drive in my sleep but these fucking pudding brained jocks get all the girls! WTF!" The problem isn't the jocks or the girls, its you. You spent all of your time obsessing over your hobbies that you never bothered to even try to say "Hey, aren't you in my class with professor Bumblebee? bla bla bla nice day today... bla bla... btw I love that book your reading there bla bla bla..." But often it is also that we aren't exactly alpha males either. So we have a poor self image and feel that we don't stand a chance. That or we are too shy/awkward/anxious etc. So we internalize and build more motor drives, software and whatnot to try and prove ourselves without ever actually proving anything to anyone but ourselves. (Am I making any sense here?) Bottom line is we need to suck it up and just go and talk to girls. Even if its just to make some small talk. But even small talk eludes us as small talk for us is Terry Pratchett, Why X programming language sucks/rules or that we bought a new FPGA dev board to implement a damn motor drive. We have to put our crazy hobbies aside and think simple. Not because the girl is simple but to give you a more common ground to lead into a conversation. Maybe it will lead to something very interesting. But that maybe wont come if we don't try.
This is part of the superiority complex that develops when we get mad at ourselves for not trying. So we blame them instead of admitting we are the fuck ups. Bad social skills aren't bad social skills. We can socialize with each other just fine as we share common hobbies and therefor can comfortably talk to each other. What we consider interesting might be boring, looked down upon (the whole "this shit is for nerds" nonsense, a social problem) or beyond most peoples understanding. The sloppy hygiene is a result of poor parenting, period. I was raised to brush my teeth daily, shower regularly, wear clean clothes etc. I do let myself get a little sloppy looking but that is when I am just doing whatever. When I go out I clean up, fix my hair and try to dress nice. Most of the time us geeks look at fashion and hygiene as a nuisance that just gets in the way of another 100 lines of code or 20 more pages in a good book. We just need a little discipline.
Could have been the shitty card edge connector in the console. They remedied that with the vertical design after the SNES came out but it was too little, too late. And it always puzzled me as to why they made the boneheaded decision to change from the Japanese vertical cart load to the slot mess they made for the rest of the world.