I for one salue ...
... oh wait.
129 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2007
"The power level involved would be similar to an oven: even if it somehow could be made to work without melting the phone, special domestic wiring would probably be required and the charger would be large and expensive."
duh. You would likely only need to deliver about 10-20V DC. It is quite possible to make a charger that will do this at very high current, given that you have 240VAC at 13A available. Only heavy wiring would be charger output to the battery, which could be quite short - even 6 inches would do it. So voltage drop isn't such a problem as it might appear. Actually all you have to do is make sure the cable doesn't melt, the PSU can easily regulate away the voltage drop that occurs in the delivery wire by using a seperate sense wire back to the feedback network.
The problem is quite a bit tougher for the size of battery that a car would need. But in Europe, many houses do have 3-phase coming in, so supply is not such a problem. Of course, the overall load on the grid would increase significantly ...
I like the idea of switch in-out battery packs more, when you pull up at the filling station you just swap out a bunch of battery modules, pay, go. End of problem.
the idea of having something faster than tape but which draws very little power until you ask it is not so stupid. But it needs to get integrated into enterprise backup solutions first. That takes time. There is a heavy market for products that lighten the burden of storage costs.
1. In any educational institution, you are going to be dealing with people that teach rather than do. They are going to be a bit of a mixed bunch - some good, some not so.
2. I did a Diploma a few years back with OU, over 2 years. I was in the electronics game, had gotten into some embedded stuff, and wanted to up my software skills. I found the course materials, the content, and the tutorship to be absolutely A1. I did well, and I still use and build on what I learned in those 2 years (I now have a pretty good job with a Fortune 500 company as a software engineer, and I enjoy what I do). There were probably a few dodgy bits, but then not all my code is perfect either ...
You get out what you put in, people. The OU may screw up some stuff, but they do a hell of a lot of good stuff. A lot.
... on the next cam down:
"Galveston's 32 miles of sun-drenched beaches are ideal places for numerous sports and leisure activities ... Stewart Beach is a family-oriented beach offering a children's playground, umbrella and chair rentals ..."
Ma! My umbrella is broke!
(wonders how to retrieve the obnoxious emails sent to my boss/spouse/customers ...)
What I want to know is, if the thing cost so many gazillion euro-dollars to make, how come there are pics of service engineer/scientist bloke is riding round on a bike?
even if it's a shiny new mountain bike it hardly seems sensible. Should be a nice BMW town bike, or as its so near Italy, a Ducati or even a whiz bang new Lambretta?
come to think of it, how come he didn't just get stuck to the magnet? hmm must a be a carbon fibre one.
@ the Italian bloke :
the scientific answer to your q is "very ****ing fast indeed"
It's not that hard. The human brain is well adapted to recognising patterns of groups of letters. That's how the English language works.
My daughters are bilingual - Dutch first, English second. Once the eldest was reading Dutch successfully (you can also get 90% Dutch pronounciation from letter sounds), I sat down with her to have a go at "Town Mouse and Country Mouse". Consider the spelling of the first sentence ... :
"Once upon a time there two mice ..."
First run, she didn't get it at all. Confusion. A week later she came back for a second go. Was reading it successfully 3 days later, and has never looked back. It just took a little while for the different rule set to sink in.
Come and tell me I'm wrong, if you think you're hard enough, Prof. Apologists for ignorance do well around here.
laptop screen sitting under a tree in the park? In a train with sun pouring through the windows? Forget it.
I would really like an e-paper device, the thing that has stopped me until now is the slow page turn speed. When they get that fixed (hope they do) I'll pay $300.
I never much read who wrote what. Were you one of the funny ones? Did you master in playmobile sculpture? If so, we'll miss you. If not, well, tough.
No doubt you will make lots and lots of wonga in the apple, but don't forget that the dollar ranks slightly lower than the lira now, so you'll never be able to return to blighty. I hope they deck the times out with a whole page full of swanky icons for your arrival.
And BTW if you are the 4th ladyboy from the left, U R hottt.
is pretty interesting in being one of the few for many years that actually *can* sing and also write a song, although she sounds nothing at all like Billie. Shades of Dinah Washington sometimes maybe. Sharon Jones would leave her for dead though.
shame she's hell bent on effing her life up, but hey, that's her business. The joke would have been a lot funnier without the "she's so irritating " bit, it is about as subtle as a bricklayer the way it stands.
Personally, I found #9 ("I like Jesus, but he loves me so it's awkward") a lot funnier, most of them were crap.
(music nerd alert)