jhallenworld

>the party in power is explicitly promising to outlaw their business model

Citation needed. This is the straw-man argument from the party out of power.

>Damned if you do, damned if you don't I guess

Hurts them in the long run- the higher the price, the more heat pumps, electric vehicles and solar panels sold.

https://www.sulpu.fi/record-high-sales-growth-of-90-recorded...

But in the short run, hurts our democracy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/opinion/will-gas-prices-d...

Commodities are sold in an auctions like this, but most products in general are not. The selling company has to actively raise the price. In the case of commodities, in a free market, greed should lead to increased production. But oil is at least partially controlled by a cartel. The cartel knows that the price of gas directly influences the US election, so if they don't like the guy in office, they just limit production.

The oil company CEOs seem to want to be coddled. They feel bad that there is emphasis placed on solar and wind, so they refuse to increase production.

Nope. But you can run Quartus Prime Professional in 30-day eval mode, I just did this for a Xilinx / Altera comparison. [Xilinx is ahead for deep combinatorial logic, I think because of the 8-level carry lookahead in each CLB. Altera was fine for well pipelined code. 1 Xilinx DSP == 2 Altera DSPs. YMMV.].

One advantage of Altera: parts made on Intel's own fab (so Stratix-10 and Agilex) have reasonable lead times (8-12 weeks).

Lattice is great for extreme low power, I've been using their Crosslink-NX 28nm FPGAs recently.

Amazing, these are actually in stock:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amd-xilinx/SM-K26...

Very good price for Zynq Ultrascale+

Or chopping/gathering firewood.

Well here is my recent experience: my daughter's cheap Lenovo laptop broke, after three years of college. It served her well except for one thing: this new game "Stray" (on steam) requires something better than Intel integrated graphics to work.

Anyway, so new laptop is HP "Victus" for $1100. It includes Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti, so now she can play Stray. It seems like a good deal: 512 GB SSD, Core i7, 16 GB RAM.

The laptop is all fan :-) She discovered that it quickly overheats if you put it on the bed (blocks the vents on the bottom). Also the battery drains real-fast when using the GPU. Also the power brick is larger.

Also there are "near-breeder" CANDU heavy water moderated reactors: they are a proven technology that exists today and can use non-enriched uranium. They also in theory can use a plutonium/thorium mixture, so can burn thorium.

They are cheaper as far as fuel, but it turns out that fuel didn't become as expensive as anticipated in the 1970s (when it was thought that there would be 1000s of reactors). They are physically larger, so have a higher construction cost that put them at a disadvantage compared to conventional LWRs.

The tritium needed for fusion reactors comes from these CANDU reactors (some of the deuterium from the heavy water is converted to tritium, it is collected).

Buttered bread, cheese and tomato, fry on pan.

Among the oldest surviving written literature, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesh_temple_hymn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak

Tandy models 2, 12, 16 and 6000 were great business machines: they had 80x24 screen, buffered keyboard (just like IBM PC), and had lots of software support (Xenix, TRSDOS, CP/M, RM/COS).

IBM PC was basically the same thing, but cheaper and had even higher quality keyboards and screens.

CoCo had a nice CPU, but otherwise was junk. I bought a CoCo3 recently, and have been playing with OS-9. If only there had been a popular 6809-based computer with better hardware than the CoCo.

An interesting channel is Will Prowse's Off Grid Solar Channel. He was living in his van (in CA, no surprise) until the youtube money allowed him to buy a house (in Vegas), which he recently paid off.

https://www.youtube.com/c/WillProwse/videos

House related videos:

Sets goal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1ZVnfjKyM

Buys house:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhtN01Hc95U

Pays off house:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALDuMufycMY

"I paid 34k every month for 10 months to pay off this house. "

Anyway, so it's possible, but you need to have the right topic. I think reviews and how-tos of expensive things you are about to buy is a lucrative place to be.

The electric field from the cloud is usually not high enough to break down air on its own, but some particles from space can ionize the air enough to start the process.

This counts as an amplifier in the same way that avalanche photodiodes do.

The US Senate just approved an HFC ban. So which refrigerant should be used in the heat pumps? Can we get HFC-free heat pumps today?

See https://www.danby.com/blog/danbys-commitment-to-remain-100-h...

http://hvacrfundamentals.blogspot.com/2019/06/appliances-wit...

Looks like r600a, iso-butane is already in use.

Probably both matter: suppose your grandma is your angel investor. If suddenly equities plummet, grandma sees less in her portfolio, so the funds available for angel investing are no longer there.

This is happening to me right now with my parents not being able to help as much with my kids' college tuition.

>I actually do not understand the source of inflation

I think this is the source of the problem:

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

Demand is coming from 100% of the population, but supply comes only from those who are working. Thanks to Covid, the supply of workers is less, but also there is a long term trend (maybe compensated for by productivity gains..)

It's interesting to compare it with this one:

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/employment-p...

This one shows the percent of people working of employment age. This doesn't look so bad, but the people not of employment age also create demand.

IMHO, the only price that really matters is the cost of labor (no matter what they say). IMHO, because the value of money is defined by average annual salary (the real value is work, not money).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003

>the TI-99/4a

TI-99/4a is what you get when you design in a complete vacuum, I mean ignoring the competition at the time.

http://shawweb.myzen.co.uk/stephen/tihistory.htm

GPL? GROMs? What on earth were they doing?

https://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/groms.htm

https://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/gpl.htm

Well Apple-II had its "Sweet16".

I understand the argument, I just wish that the most standard school calculator would highlight somehow what it's doing

Another one is "2 ^ 1 / 2 Enter". Some calculators give 1, newer ones give sqrt(2).

It's how the key is labeled.

My daughter is struggling with this problem: on TI-84s, "(-) 3 x^2 Enter" gives -9. Personally, I think that if you have a dedicated negation operator it should have a higher precedence than power, but at the very least the calculator could highlight what it's doing.

"Hypercalc" the Android app does it, but TI-84 is the standard..

According to "Asianometry", common test strips are an application of microfluidics. So in one sense they are very common.

Aside from these, it sounds like they will become lab tools not the Theranos-style lab replacements.

See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAESOEjcYfc

Relevant Silicon Valley episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAxzkl2cmNY

Right at 8:20 is a mistake. The electrons are not "pulled" across the reverse-biased collector/base junction. The technical term for electrons being "pulled" by an electric field is "drift", but that's not what's happening.

It's the other mechanism for charge carrier movement that causes the current through the base/collector depletion region: diffusion. This is really just thermal diffusion- the injected electrons will diffuse into an empty space in the same way that air quickly diffuses into an evacuated container. Once electrons have diffused into the collector / base depletion region, drift due to the collector potential "pulls" them the rest of the way.

Anyway, BJTs are partially a thermal device, since their operation depends on diffusion!

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_current

Well this gives me an idea for an interesting FPGA project. The early CD players, like Sony D-5 (I just looked at its service manual), have accessible recovered clock and data signals (they are buried in a chip for newer devices). It would not be too hard to make the EFM decoder, de-interleaver, and error corrector in an FPGA so that I can have these features.

How much would audiophiles pay to have a quality indicator on their CD player? Hmm...

Edit: Sony's CXD2500BQ shows error correction information on the pins- no FPGA needed.

CXD2500BQ is used in Onkyo's DX-7310

This company claims to have a product for this (but no pictures..), follow the links for their "CD Errormonitor":

https://www.wpnsystems.com/

Actually I have a related question about CDs: do any CD players indicate when the (Reed-Solomon I think) forward error correction actually corrects any errors? This could give an indication of the quality of the media. It could be total corrected error count, or corrected error count per minute.. something like that.

Second, do any give an indication of when the error correction fails: I think CD players just fill the missing data with the last sample value (certainly this was the case for first gen CD players)- but this FLAC encoding gives a better procedure: replace the missing samples from those of a predictive model. But either way, it would be nice to know when the playback is not perfect.

I was involved in making a server that bricked itself if you opened the cover, for added FIPS security. So let me tell you all of the things that can go wrong:

Is the switch mounted on sheet-metal? Well you will discover that sheet metal bending is an imprecise process. You need to generate a mechanical tolerance stack-up that accounts for the worst-case opening. What happens if the server flexes a little?

How precise is the open point of the switch?

The sense side of the circuit is high impedance. The wire will act as an antenna and detect any noise in your device.

How can a user replace the battery without triggering the tamper detect?

How sensitive is your switch to shipping vibrations?

Anyway, the experience gave me a good appreciation for those who make landmine triggers :-)

Removing the battery is the same as opening the switch in this circuit: they both will indicate that the device has been tampered with (output will be low).

IMHO the key comment from that post is this from kkielhofner:

"I worked on a embedded hardware application using Linux and "cameras". We (like many people) were using sensors from OmniVision[0] and there was a dedicated contractor who's entire area of focus (and life's work) was getting photons from the sensor of the camera into something usable by software. In our case that was an unholy combination of vendor software, custom code derived from very obscure NDA-only datasheets, and a bunch of custom plugins for gstreamer that could actually make use of the sensor, interfaces, and hardware encoding silicon.

It was one of the more eye-opening "WOW, so that's how the sausage is made" experiences of my life."

This matches my experience, bringing up a new MIPI camera on any of the big name SoCs is a nightmare. Actually I've seen a lot of fails with gstreamer, where for one reason or other gstreamer doesn't work, so the software just uses the image sensor driver directly (usually V4L2). But for many SoCs, this means that you get no IPU support, since it's only available as a gstreamer plug-in.

(try to make a webcam using gstreamer: ffmpeg works better...)

So here is my recommendation: provide more chairs in the cleanroom. Seriously, there are like no chairs in there..