NOVA | Absolute Zero | Absolute Hot | PBS
Seems like an innocent enough question, right? Absolute zero is 0 on the Kelvin scale, or about minus 460 F. You can’t get colder than that; it would be like trying to go south from the South Pole. Is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?
Wow, that just blew my mind. I’ve never thought about that before!
I loaded up Future Shop’s web page this morning to check out TV deals. They have a great idea on their front page, a slider that you move depending on a person’s tech savvy, and it will suggest gifts on the right scale. Great idea! I cranked it up to 100% to see what it suggested. The first thing was the Monster AVS 2000:
Monster’s AVS 2000 is a serious product for serious home theater enthusiasts. It has been hailed as a truly innovative and invaluable product by reviewers and the buying public. The AVS 2000 is designed to stabilize power line fluctuations and maintain constant voltage to your home theatre for maximum performance.
As usual, Monster is scamming people with overpriced equipment that they don’t need.
At first glance, it might seem like it is a good idea, since your house voltage does fluctuate depending on the load, but rarely between 80-140V. Generally it will be between 115-120V. BC Hydro is automatically monitoring and adjusting the power on the grid to keep it within spec.
Even if the power does change, it won’t make any difference to your electronic equipment, because they all convert the 120V AC power into whatever DC power they need. For example your computer’s power supply has -12, -5, 5, and 12V. I’m not sure about TVs but I can guarantee that they aren’t running off 120V directly. All of your equipment is carefully engineered to be able to run off relatively dirty 120V because the designers already know that this power will fluctuate. There is huge amount of study done on power supplies, the first thing that we did at UBC in the lab was to build our own!
Let’s look at some of the results people have had with their equipment. Positive Feedback Issue 6 says this:
As numerous folks have reported, audio and video benefits from the use of a power conditioner in a number of ways. There is less low-level hash and noise, the absence of which makes the audio signal appear to arrive from a darker, inkier background, and video images from a cleaner, crisper screen. Details are heard and seen that were masked before. Tonal density (audio and video) is more saturated, and seems richer and more natural.
Video is crisper? Really? Interesting. Now how did they test this… well they hooked it all up after spending $1500 US, and wow, the sound and video improved. What kind of equipment did they use to make the voltage fluctuate? Oh, they didn’t. How did they test the audio? Hmm, with their ears. No test equipment in sight. No double-blind tests, nothing.
Save your money and buy a line conditioner from a real power company. You can get a 2400W conditioner from TrippLite for $400. It’s the same rating, 20A, and the same number of outlets. I have no relation to TrippLite, they were just the first one to come up on a Google search.
Or, if you are cheap like me, just ignore the click in the audio when your fridge turns on.
CBC.ca Arts – Libraries urge Ottawa to consider consumers in drafting copyright law
The CLA fears the Canadian government, now redrafting copyright legislation, will create a new act closely mirroring U.S. legislation that curtails consumer rights, such as the right to copy material for their own use, Don Butcher, executive director of the Canadian Libraries Association said in a news conference in Ottawa Friday. “This is a battle between Hollywood lobbyists versus the average Canadian,” Butcher said. He called for a “made-in-Canada” solution that balances the rights of consumers with the rights of creators. Any changes made to law should protect artists such as musicians and authors, but also allow copying for individual use, he said.
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I’ve talked about the need for balanced copyright for many years, but we’ve never seen this much public engagement in copyright. That is because the real story is that copyright matters to people and they now have the tools to make their voices heard. I’m thrilled to have played a role in raising awareness, but the real credit goes to the thousands of people who took the time to write or call their elected representatives, to blog about the issue, to attend the Toronto or Calgary events, or to raise awareness with their friends, family and community.
I’ve been doing my part. On Monday night I sent a letter to my MP, James Moore, whom I talked to at his open house on Saturday. He said that he would pass on my concerns to the Minister of Industry. I’ve also managed to sign 16 people up to the Facebook group.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/yum”, line 29, in ?
yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 105, in main
result, resultmsgs = base.doCommands()
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py”, line 287, in doCommands
self._getTs()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 85, in _getTs
self._getTsInfo()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 91, in _getTsInfo
self._tsInfo.setDatabases(self.rpmdb, self.pkgSack)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 529, in
pkgSack = property(fget=lambda self: self._getSacks(),
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 384, in _getSacks
self.repos.populateSack(which=repos)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/repos.py”, line 242, in populateSack
sack.populate(repo, mdtype, callback, cacheonly)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/yumRepo.py”, line 167, in populate
dobj = repo_cache_function(xml, csum)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/sqlitecachec.py”, line 46, in getPrimary
self.repoid)
TypeError: Parsing primary.xml error: Start tag expected, ‘< ' not found
For future reference and Google searches, this is caused by libxml2 being compiled without zlib support. >:-|
Because of the 1024 character limit. 
Is MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server dead? « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger
Tell me why the same thing won’t happen here.
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Again I’ve been impressed by Amazon’s web services. This time it is a simple database made to work with S3 and EC2. It’s not as fully featured as something like MySQL, but the advantage here is reliability and availability. Hopefully we’ll start to see some projects start to use SimpleDB as an alternate backend instead of MySQL.
Amazon.com: Amazon Web Services (2): Help: Amazon Web Services (2) FAQ & More
Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.
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Thanks to Charlie Angus, an MP and musician:
What is also rich is that the government tabled the bill this morning. Now, three hours later, he is telling me that he has cold feet. What? Did he just discover Facebook this morning?
Very cool website Charlie!
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City of Port Moody – TransLink doubles funding allocation and approves Murray-Clarke Connector
At its December 12, 2007 meeting, TransLink’s outgoing Board of Directors approved the allocation of up to $50 million for the design and construction of the much-needed Murray-Clarke Connector.
Finally there will be some improvements to the Port Moody traffic problems. It’s only going to get worse as the new highrise construction is finished and people start moving in.
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