brianorca

That’s why most boat power systems use LiFePo4 (aka LFP) batteries instead of LiCoO2 like you phone battery. LFP is immune to thermal runaway, and can’t burn even if it did overheat.

Boats with electric motors don’t need a dedicated generator, as the motor can act as a generator when you put it in neutral. (If properly configured.)

Sailboats can operate at lower power levels, because their displacement hull is efficient at low speeds. (Where a planeing hull needs higher speeds to get more efficient.) When I had solar electric sail boat, I could motor at 2 knots with no wind using only 500w of solar without touching the battery. I usually ran it at 3.5 knots if there was no wind, which gave me lots of range on battery for a full day on the water.

They also have the sail as a primary power source when there’s enough wind, so you don’t always need the electric motor. Sometimes, if the wind is strong enough, you can use the water turning the propeller to generate electricity to charge the battery. Or if the wind is light, you can use the motor to add more speed than sail alone, using less battery than using electric alone.

They have one other advantage: unit price. But Lithium is rapidly catching up, and is already better if you calculate price per lifetime charge cycle.

In AC, diodes work half the time, every 1/60 second. The “good” LEDs will have circuitry to fully rectify the AC into DC, drop the voltage properly, and smooth the peaks and valleys, so they will be continuously lit. So the cheap LED Christmas lights might have a slight flicker, and the good ones are steady. (Or get fancy with chasing colors, etc.)

All of that happens inside each of the “bulb” enclosures, or sometimes in a box at one end, so it technically doesn’t matter which end they are getting electricity from, since the socket at the far end is still just connected in parallel to the plug at the near end. (Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to link them together.)

It’s just a really bad dangerous idea to reverse them.

It would still work. But it is VERY dangerous. 1. The far end of the light string will now have exposed metal prongs that are energized at 120v, which can be fatal. 2. If the other end gets plugged into a socket, there is a 50% chance it will be a different circuit on a different phase, which can create a 240v direct short, across a wire that has no properly sized circuit breaker. 3. Using it to plug a generator into your house during a power outage can kill electrical workers trying to fix the outage if you fail to open your circuit breakers.

If someone can’t make the own cord, what’s the chance they know how vital it is to flip the breaker?

Two things: 1: there’s a high chance you do cross live and neutral, or even live and live on different phases. 2: using it to plug in a generator to power your house can kill electrical workers who are trying to restore a power outage. (If you fail to open your circuit breaker.)

It also falls off too easily. My favorite for this use case is black Gorilla tape. Like duct tape but thicker.

My guess is that’s how high it needs to be for the sewer to flow in the right direction.

Spoilers in Connect are not readable when I click them. (White on white) Unless I first select the post so the background in grey.

It’s a third party kernel module, which Microsoft would love to be able to block, but legally can’t. It’s technically possible to write a virus scanner that runs in user space instead of the kernel, but it’s easier to make sure everything gets scanned if it’s in the kernel.

You can get Mint on a “Live” USB flash drive, so you can boot it up and see if it handles all your hardware before you install anything.

I’m saying it’s happened before. AOL. Palm. Yahoo. Blackberry. A company with an effective monopoly gets complacent and fails to serve their users. They get replaced.

But that’s also a path for them to no longer be a monopoly, if the right competitor makes the right moves.

You can do that kind of imposed structure if it’s an internal tool used by employees. But if the public is using it, it has better be able to parse whatever the consumer is saying. Somebody will say “I want a burger and a coke, but hold the mustard. And add some fries. No make it two of each.” And it won’t fit your predefined syntax.

Because bits are not expensive anymore, and if we used 64 bits, we might run out faster than the time needed to convert to a new standard. (After all, IPv4 is still around 26 years after IPv6 was drafted.) Also see the other notes about how networks get segmented in non-optimal ways. It’s a good thing to not have to worry about address space when designing your network.

SQL

It’s more than voice recognition, since it must also parse a wide variety of sentence structure into a discreet order, as well as answer questions.

If someone is paying you to write code, they have some say in the contract about how it is licensed. You could be upfront about only doing GPL, and they could be upfront about saying no. But if you try to do it after the fact, that’s a violation of the contract.