The Best Burglar Alarm In History 137
Sportsqs writes "When Nikola Tesla got creative with transformers and driver circuits at the turn of the 20th century he probably had no idea that others would have so much fun with his concepts over a hundred years later. One such guy is an Australian named Peter who runs a website called TeslaDownUnder, which showcases all his wacky Tesla ways, or rather electrickery, as Peter calls it." Very cool stuff, I wish I would have had something like this to protect my comic books from my little brother when I was a kid.
One thing I don't get about this story... (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing about this story confuses me: Why is samzenpus allowed to post stories outside of Idle?
Re:Idle (Score:5, Interesting)
Tesla was a Slashdotter (Score:5, Interesting)
I am currently working on several products that will replace current measuring instruments that use nuclear technology. Thanks to what may appear to be worthless patents filed by Tesla regarding resonance in solid bodies, I am having success beyond what I could have imagined.
It's unfortunate that someone with so much to offer is now regarded as a marginal creator of useless technology.
The next time someone promises $10,000 to increase the effiency of your DC Dynamos, kick him in the
Re:Idle (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm really not sure which is worse, that they post these things, or that they're so old. Really, I saw this years ago.
Feedback is good for any site. It shows the direction which the users would like the site to go in. It's important for good growth of any site (or any company). Try something, see if the users like it. If they do, keep it and/or expand it. If they don't like it, file it away somewhere so the same mistakes aren't made again.
But, posting what the site owner/editor/publisher wants is true. I run a news site also. It's a different format with a different target audience, but it's mine. I (owner/publisher) ran a story about men and their cats. My senior editor got a bit miffed. I'll paraphrase. "We're in the middle of two wars, the economy collapsing, and what could be the most detrimental US election ever, and you're running stories about f***ing cats?!?!"
There was good reason that I did. Because the NYTimes ran it first. Because the regular news is absolutely depressing. Once in a great while you have to give a little bright news. Broadcast TV doesn't want to do the fluff piece on a doughnut shop making the county's largest doughnut, but when all they've run for the last week is car crashes, shootings, and world news on terrorist bombings and the body count in wars we're involved in, sometimes you have to give a little bright spot in the news, even if it is still out of line.
I run what I want, when I want. I want real factual news run all day every day. I also want to keep our readers, so the fluff pieces are almost required. Silly things like the car with the tesla coil on it are good to bring in new readers too. Someone will ask someone else "Did you see the car with lightning around it on Slashdot?" Bringing in readers with fluff is fine. Keeping them around with real news is more important.
Some days it's harder to find real news than on other days. That's why you'll see repeated news on TV and in the newspaper. They have time and space to fill (respectively). We have a luxury on the Internet, where we just have to remain active. We don't have to fill X number of pages to keep our advertisers happy, we only have to bring in X number of viewers. On my site, that's trivial. I don't answer to advertisers, so if I bring in exactly 0 viewers for a year, then I simply won't make any money. If I bring in 1 million users a day, well, I'll be much happier on my yacht, checking my readership numbers once a day. :)
Re:Slashdit is idle. (Score:3, Interesting)
Force field (Score:3, Interesting)
At first, I thought he had managed
to make a force field around the car using a tesla coil.
But then I saw that he was just rotating a pole connected to a tesla coil around the car, what a disappointment.
It might actually be possible to make a force field with a Tesla coil if you can find the correct field harmonics.
See http://amasci.com/freenrg/audwall.html [amasci.com]
You might also have to know something about
quaternionic electromagnetism to pull it of.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4445/quaternionic-electrodynamics [scribd.com]
Also if you think that slashdot stories have been
to low quality lately then maybe you should try http://crowdnews.eu/ [crowdnews.eu]
Re:Tesla was a Slashdotter (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, Slashdotters have their conventional wisdom and groupthink too... Just because it doesn't match the mainstream doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Mostly due to the tireless efforts of generation of cranks who've spent their time wallowing in the more marginal of his creations and the more extraordinary of his unproven claims. Tesla's reputation is a victim of his success.