Slashdot Mirror

--------
Do you have Wireless-Enabled Hosting(tm)?

Here is another. Its a scoop engine automotive journal by yours truely. If the link doesn't work its becuase I'm rebuilding my gentoo server at the moment.

The rabbit that stood up to Woundward is threatened by a database?

Frith as a computer manufacturer!

----------------
OnRoad: JunkYard ward meets SCCA racing.

I agree 100%. I figure that the law requires consideration means that the report that is written to decide the real product will include the reasons why and why not to choose OSS solution.

With a sales guy, you can usually find out and relay word back. Here you have public record that you can mine for either injustice or legitimate ways to improve the features and acceptance of OSS.

As I think is your point, genuinly this is a good thing for OSS. It just makes things even, and encourages openness.

-----------
OnRoad: JunkYard Wars + SCCA => Banger Racing

Its a tough call. I was very interested in sports as a child, as well as the outdoors computers and cars. Nowadays sports has kind of dropped off the map. Astronomy, creative writing, physics and mechanical engineering have climbed. I've gone back and read Watership Down, and other books that were assigned to me in High School and now I love them.

In school, they couldn't get me to touch a bunch of these subjects but for some reason now that I'm an adult I find them much more fascinating. I'm going back and re-learning calculus for some fluid dynamics equations I used to know, and pounding out my old dynamics problems for kicks.

I guess what I'm saying is that I didn't stick with them when things went hard, but I rekindled a interest in them when I got older. Me and school never really mixed very well.

--------------
OnRoad: JunkYard Wars meets SCCA racing.

I admit I was ignorant. I thought Pete Townsend had taken up a cause or something.

-----------
OnRoad: Junkyard Wars meets SCCA

Thanks for the update. Sad day for electric vehicles indeed. Fortunately for those that are "le fabricator" there are a lot of good websites on turning your pickup truck or car into an electric vehicle.

My website (mentioned below) is for exploring mods for cars that make them more fuel efficient or make them into electrical vehicles. Okay, I'm not entirely altruistic, there are mods there that make nice polite cars into gas mongering pavement pounders also.

Its a shame I haven't gotten anyone to write an electrical vehicle article for it yet. Unfortunately there isn't as much journalism supporting efficiency mods as there is for performance mods. I've found that theres quite a few people out there more willing to make their car biodiesel or electric then a 10s 1/4 miler.

-----------------
OnRoad: Hit the Road.

I used to know a Ford Think! service manager. Before he moved back to Detroit, he told me what was going on.

California was threatening very strict guidelines on the automakers, that they needed to sell a certain percentage of electrical vehicles with their gasoline cars. Hence Think! and the EV1.

But then either the restrictions laxed or something becuase Dodge and Chevy started giving away electric golf carts to anyone that would take them. Ford then followed suit, although the Think! City was really just a glorified golf cart to begin with.

Its sad really owners of the EV1 have offered 22k apiece to GM to keep their cars, to no avail. There are plenty of little outfits that sell electric cars (I'm sure people here mentioned the Corbin Sparrow, et all).

They can't make enough of them. I used to know the president of the local electric car group who had a Corbin. They have belt problems, but overall are very cool.

So its kind of sad that electrical vehicles offered by the big three are not really roadable any more. There is a demand. And every now and again I still see a City, EV1, Sparrow, and golf carts on the road.

-----------------
OnRoad: The Collaborative Automotive Engineering Journal

I agree. There's one good reason to do it.

They can be ultimately cool and fun.

I'm still hoping some day for an Autoduel mmorpg adaptation. It doesn't even have to be 3D to be cool. Anyone know if Lord British or Origion would open up the Autoduel code or even sell it to me really cheap?

-----------------
OnRoad: Hit the Road.

I agree 100%. I put the distros on a scale this way...

RYO --- Gentoo --- Debian --- Redhat

Thats from the most "have it your way" on the left to the most "I don't know what my way is" to "my boss wants it his way" on the right. Slackware fits somewhere on there, but its used in so many different ways I couldn't place it in one specific point.

The value added is being able to have it your way, or being able to rest on the rock solid attempts of others. That Linux interoperates so well yet has distros that cater to each crowd is more then commendable.

They are interoperable enough in principle. We do have a Redhat box here at work running a Gentoo kernel for the NFS/TCP patches. I have rpm's running on my Gentoo box. But niether of those were easy.

--------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again

Mono, Gnome and Gtk# are a very powerful platform.

I can look into Lindows green tinted windows from my office next door. The company I admin is as much an all Linux shop as you get these days. But still there are events that happen every day that make give me wonder and amazement at how far Linux has come.

I just recently met a VP of a company that makes over 10M revenue a year. I just found out last night that it uses Mono in a crucial role in its production environment. Actually the first company I've heard of at all that uses Mono in a production environment. According to the VP, they'd use Mono exclusively if it had forms support.

This may not be news to you or anyone else, but I never really considered it was being taken that seriously. I find the news rather encouraging. I really don't see a lapse in Gnome or KDE.

--------------
OnRoad: More power!

Playing to a rather low expectation of the average consumers ability to maintain their cars is not only whats keeping us out the the air, but probably what is keeping us from more efficient engines on the road...

It never ceases to amaze me the ignorance of people so willing to call others dolts and morons.

For the last time, SUVs are not cars. They were started as cost cutting measures to sell trucks to morons

Actually, their history is just as traceable to station wagons as they are to trucks. More recently they are using unit body chassis like cars more then truck frame rail chassis.

They predate safety, emmisions and milage measures. And BTW, the milage and emmisions restrictions more direclty correlated to the SUV popularity then safety.

-----------------
OnRoad: Safely reporting the SUV war from the middle of the road.

Ford gets the prize for being the first company to embrace RABS (Rear Anti-lock Braking System -- at less than $100 per vehicle for about 80% of the benefit of a four-wheel system, it was a safety bargain). In '87, it appeared on F-series pickups, Broncos, and Bronco II's as standard equipment. Chevy followed with a similar system on its redesigned '88 C-series, and calls it RWAL (Rear Wheel Anti-Lock).

In the practicle department, we have two technologies we've used for grid computing. I'm going to guess you work on one we've used, Sun Gridware (now opensourced?) used to be Codine. It worked well enough. The interface was pretty easy, but for the users, kicking off programs to run randomly on a grid of machines was not as easy as...

Mosix (or OpenMosix). Now I'm sure theres a hundred good reasons why it doesn't qualify as gridware, but that is how we use it. It was simple to install and monitor also. Hidden enough, the engineers don't even know they are using it. Thats the kind of plug and play every IT manager wants.

The convergence, I agree is going to happen. But honestly today people just haven't become sophisticated enough to expect it yet. Or even want to. Perhaps it won't happen in our lifetime.

-------------
OnRoad: Boldly searching for the efficiency our engines deserve.

but I can guarantee you that the performance of linux NFS blows chunks.

Most of the performance scaling problems we had were fixed when we moved to NFS over TCP.

------------------
OnRoad: Hit the Road.

Mormonism: religion -> science fiction

Yep, between Orson Scott Card and the producer of Battlestar Galactica and a host of others Mormons are capable of writing science fiction.

You might appreciate this interview with OSC on Religion, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. It hits the nail on the head.

------------------
OnRoad: Hit the Road.

One of my favorite all-time quotes from a flame war was about this topic.

"While they sit in ivory towers, the mongols are multiplying in the hills. Soon, the towers will lay waste and the hordes will have moved on victorious."

Of course he was talking about the ivory tower of PERL, and how the TCL was going to become the dominant force in scripting language. But I've loved the allegory ever since.

--------------------
OnRoad: Becuase hacking funner with a hacksaw.

Yeah, the irony is not lost on me. But it seems to me that anything more then the smallest configuration issue would be solved with a "reset" back to factory settings or a replacement before you could convince a mechanic to start hunting and clicking for the problem.

Its not that they are crooked, although for those that are this would be very easy to pawn off. Its that as a systems admin, I know that is what I would rather do then scour /etc files, or even worse point and hunt through a maze of menus.

----------------
Extreme fuel efficiency. 200mpg carburator and Smokey Yunick's miracle engine evaluated.

Yes, my friend, I agree. The "swap it" mentality is not a good thing.

I recently used a soldering iron to fix the windshield wipers. With the part from the junkyard (which wasn't needed after all) it was $20. The previous owner had a mechanic friend that said he'd fix it real cheap, like $330 cheap.

You can't even argue that it took lest time to fix then swapping it. Fixing it was 1/2 an hour, but to get the steering wheel off and everything would have been 1.5 hours.

--------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again.

If you like the Cooper, you might also like the CLio.
Unfortunately, like many cool pocket rockets its not available in the US.

Personaly, I like cars like my computers. Hacked personally by me. I've recently had a car-hacking rennasaince of a sort.

After hacking with the enigmatic bits and code, it feels good to take a hacksaw to cold steal (thats not just allegorical flowery either, I'm serious that it feels good). After feeling the afterglow of installing Gentoo and finally get it working, I look forward to feeling the rush of punching the accelorator down on my car.

Right now I'm putting a 1.6L turbo engine from a Mercury Capri into a Festiva. My progress is updated in my personal journal at OnRoad. You can read up on how to do it at fordfestiva.com.

I've used that technique myself, both in off road situations like you mentioned. I've gone 30ft or so uphill on nothing more then a starter. Its for that reason that my father told me a long time ago to always get the biggest battery you can. I think you have a point, they are a natural for crawlers.

I know Ford and Dodge are looking into hybrid setups for their SUV's. They cleverly use the ground as the medium to tramsit power from the engine in the back wheels to the electrical motors/generators. But that kind of kills the coolness you bring up of getting truely distributed 4wd power from having motors on all four wheels.

In highschool I had the idea of a turbine hybrid Mickey Thomson like race truck where the turbine powered the generator, directly feeding power to the engines and the rest went to batteries. If electrical motors could produce more high-rev HP, I think it would be a pretty cool idea.

Do you know any good technical sites for crawlers? Its one of the things I always wanted to include on OnRoad.

---------------------
Extreme fuel efficiency. 200mpg carburator and Smokey Yunick's miracle engines evaluated.

Which is why all cars should be flat twos.

Two cylinder flatheads or two cylinder boxers? I'm not sure what I said to convince you of those.

Nevermind that your scenario has nothing to do with the car in question which doesn't hold power constant, but reduces power, and thus fuel requirments, by cutting out the cylinders.

I have news for you then. Power output is constant. To overcome air resistance and rolling friction (those are just the major two) you need a certain amount of power. As a driver behind the wheel going a fixed speed, you modulate the power of the engine with the throttle to match the power required to overcome the forces slowing you down at that speed.

Thats what governs the power output. Whether you are in second gear or fifth, using 8 cylinders or 4, part throttle or full you will never be able to change that to maintain a certain speed you are using a fixed amount of power.

In this case, since we are talking about an engine that modulates between four and eight cylinders you can even add engine friction as requiring a fixed amount of power. Its ludicrous to think that you are actually stopping motion in four cylinders when you cut from eight to four cylinders.

So if cutting to four cylinders doesn't cut the power output *at all*, where do you think the efficiency is coming from? It comes from the thermodynamic efficiency of the combustion itself. The greater the charge in the cylinder the greater the thermodynamic efficiency.

--------------------
Extreme fuel efficiency. 200mpg carburators and Smokey Yunick's miracle engine evaluated.

Isn't it like a pipeline, so you get the power from a charge of displacement 3 times a revolution? Come to think of it I'm not sure how a wankle measures displacement, but I figured it is the max volume of the rotor on the intake side like every other IC engine.

-------------------
Onroad: Mining urban legend for fuel efficiency.

You probably have just as much if not more torque at a standstill with an internal combustion engine. There is a lot of energy in the flywheel (a lot), as well as a clutch/torque converter that can translate the torque of higher rpm's to that initial start.

----------------
Extreme fuel efficiency. 200mpg Carburator and Smokey Yunick's miracle engine evaluated.

Debug car suddenly speaking in German 40 man hours

I'm sure that if they can't reset it they'll just replace it. People are all to used to paying mechanics $500 each time they visit them. Besides at 10 hours of mechanic time you've already hit the price of the component.

------------------
Extreme fuel efficiency! 200mpg carburator and Smokey Yunicks miracle engine evaluated.

I wonder how long before this and GPS guidance systems combine to make for a road trip where my wife and I can both relax in the back of the winebego for the trip. Or even better, I can truely put it in cruise control and follow through on the age old parental threat, "don't make me come back there".

----------------
Extreme fuel efficiency. 200mpg carburator and Smokey Yunick's miracle engine evaluated.

Actually no.

Cutting out half your cylinders increases the air/fuel charge in the remaining cylinders for the same power output. You get better BFCM(?) (combustion efficiency) with greater charge.

-------------------
Extremely efficient engines of the past. The 200mpg carburator and Smokey Yunick's miracle engine evaluated.

Looking at Appleby's and Dave and Busters, I see a real blurring between bar and family establishment. We recently attended a birthday party at D&B's, but we had misgivings since we couldn't find a babysitter for our daughter. We thought that they didn't allow anyone under 21.

Well they told us "we are a family establishment", and that they allow three minors for every person over 25 in the group. When we got there and went inside, there was about a 2-1 ration between adults and kids at the arcade machines.

Its a wierd collision. I'm not quite sure what to make of it and your "neighborhood family bar" like Appleby's. But I can say that I enjoy those establishments better then say Denny's and the local arcade (but not better then a local family park like Boomers! or Scandia). I wonder how much its cutting into the Chuck E. Cheese marketshare.

On a grander note, I think the aquisitions are inevitable. With all the downsizing going on I think its hard to say if there is a depression in video games, or just a depression in general.

----------------
OnRoad: Delving into the social ramifications of racing games.

Actually, we only get about 1 marketing call a month and also tell them to never call back (with legal merit). I like the Do Not Call registry, and I'll sign up when it comes to California, but in the mean time I've had success with the following.

Caller ID blocking, which blocks everyone that doesn't show a valid Caller ID number.

Unlisted number

Looking at the Caller ID to see if the number makes sence. I don't have to recognize the number, but telemarketers usually come across as unlisted somehow (still).

Those that do get through are so infrequent (once a month) that get a little nervous like we are missing someone real when it happens. We pick it up, tell them never to call back.

---------------
OnRoad: We get you there and back again.

I agree. Slashdot has many many members, and probably very few know how to do real machining and welding. Heck, a small percentage of your hot-rod modders knows those things. Add the word quality, and of those that can, you've shot off another 90-5%.

But in that 90% are people with real can-do attitude, that has been my favorite part of watching junkyard wars. Monster Garage, on the other hand has pretty well trained machinists. But it makes the show less entertaining, and less accessible for me the lay-viewer. In fact, what they do is so over my head the producers never really show me how they are doing it.

Its not that these qualities are mutually exclusive. But watching someone show resourcefulness in making make-shift stuff is more along my line of understanding then someone that simply knows how to fabricate it anyway.

-----------------

OnRoad: Racing Game Subcultures.

I'm not still sure how this works. If I typed "www.google.com", and then hit snap back does it go to the last page I was at in that domain or does it go back to the google home page. I doubt you are hand typing your queries into the URL, unless your one of those "real" programmers of course.

---------------
OnRoad: Why do I like GPL? Its more wholesome, open and collaborative then say GTA3.

And don't get me started on portability. MIPS, Xscale, PPC and other highly efficient chips that people would like to choose from for embedded devices are not fully supported by WinCE. Linux still does more. And WindowsXP will never be ported to them.

These are things I would look at as an investor.

-----------------
OnRoad: We know the difference between GPL and say, GTA3.

In autoduel, you could sign up to deliver cargo's or steal cargo from other cars and sell it on the black market. That, I think, makes a good balance in economy that would make it profitable for a certain number of people to be thugs, and a certain number of people to be good guys.

But since black market prices aren't near what you can get on delivery, the economy restricts the number of thugs.

Think of it, for really important loads you can get your friends to drive with you in a mad-max style caravan and fight off raiders. Or you can run up the ranks in arena matches, or just log on to watch the arena matches.

Man I wish I had an autoduel mmorpg.

-----------
OnRoad: What racing games do to you. My favorite kind of GPL.

how about a sharp zaurus?

I like them. Perhaps a laptop docking bay for a fast enough pocketPC would be good enough. So far the closest thing I've seen to what I want is a Vadem Clio.

-----------
OnRoad: The social ramifications of racing games. Why can't your game be GPL?

AutoDuel (car wars), now there's a game for a MMORPG. Arena fights at scheduled times, a real economy, cross country errands, and friends. Perhaps there is something out there like it?

There isn't a month that goes by that I don't wish I was playing it.

----------------
OnRoad: What racing games do to you. My favorite kind of GPL.

Yes, and big battery. And I think your right, its Windows thats keeping me from having it. Its enough to rekindle the old 1990's hatred against MS ;)

-------------
OnRoad: The social ramifications of racing games. Why can't your game be GPL?

I always thought that those three priorities is why Intel bought the StrongArm technology. I've never been excited about a Transmeta laptop, or Athlon laptop. I'm just sitting back patiently waiting for a long lasting, no heat StrongArm based laptop. Not a PalmPC, a Laptop.

The LART people have even made headway towards an open hardware motherboard for it. Perhaps that will be my only hope. Give me Linux and a LART, and I'd love to make a truely cool tunable ECU w/onboard diagnosis for my car. I read recently where someone did that with a Apple Laptop.

Anyway, thats enough for my sigh/rant on the topic.

------------------

OnRoad: The social ramifications of racing games. Praise GPL!

This is easy enough, I'll bite.

Those were interesting discussions. I happen to own a VMware liscence, and I use it occasionaly for particular virtualizing needs. I was anxious for Plex86, and mourned the impeding stagnation of the project when the project founder was fired. After two years, I'm still with VMWare.

Meanwhile, VMWare is being eaten at on a few fronts besides Plex86. The most recent evaluation we did for VMWare, pitted its virtual terminal server product against CodeWeavers' Wine server, Citrix, and good ol' Windows 2000. In the end Windows 2000 won, becuase, well, it was already there. Many window's programs have been decided that way.

I don't particulary see a difference in being undercut by a free solution, or being undercut by a built-in the OS solution (*ahem* Netscape). Nor do I see a difference between those undercuts, and being beat out by a better product from a different competitor.

In the end, its the developers obligation to ensure success with a quality feature full product. I think that is why, in the end, some have felt that OSS development models are better. But as far as interaction between Linux programs and free Linux programs, I see nothing out of the ordinary.

------------------
OnRoad: A review of "Piston Envy: The Sociology of Racing Games"

I don't know about the others, but as far as browsing, Links2 does an awfully good job.

---------------------
: It gets you there and back again.

As I understand it that couldn't be further from the truth. Linus has intentionally let everyone keep copyright of their pieces. He said this was to keep one company from buying him (or any two or three) developers.

That makes him different then SleepyCat and others who retain copyright so they can release code under any copyright they wish to (which I also support as useful in some situations).

-------------------
OnRoad: The automotive magazine for before your ride home.

I'll agree. Looking back on history, it just seems like there was no motivation like competition.

David Brin points out America is a peculiar society in that its populace considers its golden age to be in the future. But I wonder if that is really so. We already say "back in the day we were on the Moon".

I'm not saying we are past our peak, but I wonder if something like going to the moon will be where historians put American's peak or if we are going to have the courage to do more.

-------------------
OnRoad: Reporting what happens in America when the police get out of hand.

I used to leave the cover off my firewall in the garage. That was until I evicted a family of mice in my garage, and they decided to get back at me by using one of the network cards as a restroom. Now any PC that card is plugged into will not even boot.

---------------
OnRoad: dbDrag Racing, now showing...

I like your attitude, but perhaps it is all the more reason to bug the politicians about it. NASA is still a publically funded entity, caught at the whim of politicians and their quid-pro-quo favors. To leave the situation alone could put NASA even more at mercy to these forces.

Supporting NASA, publicaly and politically would send a strong infusion of power to NASA if that is what you wish.

--------------------
Onroad:dB Drag Racing, now showing...

Gentoo? A large company?

IBM and Redhat don't already provide commercial desktop support?

Me thinketh that the word needs to get out better.

------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again.

I'm not sure slashdot will answer, its kind of comprimising to do so. I'm much smaller potatoes then they are but I did have an interesting correspondance recently with a site that could give some insite.

Before I did an article on the coolest DIY 29psi Mustang Turbo I've ever seen, I asked Michael (the owner of the car and the site about it) if he would mind me linking to him. He liked the idea, and even appreciated the attention.

But even though I only sent about 200 hits his way (total) it was enough (with the linking on a popular mailing list) to finish off what bandwidth he had left on his free monthly contract with his host. I asked him if he would mind me paying for an upgrade in his service to get around the bandwidth cap, and he actually said no, and he also declined my offer to link directly to a cached copy of his website.

I wonder more now, if we could take a poll of people who have been slashdotted and find out how many thought it was cool, or uncool when it took down their servers. I know there have been real studies of the slashdot effect, now that I'm insterested I'll have to go hunt those down to see if such a poll was administered.

-------------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again.

From my understanding of the Debian policy on patents this is to protect the Debian project from legal liablity

Yeah thats one way to read the sentance "with Debian's patent intollerant behaviour" but not the way I meant it. In this sence patent just means a set way of doing things, as in way of doing things is stuck in intollerant mode.

This was simply a case of Alan not choosing to deal with certain people anymore.

It was a great maneuver, I liked it. I laughed, I cried, I bought the extended DVD. But it shows that kernel developers can give people the baBOOTski just as fast. I see nothing wrong with it myself, but let me be specific, I do see a problem with the previous posters inference that it does not happen in linux or any other GPL development.

Its not that you don't understand this, becuase you said... " isn't an example of GNU vs. BSD licenses but different approaches to structuring an open source development project."

Its just that I can't let you pin my comments as part of a BSD vs GPL flamewar. They simply are not.

-------------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again.

I can't say directly, but indirectly the people that come to my site *ahem*OnRoad a great place for Automotive Engineering discussion *ahem* from slashdot shows that only 20% of them use IE. Opera is only slightly less (15%), with links/linx getting 5%, Netscape getting 20% and Mozilla getting 30%, Pheonix and Galeon get 10%.

From other sites (like ezboards and Yahoo mailing lists) I get a high percentage of IE and AOL users (50%, 35% respectively) and most of the rest are netscape at 10%.

-----------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again.

I can't say directly, but indirectly the people that come to my site *ahem*OnRoad a great place for Automotive Engineering discussion *ahem* from slashdot shows that only 20% of them use IE. Opera is only slightly less (15%), with links/linx getting 5%, Netscape getting 20% and Mozilla getting 30%, Pheonix and Galeon get 10%.

From other sites (like ezboards and Yahoo mailing lists) I get a high percentage of IE and AOL users (50%, 35% respectively) and most of the rest are netscape at 10%.

-----------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again.

this general quietness about freedom and the GPL and RMS bashing seemed to be at an acceptable high point the good lads at FreeBSD go and remind us all again what open and freedom is all about.

So, while one person is kicked out of the community for narrow minded and adolescent behavior, you present the Linux community as an example for being able to tolerate RMS?

Fair enough. However, with Debian's patent intollerant behaviour, Alan Cox's famous "Thank you for joining this discussion on (whatever change to the kernel was being advocated) I've now put you all on my kill list," I don't think you have much hole GNU/ground to stand on to make a claim that they haven't shown people the door on occasion.

Besides, since this is all about software freedom, at least this person has the option to do whatever he wants with the code still. He just can't call it "FreeBSD" which is a fair thing. Just ask Theo.

--------------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again.