I wish I had mod points - your post is 90% on the money. Hybrids are more efficient because the engine is at an efficient speed and load (charging batteries or increasing kinetic energy), or it is turned off. You can get near-hybrid fuel economy by driving your regular car so that the engine is either in this zone or in neutral (engine on or for the more daring, engine off). Unfortunately for highway driving your only options are to drive slow to the point where you get reasonably low rpm as well as the lowered drag.
Another thing that could be done to improve fuel economy immensely is to have a proper overdrive gear - one that idles around say, 1500rpm at 100km/h. Instead, most small engines are left whirring at 2800+rpm at that speed because drivers like the feeling of power at that speed whether they use it or not, and that's what the car manufacturers give us.
actually, everyone who was in the market knew it was a bubble.
Every time one of these bubbles has been in the making, I hear 99% of people saying this is a "new era", or a "new economy". Internet, housing, debt, whatever. While I was not around at the time, people have sincerely believed that things are truly DIFFERENT this time! during every bubble throughout history if you care to read it. And then made up some cock and bull story about knowing it all along, all the signs being obvious etc. after the bubble bursts.
And the reason these bubbles keep forming is that the average person is a) herd following and b) of average intelligence. As a result of b), they ignore other examples in history and other countries that would serve as warnings. Even when they have a modicum of intelligence most people don't trust their own judgment. They would rather be a lemming heading over the cliff with all his compatriots than the one lemming who heads in the opposite direction and gets ridiculed.
Storing fat is a useful way of surviving famine or food shortages. Unfortunately the stored fat always makes the male less athletic, less able to fight, hunt, evade, etc. Storing extra fat on the gut/love handle area is probably the best compromise for athletic purposes - lowest center of gravity possible without adding excess weight to the legs (which have to change direction rapidly).
The worst places to store fat in large quantities are at the extremities such as fingers, toes, hands, feet, forearms, calves and the head, because of the reduction to athletic performance.
Ass, thighs and chest aren't as great as the mid-section but aren't terrible. These areas are where women usually store their fat because if they stored it on their gut men can't tell if they are are pregnant or not.
It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He isn't.
At least a few people on here seem to think that we are going to see incredible business strategy from a 78 year old (even if his name is Rupert Murdoch). We aren't.
So if we were really serious about making a dent in oil consumption and CO2, we would be pushing for more fuel-efficient pickup trucks, cargo vans and SUVs
There already is a more efficient form of SUV and pickup truck (cargo vans are less discretionary). It's called the car. There are assembly lines already constructed for them which will easily crank out the equivalent numbers of cars as is currently used for SUVs and pickups. If the government were to legislate the larger vehicles off the roads, the people who would otherwise buy such vehicles and put them into circulation in the used car market for the next 20-30 years would buy a car instead. People got along just fine with cars and station wagons in the 70s and 80s. Civilization will not cease to function if SUV/pickup drivers are forced to make do with cars.
Ever-more efficient small vehicles will take off (as they have in Japan) when the government lowers registration and other costs for vehicles above a certain efficiency (or below engine size or dimensions, as with the Kei car). Many people would benefit greatly from having one large family vehicle doing small distances per year and a very small and efficient commuting vehicle to do everything else. However, above a certain efficiency the costs like vehicle registration start to dominate.
Emacs is an amazing hammer, so it's more appealing to start treating things as nails where you can get away with it.
Vim is the hammer - it does one job really well. Emacs is more like a leatherman tool. Leatherman tool cultists have several approaches to making the leatherman function as a hammer. The first is to just place the leatherman over a nail and bash it with a rock. Problem solved! Other more advanced leatherman tool afficianados have started duct taping the leatherman to a hammer in attempting to make it more palatable to hammer users, expressing that this is the leatherman's "hammer mode". "You get all the power of the leatherman, and it "comes with" a hammer! Ha ha! See? Why are you running away from me? Come back!"
I also remember that game being very difficult. It would be interesting to play it now to see if it's as hard as I remember. I think dretching in tremulous has helped significantly for me to be able to think in 3d which would help, although automatically being normal to the surface in that game probably helps significantly.
We'll be waiting a long time I think. High prices will drive the SUVs off the road/enough people out of work to the point where politicians can afford to legislate the rest of them off the road. Then small cars and motorbikes become a lot safer. Existing 50cc honda supercub motorbikes can do 80km/h, which does the job. For 2.2l/100km, certainly less if driven with half a clue. The VW 1 litre car does 1l/100km. If the same population as drives cars/trucks now were driving those, the oil we have would last 10 times as long.
Stick a little briggs & stratton in a velomobile, aim to go 60km-70km/h, and you'd use a fraction of that even. Design some reasonable grade-separated freeways designed for this mode of transport and it would be more efficient yet, and capable of being primarily human powered. Get rid of the stops except near home and at the destination and we'll stop the number one use of gasoline from being the conversion of useful kinetic energy into heated brake pads.
Unfortunately well before that we'll have transitioned to EVs and the coal power plants will be burning overtime for the next hundred years because driving aerodynamic, light cars is not macho or unsafe, or some bullshit like that.
I'm guessing that's why they mention fiber optics in the summary, to pipe it in from a cold area (e.g. under the dash) and through the firewall.
Re:Kids and Real Science don't mix
on
The Geek Atlas
·
· Score: 1
I think it is actually destructive to suggest that creativity and inspiration are not important in science jobs, because the types of jobs that do not require these (in other words, that require a certain level of knowledge but are describable and repetitive), tend to be outsourced to contractors.
I don't think he suggested that creativity and inspiration are unimportant. They are. He just suggested that a dose of reality was good. I think he has a point. If you can find part of the reality tolerable, interesting or even fascinating, then it's worth considering as a career (or hobby). If not, why waste 4-5 years? Or 6-8 years? Why the bait and switch?
The further you get to the right of the bell curve, the more blank looks you get when you explain something. The average person doesn't have the intellectual toolkit to distinguish a brilliant idea from a crazy idea. The methods the average person has of distinguishing genius are generally proxy measures - wealth, references by authority figures, an invention that finds common use, art that gains widespread acceptance.
To find the truly great ideas, you have to conduct an exhaustive search - the low hanging fruit has been found already. You have to ask the stupid questions and you have to thoughtfully answer the rhetorical questions. No assumption can lie unchallenged. You have to risk laughter and ridicule. After you have found a few great ideas this way, you start to relish the process and soon enough you will have collected enough truly unconventional and good ideas that the average person assumes madness, or charitably puts it down to "eccentricity" if you have proven yourself in some way.
"Insulting" muslims and negroes seems to be verboten while insulting christians and white males is ok. 1984.
From what I can tell, it's the same everywhere in the so-called Western world. My interpretation of this is that it's verboten to insult everyone else bar heterosexual ethnic Europeans (especially Northern Europeans), and Christians. This will persist past the point where we are a minority in the countries where we are presently majority, as the persecution has nothing to do with minority/majority status.
There will almost certainly be long-term unintended consequences, no matter how much this state of affairs is perceived to benefit the other groups. The smallest worm will turn being trodden on.
In Soviet Russia... overlords... Natalie Portman... hot grits... like a ferrari... fixed that for you...
Most really good comedies withstand repeat viewings or even improve over time. Lots of stuff... I was going to reel it off but it's pretty much all by Zucker Abrahams Zucker, Mel Brooks, Mike Judge or Mike Meyers.
It takes some time thought, but believe me, it's worth it.
Oh god yes. There is nothing like the feeling of watching man-days and man-weeks worth of what would otherwise be very tedious and RSI inducing code being created (without error, no less) in the space of tens of seconds, those tens of seconds limited by CPU/memory/HDD with a cleverly constructed vim macro.
Yeah I know, I'm sure emacs can do the same thing, you just have to s/seconds/minutes.
Programming is 90% thinking/planning, and 10% typing. The idea that using a mouse makes you a worse programmer in any appreciable sense is about as stupid as the idea that the mouse you use matters.
GPP was talking about elite programmers. And I don't think he was talking about David Braben and Ian Bell.
Not to describe myself as such, but if you are capable of rapidly converting good ideas to good code in your head and the language/problem domain is verbose, your brain's potential output will be bandwidth limited by the hand/computer interface. Thus the hand/computer interface needs to be high bandwidth and low RSI. i.e. a keyboard.
This applies especially during the implementation phase (e.g. you have done the planning, now all that remains is converting the ideas to code). I find this with SQL, for example. The process starts with days (weeks) thinking about the problem, and then days banging out code. I have automated everything I can think of through vim (not to mention using views and various syntactic sugar in postgresql), and macros in vim are freaking amazing, but it's still many, many hours. If I had to use anything other than a keyboard and vim, I'd probably be still coding the last project or have given up. It's not just the bandwidth limitation, it's the losing of the train of thought through frustration.
Who knows. If all the programming I had to do was creating regexes, morse code would be plenty fast.
So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games?
1. Larger potential market: A lot of the population are under-endowed with imagination (hence to become immersed in something, they need realism). If you make games that even they can enjoy, you increase your potential market.
2. Barriers to entry: The higher the costs involved in producing a game (due to complexity), the less competitors you will have. You build yourself a nice little part of an oligopoly for yourself. After a while you widen the moat by lowering your costs (but the startup costs get higher), reuse code/art/story/experience/marketing/whatever to further advance the state of the art or lower costs, both of which are barriers to entry.
3. E-penis wavery: those who have to have the latest and greatest of everything (and flaunt it) will have to have your game. Counterpoint: If you make it too hard to run, you also decrease your potential market. (But how many games does the low end actually buy?)
being a techie for the foreseeable future -- always having to keep myself up-to-date on everything tech and re-inventing myself with each Web.x release to stay on top
Bingo. The ultimate goal should be a colony that is capable of growing without further input of matter or energy from earth. In the interim a base would be necessary to sort out the bugs and get proof of concept. There are probably many other things that can generate the know-how on earth for a fraction of the price.
I'd approach it from the other angle: Knowing the subterranean levels of intellectual honesty exhibited by SJ Gould, I'd stop parsing anything after "Stephen Jay Gould told".
I call BS. You are in your mom's basement with one eye watching the door. While you construct intricate combinations of self-joins. Until your fingers cramp up. Because you are too scared to even query another table let alone join with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had mod points - your post is 90% on the money. Hybrids are more efficient because the engine is at an efficient speed and load (charging batteries or increasing kinetic energy), or it is turned off. You can get near-hybrid fuel economy by driving your regular car so that the engine is either in this zone or in neutral (engine on or for the more daring, engine off). Unfortunately for highway driving your only options are to drive slow to the point where you get reasonably low rpm as well as the lowered drag.
Another thing that could be done to improve fuel economy immensely is to have a proper overdrive gear - one that idles around say, 1500rpm at 100km/h. Instead, most small engines are left whirring at 2800+rpm at that speed because drivers like the feeling of power at that speed whether they use it or not, and that's what the car manufacturers give us.
Every time one of these bubbles has been in the making, I hear 99% of people saying this is a "new era", or a "new economy". Internet, housing, debt, whatever. While I was not around at the time, people have sincerely believed that things are truly DIFFERENT this time! during every bubble throughout history if you care to read it. And then made up some cock and bull story about knowing it all along, all the signs being obvious etc. after the bubble bursts.
And the reason these bubbles keep forming is that the average person is a) herd following and b) of average intelligence. As a result of b), they ignore other examples in history and other countries that would serve as warnings. Even when they have a modicum of intelligence most people don't trust their own judgment. They would rather be a lemming heading over the cliff with all his compatriots than the one lemming who heads in the opposite direction and gets ridiculed.
Storing fat is a useful way of surviving famine or food shortages. Unfortunately the stored fat always makes the male less athletic, less able to fight, hunt, evade, etc. Storing extra fat on the gut/love handle area is probably the best compromise for athletic purposes - lowest center of gravity possible without adding excess weight to the legs (which have to change direction rapidly).
The worst places to store fat in large quantities are at the extremities such as fingers, toes, hands, feet, forearms, calves and the head, because of the reduction to athletic performance.
Ass, thighs and chest aren't as great as the mid-section but aren't terrible. These areas are where women usually store their fat because if they stored it on their gut men can't tell if they are are pregnant or not.
At least a few people on here seem to think that we are going to see incredible business strategy from a 78 year old (even if his name is Rupert Murdoch). We aren't.
There already is a more efficient form of SUV and pickup truck (cargo vans are less discretionary). It's called the car. There are assembly lines already constructed for them which will easily crank out the equivalent numbers of cars as is currently used for SUVs and pickups. If the government were to legislate the larger vehicles off the roads, the people who would otherwise buy such vehicles and put them into circulation in the used car market for the next 20-30 years would buy a car instead. People got along just fine with cars and station wagons in the 70s and 80s. Civilization will not cease to function if SUV/pickup drivers are forced to make do with cars.
Ever-more efficient small vehicles will take off (as they have in Japan) when the government lowers registration and other costs for vehicles above a certain efficiency (or below engine size or dimensions, as with the Kei car). Many people would benefit greatly from having one large family vehicle doing small distances per year and a very small and efficient commuting vehicle to do everything else. However, above a certain efficiency the costs like vehicle registration start to dominate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car
A fly on the wall at those meetings would have heard at least one person discuss the obvious synergies being leveraged.
Vim is the hammer - it does one job really well. Emacs is more like a leatherman tool. Leatherman tool cultists have several approaches to making the leatherman function as a hammer. The first is to just place the leatherman over a nail and bash it with a rock. Problem solved! Other more advanced leatherman tool afficianados have started duct taping the leatherman to a hammer in attempting to make it more palatable to hammer users, expressing that this is the leatherman's "hammer mode". "You get all the power of the leatherman, and it "comes with" a hammer! Ha ha! See? Why are you running away from me? Come back!"
They could call it... "Rapture".
6 degrees of freedom, 7 degrees of hurl.
I also remember that game being very difficult. It would be interesting to play it now to see if it's as hard as I remember. I think dretching in tremulous has helped significantly for me to be able to think in 3d which would help, although automatically being normal to the surface in that game probably helps significantly.
We'll be waiting a long time I think. High prices will drive the SUVs off the road/enough people out of work to the point where politicians can afford to legislate the rest of them off the road. Then small cars and motorbikes become a lot safer. Existing 50cc honda supercub motorbikes can do 80km/h, which does the job. For 2.2l/100km, certainly less if driven with half a clue. The VW 1 litre car does 1l/100km. If the same population as drives cars/trucks now were driving those, the oil we have would last 10 times as long.
Stick a little briggs & stratton in a velomobile, aim to go 60km-70km/h, and you'd use a fraction of that even. Design some reasonable grade-separated freeways designed for this mode of transport and it would be more efficient yet, and capable of being primarily human powered. Get rid of the stops except near home and at the destination and we'll stop the number one use of gasoline from being the conversion of useful kinetic energy into heated brake pads.
Unfortunately well before that we'll have transitioned to EVs and the coal power plants will be burning overtime for the next hundred years because driving aerodynamic, light cars is not macho or unsafe, or some bullshit like that.
I'm guessing that's why they mention fiber optics in the summary, to pipe it in from a cold area (e.g. under the dash) and through the firewall.
I don't think he suggested that creativity and inspiration are unimportant. They are. He just suggested that a dose of reality was good. I think he has a point. If you can find part of the reality tolerable, interesting or even fascinating, then it's worth considering as a career (or hobby). If not, why waste 4-5 years? Or 6-8 years? Why the bait and switch?
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
The further you get to the right of the bell curve, the more blank looks you get when you explain something. The average person doesn't have the intellectual toolkit to distinguish a brilliant idea from a crazy idea. The methods the average person has of distinguishing genius are generally proxy measures - wealth, references by authority figures, an invention that finds common use, art that gains widespread acceptance.
To find the truly great ideas, you have to conduct an exhaustive search - the low hanging fruit has been found already. You have to ask the stupid questions and you have to thoughtfully answer the rhetorical questions. No assumption can lie unchallenged. You have to risk laughter and ridicule. After you have found a few great ideas this way, you start to relish the process and soon enough you will have collected enough truly unconventional and good ideas that the average person assumes madness, or charitably puts it down to "eccentricity" if you have proven yourself in some way.
From what I can tell, it's the same everywhere in the so-called Western world. My interpretation of this is that it's verboten to insult everyone else bar heterosexual ethnic Europeans (especially Northern Europeans), and Christians. This will persist past the point where we are a minority in the countries where we are presently majority, as the persecution has nothing to do with minority/majority status.
There will almost certainly be long-term unintended consequences, no matter how much this state of affairs is perceived to benefit the other groups. The smallest worm will turn being trodden on.
In Soviet Russia... overlords... Natalie Portman... hot grits... like a ferrari... fixed that for you...
Most really good comedies withstand repeat viewings or even improve over time. Lots of stuff... I was going to reel it off but it's pretty much all by Zucker Abrahams Zucker, Mel Brooks, Mike Judge or Mike Meyers.
The counter-strike players would probably enjoy it once they got fit. And the WoW players would enjoy digging holes and filling them back in again.
Oh god yes. There is nothing like the feeling of watching man-days and man-weeks worth of what would otherwise be very tedious and RSI inducing code being created (without error, no less) in the space of tens of seconds, those tens of seconds limited by CPU/memory/HDD with a cleverly constructed vim macro.
Yeah I know, I'm sure emacs can do the same thing, you just have to s/seconds/minutes.
GPP was talking about elite programmers. And I don't think he was talking about David Braben and Ian Bell.
Not to describe myself as such, but if you are capable of rapidly converting good ideas to good code in your head and the language/problem domain is verbose, your brain's potential output will be bandwidth limited by the hand/computer interface. Thus the hand/computer interface needs to be high bandwidth and low RSI. i.e. a keyboard.
This applies especially during the implementation phase (e.g. you have done the planning, now all that remains is converting the ideas to code). I find this with SQL, for example. The process starts with days (weeks) thinking about the problem, and then days banging out code. I have automated everything I can think of through vim (not to mention using views and various syntactic sugar in postgresql), and macros in vim are freaking amazing, but it's still many, many hours. If I had to use anything other than a keyboard and vim, I'd probably be still coding the last project or have given up. It's not just the bandwidth limitation, it's the losing of the train of thought through frustration.
Who knows. If all the programming I had to do was creating regexes, morse code would be plenty fast.
1. Larger potential market: A lot of the population are under-endowed with imagination (hence to become immersed in something, they need realism). If you make games that even they can enjoy, you increase your potential market.
2. Barriers to entry: The higher the costs involved in producing a game (due to complexity), the less competitors you will have. You build yourself a nice little part of an oligopoly for yourself. After a while you widen the moat by lowering your costs (but the startup costs get higher), reuse code/art/story/experience/marketing/whatever to further advance the state of the art or lower costs, both of which are barriers to entry.
3. E-penis wavery: those who have to have the latest and greatest of everything (and flaunt it) will have to have your game. Counterpoint: If you make it too hard to run, you also decrease your potential market. (But how many games does the low end actually buy?)
...if it had smooth disc wheel covers and an attempt at wheel skirts.
COBOL
Bingo. The ultimate goal should be a colony that is capable of growing without further input of matter or energy from earth. In the interim a base would be necessary to sort out the bugs and get proof of concept. There are probably many other things that can generate the know-how on earth for a fraction of the price.
I'd approach it from the other angle: Knowing the subterranean levels of intellectual honesty exhibited by SJ Gould, I'd stop parsing anything after "Stephen Jay Gould told".
I call BS. You are in your mom's basement with one eye watching the door. While you construct intricate combinations of self-joins. Until your fingers cramp up. Because you are too scared to even query another table let alone join with it.