My point is that you will, eventually, brake your vehicle, unless you manage to time your drive such that you exactly coast to a stop in a parking space/your driveway. Moreover, I've been on very few (if any) drives such that I only stopped once on the whole trip, and even fewer (if any) where I never even had to slow down to take a curve.
Even in the worst-case situation, capturing energy back from those slowdowns will be better than dissipating it as heat - again, other things being equal. It is certainly possible that the inefficiency of dragging around a current-tech battery back and parallel power-to-the-wheels infrastructure pushes continual driving efficiency below that of a pure ICE vehicle. But that's an engineering problem, and probably solvable (or at least, mitigate-able). Losing energy to heating up your rotors is a physics problem, and intractable.
Obviously, you'll see the most apparent gains from stop-and-go driving, but conceptually speaking, wasting less energy as rotor heat and retaining it for kinetic energy is a more efficient system.
Concentration. It's easier to effectively deal with and mitigate the effects of a dead battery back every x years than it is to deal with constant pollution emission.
The real win of hybrids isn't the drivetrain, it's rengenerative braking. Storing kinetic energy rather than dissipating it as heat is an obvious efficiency win, since you're presumably going to stop moving at some point.
Really, the other efficiencies of hybrids are side effects of regenerative braking - once you've got an infrastructure in the car to store kinetic energy and subsequently deliver it to the wheels, you might as well use that infrastructure to improve the running efficiency as much as possible.
Now, it's possible that for current hybrids, the overhead incurred by including that infrastructure outweighs the gains of regenerative braking for some driving profiles, but there's no reason to think that will always be the case, since that's an engineering problem, not a physics one.
Other things equal, vehicles with regenerative braking will always be more fuel-efficient than vehicles without. The challenge is to make other things equal.
AbiWord. WYSIWYG word processor that ran in DOS 3, IIRC. I loved it.
But, unsurprisingly, you quickly get into "how close is too close" issues when you start discussing the UI. Is having a button for "save" patentable? Is having a button for "save" with a picture of a floppy on it patentable? Etc.
Your sarcasm, though heavy as the weight of worlds, rolls off my back like water off a duck. Lo, I swim atop a sea of sarcasm, and can almost touch the stars!
Perhaps more pertinently, see my other response in this thread.
Also, note that nowhere in the post you replied to did I say Windows is easier. I did point out a method for preventing those annoying recurring popups, which those who use Windows may or may not find useful.
I might point out that, to many users, typing anything at the command line is just as intimidating as scouring kb articles. As it turns out, properly adminstering a computer is a complex task. Windows manages to sweep most of that complexity under the rug of rebooting or hide it behind the drapes of "do everything" executables (with the unreliability and security problems those "solutions" entail). Linux chooses to not make those compromises.
To quote Neal Stephenson: "People want things to be easier. How much they want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates' wallet."
Someone should mod you insightful - and I say this as a long-time Windows user, both professionally and at home.
The only difference in difficulty between Windows and Linux is that Windows' failure modes* are generally tolerable for Aunt Tilly - in this case, she'll just restart the computer, regardless of whether it really needs it or not. To really get the system running correctly, even with the free help MS gets from all the vendors that support Windows, you need just as much skill as you do with a Linux install.
It's just that when Windows isn't running correctly, it's still running well enough for an awful lot of people (even if only because they don't know any better). Linux, in my experience**, either works correctly or not at all. This gives the perception that you need to know a lot more to make it work, when really all it's saying is that it doesn't fail as gracefully.
*I'm talking about your general Windows failures, like random reboots, system hangs from driver failures; obviously, spectacular failures (BSODs) are spectacular failures. Those failure modes are certainly more disastrous than Linux' spectacular failure modes - I've never heard of an error message in Linux proposing an OS reinstall as the solution.
**My last Linux experience, however, was from before the concept of Fedora existed, so perhaps this isn't true any more - which is what this article certainly implies.
A couple guys who want to do something they think is cool turned out to be faster at it than a couple corporations trying to do something to monetize what they perceive as something users want.
OTOH, FWD puts the mass of the engine over the drive wheels, improving traction so you break free less often. Possibly more importantly, when you do lose traction, accelerating will not turn a bad situation into a hopeless one, as it often does with RWD. As a corollary, this also gives you the option of accelerating out of a slide (depending on conditions, of course), which is something that's impossible with a fishtailing RWD.
All that being said, the advantages of FWD over RWD are, IMHO, more in the learning curve than in the actual performance on slick/icy/snowy roads. Once you know how to handle a RWD vehicle, FWD isn't as big an improvement as people think. What improvements there are come from the weight over the tires and the added option to accelerate out of a skid.
I'm in the process of doing something like this right now, in fact.
I haven't even been in IT for all that long - less than a decade - and I can't even say that I'm burned out on it. I'm the DBA for a 2000-strong accounting firm. If I wanted to stay with my company, there's a rich career development path available to me, ending in becoming a partner. My point is that my situation doesn't map directly to yours, insofar as I don't have a fundamental dissatisfaction with what I'm doing or where it's leading me.
But I do think I could be more satisfied with a career change, so I'm just now starting the process of going to school to get a degree in IP law (insert lawyer joke here). I'm hoping it will be the difference between doing something I like and am capable of and doing something I really care about and am notably good at.
For me, it's a matter of taking something that interests me and is, IMHO, in need of people with a strong tech background and moving from the sidelines into the game. I'd like to move from posting IP rants on/. to actually working to have an impact.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you've got the ability/opportunity to make a fundamental change like that, find something that matters to you and run with it. That may, in your case, be woodworking, CNC operating, writing, photography, making travel documentaries or what-have-you. But if you're looking to move, take advantage of the fact that you aren't in a position where you've got to find a job, and pick something that you care about.
This, while news to me, doesn't actually surprise me at all.
I've encountered this effect personally - working on cars, the thought and problem-solving processes I go through when lying on the driveway under the car are notably different than those when I shimmy out and stand up next to it. Case in point: the starter/solenoid assembly on a 1977 Caprice is practically a topological brain teaser if you're trying to put it in or take it out without removing significant sections of the frame. There's literally one correct ordered set of rotations and translations that must be performed to do so.
Standing next to the car with the starter, I had an incredibly hard time solving this problem. Once under the car, however, it was a matter of a few minutes before I could "see" the solution. Before everyone points out the obvious, no, it wasn't a matter of being able to literally see the solution; given the available vantage point due to the right front tire, the jack, and a frame member, you really couldn't see any more of the problem than the first opening.
That's the most specific example I've got, but a similar thing has happened to me multiple times. At this point, I spend most of my planning time under the car with rust falling in my eyes, because I think better that way.
You're assuming the solar array more than covers the house's peak load. I think the point is that, in many instances, it doesn't. So homeowners are still paying for power from the grid during peak, and the requirement to go to TOU metering ups the rates such that they're still paying roughly the same out of pocket as they were before installing solar.
They're still buying less power, of course, but if that doesn't get reflected in the bill, then it's cold comfort at best.
Got it. And you're completely correct; I can't imagine it's even close to economically viable to try and power your home off a battery array. Not to mention the potential risk of storing dozens of car batteries in your basement - house fires leap to mind, and the possibility of a dead short.
Or, of course, user stupidity. Some years back, I saw someone with take a UPS and plug it into itself, with some fairly interesting results. To some extent, this can be engineered around - I'm pretty sure modern UPSes are designed to prevent spectacular failure in the event of plugging them into themselves, but I haven't been involved in DC design in a while - but we all know how the race between idiot-proofing and better idiots goes.
You'd be better off, I think, spinning up a flywheel array than trying to store energy in a room full of car batteries.
That was sort of my point. Along with the "redundant" line that is lying right next to the primary, and the fact that the DR site also hosted non-replicated production boxes.
I wasn't exactly holding this place up as a model of How To Do DR.
Anyway, that's it exactly. There's no incentive at all for the cable company to provide a manifold increase in speed, since people are already paying for what they've got now. The only way this means anything is if the local monopolies open up to competition, which isn't going to happen.
Or, to phrase it another way: "I'll believe it when I see it."
Add to this the fact that Lead/Acid batteries don't like being drained/charged regularly
Really? I thought that was exactly what they were good at - being able to deliver a large percentage of their charge at once, then take a recharge (which is why you use them in cars, since that's the profile of electrically starting an ICE).
My car battery cranks out 12 volts at 400 amps for a couple seconds at least twice a day, then recharges real well over fifteen minutes.
Now, if you're talking about draining them completely flat, you're 100% correct. A steady drain down to empty is one of the worst things you can do to a lead-acid battery. But that just means you have to plan your battery capacity such that the expected load doesn't empty them completely.
but the only way to get private connections between sites is leased lines and the last time I priced a private DS3 my boss got sticker shock
That's not the only way. I worked for a place a while back that ran fibre from their main office to their DR site.
Now, their DR site was fifty yards away, and some of the servers in there were production boxes...but they did string fibre on poles across the intervening freeway. They even had a redundant fibre line in case the first one was cut or damaged.
Now, their redundant fibre line was hanging from the very same hooks on the very same poles as their primary...
But they did run a private line without leasing anything.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that you will, eventually, brake your vehicle, unless you manage to time your drive such that you exactly coast to a stop in a parking space/your driveway. Moreover, I've been on very few (if any) drives such that I only stopped once on the whole trip, and even fewer (if any) where I never even had to slow down to take a curve.
Even in the worst-case situation, capturing energy back from those slowdowns will be better than dissipating it as heat - again, other things being equal. It is certainly possible that the inefficiency of dragging around a current-tech battery back and parallel power-to-the-wheels infrastructure pushes continual driving efficiency below that of a pure ICE vehicle. But that's an engineering problem, and probably solvable (or at least, mitigate-able). Losing energy to heating up your rotors is a physics problem, and intractable.
Obviously, you'll see the most apparent gains from stop-and-go driving, but conceptually speaking, wasting less energy as rotor heat and retaining it for kinetic energy is a more efficient system.
Your joke is somewhat undermined by the hybrid GM vehicles that are currently available:
2006 Chevrolet Silverado
2006 GMC Sierra
2007 Saturn Vue
And soon including the upcoming 2008 Chevrolet Tahoe and GMC Yukon.
Concentration. It's easier to effectively deal with and mitigate the effects of a dead battery back every x years than it is to deal with constant pollution emission.
The real win of hybrids isn't the drivetrain, it's rengenerative braking. Storing kinetic energy rather than dissipating it as heat is an obvious efficiency win, since you're presumably going to stop moving at some point.
Really, the other efficiencies of hybrids are side effects of regenerative braking - once you've got an infrastructure in the car to store kinetic energy and subsequently deliver it to the wheels, you might as well use that infrastructure to improve the running efficiency as much as possible.
Now, it's possible that for current hybrids, the overhead incurred by including that infrastructure outweighs the gains of regenerative braking for some driving profiles, but there's no reason to think that will always be the case, since that's an engineering problem, not a physics one.
Other things equal, vehicles with regenerative braking will always be more fuel-efficient than vehicles without. The challenge is to make other things equal.
AbiWord. WYSIWYG word processor that ran in DOS 3, IIRC. I loved it.
But, unsurprisingly, you quickly get into "how close is too close" issues when you start discussing the UI. Is having a button for "save" patentable? Is having a button for "save" with a picture of a floppy on it patentable? Etc.
Your sarcasm, though heavy as the weight of worlds, rolls off my back like water off a duck. Lo, I swim atop a sea of sarcasm, and can almost touch the stars!
Perhaps more pertinently, see my other response in this thread.
Also, note that nowhere in the post you replied to did I say Windows is easier. I did point out a method for preventing those annoying recurring popups, which those who use Windows may or may not find useful.
I might point out that, to many users, typing anything at the command line is just as intimidating as scouring kb articles. As it turns out, properly adminstering a computer is a complex task. Windows manages to sweep most of that complexity under the rug of rebooting or hide it behind the drapes of "do everything" executables (with the unreliability and security problems those "solutions" entail). Linux chooses to not make those compromises.
To quote Neal Stephenson: "People want things to be easier. How much they want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates' wallet."
Someone should mod you insightful - and I say this as a long-time Windows user, both professionally and at home.
The only difference in difficulty between Windows and Linux is that Windows' failure modes* are generally tolerable for Aunt Tilly - in this case, she'll just restart the computer, regardless of whether it really needs it or not. To really get the system running correctly, even with the free help MS gets from all the vendors that support Windows, you need just as much skill as you do with a Linux install.
It's just that when Windows isn't running correctly, it's still running well enough for an awful lot of people (even if only because they don't know any better). Linux, in my experience**, either works correctly or not at all. This gives the perception that you need to know a lot more to make it work, when really all it's saying is that it doesn't fail as gracefully.
*I'm talking about your general Windows failures, like random reboots, system hangs from driver failures; obviously, spectacular failures (BSODs) are spectacular failures. Those failure modes are certainly more disastrous than Linux' spectacular failure modes - I've never heard of an error message in Linux proposing an OS reinstall as the solution.
**My last Linux experience, however, was from before the concept of Fedora existed, so perhaps this isn't true any more - which is what this article certainly implies.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
A couple guys who want to do something they think is cool turned out to be faster at it than a couple corporations trying to do something to monetize what they perceive as something users want.
Let me put on my surprised face.
Turn the pop-up off. If you shut down affected services before installing the update, you don't need a restart anyway.
gpedit.msc -> Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update
Set "Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations" to disabled.
However, kids want the latest hot games, and that means Windows or Mac.
Oh, that's a good one. I haven't seen comedy like this in ages. Keep 'em coming!
because HP service rocks
Oh, man, that's even funnier than the last one! I swear, you're a comic genius.
unfortunately, the scientists did not offers any such tool for correcting grammar.
I'm trying to decide if this is ironic by intent or by accident.
I should start a poll.
OTOH, FWD puts the mass of the engine over the drive wheels, improving traction so you break free less often. Possibly more importantly, when you do lose traction, accelerating will not turn a bad situation into a hopeless one, as it often does with RWD. As a corollary, this also gives you the option of accelerating out of a slide (depending on conditions, of course), which is something that's impossible with a fishtailing RWD.
All that being said, the advantages of FWD over RWD are, IMHO, more in the learning curve than in the actual performance on slick/icy/snowy roads. Once you know how to handle a RWD vehicle, FWD isn't as big an improvement as people think. What improvements there are come from the weight over the tires and the added option to accelerate out of a skid.
Yep. It gives me the shivers, sometimes.
Have you ever seen the Hubble Deep Field image, though? I've been using that as my wallpaper for a while now; a jpeg named "the galaxies like dust".
It's amazing.
I also don't want to use "DRM" any more.
I suspect he and I disagree on ways and means, though.
Yes.
No.
I probably should have seen that one coming.
It absolutely could be. I don't mean to hold this up as any kind of evidence; there's a dearth of controls and a surfeit of variables, I know.
It just lines up well with what the study is concluding, and, for me, lends credence to those conclusions.
I'm in the process of doing something like this right now, in fact.
/. to actually working to have an impact.
I haven't even been in IT for all that long - less than a decade - and I can't even say that I'm burned out on it. I'm the DBA for a 2000-strong accounting firm. If I wanted to stay with my company, there's a rich career development path available to me, ending in becoming a partner. My point is that my situation doesn't map directly to yours, insofar as I don't have a fundamental dissatisfaction with what I'm doing or where it's leading me.
But I do think I could be more satisfied with a career change, so I'm just now starting the process of going to school to get a degree in IP law (insert lawyer joke here). I'm hoping it will be the difference between doing something I like and am capable of and doing something I really care about and am notably good at.
For me, it's a matter of taking something that interests me and is, IMHO, in need of people with a strong tech background and moving from the sidelines into the game. I'd like to move from posting IP rants on
I guess the moral of the story is, if you've got the ability/opportunity to make a fundamental change like that, find something that matters to you and run with it. That may, in your case, be woodworking, CNC operating, writing, photography, making travel documentaries or what-have-you. But if you're looking to move, take advantage of the fact that you aren't in a position where you've got to find a job, and pick something that you care about.
This, while news to me, doesn't actually surprise me at all.
I've encountered this effect personally - working on cars, the thought and problem-solving processes I go through when lying on the driveway under the car are notably different than those when I shimmy out and stand up next to it. Case in point: the starter/solenoid assembly on a 1977 Caprice is practically a topological brain teaser if you're trying to put it in or take it out without removing significant sections of the frame. There's literally one correct ordered set of rotations and translations that must be performed to do so.
Standing next to the car with the starter, I had an incredibly hard time solving this problem. Once under the car, however, it was a matter of a few minutes before I could "see" the solution. Before everyone points out the obvious, no, it wasn't a matter of being able to literally see the solution; given the available vantage point due to the right front tire, the jack, and a frame member, you really couldn't see any more of the problem than the first opening.
That's the most specific example I've got, but a similar thing has happened to me multiple times. At this point, I spend most of my planning time under the car with rust falling in my eyes, because I think better that way.
You're assuming the solar array more than covers the house's peak load. I think the point is that, in many instances, it doesn't. So homeowners are still paying for power from the grid during peak, and the requirement to go to TOU metering ups the rates such that they're still paying roughly the same out of pocket as they were before installing solar.
They're still buying less power, of course, but if that doesn't get reflected in the bill, then it's cold comfort at best.
Got it. And you're completely correct; I can't imagine it's even close to economically viable to try and power your home off a battery array. Not to mention the potential risk of storing dozens of car batteries in your basement - house fires leap to mind, and the possibility of a dead short.
Or, of course, user stupidity. Some years back, I saw someone with take a UPS and plug it into itself, with some fairly interesting results. To some extent, this can be engineered around - I'm pretty sure modern UPSes are designed to prevent spectacular failure in the event of plugging them into themselves, but I haven't been involved in DC design in a while - but we all know how the race between idiot-proofing and better idiots goes.
You'd be better off, I think, spinning up a flywheel array than trying to store energy in a room full of car batteries.
Er...yes.
That was sort of my point. Along with the "redundant" line that is lying right next to the primary, and the fact that the DR site also hosted non-replicated production boxes.
I wasn't exactly holding this place up as a model of How To Do DR.
Meh, I've got karma to burn.
Anyway, that's it exactly. There's no incentive at all for the cable company to provide a manifold increase in speed, since people are already paying for what they've got now. The only way this means anything is if the local monopolies open up to competition, which isn't going to happen.
Or, to phrase it another way: "I'll believe it when I see it."
Add to this the fact that Lead/Acid batteries don't like being drained/charged regularly
Really? I thought that was exactly what they were good at - being able to deliver a large percentage of their charge at once, then take a recharge (which is why you use them in cars, since that's the profile of electrically starting an ICE).
My car battery cranks out 12 volts at 400 amps for a couple seconds at least twice a day, then recharges real well over fifteen minutes.
Now, if you're talking about draining them completely flat, you're 100% correct. A steady drain down to empty is one of the worst things you can do to a lead-acid battery. But that just means you have to plan your battery capacity such that the expected load doesn't empty them completely.
but the only way to get private connections between sites is leased lines and the last time I priced a private DS3 my boss got sticker shock
That's not the only way. I worked for a place a while back that ran fibre from their main office to their DR site.
Now, their DR site was fifty yards away, and some of the servers in there were production boxes...but they did string fibre on poles across the intervening freeway. They even had a redundant fibre line in case the first one was cut or damaged.
Now, their redundant fibre line was hanging from the very same hooks on the very same poles as their primary...
But they did run a private line without leasing anything.