The theory appears to go that the control motors need far less torque than the input motor.
Less torque, more speed. It's the basic principle behind all gearing systems. That means you can use a really small but really fast (or highly geared up for speed) motor to drive a slower, more powerful engine. The idea is if your drive shaft is spinning at 1,000 rpm, a control shaft spinning at 10,000 rpm can easily control that power with a motor 1/10th the size. There are other transmissions that do the exact same thing, but they use cones and belts (which are not fundamentally different from gears, except that the gear ratio is naturally variable). The Prius effectively does this with its gasoline engine and its much smaller electric motor. John Dear tractors use a geared hydrostatic motor for their CVT.
It's how gears work, most of what you guys are arguing about are the fundamentals of gears and CVTs, which are proven to work. The clever thing here is he managed to come up with a variable control that uses 100% toothed gears and a small motor, without the need for friction-based variable gear systems or hydraulic systems.
The demo shows that it works, though the gearing is such that the motors need to be similar in size. The crux here is whether or not he can get the proper gearing to keep the control motor small and make the drive motor large, while still in a small enough package to put it in a vehicle. It would really suck if this were an awesome new infinitely variable transmission that is only practical when installed in large tractors, locomotives, or cruise ships - which is the current problem with non-friction based CVTs (friction based are small enough for vehicles, but can't handle much horsepower without causing lots of wear, which is why they aren't popular).
I'm assuming you mean km/h, since the 2010 Prius's 0-60mph time is 9.8 seconds according to Toyota. That's about a second and a half slower than the average car, which is noticeably sluggish. It is apparently much better at passing than the older models, though, and gives a fairly consistant 50 mpg according to the reviews I've read.
You're completely ignoring how gear ratios work - a low power, high speed motor can take away the rotational speed of a low speed high power motor pretty easily. Since any resistance caused by the power being applied to the ground will be distributed to the control motor and the power motor at the same ratio as their gearing, if the control motor can match the output speed of the drive motor then it can automatically handle any resistance generated when that power is applied.
In other words, if the control motor is able to operate at 1/100th the power of the drive motor because of the gearing, when resistance is applied to the output shaft the control motor only receives 1/100th of the force because of that same gearing. The force is distributed according to the gear ratios, it is not distributed equally. The control motor will certainly be capable of handling it.
If this were not true, you could never combine two engines of different power, which the Toyota Prius (along with hundreds of other examples) prove you can.
Leverage, leverage, leverage, that's the key. Can you get enough leverage while still keeping the gears a reasonable size to fit in a car and the control motor reasonably small to make the system efficient? That's the question, for which we don't know the answer yet. Keeping the gears a reasonable size is much easier when the two engines are of similar size, which is what he has in his demo.
Can he still control it with the small DC permag gearmotor he appears to be using?
Absolutely, provided the gear ratios he uses provide enough leverage for the little DC motor and can do so in a reasonably sized package.
That's the practical problem here, and the question that remains to be answered.
All this "equal and opposite reaction" nonsense (it's not nonsense, just the yelling about it is nonsense) is ignoring leverage. Leverage is all you need, and if he can provide enough it will work. It already works with differently sized motors, so it's quite apparent that the principle works just fine. The question is only: can it be made practical?
Torque is power in this case - it's the rotational force applied to the shaft. We aren't talking horsepower when we talk about spinning gears and shafts, we are talking rotational force.
There are some semantics in the automotive world that make things a little confusing. The horsepower of an engine is basically the amount of force generated either at the pistons or where the rubber meets the road. It starts as chemical energy, which is converted to kinetic energy immediately, which is then converted to torque almost immediately (as soon as the piston turns the shaft), and isn't converted back to kinetic energy until the rubber hits the pavement. In between it's all torque, and in a transmission any power or force you talk about is torsional.
So, when your monster torque motor is spinning the input shaft, surely it is pushing against the counterspinning shafts with exactly that amount of power?
You're ignoring leverage, which is what gears are all about. You can compensate for power (torque) with a bigger ratio and more speed. In other words, a 1hp engine running at 10,000rpm can match the output of a 10hp engine running at 1,000rpm if the gear ratio is correct. It's basically a round version of a really big stick - by traveling a longer distance, a light object can move a heavy object with the proper leverage. Same thing with gears - by spinning faster, a small power motor can match a larger power motor.
That's basically what he has done here, except his transmission is designed to apply any power not absorbed by the small motor to the output shaft. In the demo he is using two differently sized but similar motors. In practice you would want a control motor that is significantly smaller than the drive motor, which means you need a very high gear ratio between the control motor and the input motor. It very well may be that either the gear size or the control motor are too big to be practical. For example, if he can only get the control motor down to 1/10th the size of the drive motor and have a gear box that can fit under a car, then a 200hp engine will require a 20hp control motor, which kind of defeats the purpose of a transmission. If he can get it down to 1/100th the size of the drive motor (a 2hp control motor) and still use gears that are a reasonable size for a transmission, then you're in business. That's the part that remains to be seen, and now that he has some funding he has hired a team of trained engineers to see if it can be done.
There can be issues of loads when parked, though, when another car bumps yours.
I don't think so, if the engine input and control are matched, then the engine is effectively not connected output, the engine is "slipped" out of the power loop by the control gear just like a clutch would do, so the car would act like any other car that is out of gear - it will roll if an outside force acts on it.
The other issue is how do you tow such a car when the engine fails or you want to tow it behind a motor home?
If I'm correct in how this operates, then the answer is the opposite but with the same result - if the input shaft is not turning, control shaft does not need to turn, effectively putting the car in neutral.
Issues involved in getting it into a small, produceable and cost effective prototype will tax the engineers. If they can do it, there will be applications in many different fields.
That's where I think the real problem is. I can easily understand how you'd get enough leverage to make a small electric motor equal to a large engine, what I can't see is how to do that in a reasonable size.
I'm no mechanical engineer, but I think I understand the basic idea behind it. I just wonder if they'll be able to get a big enough difference between the two engines to make it useful. It takes quite a ratio to get a 200hp engine and a 1/2hp engine to agree.
So in the same way an outside reactive torque places a load on the main engine, it will also place a load on the control motor.
You can deal with the torque just fine with enough leverage (i.e. the proper gear ratios). If the small motor gets enough leverage, the torque is not a problem. The question is whether or not you can generate that much leverage for a small enough motor in a small enough overall package to make it practical for an automobile, the only area where CVT systems are usually impractical (for either size, speed, or power restrictions).
If this guy has solved that problem, then he has something amazing.
How do you start this up from a dead stop? Somehow you have to exactly match the shaft rotation speeds to keep it in neutral before you start moving forward, otherwise there will be a lurch.
Uh, you do realize that a gasoline engine can be throttled, right? That's kinda how you use them. In fact, if you're good with a manual, you can change gears without the clutch by rev-matching. A buddy of mine managed to drive 300 miles with a blown clutch this way, without overly harming the transmission. It's not easy, and is not recommended because you can easily make a mistake that will destroy your transmission, but if human reflexes and estimation can manage it reasonably well, a computer could be programmed to do it perfectly. With a decent electronic control, it would simply rev-match from start-up. It's not really a difficult thing, the rev changes in a particular engine are very predictable as it moves toward your desired revolution. With given engine, a given air-fuel mixture, and a given throttle setting, you can tell exactly what the revolutions will be. Since the engine is known, and the air-fuel mix and throttle are both controlled by the same computer that needs match the revolutions, solving this particular problem is a cinch.
He responded that people are weirded out by engines sitting at a single rev point (the optimal point) and find it difficult to gauge their speed without the changing rev noises from the engine.
And when Google's search engine first came out, people kept waiting for it to "finish loading" because it was so clean it loaded instantly, and everyone was used to a jumbled mess that took forever to load. People got used to it, and are now disgusted by a cluttered search engine page.
Same thing here, if a high rev point were the norm, people would be weirded out by continuously changing rev noises.
We also have this handy-dandy tool called a "speedometer" built into every car. If more people used them, rather than just guessing their speed based on rev noises, we'd probably be a lot safer.
People are only uncomfortable with CVT's because they are not used to them. If they were more effective, they'd be more common and more people would be just fine with using one.
Still, for an 80 mile trip, that's 140mpg, pretty damn good. Of course it gets worse the longer you go, but electricity is generally much cheaper than gas, so if you can stop somewhere and pay someone to charge for a while while you eat lunch or something, you could be saving a ton of cash.
At 160 miles with no charging you're at 92.5 mpg, still great but your efficiency is still tanking fast. It starts to level off at this point though, and will slowly approach 50mpg (but never actually hit it) as you keep going (assuming their efficiency estimates for the gas engine are correct).
For a 350 mile trip you are looking at about 71mpg, or about $23 where I live (the gas portion is more expensive than the electric portion per gallon of gas worth of energy). Not bad at all.
If a 150 mpg car could be made affordably, it would still be worthwhile to some people to get one.
Have you seen what a 150mpg car looks like? They are about three feet high and only fit one person (so long as they weigh less than 150 pounds or so).
They are also extremely expensive. At today's prices, saving 220 gallons saves you $750 or so (assuming $3.40 gas, which is what it is in my area) per year. I'm no economist, but $750 a year doesn't cover the extra $10k-20k plus absolute lack of storage space and any other reasonable features (like the ability to carry more than one person, let alone some luggage).
In fact, the disadvantages are so great, even switching from a pickup that gets 12mpg is a hard sell to a 150mpg car, and that saves you $6,000+ a year. A much easier sell is to the 40mpg car, which saves you about $5,400 a year but can still be reasonably practical. Drop it a little further, to 30mpg, and you are saving about $5,000 a year in gas and have a standard sedan, which is a very reasonable switch from a pickup truck (provided you don't do much actually hauling - most people with pickups don't).
That was the GP's point - the sweet-spot is about 30mpg, where you get huge savings in gas but still have cars reasonable prices and can do the things you expect to be able to do with your car, like carry your luggage to the airport. Tough to do that in a prius, impossible to do it in a 150mpg car, but no problem in a mid-sized modern sedan (which generally gets about 30mpg these days).
Certainly. You could also learn reading on your own, but it sure as hell helps to have someone to tell you just how you'd do it.
That's one of the problems with the modern system of teaching reading in public schools today, and is the reason we have a 20% functional illiteracy rate in America. All those "see spot run" books are sabotaging kids' ability to read, at the very least setting them back years. At worst they never learn to really read at all. All new education must come from an educator, someone who is functionally illiterate cannot learn anything from books.
See, the idea is that sight reading - looking at a word as a whole and associating it with its meaning instead of breaking it down into letters first - will get kids reading fast, and they'll "figure out" the alphabet from reading the words. A lot of kids eventually get it, a lot only get it after supplementing it with heavy phonetic training. Any kids who don't get it on their own and don't get the supplemental phonetics are functionally illiterate. If you don't understand the phonetic alphabet, it is impossible to learn brand new words without someone first explaining it to you in a context you can understand. It basically dumps people back to the days of hieroglyphics.
The whole reason the alphabet was such an amazing advancement was because once you knew the letters you could read anything. But today we are working backwards like it's some sort of new thing. It's not new, it's thousands of years old, and it sucks. You might as well replace all the words with pictures, they are doing you that much good. Sight reading comes naturally as you get familiar with words. With the phonetic alphabet to fall back on, picking up new words is easy. That is absolutely impossible if you start out with sight reading and never learn the phonetic alphabet.
It's far better to teach someone how to educate themselves, than it is to simply show them everything and force them to rely upon you (or some other educator) for their next new skill.
College is supposed to teach you how to learn on your own, how to get information and how to digest it.
Everything on top of that is flavor.
200 years ago, elementary/high school level schooling accomplished that. Just look at how accomplished George Washington was, with a little more than an elementary level education. He did feel his education was a little lacking, for unlike his brothers he did not go off to school in England. However, he was a trained surveyor at age 16 (a job which today pays about the same as an engineer), a successful general, an excellent arbiter, and eventually first president of the country. All on a substandard education for the time which, compared to what we learn today in school, would have put him half way through college.
It is very unlikely that each person earning 100 million in today's economy are actually producing that much more value than the next best candidate (or even, the minimally acceptable alternative candidate, if you want to go that far).
You realize the next best candidate is already pulling down close to 100 million, right? And the guy next down the line? Just a little bit less. The reason that guy makes 100 million dollars a year and you don't is because he has skills that you will never possess, and they just happen to be a hell of a lot more important than you think they are.
The fact is, there are very, very few people with the skills and experience necessary to run a multi-billion dollar company. If that were not the case they wouldn't have to pay these guys so much.
Why the hell do you think a structural engineer can demand $100k a year while a chemist tops out at $55,000? It isn't because engineers are twice as smart as chemists, far from it. It's because there is a greater disparity between the number of people with the skills and training to be a structural engineer and the number of structural engineers needed than there is for chemists and the number of chemists needed. In other words, it's easier to find a chemist, so you don't have to pay them as much.
Top executives pull down millions of dollars because their skills are in very high demand, but there are very few people (relative to the demand) who can do the work. Even the people you think suck are a hell of a lot better at it than you ever would be. Frankly, that you think 100 million dollars is too much for someone to make doesn't matter in the slightest. You don't get a vote, the people who need the executive get to vote. Your opinion on the matter is meaningless.
Average pay range for a garbage collector: 26,000-50,000 per year.
Average pay range for a chemist: 39,000-55,000 per year.
There is a big difference in entry pay, but at the top end they make about the same.
Who's being disrespected here, the garbage collector or the chemist? In the four years that chemist got his degree, the garbage collector was working up close to his pay level, so who comes out ahead?
College can improve your prospects, especially in high-demand fields like engineering and the like. But it is not a given that it will improve your prospects, and you are going to come out of it with a lot of debt if your parents can't afford to pay your way.
Yeah that "Advanced Calculus" you "mastered" was more like college level pre-calc. I went to a private school that regularly outperformed the public schools in pretty much every area, and I took the advanced classes as well, and college calculus kicked my ass.
You are an ignorant fool if you think getting an A in AP Calculus is the same as "mastering Advanced Calculus". Your AP physics class may be a rough equivalent of an introductory college physics class, but you sure as hell didn't "master physics". Nobody in the history of the world has ever "mastered physics", to say so is to be completely ignorant of physics.
The fact that you consider programming to be more difficult than calculus is proof that you don't know calculus. Programming is easy, it's just basic logic. This then that else this or if that enough times to produce a program. That's all computers are. There are all of six basic commands, repeated enough to create something functional. Becoming proficient is difficult, and requires a certain type of creativity and anal attention to detail, but the basics are incredibly simple. Calculus, on the other hand, is hard. It's not just logical repetition. There is an extremely strong foundation required to understand the concepts of calculus, let alone put them into practice.
Apparently your high school experience was filled with delusions of grandeur, must have been all those medals you got just for participating.
(One guy I know who got a biology degree or such at a prestigious private university is now working at Starbucks; at least he gets to meet people, I suppose.)
That's cool, all the biology majors I know drive trucks for a living. It's good to know a biology degree gives you options!;)
With HTML, whether the shiniest of web 2.0 or the seriously old-school stuff, there is clear separation between the client(where "standards" such as they are, matter) and the server, which can do absolutely whatever it likes, so long as it responds correctly to a few HTTP messages.
We're talking about a hell of a lot more than HTML. HTML is actually the problem, it doesn't do anything we really need it to, so in the browser wars JavaScript was developed. Well, that still doesn't do anything close to what we need, so developers turned to Java, Flash, Ruby, jQuery, ASP, MooTools, YUI, etcetera, etcetera.
HTML is easy. It's also next to useless. All you can do with it is throw up some images and text in a neat layout. Seriously, try using just HTML to build a website - it sucks. Even then, HTML4 isn't even 100% implemented by the major browsers. To do anything else you need a workaround, a hack. So we have all these frameworks for supporting those hacks, and trying to stay current means your website is a jumble of mixed frameworks that are barely holding together. The other option is to completely re-write your web app every time a new technology comes out that you want to use. Not the most efficient way to run a website.
You can do whatever you want to deliver HTML, CSS, and javascript, and interpret responses from your clients.
But certain implementations work better than others, and there is no way to tell until you actually get it all built up and realize that it sucks. Different browsers are going to do your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript differently, and you have to account for that. There are no best practices to follow, because best practices for Ruby are different from those for ASP, etc.
You make it sound like you can do everything you want in a single framework, but that's the point: you can't. So you have to use multiple frameworks, and it becomes a house of cards, ready to topple at the slightest tremble.
That's what the OP was talking about. It seems to be true of all large, open, consortium based standards. They cannot create the consistency that a single vendor can. I don't think it outweighs the value of keeping the standards open, and I don't think the OP is saying that either. He's just saying it isn't all downsides to closed standards. There are some real positives there.
"A ways to go" is an idiom, like "nest egg" or "tongue in cheek".
You have to take the phrase in its entirety, it is not singular or plural, and it means (with some flexibility) "there is a lot left to be done".
It's similar to "a long ways off", and the two are often interchangeable. Both suffer the problem of horrendous grammar that you pointed out, but that's English for you.
In other words, there are a lot of phrases in English where you just toss all the rules right out the window (another idiom there!), because that is just the way it is said.
HTML is inadequate as a software platform - it's a markup language, not a proper development language.
It is laden with hacks and "extensions" by individual browsers that are not officially supported and therefore not found in other browsers. Maintaining backwards compatibility creates a very difficult environment to develop web applications in.
The W3C lacks the authority to reliably set standards and best-practices for the industry that a closed-source vendor would have.
Pretty much a re-statement of the OP, and you make the case for the parent's post even while saying he's wrong. Interesting.
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The theory appears to go that the control motors need far less torque than the input motor.
Less torque, more speed. It's the basic principle behind all gearing systems. That means you can use a really small but really fast (or highly geared up for speed) motor to drive a slower, more powerful engine. The idea is if your drive shaft is spinning at 1,000 rpm, a control shaft spinning at 10,000 rpm can easily control that power with a motor 1/10th the size. There are other transmissions that do the exact same thing, but they use cones and belts (which are not fundamentally different from gears, except that the gear ratio is naturally variable). The Prius effectively does this with its gasoline engine and its much smaller electric motor. John Dear tractors use a geared hydrostatic motor for their CVT.
It's how gears work, most of what you guys are arguing about are the fundamentals of gears and CVTs, which are proven to work. The clever thing here is he managed to come up with a variable control that uses 100% toothed gears and a small motor, without the need for friction-based variable gear systems or hydraulic systems.
The demo shows that it works, though the gearing is such that the motors need to be similar in size. The crux here is whether or not he can get the proper gearing to keep the control motor small and make the drive motor large, while still in a small enough package to put it in a vehicle. It would really suck if this were an awesome new infinitely variable transmission that is only practical when installed in large tractors, locomotives, or cruise ships - which is the current problem with non-friction based CVTs (friction based are small enough for vehicles, but can't handle much horsepower without causing lots of wear, which is why they aren't popular).
It says you can go from 0 to 100 in 10 secs
I'm assuming you mean km/h, since the 2010 Prius's 0-60mph time is 9.8 seconds according to Toyota. That's about a second and a half slower than the average car, which is noticeably sluggish. It is apparently much better at passing than the older models, though, and gives a fairly consistant 50 mpg according to the reviews I've read.
You're completely ignoring how gear ratios work - a low power, high speed motor can take away the rotational speed of a low speed high power motor pretty easily. Since any resistance caused by the power being applied to the ground will be distributed to the control motor and the power motor at the same ratio as their gearing, if the control motor can match the output speed of the drive motor then it can automatically handle any resistance generated when that power is applied.
In other words, if the control motor is able to operate at 1/100th the power of the drive motor because of the gearing, when resistance is applied to the output shaft the control motor only receives 1/100th of the force because of that same gearing. The force is distributed according to the gear ratios, it is not distributed equally. The control motor will certainly be capable of handling it.
If this were not true, you could never combine two engines of different power, which the Toyota Prius (along with hundreds of other examples) prove you can.
Leverage, leverage, leverage, that's the key. Can you get enough leverage while still keeping the gears a reasonable size to fit in a car and the control motor reasonably small to make the system efficient? That's the question, for which we don't know the answer yet. Keeping the gears a reasonable size is much easier when the two engines are of similar size, which is what he has in his demo.
Can he still control it with the small DC permag gearmotor he appears to be using?
Absolutely, provided the gear ratios he uses provide enough leverage for the little DC motor and can do so in a reasonably sized package.
That's the practical problem here, and the question that remains to be answered.
All this "equal and opposite reaction" nonsense (it's not nonsense, just the yelling about it is nonsense) is ignoring leverage. Leverage is all you need, and if he can provide enough it will work. It already works with differently sized motors, so it's quite apparent that the principle works just fine. The question is only: can it be made practical?
Torque is power in this case - it's the rotational force applied to the shaft. We aren't talking horsepower when we talk about spinning gears and shafts, we are talking rotational force.
There are some semantics in the automotive world that make things a little confusing. The horsepower of an engine is basically the amount of force generated either at the pistons or where the rubber meets the road. It starts as chemical energy, which is converted to kinetic energy immediately, which is then converted to torque almost immediately (as soon as the piston turns the shaft), and isn't converted back to kinetic energy until the rubber hits the pavement. In between it's all torque, and in a transmission any power or force you talk about is torsional.
So, when your monster torque motor is spinning the input shaft, surely it is pushing against the counterspinning shafts with exactly that amount of power?
You're ignoring leverage, which is what gears are all about. You can compensate for power (torque) with a bigger ratio and more speed. In other words, a 1hp engine running at 10,000rpm can match the output of a 10hp engine running at 1,000rpm if the gear ratio is correct. It's basically a round version of a really big stick - by traveling a longer distance, a light object can move a heavy object with the proper leverage. Same thing with gears - by spinning faster, a small power motor can match a larger power motor.
That's basically what he has done here, except his transmission is designed to apply any power not absorbed by the small motor to the output shaft. In the demo he is using two differently sized but similar motors. In practice you would want a control motor that is significantly smaller than the drive motor, which means you need a very high gear ratio between the control motor and the input motor. It very well may be that either the gear size or the control motor are too big to be practical. For example, if he can only get the control motor down to 1/10th the size of the drive motor and have a gear box that can fit under a car, then a 200hp engine will require a 20hp control motor, which kind of defeats the purpose of a transmission. If he can get it down to 1/100th the size of the drive motor (a 2hp control motor) and still use gears that are a reasonable size for a transmission, then you're in business. That's the part that remains to be seen, and now that he has some funding he has hired a team of trained engineers to see if it can be done.
If what this guy has is real, then:
There can be issues of loads when parked, though, when another car bumps yours.
I don't think so, if the engine input and control are matched, then the engine is effectively not connected output, the engine is "slipped" out of the power loop by the control gear just like a clutch would do, so the car would act like any other car that is out of gear - it will roll if an outside force acts on it.
The other issue is how do you tow such a car when the engine fails or you want to tow it behind a motor home?
If I'm correct in how this operates, then the answer is the opposite but with the same result - if the input shaft is not turning, control shaft does not need to turn, effectively putting the car in neutral.
Issues involved in getting it into a small, produceable and cost effective prototype will tax the engineers. If they can do it, there will be applications in many different fields.
That's where I think the real problem is. I can easily understand how you'd get enough leverage to make a small electric motor equal to a large engine, what I can't see is how to do that in a reasonable size.
I'm no mechanical engineer, but I think I understand the basic idea behind it. I just wonder if they'll be able to get a big enough difference between the two engines to make it useful. It takes quite a ratio to get a 200hp engine and a 1/2hp engine to agree.
So in the same way an outside reactive torque places a load on the main engine, it will also place a load on the control motor.
You can deal with the torque just fine with enough leverage (i.e. the proper gear ratios). If the small motor gets enough leverage, the torque is not a problem. The question is whether or not you can generate that much leverage for a small enough motor in a small enough overall package to make it practical for an automobile, the only area where CVT systems are usually impractical (for either size, speed, or power restrictions).
If this guy has solved that problem, then he has something amazing.
How do you start this up from a dead stop? Somehow you have to exactly match the shaft rotation speeds to keep it in neutral before you start moving forward, otherwise there will be a lurch.
Uh, you do realize that a gasoline engine can be throttled, right? That's kinda how you use them. In fact, if you're good with a manual, you can change gears without the clutch by rev-matching. A buddy of mine managed to drive 300 miles with a blown clutch this way, without overly harming the transmission. It's not easy, and is not recommended because you can easily make a mistake that will destroy your transmission, but if human reflexes and estimation can manage it reasonably well, a computer could be programmed to do it perfectly. With a decent electronic control, it would simply rev-match from start-up. It's not really a difficult thing, the rev changes in a particular engine are very predictable as it moves toward your desired revolution. With given engine, a given air-fuel mixture, and a given throttle setting, you can tell exactly what the revolutions will be. Since the engine is known, and the air-fuel mix and throttle are both controlled by the same computer that needs match the revolutions, solving this particular problem is a cinch.
He responded that people are weirded out by engines sitting at a single rev point (the optimal point) and find it difficult to gauge their speed without the changing rev noises from the engine.
And when Google's search engine first came out, people kept waiting for it to "finish loading" because it was so clean it loaded instantly, and everyone was used to a jumbled mess that took forever to load. People got used to it, and are now disgusted by a cluttered search engine page.
Same thing here, if a high rev point were the norm, people would be weirded out by continuously changing rev noises.
We also have this handy-dandy tool called a "speedometer" built into every car. If more people used them, rather than just guessing their speed based on rev noises, we'd probably be a lot safer.
People are only uncomfortable with CVT's because they are not used to them. If they were more effective, they'd be more common and more people would be just fine with using one.
Still, for an 80 mile trip, that's 140mpg, pretty damn good. Of course it gets worse the longer you go, but electricity is generally much cheaper than gas, so if you can stop somewhere and pay someone to charge for a while while you eat lunch or something, you could be saving a ton of cash.
At 160 miles with no charging you're at 92.5 mpg, still great but your efficiency is still tanking fast. It starts to level off at this point though, and will slowly approach 50mpg (but never actually hit it) as you keep going (assuming their efficiency estimates for the gas engine are correct).
For a 350 mile trip you are looking at about 71mpg, or about $23 where I live (the gas portion is more expensive than the electric portion per gallon of gas worth of energy). Not bad at all.
If a 150 mpg car could be made affordably, it would still be worthwhile to some people to get one.
Have you seen what a 150mpg car looks like? They are about three feet high and only fit one person (so long as they weigh less than 150 pounds or so).
They are also extremely expensive. At today's prices, saving 220 gallons saves you $750 or so (assuming $3.40 gas, which is what it is in my area) per year. I'm no economist, but $750 a year doesn't cover the extra $10k-20k plus absolute lack of storage space and any other reasonable features (like the ability to carry more than one person, let alone some luggage).
In fact, the disadvantages are so great, even switching from a pickup that gets 12mpg is a hard sell to a 150mpg car, and that saves you $6,000+ a year. A much easier sell is to the 40mpg car, which saves you about $5,400 a year but can still be reasonably practical. Drop it a little further, to 30mpg, and you are saving about $5,000 a year in gas and have a standard sedan, which is a very reasonable switch from a pickup truck (provided you don't do much actually hauling - most people with pickups don't).
That was the GP's point - the sweet-spot is about 30mpg, where you get huge savings in gas but still have cars reasonable prices and can do the things you expect to be able to do with your car, like carry your luggage to the airport. Tough to do that in a prius, impossible to do it in a 150mpg car, but no problem in a mid-sized modern sedan (which generally gets about 30mpg these days).
Without WalMart the average person's standard of living would be much lower, because they would not be able to afford nearly as much.
You can be all high and mighty, but all you're doing is pissing on poor people.
Certainly. You could also learn reading on your own, but it sure as hell helps to have someone to tell you just how you'd do it.
That's one of the problems with the modern system of teaching reading in public schools today, and is the reason we have a 20% functional illiteracy rate in America. All those "see spot run" books are sabotaging kids' ability to read, at the very least setting them back years. At worst they never learn to really read at all. All new education must come from an educator, someone who is functionally illiterate cannot learn anything from books.
See, the idea is that sight reading - looking at a word as a whole and associating it with its meaning instead of breaking it down into letters first - will get kids reading fast, and they'll "figure out" the alphabet from reading the words. A lot of kids eventually get it, a lot only get it after supplementing it with heavy phonetic training. Any kids who don't get it on their own and don't get the supplemental phonetics are functionally illiterate. If you don't understand the phonetic alphabet, it is impossible to learn brand new words without someone first explaining it to you in a context you can understand. It basically dumps people back to the days of hieroglyphics.
The whole reason the alphabet was such an amazing advancement was because once you knew the letters you could read anything. But today we are working backwards like it's some sort of new thing. It's not new, it's thousands of years old, and it sucks. You might as well replace all the words with pictures, they are doing you that much good. Sight reading comes naturally as you get familiar with words. With the phonetic alphabet to fall back on, picking up new words is easy. That is absolutely impossible if you start out with sight reading and never learn the phonetic alphabet.
It's far better to teach someone how to educate themselves, than it is to simply show them everything and force them to rely upon you (or some other educator) for their next new skill.
College is supposed to teach you how to learn on your own, how to get information and how to digest it.
Everything on top of that is flavor.
200 years ago, elementary/high school level schooling accomplished that. Just look at how accomplished George Washington was, with a little more than an elementary level education. He did feel his education was a little lacking, for unlike his brothers he did not go off to school in England. However, he was a trained surveyor at age 16 (a job which today pays about the same as an engineer), a successful general, an excellent arbiter, and eventually first president of the country. All on a substandard education for the time which, compared to what we learn today in school, would have put him half way through college.
Looks like we're making a serious improvement!
It is indeed in the interest of society to provide well-round educated to all those who can benefit intellectually.
How so?
Capitalists rarely become professors, sucking off the tit of the government.
They tend to, you know, make stuff.
It is very unlikely that each person earning 100 million in today's economy are actually producing that much more value than the next best candidate (or even, the minimally acceptable alternative candidate, if you want to go that far).
You realize the next best candidate is already pulling down close to 100 million, right? And the guy next down the line? Just a little bit less. The reason that guy makes 100 million dollars a year and you don't is because he has skills that you will never possess, and they just happen to be a hell of a lot more important than you think they are.
The fact is, there are very, very few people with the skills and experience necessary to run a multi-billion dollar company. If that were not the case they wouldn't have to pay these guys so much.
Why the hell do you think a structural engineer can demand $100k a year while a chemist tops out at $55,000? It isn't because engineers are twice as smart as chemists, far from it. It's because there is a greater disparity between the number of people with the skills and training to be a structural engineer and the number of structural engineers needed than there is for chemists and the number of chemists needed. In other words, it's easier to find a chemist, so you don't have to pay them as much.
Top executives pull down millions of dollars because their skills are in very high demand, but there are very few people (relative to the demand) who can do the work. Even the people you think suck are a hell of a lot better at it than you ever would be. Frankly, that you think 100 million dollars is too much for someone to make doesn't matter in the slightest. You don't get a vote, the people who need the executive get to vote. Your opinion on the matter is meaningless.
Average pay range for a garbage collector: 26,000-50,000 per year.
Average pay range for a chemist: 39,000-55,000 per year.
There is a big difference in entry pay, but at the top end they make about the same.
Who's being disrespected here, the garbage collector or the chemist? In the four years that chemist got his degree, the garbage collector was working up close to his pay level, so who comes out ahead?
College can improve your prospects, especially in high-demand fields like engineering and the like. But it is not a given that it will improve your prospects, and you are going to come out of it with a lot of debt if your parents can't afford to pay your way.
Yeah that "Advanced Calculus" you "mastered" was more like college level pre-calc. I went to a private school that regularly outperformed the public schools in pretty much every area, and I took the advanced classes as well, and college calculus kicked my ass.
You are an ignorant fool if you think getting an A in AP Calculus is the same as "mastering Advanced Calculus". Your AP physics class may be a rough equivalent of an introductory college physics class, but you sure as hell didn't "master physics". Nobody in the history of the world has ever "mastered physics", to say so is to be completely ignorant of physics.
The fact that you consider programming to be more difficult than calculus is proof that you don't know calculus. Programming is easy, it's just basic logic. This then that else this or if that enough times to produce a program. That's all computers are. There are all of six basic commands, repeated enough to create something functional. Becoming proficient is difficult, and requires a certain type of creativity and anal attention to detail, but the basics are incredibly simple. Calculus, on the other hand, is hard. It's not just logical repetition. There is an extremely strong foundation required to understand the concepts of calculus, let alone put them into practice.
Apparently your high school experience was filled with delusions of grandeur, must have been all those medals you got just for participating.
(One guy I know who got a biology degree or such at a prestigious private university is now working at Starbucks; at least he gets to meet people, I suppose.)
That's cool, all the biology majors I know drive trucks for a living. It's good to know a biology degree gives you options! ;)
With HTML, whether the shiniest of web 2.0 or the seriously old-school stuff, there is clear separation between the client(where "standards" such as they are, matter) and the server, which can do absolutely whatever it likes, so long as it responds correctly to a few HTTP messages.
We're talking about a hell of a lot more than HTML. HTML is actually the problem, it doesn't do anything we really need it to, so in the browser wars JavaScript was developed. Well, that still doesn't do anything close to what we need, so developers turned to Java, Flash, Ruby, jQuery, ASP, MooTools, YUI, etcetera, etcetera.
HTML is easy. It's also next to useless. All you can do with it is throw up some images and text in a neat layout. Seriously, try using just HTML to build a website - it sucks. Even then, HTML4 isn't even 100% implemented by the major browsers. To do anything else you need a workaround, a hack. So we have all these frameworks for supporting those hacks, and trying to stay current means your website is a jumble of mixed frameworks that are barely holding together. The other option is to completely re-write your web app every time a new technology comes out that you want to use. Not the most efficient way to run a website.
You can do whatever you want to deliver HTML, CSS, and javascript, and interpret responses from your clients.
But certain implementations work better than others, and there is no way to tell until you actually get it all built up and realize that it sucks. Different browsers are going to do your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript differently, and you have to account for that. There are no best practices to follow, because best practices for Ruby are different from those for ASP, etc.
You make it sound like you can do everything you want in a single framework, but that's the point: you can't. So you have to use multiple frameworks, and it becomes a house of cards, ready to topple at the slightest tremble.
That's what the OP was talking about. It seems to be true of all large, open, consortium based standards. They cannot create the consistency that a single vendor can. I don't think it outweighs the value of keeping the standards open, and I don't think the OP is saying that either. He's just saying it isn't all downsides to closed standards. There are some real positives there.
"A ways to go" is an idiom, like "nest egg" or "tongue in cheek".
You have to take the phrase in its entirety, it is not singular or plural, and it means (with some flexibility) "there is a lot left to be done".
It's similar to "a long ways off", and the two are often interchangeable. Both suffer the problem of horrendous grammar that you pointed out, but that's English for you.
In other words, there are a lot of phrases in English where you just toss all the rules right out the window (another idiom there!), because that is just the way it is said.
HTTP != HTML
Dumbass.
So let me see if I can sum this up:
HTML is inadequate as a software platform - it's a markup language, not a proper development language.
It is laden with hacks and "extensions" by individual browsers that are not officially supported and therefore not found in other browsers. Maintaining backwards compatibility creates a very difficult environment to develop web applications in.
The W3C lacks the authority to reliably set standards and best-practices for the industry that a closed-source vendor would have.
Pretty much a re-statement of the OP, and you make the case for the parent's post even while saying he's wrong. Interesting.