My dept. has rep from Hurst come by yearly to let us know what ways of killing us the auto companies have come up with next. Then we spend an evening tearing up cars. Not a bad night, it's normally pretty fun.
But the key is that we try to stay very aware of what's in the newest cars, and even sometimes a few of us will go a dealership to look at the new models, and take a look at the key things we need to keep an eye out for.
While the new technologies have made a greater chance of surviving the wreck, they've also increased the time that you're likely to be stuck in the car if we need to go cutting.
My favorite so far are the polycarbonate windows. They don't shatter in an accident, and they compress and store energy, waiting like a coiled spring. Hit them with a sledge hammer and they won't break. But start cutting into the roof, and they try to launch the roof off the car if they've been compressed and bent.
Also fun is the poor guy who rolls his bmw 745, has some minor dents/scratches in the roof, but can't get it out (doors won't unlock). However, we can't shatter out the windows, so we have to tear off the doors. Instead of just replacing the glass, the car is likely totaled by insurance.
So what size fire are you worried about not having enough water for with a single tender?
(I'm guessing your not in cali, since you call it a tanker. If we ask for a tanker, we get a fixed-wing aircraft carrying water...)
In our area, we're always having to be miserly with water, if we can't wrap a hydrant.
But to be flowing up around 1000gpm is one hell of a fire. Fully involved house, at a minimum. Do you have CAFS, or just plain water?
What's really nice with our tender is that it has automated water cannons on it, plus CAFS, and pump and roll. Big Cummins 5.9L diesel jsut to run the pump. Very usefull for putting out fires along the road-side. Just fire it up and drive along the edge of the road. Only takes 1 person.
The problem is that in an accident, the "safety devices" don't always disarm themselves. When we (fire dept) show up on a late-model wrecked car, we need to start figuring out how many airbags it has, where they might be, and what other non-deactivated surprises have been left on.
We have to assume everything is live, because of the fact that cars don't go crunch all nice and neatly (especially when they hit other things at wierd angles as they go sliding off the road) and the stuff *might* still be live.
You just fell asleep and hit a tree. If I can cut you out and send you home, good. But I'm not going to kill myself in trying. Take some risks, yes, but not be stupid.
Actually, roll-overs aren't all that violent, from my experience (volunteer fire dept). It's head on impacts that are the worst, or blowing a turn at high speed and hitting a tree sideways.
However, if the car's upside down, with people trapped inside, it's pretty trivial to block the car so it can't move, and then just pull the doors off. Takes a minute or so, with the right tools (big hydraulic spreaders).
And Mini firewall crossmembers... REALLY bright lights. Pretty impressive. Found that one out the hard way one night. Now for Mini fires (and probably the new Ford pickups), we (fire dept) call for the water tender (3500 gallons of water on wheels). It will put it out. Make quite a show, but put it out.
I'm a volunteer FF, and we get LOTS of training on how to properly cut up cars, especially the new ones that are more deadly to us trying to rescue you, than they are to you and your 60mph argument with a tree.
Insane numbers of airbags, compressed gas cylinders strategicly located in our best cutting points, airbags that don't always go off, and therefore might go off at any point in time while we're cutting the car apart.
And now they're adding several hundred volts to the mix.
Luckily we don't need to cut through the center of the floor boards very often (common wiring route for the big linces).
But then, the automotive companies don't seem to have concern for making a car that's easy to cut apart. They main focus on not killing you in the first place.
The Mini's are the most impressive I've seen. 60mph into a telephone pole (annihalated the pole), and then into a redwood tree. No broken glass, but the engine compartment was demolished. Incredible how much energy it soaked up, without harming anything past the firewall. Too bad it caught fire as the gas tank was torn open by the bottom of the telephone poll...
Put someone on enough caffiene and they get a bit... unstable. I think an OD of any stimulant (that doesn't kill you) could inspire some interesting behavior.
The desert is amazingly quiet. I go camping out there, and once I adjust to that level of sound (or absence of it), and come back, everythings loud.
3 years ago I moved from Silicone Valley into the hills above it, deep into the hills. At night, it's VERY quiet.
The result is now that I can hear TVs. Annoying high-pitched whine that they all make. I'm hearing a LOT more background noise than before, and as I continually make things quieter, I hear more, and have to make things quieter.
I figure that the 0dB threshold of hearing has probably been moved up to at least 20dB or so for most people, due to background noise (this is not a scientific number, of course). And as we work to make things quieter again, we'll need to make things quieter until they get back down to the 20dB and then nearer to 0dB.
The problem is that people think that punishing people for riding cars will make them ride mass transit more. Or that making transit better will make people magically decide to ride it.
It needs to be a coordinated effort to make mass transit more usefull, start designing cities around pedestrian traffic (but with accessible perimiter or "back street" parking for people that do live in outlying areas.
Make it easy for me to drive into the area, ditch the car, and then walk/ride to where I need to. I'd love to be able to take transit instead of my 45 minute commute, but I live up in the hills/mtns above Silicone Valley, and it's not feasible. However, I wouldn't mind a 25-30 minute drive down out of the hills, and then hop on a rail line into San Jose. Especially if it offered wireless ethernet, and had a coffee shop near the station.
The BART is great around the Bay Area, at least, where it goes... It's great, but it's not well integrated into the SF transit system, and it really needs to extend down into South Bay, but I haven't taken CalTrain up to the BART spur by the SF airport since they put it in. Too hard to get to CalTrain. Easier to just drive into SF via the mountain highways.
But if you follow those links, it's showing that the major industrialized countries, while producing a lot of CO2, and often the ost per capita, are also reducing their usage. One thing I can't tell is if the States had a positive or negative 9.9% change in emissions. Normally numbers in parens are considered negative, but they're the only ones in that collumn that are, the rest have '-' signs...
Anyway, the developing countries are all gaining.
Extrapolate those changes out a few decades, and the per-capita amounts start to even out, although the US is still well in the lead.
Frankly, we need to do something here in the states. Changes in car emissions helps some, but isn't the end-all-be-all, although it's the primary target here for reducing emissions.
I think we need to start with electricity generation. I'm fairly sure that I can put in a solar installation that will make my house a net-zero house. I'll need to supplement from the grid in the winter, but summers I should be able to produce well more than I can use (especially in the afternoons when I'm not home).
Businesses could roof with solar panels, or at least build roof-tops gardens. Increasing the plant bio-mass in the areas where we are producing CO2 heavily (the cities) will help to offset it's production. The use of solar panels will cool the building underneath it, and will reduce electrical demand during peak usages (especially here in cali, where summer afternoons are the highest times of usage, and the best times for insolation). Currently that energy just gets reflected back into the atmosphere, or absorbed into the building. If absorbed into the building, it's released back into the atmosphere by the A/C system, along with all of the energy used to extract it from the building.
I think what really torques people off here is that personal vehicles are targeted by the EPA, which would be fine if there were better alternatives to driving. Mass transit here is just a joke. You can't realisticly depend on it in most areas, especially out of the cities.
And the EPA has lots of pretty graphs online showing the breakdown of co2 emssions by source (autos, power generation, off-highway vehicles (construction), mining, etc. Cars a MUCH smaller proportion these days than they were 3 decades ago.
Also, the driving focus here of cali and the EPA is for reduced emissions, not increased fuel efficiencies. And diesels are particularly targeted as "bad", while small displacement turbo diesel engines compare well with gasoline engines for emissions, and are MUCH more fuel efficient. diesel's just a better design for all exception high HP, high performance cars.
And if the power is needed, it's possible to create clean diesel enignes that run up to 600hp (not producing tons of black smoke).
The Win32 API has had most of what's required for this since long before Terminal Services. CreateWindowStation() is one of the calls. I don't think it had multiple interactive user support, but it did have multiple desktop support, and a bunch of other things not exposed by the windows GUI.
Stuff I always wanted to implement, but then I just switched to linux.
Which driver? And I'll assume you didn't want to do the route of rpm2gz (IIRC that's what it's called), to open the RPM up and then install it as a binary package?
Re:Done right, CSS can help multi-platform use.
on
CSS for the LDP?
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· Score: 1
That stylesheet is just amazingly good. My first thought upon seeing this question was to use Gentoo's CSS for their documentation. It's so much more readable than just about anything else out there. (Although Samba's stuff is pretty good, too, but I don't know if that's CSS or not).
It's why I recommend Gentoo to those that are computer-literate, and interested in trying linux. You learn so much about how the computer works during the installation.
I grew up with PCs as they grew up, and learned DOS/Windows through all of it's incarnations (well, windows 3.1 and later). And I realize that I can handle XP MUCH better than most people I know that came into it later, and don't understand how the low-levels of the OS fit together, and what does what.
I once saw the definition of an Expert as someone that knew the low-level so well that all of the high level stuff was obvious. I'm nowhere near that (I don't think anyone is with Windows, at this point), but that's the route that I like to go towards. It's so much easier to debug things when you understand the computer is a system, and what the parts are, and what are the core required things to get it functional.
Gentoo's install steps are essentially a how-to guide for bringing up a box after it falls on it's face. Something often learned the hard way. It's really quite simple, and most of it could be automated, but I think that they have intentionally left it manual.
A) It requires you to learn to use it B) It raises the bar on the quality of noobs.
I'd rather start someone on an OS where they need to learn how it works than on one where it's all magic. Because magic only goes so far.
Actually, that's not quite accurate. (I live in the middle of the santa cruz mountains, in a house made primarilly of redwood).
My house might be virgin (our local term for old-growth) redwood, but the grain patterns and density between the currently growing crops and stuff harvested a 100 years ago is mostly false.
And many decks are made entirely from redwood. Big advantage with the super-agressive termites around here. redwood is weaker than douglas, at only about 60% of the strength, but due to it's amazingly light weight, you can build massive structures with it, without the weight of the structure causing it to fall down.
Actually, they are. laminated chip-board beams. Scary, but it has a purpose. The fibers run at all angles, providing a great deal of strength, and the relatively short length of the fibers is compensated for by the glue used to hold them together. Most wood glues are actually stronger than the wood fibers themselves.
I do woodworking, and have broken apart good joints to test them out (practicing). On a good joint, the glue pulls the wood apart. In a laminated, chip-board I-beam, the glue is STRONG, and the resultant beams are very lightweight and strong (and relatively thin, too).
Although, my redwood 4x8s in my house are plenty strong/lightweight. Just too bad it's hard to find the trees big enough to make those. Give my property (6 acres) another 50 years or so, and I'll have a crop of trees big enough for that. Redwoods grow FAST.
You have to go deep, and have cold water. Someone claimed the salvage rights to old-growth hardwood that's at the bottom of Lake Superior, and has been harvesting it with similar equipment to this.
He's rich, rich, now. These were all old-grown hardwood that was felled, but became water-logged and sank before being floated to the mills. The water is so cold and devoid of life that the wood hasn't rotted, because nothing is there to make it rot (no bacteria/fungai to break it down).
You actually want mufflers on cars. The resonance of having mufflers actually helps the engines to run. It's been empirically proven in some circles that removing the muffler (and catalytic converter) degrade the performance of the engine.
I run a local SMTP server for sending mail out of because my ISP requires that I have checked my mail within the last n minutes before using theirs. And that sucks when my mail is continuously pulled off their servers and dumped locally. Kinda a PITA to manually "check mail" over my dialup so that the outgoing messages actually go out. Much easier to just let the local SMTP server do the sending.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully won't be.
My dept. has rep from Hurst come by yearly to let us know what ways of killing us the auto companies have come up with next. Then we spend an evening tearing up cars. Not a bad night, it's normally pretty fun.
But the key is that we try to stay very aware of what's in the newest cars, and even sometimes a few of us will go a dealership to look at the new models, and take a look at the key things we need to keep an eye out for.
While the new technologies have made a greater chance of surviving the wreck, they've also increased the time that you're likely to be stuck in the car if we need to go cutting.
My favorite so far are the polycarbonate windows. They don't shatter in an accident, and they compress and store energy, waiting like a coiled spring. Hit them with a sledge hammer and they won't break. But start cutting into the roof, and they try to launch the roof off the car if they've been compressed and bent.
Also fun is the poor guy who rolls his bmw 745, has some minor dents/scratches in the roof, but can't get it out (doors won't unlock). However, we can't shatter out the windows, so we have to tear off the doors. Instead of just replacing the glass, the car is likely totaled by insurance.
So what size fire are you worried about not having enough water for with a single tender?
(I'm guessing your not in cali, since you call it a tanker. If we ask for a tanker, we get a fixed-wing aircraft carrying water...)
In our area, we're always having to be miserly with water, if we can't wrap a hydrant.
But to be flowing up around 1000gpm is one hell of a fire. Fully involved house, at a minimum. Do you have CAFS, or just plain water?
What's really nice with our tender is that it has automated water cannons on it, plus CAFS, and pump and roll. Big Cummins 5.9L diesel jsut to run the pump. Very usefull for putting out fires along the road-side. Just fire it up and drive along the edge of the road. Only takes 1 person.
Definitely.
:)
We're "urban interface", in the Santa Cruz Mtns, near Silicone Valley.
But if you're flowing at 1000gpm, with only a tender as a supply, you have other problems to worry about.
The problem is that in an accident, the "safety devices" don't always disarm themselves. When we (fire dept) show up on a late-model wrecked car, we need to start figuring out how many airbags it has, where they might be, and what other non-deactivated surprises have been left on.
We have to assume everything is live, because of the fact that cars don't go crunch all nice and neatly (especially when they hit other things at wierd angles as they go sliding off the road) and the stuff *might* still be live.
You just fell asleep and hit a tree. If I can cut you out and send you home, good. But I'm not going to kill myself in trying. Take some risks, yes, but not be stupid.
Actually, roll-overs aren't all that violent, from my experience (volunteer fire dept). It's head on impacts that are the worst, or blowing a turn at high speed and hitting a tree sideways.
However, if the car's upside down, with people trapped inside, it's pretty trivial to block the car so it can't move, and then just pull the doors off. Takes a minute or so, with the right tools (big hydraulic spreaders).
power = voltage * current
energy = power * time
Same with us and our Hurst tools. If it fits into the jaws of the heavy cutter, it's going to get cut through.
And Mini firewall crossmembers... REALLY bright lights. Pretty impressive. Found that one out the hard way one night. Now for Mini fires (and probably the new Ford pickups), we (fire dept) call for the water tender (3500 gallons of water on wheels). It will put it out. Make quite a show, but put it out.
I'm a volunteer FF, and we get LOTS of training on how to properly cut up cars, especially the new ones that are more deadly to us trying to rescue you, than they are to you and your 60mph argument with a tree.
Insane numbers of airbags, compressed gas cylinders strategicly located in our best cutting points, airbags that don't always go off, and therefore might go off at any point in time while we're cutting the car apart.
And now they're adding several hundred volts to the mix.
Luckily we don't need to cut through the center of the floor boards very often (common wiring route for the big linces).
But then, the automotive companies don't seem to have concern for making a car that's easy to cut apart. They main focus on not killing you in the first place.
The Mini's are the most impressive I've seen. 60mph into a telephone pole (annihalated the pole), and then into a redwood tree. No broken glass, but the engine compartment was demolished. Incredible how much energy it soaked up, without harming anything past the firewall. Too bad it caught fire as the gas tank was torn open by the bottom of the telephone poll...
Put someone on enough caffiene and they get a bit... unstable. I think an OD of any stimulant (that doesn't kill you) could inspire some interesting behavior.
The desert is amazingly quiet. I go camping out there, and once I adjust to that level of sound (or absence of it), and come back, everythings loud.
3 years ago I moved from Silicone Valley into the hills above it, deep into the hills. At night, it's VERY quiet.
The result is now that I can hear TVs. Annoying high-pitched whine that they all make. I'm hearing a LOT more background noise than before, and as I continually make things quieter, I hear more, and have to make things quieter.
I figure that the 0dB threshold of hearing has probably been moved up to at least 20dB or so for most people, due to background noise (this is not a scientific number, of course). And as we work to make things quieter again, we'll need to make things quieter until they get back down to the 20dB and then nearer to 0dB.
Exactly.
The problem is that people think that punishing people for riding cars will make them ride mass transit more. Or that making transit better will make people magically decide to ride it.
It needs to be a coordinated effort to make mass transit more usefull, start designing cities around pedestrian traffic (but with accessible perimiter or "back street" parking for people that do live in outlying areas.
Make it easy for me to drive into the area, ditch the car, and then walk/ride to where I need to. I'd love to be able to take transit instead of my 45 minute commute, but I live up in the hills/mtns above Silicone Valley, and it's not feasible. However, I wouldn't mind a 25-30 minute drive down out of the hills, and then hop on a rail line into San Jose. Especially if it offered wireless ethernet, and had a coffee shop near the station.
The BART is great around the Bay Area, at least, where it goes... It's great, but it's not well integrated into the SF transit system, and it really needs to extend down into South Bay, but I haven't taken CalTrain up to the BART spur by the SF airport since they put it in. Too hard to get to CalTrain. Easier to just drive into SF via the mountain highways.
But if you follow those links, it's showing that the major industrialized countries, while producing a lot of CO2, and often the ost per capita, are also reducing their usage. One thing I can't tell is if the States had a positive or negative 9.9% change in emissions. Normally numbers in parens are considered negative, but they're the only ones in that collumn that are, the rest have '-' signs...
Anyway, the developing countries are all gaining.
Extrapolate those changes out a few decades, and the per-capita amounts start to even out, although the US is still well in the lead.
Frankly, we need to do something here in the states. Changes in car emissions helps some, but isn't the end-all-be-all, although it's the primary target here for reducing emissions.
I think we need to start with electricity generation. I'm fairly sure that I can put in a solar installation that will make my house a net-zero house. I'll need to supplement from the grid in the winter, but summers I should be able to produce well more than I can use (especially in the afternoons when I'm not home).
Businesses could roof with solar panels, or at least build roof-tops gardens. Increasing the plant bio-mass in the areas where we are producing CO2 heavily (the cities) will help to offset it's production. The use of solar panels will cool the building underneath it, and will reduce electrical demand during peak usages (especially here in cali, where summer afternoons are the highest times of usage, and the best times for insolation). Currently that energy just gets reflected back into the atmosphere, or absorbed into the building. If absorbed into the building, it's released back into the atmosphere by the A/C system, along with all of the energy used to extract it from the building.
Um, actually, it expands as it freezes, since the crystaline structure of ice is less dense than water. Which is why it floats.
I think what really torques people off here is that personal vehicles are targeted by the EPA, which would be fine if there were better alternatives to driving. Mass transit here is just a joke. You can't realisticly depend on it in most areas, especially out of the cities.
And the EPA has lots of pretty graphs online showing the breakdown of co2 emssions by source (autos, power generation, off-highway vehicles (construction), mining, etc. Cars a MUCH smaller proportion these days than they were 3 decades ago.
Also, the driving focus here of cali and the EPA is for reduced emissions, not increased fuel efficiencies. And diesels are particularly targeted as "bad", while small displacement turbo diesel engines compare well with gasoline engines for emissions, and are MUCH more fuel efficient. diesel's just a better design for all exception high HP, high performance cars.
And if the power is needed, it's possible to create clean diesel enignes that run up to 600hp (not producing tons of black smoke).
The Win32 API has had most of what's required for this since long before Terminal Services. CreateWindowStation() is one of the calls. I don't think it had multiple interactive user support, but it did have multiple desktop support, and a bunch of other things not exposed by the windows GUI.
Stuff I always wanted to implement, but then I just switched to linux.
Which driver? And I'll assume you didn't want to do the route of rpm2gz (IIRC that's what it's called), to open the RPM up and then install it as a binary package?
That stylesheet is just amazingly good. My first thought upon seeing this question was to use Gentoo's CSS for their documentation. It's so much more readable than just about anything else out there. (Although Samba's stuff is pretty good, too, but I don't know if that's CSS or not).
It's why I recommend Gentoo to those that are computer-literate, and interested in trying linux. You learn so much about how the computer works during the installation.
I grew up with PCs as they grew up, and learned DOS/Windows through all of it's incarnations (well, windows 3.1 and later). And I realize that I can handle XP MUCH better than most people I know that came into it later, and don't understand how the low-levels of the OS fit together, and what does what.
I once saw the definition of an Expert as someone that knew the low-level so well that all of the high level stuff was obvious. I'm nowhere near that (I don't think anyone is with Windows, at this point), but that's the route that I like to go towards. It's so much easier to debug things when you understand the computer is a system, and what the parts are, and what are the core required things to get it functional.
Gentoo's install steps are essentially a how-to guide for bringing up a box after it falls on it's face. Something often learned the hard way. It's really quite simple, and most of it could be automated, but I think that they have intentionally left it manual.
A) It requires you to learn to use it
B) It raises the bar on the quality of noobs.
I'd rather start someone on an OS where they need to learn how it works than on one where it's all magic. Because magic only goes so far.
Actually, that's not quite accurate. (I live in the middle of the santa cruz mountains, in a house made primarilly of redwood).
My house might be virgin (our local term for old-growth) redwood, but the grain patterns and density between the currently growing crops and stuff harvested a 100 years ago is mostly false.
And many decks are made entirely from redwood. Big advantage with the super-agressive termites around here. redwood is weaker than douglas, at only about 60% of the strength, but due to it's amazingly light weight, you can build massive structures with it, without the weight of the structure causing it to fall down.
robotic submarines aren't nearly as expensive as manned ones, for those kinds of depths, and we're only talking a few thousand feet or so (max).
Actually, they are. laminated chip-board beams. Scary, but it has a purpose. The fibers run at all angles, providing a great deal of strength, and the relatively short length of the fibers is compensated for by the glue used to hold them together. Most wood glues are actually stronger than the wood fibers themselves.
I do woodworking, and have broken apart good joints to test them out (practicing). On a good joint, the glue pulls the wood apart. In a laminated, chip-board I-beam, the glue is STRONG, and the resultant beams are very lightweight and strong (and relatively thin, too).
Although, my redwood 4x8s in my house are plenty strong/lightweight. Just too bad it's hard to find the trees big enough to make those. Give my property (6 acres) another 50 years or so, and I'll have a crop of trees big enough for that. Redwoods grow FAST.
You have to go deep, and have cold water. Someone claimed the salvage rights to old-growth hardwood that's at the bottom of Lake Superior, and has been harvesting it with similar equipment to this.
He's rich, rich, now. These were all old-grown hardwood that was felled, but became water-logged and sank before being floated to the mills. The water is so cold and devoid of life that the wood hasn't rotted, because nothing is there to make it rot (no bacteria/fungai to break it down).
You actually want mufflers on cars. The resonance of having mufflers actually helps the engines to run. It's been empirically proven in some circles that removing the muffler (and catalytic converter) degrade the performance of the engine.
I run a local SMTP server for sending mail out of because my ISP requires that I have checked my mail within the last n minutes before using theirs. And that sucks when my mail is continuously pulled off their servers and dumped locally. Kinda a PITA to manually "check mail" over my dialup so that the outgoing messages actually go out. Much easier to just let the local SMTP server do the sending.