Too right. And, in support, I started off writing machine code in the 60s...machine code, not assembler...and migrated so that nowadays I use Netbeans and Visual Studio because it gets the job done - many times faster, many times more reliably. I know other people of my age who, as far as the technology goes, are basically stuck in the punchcard era; they have become computer users and they simply cannot understand the decisions that have to be made in product design.
The secret of good tools is that they hide the problems by addressing them invisibly, not by pretending they do not exist.
Thermal solar power allows you to spread generation over 24 hours. If you have plenty of sun, it's a pretty good idea. It's almost like having a conventional generation station with a thermal mass large enough that it only has to be fueled once in every 24 hours, so you can leverage existing technology to reduce the technical risk. I like solar PV - I have it - but it doesn't work at night, or most of the day in the winter.
When I was at school in the 60s we were encouraged to go into nuclear physics because we would be able to take part in the transition to fusion power. By the time I got to University it was obvious that it would take longer than that. I believe that the best estimates (as collated by Scientific American) are that a workable fusion plant is now 40-70 years away. This suggests that in the 60s the technical challenges were simply totally underestimated, and since then, as our knowledge has increased, we've realised that fusion is more difficult than we even imagined. Whereas my home fusion-powered generator (solar PV) is up and running, and barely imagined in the 60s, and large wind generators are now standard, off-the-shelf products.
My suspicion is that in the end fusion will be got to work, and it will be hopelessly uneconomic compared to wind and stored-heat solar.
Look at the first computers. The CRT was used to display a pattern of dots (binary digits, in fact) and a teletype was used for the data input. They didn't even think to put new key labels and a new drum on the teletype so that you knew you were entering 00000 rather than "/", so that when they gave a lecture to the Royal Society everyone was confused by pages of completely nonobvious symbols.
I actually once worked with an early RCA chipset for running low-res CRT images. One nice thing about it was you could sync the display generator to the NTSC signal and so overlay your own pattern very precisely on a TV picture. RCA at least did produce and sell hardware that embodied their invention.
It's true that the A4 class recorded 126MPH once. You might want to know that at the time my grandfather was an engineer on the line. After the A4, with only three recording coaches, reached 126mph, it took 3 weeks to repair the line. My grandfather was the most enthusiastic convert to Diesels and electric traction you can imagine.
Hurrah for revolution, and more cannon-shot
A beggar on horseback lashes a beggar on foot
Hurrah for revolution, and cannon come again
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
Wasn't it the Incas and the Maya who never developed the wheel? It is not an obvious invention, especially as it is useless on its own - you need roads or rails to use it efficiently. "cavemen" didn't invent the wheel - the Stonehenge builders are believed to have used round stones or logs to move the large stones, and they had quite an advanced Bronze Age society. There is a case that the inventor of the actual wheel - with a hub and axle - (and there must actually have been a first one) should have partial credit for modern civilisation. But it was Roman roads that made the wheel so useful. Here in the UK, up until the advent of railways, once you were off what was mainly the Roman road network wheels were of limited use, and water was a far more effective means of transport. The "Great Trek" and the Westward invasion of the US was done at under 2mph.
It says that the light was separated from the darkness, an obvious reference to the splitting of the Universe into the parts that do, and do not, interact with em radiation. The Bible predicts dark energy and dark matter*
Let's try more like $100-200 million to design a new engine, amortised over a million units, less the cost of replacing tools to keep making the old one, and less the cost improvements as CAD simplifies manufacturing and reduces metal content. Why do you think complex modern engines are actually cheaper to make and service than old style carb-equipped grunt boxes? $5000 is far more than the entire powertrain typically costs the manufacturer. You can prove anything with POOMA numbers.
I thought that, but the answer is that Diesels are not only quite heavy, but their starting load is much higher. So start/stop doesn't work as well on a Diesel hybrid, especially compared to e.g. Toyota engines where the starting compression ratio can be reduced for easier starting. Natural gas isn't more efficient because you cannot use it with a Diesel cycle and, as it is a gas not droplets, the compression ratio cannot be too high (detonation.) Mitsubishi started off with hub motors for the MiEV and abandoned them for a variety of reasons, but mainly the unsprung weight is very poor, the width is too great with the brakes, and delivering power to a wheel with a shaft is far easier than with a flexible cable, when kilowatts are involved.
I've already commented on this thread and I cannot up-mod you, but: Good post.
I'd also add one thing: direct injection gasoline with a laser igniter and high compression is close to a Diesel (the ignition in a Diesel normally starts well into the combustion space when the droplets reach ignition temperature. So I think the theory is already there.
Because the British were noticeably tight fisted and lazy about servicing, British motorcycles were more or less designed to leak enough oil to require regular top ups to keep the oil clean. What was widely seen as incompetent design had a real-world purpose. When Triumph finally came up with a unit twin design that could be made to be oil tight (I wish I still had my T100...) they promptly fitted an oil bleed to lubricate the chain so that the oil replenishment would still be needed.
I have simply hardly ever read such inaccuracies, even in Wikipedia articles (which tend to be edited by automotive fanboys with limited engineering knowledge).
It may just about be possible for racing, but normal owners would not want to have to readjust the carburetor every time the barometric pressure or temperature changed. And then you have the little problem that a carb will always change the mixture slightly when cornering. It is just not possible to adjust automatically for lateral, rotational and acceleration forces on a pot of gasoline which is being used as the input to a metered jet. Anybody familiar with racing carbs knows that they are a complete pain to set up and keep adjusted.
Your second point is nonsense. You're just saying "The injector has to be the correct size for the application".
Third, this is a gross oversimplification. You do not want the fuel completely vaporised. That will cause explosion. Enough fuel has to be vaporised for the ignition to work, but otherwise it has to be atomised - i.e. present as very small droplets - which can then burn at a controlled rate, preventing uncontrollable pressure rise with the risk of gaskets blowing and bearings failing. This problem is common to carburetors and injectors alike. (Diesels do not need any vaporisation at all because they do not have spark ignition.)
Only your last paragraph is correct. Injectors can do a better job, not only of metering fuel, but also of timing it, stratifying the charge, and ensuring that the mixture around the plugs is ignitable. A carb is basically a crude analog solution to a complex fluidics problem. (Incidentally you contradict yourself - you correctly refer to "atomisation" in that para, whereas you refer to "vaporized" above.)
In case you didn't notice, Toshiba launched the product for them last year. The reason you didn't notice was that it flopped completely owing to short battery life, too much heat, and the need for fans (plus the actual software wasn't very good.) As of present, Windows needs too much CPU power for any practical tablet.
the problem for Microsoft is that new developments in hardware start low and build up - thus the PC grew out of the enthusiast market and came to replace the minicomputer, and the smartphone replaced the phone. AFAIK nobody has successfully done the reverse - i.e. started big and made it small. Microsoft's phones have been failures. Why should a tablet be any different? They will simply be unable to leave out all the stuff that makes Windows what it is, so it will always be more bloated, slower and less tablet like than the competition.
CEOs are massively overrated. What matters is to have an effective, co-operating management structure instead of competing egos. If you have that, then usually swapping out the CEO works if you replace a dysfunctional parasite with a human being (perhaps you can work out the company I'm particularly thinking of here.) If, as in Germany, CEOs were not given nearly so much power, I suspect many US companies would work better. If you want to understand how a completely dysfunctional management structure can appear successful for a while, read the history of Nazi Germany. Then think that you probably don't know the name of anybody in the current Swiss government.
Blake's "Dark, Satanic mills" were churches. Nothing to do with the industrial revolution. He believed that the Devil had taken over organised religion. The second verse is a hymn to sex, which is why it was always either funny or insightful that the Woman's Institute used to sing it at their meetings.
I am sure that the USN is incapable of having any major systems failures, anytime, anywhere:( but only last week a "rogue sailor" on HMS Astute killed one officer and wounded another, and was only stopped by a civilian visitor. This is a little worrying on a nuclear submarine. Mind you, HMS Astute has already had an embarrassing "grounding incident" off Skye, so perhaps it's just a jinxed ship.
No, it wasn't meant as racist. Kipling was an Imperialist - it is true - but an Imperialist who believed that the only superiority of the white man lay in his technical knowledge and organisational ability (such as was taught to the ICS). He believed that the British had a duty to improve India by bringing in railways, safe transport, education and an end to backward practices like Suttee. The "White man's burden" is a verse about this - suggesting that the very best of the British should be sent out to spread enlightenment, and that this should continue even when "heathen waste and folly" brought it to nothing.
Kipling believed this, not because he saw Hindus, Moslems and Buddhists as inferior, but because he saw them as equals who had lacked opportunity. (This comes out very strongly in his book for adolescents, Kim, which as intended in part to excite schoolboys with the prospects of a career in India.) You may think this was paternalistic, but from the perspective of the time, he was pretty enlightened, and extremely pro-Indian. (G K Chesterton thought that Kipling should be buried, not in Westminster Abbey, but in a Hindu temple.)
They have "minders" trained by KRM. It's already looking like an Eastern government, in which the civil servants of the original ruler have the real power under his sons, until everyone has forgotten the original - like the Mikado (which I believe means "Palace gate")
In the UK dentists only normally fit braces to deal with actual problems, because they can have very unpleasant long term side effects - the FSM didn't design us to walk around with continued sideways pressure on our teeth. In the US, dentists expect to get rich, so they perpetuate the idea that every child needs braces for perfect teeth.
I've been told this by my last two dentists, both of whom have been very good. My present one says he prefers to feel good about his profession rather than promote unnecessary work, and recently spent an hour carefully rebuilding a tooth rather than fit a crown because he "wanted to keep as much of the original as possible, and besides crowns can take a long time to settle down". That's probably why, at well over 60, I still have all the teeth that I had at 18.
What do you expect would be the effect of circulating oil failure on marine engines with electric oil pumps (which many of them have)? Yet such a failure is very, very rare. Hint: Duplex pumps, standby emergency generators
It is not always a simple rule. It may be for Americans. But in British English, upper class and ordinary speech sometimes follow different rules. Take the word "hotel". In upper class speech it used to be pronounced without the h, so one would say (and write) "an hotel". "Hero" usually takes "a". But the word "heroic" doesn't. It is actually more or less correct to write "a hero leads an heroic lifestyle". This is because in that upper-class speech the H in hero is more consonantal than the h in heroic.
Then there are the words where the n has shifted. The snake was originally a nadder, and the fruit original a norange. But the n has gone for a walk; we now have an adder and an orange.
Anyone who reports any aspect of English grammar as having "no exceptions" is more than not likely to be wrong. English is a bastard language developed by bastards - and I, as a typical English person with 100% purebred French/Jewish/Saxon/Norman ancestry, like it that way.
I was doing cross-platform development in 1981. So long as I have proper emulation of the target machine, why should I care? The only thing I want to be able to do on the target as regards development is rapid and efficient debug.
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The secret of good tools is that they hide the problems by addressing them invisibly, not by pretending they do not exist.
Thermal solar power allows you to spread generation over 24 hours. If you have plenty of sun, it's a pretty good idea. It's almost like having a conventional generation station with a thermal mass large enough that it only has to be fueled once in every 24 hours, so you can leverage existing technology to reduce the technical risk. I like solar PV - I have it - but it doesn't work at night, or most of the day in the winter.
My suspicion is that in the end fusion will be got to work, and it will be hopelessly uneconomic compared to wind and stored-heat solar.
I actually once worked with an early RCA chipset for running low-res CRT images. One nice thing about it was you could sync the display generator to the NTSC signal and so overlay your own pattern very precisely on a TV picture. RCA at least did produce and sell hardware that embodied their invention.
It's true that the A4 class recorded 126MPH once. You might want to know that at the time my grandfather was an engineer on the line. After the A4, with only three recording coaches, reached 126mph, it took 3 weeks to repair the line. My grandfather was the most enthusiastic convert to Diesels and electric traction you can imagine.
Hurrah for revolution, and more cannon-shot
A beggar on horseback lashes a beggar on foot
Hurrah for revolution, and cannon come again
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
Wasn't it the Incas and the Maya who never developed the wheel? It is not an obvious invention, especially as it is useless on its own - you need roads or rails to use it efficiently. "cavemen" didn't invent the wheel - the Stonehenge builders are believed to have used round stones or logs to move the large stones, and they had quite an advanced Bronze Age society. There is a case that the inventor of the actual wheel - with a hub and axle - (and there must actually have been a first one) should have partial credit for modern civilisation. But it was Roman roads that made the wheel so useful. Here in the UK, up until the advent of railways, once you were off what was mainly the Roman road network wheels were of limited use, and water was a far more effective means of transport. The "Great Trek" and the Westward invasion of the US was done at under 2mph.
*No, of course it doesn't.
Does anybody know if webOS does this? What is the least evil phone operating system out there now Symbian has been buried at the crossroads?
Let's try more like $100-200 million to design a new engine, amortised over a million units, less the cost of replacing tools to keep making the old one, and less the cost improvements as CAD simplifies manufacturing and reduces metal content. Why do you think complex modern engines are actually cheaper to make and service than old style carb-equipped grunt boxes? $5000 is far more than the entire powertrain typically costs the manufacturer. You can prove anything with POOMA numbers.
I thought that, but the answer is that Diesels are not only quite heavy, but their starting load is much higher. So start/stop doesn't work as well on a Diesel hybrid, especially compared to e.g. Toyota engines where the starting compression ratio can be reduced for easier starting. Natural gas isn't more efficient because you cannot use it with a Diesel cycle and, as it is a gas not droplets, the compression ratio cannot be too high (detonation.) Mitsubishi started off with hub motors for the MiEV and abandoned them for a variety of reasons, but mainly the unsprung weight is very poor, the width is too great with the brakes, and delivering power to a wheel with a shaft is far easier than with a flexible cable, when kilowatts are involved.
I'd also add one thing: direct injection gasoline with a laser igniter and high compression is close to a Diesel (the ignition in a Diesel normally starts well into the combustion space when the droplets reach ignition temperature. So I think the theory is already there.
Because the British were noticeably tight fisted and lazy about servicing, British motorcycles were more or less designed to leak enough oil to require regular top ups to keep the oil clean. What was widely seen as incompetent design had a real-world purpose. When Triumph finally came up with a unit twin design that could be made to be oil tight (I wish I still had my T100...) they promptly fitted an oil bleed to lubricate the chain so that the oil replenishment would still be needed.
It may just about be possible for racing, but normal owners would not want to have to readjust the carburetor every time the barometric pressure or temperature changed. And then you have the little problem that a carb will always change the mixture slightly when cornering. It is just not possible to adjust automatically for lateral, rotational and acceleration forces on a pot of gasoline which is being used as the input to a metered jet. Anybody familiar with racing carbs knows that they are a complete pain to set up and keep adjusted.
Your second point is nonsense. You're just saying "The injector has to be the correct size for the application".
Third, this is a gross oversimplification. You do not want the fuel completely vaporised. That will cause explosion. Enough fuel has to be vaporised for the ignition to work, but otherwise it has to be atomised - i.e. present as very small droplets - which can then burn at a controlled rate, preventing uncontrollable pressure rise with the risk of gaskets blowing and bearings failing. This problem is common to carburetors and injectors alike. (Diesels do not need any vaporisation at all because they do not have spark ignition.)
Only your last paragraph is correct. Injectors can do a better job, not only of metering fuel, but also of timing it, stratifying the charge, and ensuring that the mixture around the plugs is ignitable. A carb is basically a crude analog solution to a complex fluidics problem. (Incidentally you contradict yourself - you correctly refer to "atomisation" in that para, whereas you refer to "vaporized" above.)
review
the problem for Microsoft is that new developments in hardware start low and build up - thus the PC grew out of the enthusiast market and came to replace the minicomputer, and the smartphone replaced the phone. AFAIK nobody has successfully done the reverse - i.e. started big and made it small. Microsoft's phones have been failures. Why should a tablet be any different? They will simply be unable to leave out all the stuff that makes Windows what it is, so it will always be more bloated, slower and less tablet like than the competition.
CEOs are massively overrated. What matters is to have an effective, co-operating management structure instead of competing egos. If you have that, then usually swapping out the CEO works if you replace a dysfunctional parasite with a human being (perhaps you can work out the company I'm particularly thinking of here.) If, as in Germany, CEOs were not given nearly so much power, I suspect many US companies would work better. If you want to understand how a completely dysfunctional management structure can appear successful for a while, read the history of Nazi Germany. Then think that you probably don't know the name of anybody in the current Swiss government.
Blake's "Dark, Satanic mills" were churches. Nothing to do with the industrial revolution. He believed that the Devil had taken over organised religion. The second verse is a hymn to sex, which is why it was always either funny or insightful that the Woman's Institute used to sing it at their meetings.
I am sure that the USN is incapable of having any major systems failures, anytime, anywhere :( but only last week a "rogue sailor" on HMS Astute killed one officer and wounded another, and was only stopped by a civilian visitor. This is a little worrying on a nuclear submarine. Mind you, HMS Astute has already had an embarrassing "grounding incident" off Skye, so perhaps it's just a jinxed ship.
Kipling believed this, not because he saw Hindus, Moslems and Buddhists as inferior, but because he saw them as equals who had lacked opportunity. (This comes out very strongly in his book for adolescents, Kim, which as intended in part to excite schoolboys with the prospects of a career in India.) You may think this was paternalistic, but from the perspective of the time, he was pretty enlightened, and extremely pro-Indian. (G K Chesterton thought that Kipling should be buried, not in Westminster Abbey, but in a Hindu temple.)
They have "minders" trained by KRM. It's already looking like an Eastern government, in which the civil servants of the original ruler have the real power under his sons, until everyone has forgotten the original - like the Mikado (which I believe means "Palace gate")
I've been told this by my last two dentists, both of whom have been very good. My present one says he prefers to feel good about his profession rather than promote unnecessary work, and recently spent an hour carefully rebuilding a tooth rather than fit a crown because he "wanted to keep as much of the original as possible, and besides crowns can take a long time to settle down". That's probably why, at well over 60, I still have all the teeth that I had at 18.
What do you expect would be the effect of circulating oil failure on marine engines with electric oil pumps (which many of them have)? Yet such a failure is very, very rare. Hint: Duplex pumps, standby emergency generators
Then there are the words where the n has shifted. The snake was originally a nadder, and the fruit original a norange. But the n has gone for a walk; we now have an adder and an orange.
Anyone who reports any aspect of English grammar as having "no exceptions" is more than not likely to be wrong. English is a bastard language developed by bastards - and I, as a typical English person with 100% purebred French/Jewish/Saxon/Norman ancestry, like it that way.
I was doing cross-platform development in 1981. So long as I have proper emulation of the target machine, why should I care? The only thing I want to be able to do on the target as regards development is rapid and efficient debug.