The Johnson bar to Walschaerts valve gear controls a form of mechanical phase shifter. Reverse is reached by adjusting the intake and cutoff phase angles all the way past dead center into negative territory. Walschaerts gear isn't fully symmetrical; reverse doesn't have the range that forward does.
The amount of power needed to operate the valve gear is substantial. On larger locomotives, driving the valve gear to full reverse is often steam powered. Otherwise, it takes a long time to turn a low-geared crank a large number of turns. This is a problem in automotive designs, where you want to change phase angle rapidly during acceleration. People today expect instant gratification when they step on the accelerator.
The trouble with direct valve actuation is making an actuator that's fast enough, powerful enough, small enough, heat-tolerant enough, and reliable enough to do the job. Cheaply. This is not easy. Prototypes have been built, but it's still not something that's easy to do. BMW did quite a bit of work in this direction, but backed off to their "Valvetronic" scheme, which still has a camshaft with other components to give some adjustment potential.
Most of the existing schemes for tweaking valve timing still involve camshafts, but there's an additional mechanical linkage which allows adjustment of phase angle, valve travel, or both. That's an idea which goes back to steam engine design. Most of the gear on the side of a steam locomotive is there to adjust valve timing. Steam engines are controlled by valve duty cycle, not throttling. This was the original pulse-width-modulation system. On steam engines, valve phase can be adjusted far enough to reverse the engine, which is how locomotives back up. Some newer marine diesels have that feature, too. Eliminates the need for a reverse gear.
So this isn't a new idea. It's an old idea that's hard to make work cost-effectively. Somebody may crack this thing; it's a tough mechanical engineering problem, but not an impossible one.
Wikia was supposed to be a new search engine. But it's really just a free hosting service for wikis. The section that gets the most traffic is Wookiepedia, which Wikia took over and infested with ads. Wikia seems to be turning into a place where the fancruft kicked out of Wikipedia can flourish. This is probably a good thing.
So it would make sense for Lucas to acquire Wikia, and thus acquire control of the fanbase, which can then be monetized. Wikia's ads are for minor companies and are placed on irrelevant articles. Lucas's operation, which understands marketing, could do better.
Lucas might even be able to unload the leftover Jar-Jar merchandise that way.
That has it right. The rate structure was set up in a way such that you don't make money off the solar panels unless you have enough of them to cover your peak daytime load.
This actually makes sense. It encourages people to install enough panels, keeping this from being merely symbolic. The problem is that, with current panel costs, efficiencies, and roof space, installing enough panels to cover the peak daytime load is tough.
Maybe, rather than focusing on houses, this should be targeted to flat-roofed commercial and industrial buildings. There's no reason that most of the roof space of a mall can't be covered with racks of angled solar panels, enough to power the air conditioning load.
That should really be the goal for California - power the peak air conditioning load of Southern California entirely from solar power.
Having totally botched deployment of the "applet" thing with Java (to be fair, Microsoft sabotaged that in IE), Sun is trying again. As if anybody cared.
JavaScript isn't really that bad. There are about a half dozen known serious problems with JavaScript and browser support for it, and they're getting fixed.
The Tamarin just-in-time compiler is in test, and the speed problem will soon be solved.
Most of the real trouble comes from the CSS div/float/clear model of layout, which just isn't enough to insure that everything ends up in a reasonable place. Not having a grid model was too restrictive. Manipulating "div" items dynamically tends to result in brittle web page designs that break easily. To get around that, you almost have to code up a layout engine in Javascript, which is silly. So there's something of a move back to table based layout, a plethora of frameworks to paper over the troubles with the "div" model, and meanwhile the CSS theorists take their model back to the shop for rework.
I have a feeling that banning previews for _Oceans 13_ will only help its draw,
Yes, it's one of those movies that makes you ask "Why bother?". The original Oceans 11 was a vehicle for Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. So this is the second sequel of a remake. For a second-rate heist movie.
Maybe they're trying to break the record for second-rate sequels, currently held by "Police Academy 7".
The best idea so far in this direction was a scheme where, when you used a credit card number on line, your bank automatically called your cell phone, and you got a voice or text message saying "XYZ.com wants to charge your credit card $221.45. If you're making that purchase on line right now, and this is OK, press 1. If this is not OK with you, press 2."
Merchants hated the idea. But that's the right way to go.
Remember, WalMart Music is at $0.88 per song. Increasing the price much beyond that will drive customers to WalMart.
The RIAA members have very little leverage against WalMart. WalMart sells over 40% of the RIAA's market volume. But music is a minor item to WalMart; they use it mostly as a traffic builder for their stores.
The record companies can, of course, send someone down to WalMart in Bentonville, to sit in the waiting room to wait their turn with a buyer on the Corridor of Doom to discuss raising prices. Which is not likely to work.
I'm not even seeing porn spam much any more. It's the same old stock pump and dump scams and that "discount pharmacy" guy, day in and day out, all with random headings. That may be because the upstream spam filters are dropping anything with a link to a known annoyance site, though.
I don't think much spam is aimed at kids any more. Most of the spam I get (after ordinary spam filtering) is either for 1) Viagra, or 2) penny stocks. Neither subject is likely to interest kids much.
Looking at the last ten spams in the trash:
"???? IS SET TO ROCK YOUR PORTFOLIO!"
"Discount Pharmacy Online"
"Thank you for your loan request, which we recieved (misspelling in original) yesterday."
Repeat of #2.
"???? have released very hot news. Check this out, info and call to your brocker (in original) right now!!"
" Buy your drugs from the comfort of your home and save up to 20% on pharmaceutical products."
"$49 Windows XP Pro w/SP2"
Another #2.
"Los mejores precios del mercado en Notebook, desde $357.000!" (from Santiago, Chili)
"Great and Powerful, by Leonid Pisnoy" (in Russian; seems to be a political rant)
None of these are "harmful to children". They're mostly aimed at adults with room-temperature IQs.
There have been huge changes to Blender over time. For example, the physics engine in the game engine was replaced with a much better one. The original poster is apparently wound up about some XML import/export thing, which is minor. You can write Blender import/export filters in Python, and many such filters exist.
Blender has some problems, but converting its files to an XML format isn't one of them.
This isn't that new. In fact, it's rather like Tandem's file system from the 1980s.
It's good that people are thinking about this. Traditional UNIX file system semantics are incredibly dumb; no locking, no transactions, and no guarantees. Really, if you're looking into reliability, find out how Tandem did it. Tandem systems routinely ran for years, in some cases decades, without crashing. Even during reconfigurations and hardware upgrades.
To me, the real "layering" issue is that the file system is in the kernel. If it were simply an application one talks to by message passing, as it is in QNX, replacing the file system wouldn't be a big deal.
This Wall Street Journal article indicated it was happening back in March. AT&T has removed the Yahoo logo from their trucks. But so far, no official breakup.
There's standard hardware for this sort of thing. You can get little industrial I/O units with Ethernet interfaces. They're little boxes with an Ethernet connector on one side, and digital, analog, or thermocouple inputs on the other side. They're built to hold up in a factory floor environment, and easily replaced if damaged. You can even get wireless ones.
If you're going to send signals around a plant, 100baseT is actually quite noise-resistant. More so than TTL signals or even RS-232, because it's a twisted-pair differential signal.
To talk to these things, LabView is often a good option. You can create panels of dials, gauges, and graphs with little effort, log and analyze data, and give the plant operators the tools to see what's going on.
AT&T dumped their co-branding arrangement with Yahoo, "AT&T Yahoo DSL". It wasn't adding any useful value to their DSL service. Why at this late date does Microsoft want Yahoo?
The Disney characters seem to be confined to a small section of the park. The park's iconic characters seem to be cats with big pointy ears.
The Beijing park has Vegas showgirls. They didn't copy that from Disney.
It's an older park, from one of China's less creative periods. Remember, it was built after the crackdown on creativity towards the end of the Mao era, when China lost a whole generation of young creative people. That's over. We're seeing quite good design out of China today. The next time that park gets a refresh, they may well dump the Disney stuff.
Click here to turn in your employer. Select the button that says "I am reporting an organization using pirated software on its own computers. (You may be eligible for a reward.)". Or call, toll-free, 1-888 NO PIRACY. Operators are waiting to take your call.
When I was a young'un, I created a Quake map of the local Laser Tag joint.
The Laser Tag outlet in Redwood City, California once had a sign reading "Serious Fun with a Laser Gun". In late 2001, this was changed to "Serious Fun with a Laser".
Wrong answer. Too many little turbines not generating enough energy each. Worse, gearing a number of turbines together when they don't get uniform wind pressure means some of them are just sources of drag.
Progress in wind turbines has been through scaling them up. The 50KW - 100 KW machines of the
1970s never paid for themselves. Somewhere above 500KW, the economics start to work,
and farms of megawatt and up machines are quite profitable. Here's General Electric's 2.5 megawatt wind turbine, which is typical of current large wind turbines. Total worldwide wind generation capacity is about 75 gigawatts. Wind power is now a serious energy source because, at last, the units are big enough to generate serious power.
Actually, that site got a "no rating" because it's listed in the Open Directory in a category that wasn't unambiguously commercial. That's not bad, just neutral. If you get the red circle with the bar through it, that's bad.
If we can find the name and address of the owner of the site on a commercial site, it gets a "?" rating, since that's required for businesses. A green checkmark requires third party verification of business identity, either via SSL or some other source. Right now, as well as SSL certs, we recognize and check BBBonline seals. We're looking into a plan where third party payment services verify the identity of their payment customers, for exactly the situation described here.
We recommend to small businesses that they sign up with BBBonline. It's cheaper than an SSL cert, and their seal actually means some standards have been met.
The basic criterion is "if someone needed to sue you, could they find you"?
At some point, ads get too intrusive. Some notable failures:
Ad cards bound into paperback books. That was tried in the 1980s, and customers were so angry publishers stopped that, and it didn't come back.
Ads during telephone ring. Yes, little blipverts between each ring. Tried around 2000. That came and went so fast few ever heard one.
Fast food table clutter. Little stand-up things with ads on every table. The fast food industry has mostly backed off from that since the 1990s; not many sales and too much hassle.
The big one - sound trucks. 1930s idea, around the time amplifiers started really working. Trucks driving around blaring ads. That was so obnoxious it was made a criminal offense in most US states.
Besides, music already has ads. 50 Cent mentioned 20 brands in his songs in 2005, according to American Brandstand. "Mercedes emerged as
the top brand of the year, and 50 Cent outbranded the rest to become the top
brand-dropping artist... Meanwhile, weapon brands surged..."
I want one. I need a low-end laptop with Linux. Nothing all that elaborate, just something for remote use, OpenOffice Impress, and stuff like that. Something with a price tag in the $600-$700 range, not the $2000 range.
And WiFi that works out of the box. That's the important thing. If you have to edit files in/etc, they've failed.
I'd like to have the name and address of every legitimate business in the United States, for web site legitimacy validation. I've purchased databases which contain an approximation to that information, but that's mostly phone book data, not Government data.
More business records need to be easily available. This varies from state to state now. Corporation records are usually freely available, although a few states (notably Delaware) charge for address information. Every US state has their own format; I've yet to find two states using the same output format on their web site. That's a hassle, but can be overcome.
D/B/A name and business license data is even harder to get. It's public record information, and you can get it from data brokers, but it's fairly expensive and not current.
It's easier for some major countries outside the US. The UK has centralized business registration at Companies House. You can get this kind of information for all the G-7 countries (although not for Russia) and most of the major exporting countries, including China.
Those things all understand more or less the same command set. There's a "USB Video Device Class Specification". The current revision is 1.1. This Linux driver effort isn't some huge collection of drivers, which would be silly and a maintenance headache. It's a generic driver.
A few years back, I wrote a generic Firewire camera driver for QNX. It's really not that hard. These things self-identify when they hot-plug, and you can read their configuration and capabilities over the bus interface. The USB camera spec, unlike the FireWire camera spec, has some annoying Microsoft-specific stuff in it, but it's not all that pervasive.
Slashdot Mirror
The Johnson bar to Walschaerts valve gear controls a form of mechanical phase shifter. Reverse is reached by adjusting the intake and cutoff phase angles all the way past dead center into negative territory. Walschaerts gear isn't fully symmetrical; reverse doesn't have the range that forward does.
The amount of power needed to operate the valve gear is substantial. On larger locomotives, driving the valve gear to full reverse is often steam powered. Otherwise, it takes a long time to turn a low-geared crank a large number of turns. This is a problem in automotive designs, where you want to change phase angle rapidly during acceleration. People today expect instant gratification when they step on the accelerator.
The trouble with direct valve actuation is making an actuator that's fast enough, powerful enough, small enough, heat-tolerant enough, and reliable enough to do the job. Cheaply. This is not easy. Prototypes have been built, but it's still not something that's easy to do. BMW did quite a bit of work in this direction, but backed off to their "Valvetronic" scheme, which still has a camshaft with other components to give some adjustment potential.
Most of the existing schemes for tweaking valve timing still involve camshafts, but there's an additional mechanical linkage which allows adjustment of phase angle, valve travel, or both. That's an idea which goes back to steam engine design. Most of the gear on the side of a steam locomotive is there to adjust valve timing. Steam engines are controlled by valve duty cycle, not throttling. This was the original pulse-width-modulation system. On steam engines, valve phase can be adjusted far enough to reverse the engine, which is how locomotives back up. Some newer marine diesels have that feature, too. Eliminates the need for a reverse gear.
So this isn't a new idea. It's an old idea that's hard to make work cost-effectively. Somebody may crack this thing; it's a tough mechanical engineering problem, but not an impossible one.
Wikia was supposed to be a new search engine. But it's really just a free hosting service for wikis. The section that gets the most traffic is Wookiepedia, which Wikia took over and infested with ads. Wikia seems to be turning into a place where the fancruft kicked out of Wikipedia can flourish. This is probably a good thing.
So it would make sense for Lucas to acquire Wikia, and thus acquire control of the fanbase, which can then be monetized. Wikia's ads are for minor companies and are placed on irrelevant articles. Lucas's operation, which understands marketing, could do better.
Lucas might even be able to unload the leftover Jar-Jar merchandise that way.
That has it right. The rate structure was set up in a way such that you don't make money off the solar panels unless you have enough of them to cover your peak daytime load.
This actually makes sense. It encourages people to install enough panels, keeping this from being merely symbolic. The problem is that, with current panel costs, efficiencies, and roof space, installing enough panels to cover the peak daytime load is tough.
Maybe, rather than focusing on houses, this should be targeted to flat-roofed commercial and industrial buildings. There's no reason that most of the roof space of a mall can't be covered with racks of angled solar panels, enough to power the air conditioning load.
That should really be the goal for California - power the peak air conditioning load of Southern California entirely from solar power.
Having totally botched deployment of the "applet" thing with Java (to be fair, Microsoft sabotaged that in IE), Sun is trying again. As if anybody cared.
JavaScript isn't really that bad. There are about a half dozen known serious problems with JavaScript and browser support for it, and they're getting fixed. The Tamarin just-in-time compiler is in test, and the speed problem will soon be solved.
Most of the real trouble comes from the CSS div/float/clear model of layout, which just isn't enough to insure that everything ends up in a reasonable place. Not having a grid model was too restrictive. Manipulating "div" items dynamically tends to result in brittle web page designs that break easily. To get around that, you almost have to code up a layout engine in Javascript, which is silly. So there's something of a move back to table based layout, a plethora of frameworks to paper over the troubles with the "div" model, and meanwhile the CSS theorists take their model back to the shop for rework.
I have a feeling that banning previews for _Oceans 13_ will only help its draw,
Yes, it's one of those movies that makes you ask "Why bother?". The original Oceans 11 was a vehicle for Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. So this is the second sequel of a remake. For a second-rate heist movie.
Maybe they're trying to break the record for second-rate sequels, currently held by "Police Academy 7".
The best idea so far in this direction was a scheme where, when you used a credit card number on line, your bank automatically called your cell phone, and you got a voice or text message saying "XYZ.com wants to charge your credit card $221.45. If you're making that purchase on line right now, and this is OK, press 1. If this is not OK with you, press 2."
Merchants hated the idea. But that's the right way to go.
That's the last line of the article. Really.
Remember, WalMart Music is at $0.88 per song. Increasing the price much beyond that will drive customers to WalMart.
The RIAA members have very little leverage against WalMart. WalMart sells over 40% of the RIAA's market volume. But music is a minor item to WalMart; they use it mostly as a traffic builder for their stores.
The record companies can, of course, send someone down to WalMart in Bentonville, to sit in the waiting room to wait their turn with a buyer on the Corridor of Doom to discuss raising prices. Which is not likely to work.
I'm not even seeing porn spam much any more. It's the same old stock pump and dump scams and that "discount pharmacy" guy, day in and day out, all with random headings. That may be because the upstream spam filters are dropping anything with a link to a known annoyance site, though.
I don't think much spam is aimed at kids any more. Most of the spam I get (after ordinary spam filtering) is either for 1) Viagra, or 2) penny stocks. Neither subject is likely to interest kids much.
Looking at the last ten spams in the trash:
None of these are "harmful to children". They're mostly aimed at adults with room-temperature IQs.
There have been huge changes to Blender over time. For example, the physics engine in the game engine was replaced with a much better one. The original poster is apparently wound up about some XML import/export thing, which is minor. You can write Blender import/export filters in Python, and many such filters exist.
Blender has some problems, but converting its files to an XML format isn't one of them.
This isn't that new. In fact, it's rather like Tandem's file system from the 1980s. It's good that people are thinking about this. Traditional UNIX file system semantics are incredibly dumb; no locking, no transactions, and no guarantees. Really, if you're looking into reliability, find out how Tandem did it. Tandem systems routinely ran for years, in some cases decades, without crashing. Even during reconfigurations and hardware upgrades.
To me, the real "layering" issue is that the file system is in the kernel. If it were simply an application one talks to by message passing, as it is in QNX, replacing the file system wouldn't be a big deal.
This Wall Street Journal article indicated it was happening back in March. AT&T has removed the Yahoo logo from their trucks. But so far, no official breakup.
There's standard hardware for this sort of thing. You can get little industrial I/O units with Ethernet interfaces. They're little boxes with an Ethernet connector on one side, and digital, analog, or thermocouple inputs on the other side. They're built to hold up in a factory floor environment, and easily replaced if damaged. You can even get wireless ones.
If you're going to send signals around a plant, 100baseT is actually quite noise-resistant. More so than TTL signals or even RS-232, because it's a twisted-pair differential signal.
To talk to these things, LabView is often a good option. You can create panels of dials, gauges, and graphs with little effort, log and analyze data, and give the plant operators the tools to see what's going on.
AT&T dumped their co-branding arrangement with Yahoo, "AT&T Yahoo DSL". It wasn't adding any useful value to their DSL service. Why at this late date does Microsoft want Yahoo?
The Disney characters seem to be confined to a small section of the park. The park's iconic characters seem to be cats with big pointy ears.
The Beijing park has Vegas showgirls. They didn't copy that from Disney.
It's an older park, from one of China's less creative periods. Remember, it was built after the crackdown on creativity towards the end of the Mao era, when China lost a whole generation of young creative people. That's over. We're seeing quite good design out of China today. The next time that park gets a refresh, they may well dump the Disney stuff.
Click here to turn in your employer. Select the button that says "I am reporting an organization using pirated software on its own computers. (You may be eligible for a reward.)". Or call, toll-free, 1-888 NO PIRACY. Operators are waiting to take your call.
There's even a PowerPoint presentation which explains all this, titled "Don't Play Roulette With Your Business" (And it plays fine in OpenOffice Impress.)
Also, print out this Microsoft article about "reduced functionality mode", which is where your pirated version of Microsoft Office will probably end up after a while, unable to create new documents.
When I was a young'un, I created a Quake map of the local Laser Tag joint.
The Laser Tag outlet in Redwood City, California once had a sign reading "Serious Fun with a Laser Gun". In late 2001, this was changed to "Serious Fun with a Laser".
Wrong answer. Too many little turbines not generating enough energy each. Worse, gearing a number of turbines together when they don't get uniform wind pressure means some of them are just sources of drag.
Progress in wind turbines has been through scaling them up. The 50KW - 100 KW machines of the 1970s never paid for themselves. Somewhere above 500KW, the economics start to work, and farms of megawatt and up machines are quite profitable. Here's General Electric's 2.5 megawatt wind turbine, which is typical of current large wind turbines. Total worldwide wind generation capacity is about 75 gigawatts. Wind power is now a serious energy source because, at last, the units are big enough to generate serious power.
Actually, that site got a "no rating" because it's listed in the Open Directory in a category that wasn't unambiguously commercial. That's not bad, just neutral. If you get the red circle with the bar through it, that's bad.
If we can find the name and address of the owner of the site on a commercial site, it gets a "?" rating, since that's required for businesses. A green checkmark requires third party verification of business identity, either via SSL or some other source. Right now, as well as SSL certs, we recognize and check BBBonline seals. We're looking into a plan where third party payment services verify the identity of their payment customers, for exactly the situation described here.
We recommend to small businesses that they sign up with BBBonline. It's cheaper than an SSL cert, and their seal actually means some standards have been met.
The basic criterion is "if someone needed to sue you, could they find you"?
At some point, ads get too intrusive. Some notable failures:
Besides, music already has ads. 50 Cent mentioned 20 brands in his songs in 2005, according to American Brandstand. "Mercedes emerged as the top brand of the year, and 50 Cent outbranded the rest to become the top brand-dropping artist... Meanwhile, weapon brands surged..."
I want one. I need a low-end laptop with Linux. Nothing all that elaborate, just something for remote use, OpenOffice Impress, and stuff like that. Something with a price tag in the $600-$700 range, not the $2000 range.
And WiFi that works out of the box. That's the important thing. If you have to edit files in /etc, they've failed.
I'd like to have the name and address of every legitimate business in the United States, for web site legitimacy validation. I've purchased databases which contain an approximation to that information, but that's mostly phone book data, not Government data.
More business records need to be easily available. This varies from state to state now. Corporation records are usually freely available, although a few states (notably Delaware) charge for address information. Every US state has their own format; I've yet to find two states using the same output format on their web site. That's a hassle, but can be overcome.
D/B/A name and business license data is even harder to get. It's public record information, and you can get it from data brokers, but it's fairly expensive and not current.
It's easier for some major countries outside the US. The UK has centralized business registration at Companies House. You can get this kind of information for all the G-7 countries (although not for Russia) and most of the major exporting countries, including China.
Those things all understand more or less the same command set. There's a "USB Video Device Class Specification". The current revision is 1.1. This Linux driver effort isn't some huge collection of drivers, which would be silly and a maintenance headache. It's a generic driver.
A few years back, I wrote a generic Firewire camera driver for QNX. It's really not that hard. These things self-identify when they hot-plug, and you can read their configuration and capabilities over the bus interface. The USB camera spec, unlike the FireWire camera spec, has some annoying Microsoft-specific stuff in it, but it's not all that pervasive.