Another problem is "rings". The rotor has flat barriers at the points of the triangle, and rings around the two faces of the rotor. These wear very quickly, and need to be replaced.
That used to be true of the wankel engines Mazda used back in the late 60's-70s. They made money selling new engines, not rebuilding, because nobody knew how to do it. Furthermore, the problem with the seals isn't that they wear out. It's that they were brittle from the get-go, and they become more so after tens of thousands of miles, so they would break. This could happen because a little carbon built up around the sparkplug area, increasing the compression of the engine, thus increasing the probability of detonation, the lean running state of the engines compounding that problem. Those brittle seals fly apart if detonation occours, and cheap gas isn't a friend to your engine. Furthermore, the early cars suffered cooling problems, causing the engine to overheat and the sidedeals to let coolant in, again resulting in bad stuff. The rest explains itself. Similar things can happen to piston engines, and guess what the result is?!
All of that stuff has been worked out since the mid 80's, and it's even better today. The seals aren't as brittle, and people who work on those engines know what they're doing. A properly maintained and non-abused mid 80's RX-7 will go 200k without any engine work, and there are some out there. Most cars were abused and not maintained, it's not a suprise they break down. So some engines may be more fickle than others. It's a reality, but people who love rotary engines are willing to deal with that. Saying that rotarys have poor reliability is the furthest thing from the truth today--unless you abuse the heck out of your engine, in which case most factory piston engines would similarly self-destruct under the same circumstances.
The thermal-reactor "afterburner", as you call it, was done away with ages ago, and then we had lean-burn, and now we have a regular cat like everyone else.
Plus, you have to consider that for the displacement of the engine, they put out tons of power. The Honda S2000 takes 2.2L to put out 237HP, about the same as an RX-8, which displaces 1.3L. Incidentally, the S2000 also revs to 9,000 RPM and gets similar gas mileage, if a bit better, which is undoubtedly because it gets to take advantage of variable valve timing. The S2000 cots a fair bit more, though. Anyway, arguing over fuel economy for a spots car is stupid, I think. It dosen't cost that much more to power them than the regular car, and if you can afford the car and the insurance you can afford the fuel.
Personally, I think all these people going on about hybrids need to look at diesel hybrid systems. Diesel-electric is used everywhere else from trains to cruise and freight ships.
I think their only hope would be to partner with nVidia and try to claw their way back into the visualization market, while they still have some reputation left. Some new high-end graphics hardware on a 2+2 itanium board might get them some attention, maybe enough to leverage a round of financing.
Exactly... But I think they should stay the heck away from itanium. It's going nowhere in the long term, and like you say, HP has them beat in that market anyway.
SGI should continue going on with their servers and huge visualization systems, but they should partner with both nVidia and AMD, and one of the premium PC motherboard manufacturers, and should market motherboards, graphics cards, and complete systems ala Alienware to the medium-high end PC desktop and Server market... The revenue would be used to prop the company back up.
There is more of a market for high end gaming rigs today than there ever was for workstations. They could easily do 200 million of business in a year (which is what AlienWare did last year). Give it a couple years to start, and it could happen--if they pushed compelling products at prices that aren't insane. They sort of missed the boat back when they started switching to Intel. They had the right idea, but poor follow through. They though that they could ship commodity hardware at their usual prices... And they did, but they didn't ship many. Whoever has been in charge of the SGI pricing schemes should be shot. Apple had the right idea, make it compelling and somewhat affordable, and people will buy it.
If SGI made a 2x2 AMD 64 system that could take gobs of ram and had high speed busses and memory systems, tweaked video cards, etc, they could make a killing, and they wouldn't even have to do anything but help design it and slap their badge on it. If SGI made an nVidia graphics card and an nVidia motherboard (with SoundStorm, please), I'd buy a dozen! Heck, I'd buy it if it were $70 more than the nearest competitor, probably even if it didn't have any clear benefit!
It seemed to me as if they had the same problem that Sun currently has, not being able to decide what business they're in.
I don't think that's quite true at all. I don't think Sun has been quite as focused on the midrange Server market as they are right now... If your business runs Java apps, their servers are pretty compelling.
It's just as well that the old ways at SGI are dying. It's an amazing thing to me that a company which is continually managed so ineptly and myopically is still hanging on at all!
Companies, like countries, tend to talk the toughest when they're in trouble. Seeing their domains as God-given rights instead of something they had to work for, making threats they can't back up, getting into fights with much smaller competitors that it seems like they should be able to win easily but somehow can't...
Yep. It appears that only thing left is for the Germans to take over.
So blown-in-half guy gets aorta and cava put back together; bone grafting and wiring or rodding his spinal column and an anastamosis of the spinal cord or cord amputation; clean up the damage to the kidneys and pancreas; do splenectomy if needed; multiple gut anastamoses and/or resections; and layered closures of the whole body wall. Nothing we don't do now - we just don't have time to do it.
I'd guess that one of the big reasons Wal-mart doesn't carry 'explicit lyrics' versions of CDs is because of liability. Selling one of those to a minor will get you fired just as quickly as selling them beer.
Meh... Don'tcha think it's a bit more likely they do this because it upholds the "conservative family values" image they work so hard to maintain?
Anyway, I don't know of a federal law that makes it illegal to sell such music to minors. I know some localities used to have obscenity laws that made it a misdemenor to sell music that was branded 'obscene' to an adult, and a felony to sell to a minor. I know some groups pushed like hell for a similar federal law in the late 80's/early 90's, but I don't think any of that nonsense stuck around.
Gitmo would be like staying at a 4 star resort on the French Rivera compared to anything China has to offer... And even that assumes the court dosen't decide to have you executed so they can harvest your organs.
You know, the scary thing is that they're doing this so they can eliminate *TRACTION CONTROL* from the race, and make it more of a level field, or so they say.
Anyone who thinks this is about cutting costs is a moron. Seriously, even if the freaking ECU and associated stuff cost $300,000 (which it dosen't) it would still be a drop in the bucket for ANY F1 team considering the millions and millions of dollars it takes to engineer a car that will compete, which will include hiring a good driver, a good crew, abuttload of engineers, logistics people, etc.
I can see where they're coming from with the idea that having all the electronics basically standard would be a good thing... But Microsoft? My god! The idea of having anything related to Windows tied to the ECU makes me shiver.
Hah! You say civil disobediance is a spit on the face of Democracy? I say Democracy cannot exist without civil disobediance. I say the two are forever juxtaposed. Civil disobediance is the breast from which Democracy suckles. Apathy and capitulation are the sustenances of tyranny.
One day a few years ago I was crusing down I-70 outside of Denver going eastbound in the left most lane, I was doing around 70MPH early in the morning. A guy in a Geo Metro, or some other ultra-small, car *passes me* in the middle lane, playing no less than a goddamned recorder! You know, the flute like thing with holes that you cover with your finger--the plastic thing they let 2nd graders blow on and make a cacophony? Bingo. He was playing the recorder and driving with his knees. He even had a piece of sheet music propped up on the steering column. No shit.
We could take all of the stories about women doing their makeup, guys shaving, and all that sort of stuff, and combine them... But it'll still never be as good as my story. Seriously, the only thing that can beat it is if someone spots a musical driver playing an oboe, a sax, a chello, a trumpet, a tuba or a trombone, snare drum or some other instrument that is larger than a stupid recorder...
I'd be most impressed if someone spotted a tympani player, like on a bus or something.
Or you can skip that all together and go to the local crazy vietnam vet computer/HAM radio guru. He'll do all of the above and he'll be most entertaining, to boot. You know the one, he has distasteful words tattoed onto his forearms, smokes like a steamboat, and tells jokes that would make most standup comedians blush... You can never hear enough jokes about ex-wives, cunts, fags, and stories about this Charlie guy, but maybe that's just me.
The real bitch will be when games start to require DX10. Frankly, it's the only thing that will make many people to upgrade to vista, and MS knows it. I hope OpenGL and an open SDL type will be available to compete for with DX10 in the eyes of developers.
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Why must all anti-ATI comments end with "on Linux" ?
You're absolutely right, he should have left it simply, "...because ATI drivers are horsecrap." because it's true.
Another problem is "rings". The rotor has flat barriers at the points of the triangle, and rings around the two faces of the rotor. These wear very quickly, and need to be replaced.
That used to be true of the wankel engines Mazda used back in the late 60's-70s. They made money selling new engines, not rebuilding, because nobody knew how to do it. Furthermore, the problem with the seals isn't that they wear out. It's that they were brittle from the get-go, and they become more so after tens of thousands of miles, so they would break. This could happen because a little carbon built up around the sparkplug area, increasing the compression of the engine, thus increasing the probability of detonation, the lean running state of the engines compounding that problem. Those brittle seals fly apart if detonation occours, and cheap gas isn't a friend to your engine. Furthermore, the early cars suffered cooling problems, causing the engine to overheat and the sidedeals to let coolant in, again resulting in bad stuff. The rest explains itself. Similar things can happen to piston engines, and guess what the result is?!
All of that stuff has been worked out since the mid 80's, and it's even better today. The seals aren't as brittle, and people who work on those engines know what they're doing. A properly maintained and non-abused mid 80's RX-7 will go 200k without any engine work, and there are some out there. Most cars were abused and not maintained, it's not a suprise they break down. So some engines may be more fickle than others. It's a reality, but people who love rotary engines are willing to deal with that. Saying that rotarys have poor reliability is the furthest thing from the truth today--unless you abuse the heck out of your engine, in which case most factory piston engines would similarly self-destruct under the same circumstances.
The thermal-reactor "afterburner", as you call it, was done away with ages ago, and then we had lean-burn, and now we have a regular cat like everyone else.
Plus, you have to consider that for the displacement of the engine, they put out tons of power. The Honda S2000 takes 2.2L to put out 237HP, about the same as an RX-8, which displaces 1.3L. Incidentally, the S2000 also revs to 9,000 RPM and gets similar gas mileage, if a bit better, which is undoubtedly because it gets to take advantage of variable valve timing. The S2000 cots a fair bit more, though. Anyway, arguing over fuel economy for a spots car is stupid, I think. It dosen't cost that much more to power them than the regular car, and if you can afford the car and the insurance you can afford the fuel.
Personally, I think all these people going on about hybrids need to look at diesel hybrid systems. Diesel-electric is used everywhere else from trains to cruise and freight ships.
Yeah, but that excuse only works if said audiobook reader is blind.
The odds are actually overwhelming that the new team is better than the old one. ;-)
You know what they say, the good thing about being at the bottom is you have nowhere to go but up!
But I guess I shouldn't be bitter, they gave us XFS. That's nice.
I think their only hope would be to partner with nVidia and try to claw their way back into the visualization market, while they still have some reputation left. Some new high-end graphics hardware on a 2+2 itanium board might get them some attention, maybe enough to leverage a round of financing.
Exactly... But I think they should stay the heck away from itanium. It's going nowhere in the long term, and like you say, HP has them beat in that market anyway.
SGI should continue going on with their servers and huge visualization systems, but they should partner with both nVidia and AMD, and one of the premium PC motherboard manufacturers, and should market motherboards, graphics cards, and complete systems ala Alienware to the medium-high end PC desktop and Server market... The revenue would be used to prop the company back up.
There is more of a market for high end gaming rigs today than there ever was for workstations. They could easily do 200 million of business in a year (which is what AlienWare did last year). Give it a couple years to start, and it could happen--if they pushed compelling products at prices that aren't insane. They sort of missed the boat back when they started switching to Intel. They had the right idea, but poor follow through. They though that they could ship commodity hardware at their usual prices... And they did, but they didn't ship many. Whoever has been in charge of the SGI pricing schemes should be shot. Apple had the right idea, make it compelling and somewhat affordable, and people will buy it.
If SGI made a 2x2 AMD 64 system that could take gobs of ram and had high speed busses and memory systems, tweaked video cards, etc, they could make a killing, and they wouldn't even have to do anything but help design it and slap their badge on it. If SGI made an nVidia graphics card and an nVidia motherboard (with SoundStorm, please), I'd buy a dozen! Heck, I'd buy it if it were $70 more than the nearest competitor, probably even if it didn't have any clear benefit!
It seemed to me as if they had the same problem that Sun currently has, not being able to decide what business they're in.
I don't think that's quite true at all. I don't think Sun has been quite as focused on the midrange Server market as they are right now... If your business runs Java apps, their servers are pretty compelling.
It's just as well that the old ways at SGI are dying. It's an amazing thing to me that a company which is continually managed so ineptly and myopically is still hanging on at all!
It's been a while since I've cleaned my monitor., I have to admit, so thanks for giving me a reason!
Companies, like countries, tend to talk the toughest when they're in trouble. Seeing their domains as God-given rights instead of something they had to work for, making threats they can't back up, getting into fights with much smaller competitors that it seems like they should be able to win easily but somehow can't ...
Yep. It appears that only thing left is for the Germans to take over.
So blown-in-half guy gets aorta and cava put back together; bone grafting and wiring or rodding his spinal column and an anastamosis of the spinal cord or cord amputation; clean up the damage to the kidneys and pancreas; do splenectomy if needed; multiple gut anastamoses and/or resections; and layered closures of the whole body wall. Nothing we don't do now - we just don't have time to do it.
Blow-in-half Guy is The Six Million Dollar Man!
*queue bionic sound effects*
So now we can look forward to a spam filtering solution that actively searches for spammers and kills them?
Hooah! First one to hook this up with an MLRS gets a cookie!
I'd guess that one of the big reasons Wal-mart doesn't carry 'explicit lyrics' versions of CDs is because of liability. Selling one of those to a minor will get you fired just as quickly as selling them beer.
Meh... Don'tcha think it's a bit more likely they do this because it upholds the "conservative family values" image they work so hard to maintain?
Anyway, I don't know of a federal law that makes it illegal to sell such music to minors. I know some localities used to have obscenity laws that made it a misdemenor to sell music that was branded 'obscene' to an adult, and a felony to sell to a minor. I know some groups pushed like hell for a similar federal law in the late 80's/early 90's, but I don't think any of that nonsense stuck around.
So, can anyone point out such a beast?
I'd be nice if we could use something different to distingish between "some" GPS and the "American" GPS.
Besides, it would be a bitch to change all of the stationaty.
Gitmo would be like staying at a 4 star resort on the French Rivera compared to anything China has to offer... And even that assumes the court dosen't decide to have you executed so they can harvest your organs.
Grat place they chose to have the Olympics at!
I don't know how greedy this guy is, but yes, he may end up with a paperclip instead of the world :-)
I wager the president will soon be wondering why he's out of a job, but he'll be glad of his newly acquired pair of calf length gym socks.
Yeah, and I even mispelled disobedience multiple times!
D'oh!
You know, the scary thing is that they're doing this so they can eliminate *TRACTION CONTROL* from the race, and make it more of a level field, or so they say.
Anyone who thinks this is about cutting costs is a moron. Seriously, even if the freaking ECU and associated stuff cost $300,000 (which it dosen't) it would still be a drop in the bucket for ANY F1 team considering the millions and millions of dollars it takes to engineer a car that will compete, which will include hiring a good driver, a good crew, abuttload of engineers, logistics people, etc.
I can see where they're coming from with the idea that having all the electronics basically standard would be a good thing... But Microsoft? My god! The idea of having anything related to Windows tied to the ECU makes me shiver.
Hah! You say civil disobediance is a spit on the face of Democracy? I say Democracy cannot exist without civil disobediance. I say the two are forever juxtaposed. Civil disobediance is the breast from which Democracy suckles. Apathy and capitulation are the sustenances of tyranny.
Hell, I didn't know that he did all the voices till you just said so, and I have damn good hearing!
One day a few years ago I was crusing down I-70 outside of Denver going eastbound in the left most lane, I was doing around 70MPH early in the morning. A guy in a Geo Metro, or some other ultra-small, car *passes me* in the middle lane, playing no less than a goddamned recorder! You know, the flute like thing with holes that you cover with your finger--the plastic thing they let 2nd graders blow on and make a cacophony? Bingo. He was playing the recorder and driving with his knees. He even had a piece of sheet music propped up on the steering column. No shit.
We could take all of the stories about women doing their makeup, guys shaving, and all that sort of stuff, and combine them... But it'll still never be as good as my story. Seriously, the only thing that can beat it is if someone spots a musical driver playing an oboe, a sax, a chello, a trumpet, a tuba or a trombone, snare drum or some other instrument that is larger than a stupid recorder...
I'd be most impressed if someone spotted a tympani player, like on a bus or something.
Or you can skip that all together and go to the local crazy vietnam vet computer/HAM radio guru. He'll do all of the above and he'll be most entertaining, to boot. You know the one, he has distasteful words tattoed onto his forearms, smokes like a steamboat, and tells jokes that would make most standup comedians blush... You can never hear enough jokes about ex-wives, cunts, fags, and stories about this Charlie guy, but maybe that's just me.
I was kind of thinking the same thing...what if what we put up there to 'block' the sun a little...got stuck??
Yeah, that would be a *scary* thing... It's not like any of the industrialized nations couldn't shoot it down or anything...
Oh my, I nearly soiled my trousers!
The real bitch will be when games start to require DX10. Frankly, it's the only thing that will make many people to upgrade to vista, and MS knows it. I hope OpenGL and an open SDL type will be available to compete for with DX10 in the eyes of developers.
holding out 2 strangely colored pills.
Lemme guess, the colors were Salmon Pink and Sapphire Blue? If so, RMS might have been watching too much Queer Eye for the Wannabe Messiah Figure.
Just sayin'
...but... why?
'Cause it's much easier to destroy your evidence^W data when the feds come over to be party poopers.