Ethernet is good, but it does not support isochronous transfer.
Of course not. But be honest. How often is that a critical requirement? Like I said, Firewire has been relegated
With Firewire, isochronous mode creates dedicated timeslots for devices that produce steady streams of data. DV and DCAM camera interfaces, multiple ADAC audio interfaces, you can theoretically load the bus to very close to 400MBit, and never have to worry about collisions or jitter, indeterminism, latency, or packet loss.
Firewire may be able to guarantee 400Mbit/s, but that's not much of an advantage when Ethernet can provide nearly 1000Mbit/s.
Jitter, packet loss, et al., are non-sequiters. They are already handled appropriately and reliably. Collisions are a thing of the past, you can't even find gigabit hubs.
Latency/isochronous transfer is an issue to ONLY a small bit of studio equipment... Which is where Firewire has been relegated to. And with such a small niche, it may go out of fashion there in short order, as other protocols that have better penetration get slightly expanded to eat away at that niche. eg. HDMI, SDI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc.
DV cameras could benefit greatly from the faster-than-realtime transfer that ethernet offers and seem likely to switch away from Firewire in the near future. Eliminating the fixed-data rate realtime transfer would also allow for the use of much better (VBR) compression, with the potential for higher capacity on the same media, and longer battery life as well.
Not to mention that USB1 is really just a user friendly replacement for the old reliable RS232, and PS/2.
..and IEEE 1284 (Parallel ports), and SCSI-1 (see: Pre-USB scanners, CD Burners, HDDs), and PCMCIA (see WiFi, Flash, Floppies, Zip drives, etc.), and...
Firewire seems to be fading into smaller niches though. I don't want to daisy chain hard drives, so eSATA will do fine, and eSATA does allow the use of port multipliers, one port still does five drives.
It's not USB2 or SATA that cannibalized Firewire's supposed market... It's Ethernet.
Much better range, lower price, more devices, equally high speed, similar (controller) requirements, easier device sharing, etc.
High-end printers, scanners, CD/DVD duplicators, studio (audio/video) equipment, hard drive arrays, etc. They all have gigabit ethernet connectors now.
Ethernet ate the high-end, USB ate the low-end, Firewire got left out in the cold, with just a few niche applications where Ethernet is inconvenient and its benefits don't apply, and yet USB isn't quite fast/flexible enough. That basically means just digital camcorders, and a handful of studio equipment...
For example, under a "right to roam", all a thief need do is come onto isolated land and wait for the opportunity to steal fuel or equipment (tractors and harvesters are very expensive).
While under a private property system... the thief needs to wait at the property line for the opportunity to steal...
So, what, you think you shouldn't be more cautious than usual around people with guns,
Absolutely not. If you get scared at the sight of guns, it's just a case of the sight of a firearm stirring you out of your happy ignorance at your own vulnerability.
You should be more cautious around people with cars. They kill far more people than guns. Yet few worry about being around cars, and fewer feel the need to mention it.
You should assume everyone is armed, because anyone may be. Also... be much more scared of the people who are concealing the fact that they are armed. In either case, you won't know you should have been cautious, until it's too late. And finally, a guy with tools is every bit as dangerous as a guy with a shotgun.
with a USB cable plugged into a free USB port and the other end plugged into the USB-styled powerport, you can carry your laptop around forever and never run out of power! I think the Chinese are onto something there...
Bah! I've been doing the same thing with my APC UPSes for decades. And they can power anything that plugs-in, not just laptops!
Old-line American audio equipment manufacturers like Marantz sold their names and are now just marketing fronts.
So? You get a crappy product from a formerly good brand, and you buy elsewhere in the future. Isn't that what branding is FOR? It's underhanded, but how is this a problem?
The point being, a particular model from a particular maker may be good quality and worth the money, but you can no longer depend upon branding as a reliable indicator of quality.
I would say just the opposite... Now that millions of new brands are popping up all the time, and making crap, while claiming it's pate, is the ideal time to start paying attention to brand names. You can no longer walk into your favorite store and assume everything on the shelves will work just fine, and as described.
You need to do your research first before you plunk down your money (good advice in any event, but it's especially true today.)
Yes, always good advice. You should be sure to try out that pack of gum before you buy it. You should test drive any potential vehicles for 20 years to make sure you know they will hold up. Clearly, that's the real answer. Ignore brand names.
Not dissimilar to the way Americans have been hoodwinked into changing their engine oil every few weeks. Guess what? In a modern car, the oil only needs changing every 20,000 miles or so. Check the manufacturer's service recommendations for any car sold outside the USA.
Your tin-foil hat is on too tight...
Let's see... According to ford.co.uk, maintenance on a Focus is every "12,500 miles / 12 months". According to Ford.com, it's every "15k" "miles" / "or every 6 months". And ford.co.uk lists a lot more as 10k miles than 12. Sounds like Europeans are getting screwed at least as much as Americans...
What if there aren't habitable planets in the neighborhood?
Once you've got the technology to hop to the next solar system, terraforming isn't going to be a major problem for you...
I don't understand why we'd ever value such a huge push. I would rather think that we would hit the colonize phase, then upon establishing a colony we'd expand it, until we hit a resource cap, and them further colonize.
This was just a theoretical example of how quickly life-forms can spread through the universe without Hollywood-movie propulsion systems. The motivation is left entirely as an exercise for the reader.
I'm sure you could easily conceive of some circumstance where a fairly small number of people are capable of taping the full resources of a planet, if not a solar system.
In a sufficiently advanced scenario for this, I would think birth rates would be low, thanks to better quality of life, and extended quantity of life (if you live 100+ years, why bother having children young?).
When there is a need for large numbers of offspring, it won't be difficult to motivate people to oblige. Providing monetary incentives, while, at the same time, eliminating as much of the burden of raising children as possible, would easily motivate a significant portion of the population. Not like people need much motivation in the first place.
Unless someone finds an end-run around Relativity, interstellar travel is going to be slow,
Umm... Not really.
Interstellar colonization could be extremely fast. What would be "slow" is the current model of a few people getting in a ship, and traveling to distant solar systems.
If, instead, you work out a short-hop model, you can have exponentially increasing rates of colonization.
You just need to send a small city's population on a big ship, travel for 5 years to the nearest solar system, colonize, and then start building more identical ships, and start the process over with their children... Each generation only spends 5 years of their lives on a ship, and a few more harnessing the resources of their new world and setting up the same system for their offspring.
Such time-frames are doable for anybody (hey, college is 4 years... why not do it on a space ship?), and each generation results in an exponentially increasing numbers of colonization. As quickly as humans reproduce, it wouldn't be long before we've got a massive chunk of the galaxy partially populated.
Every 20 years, each groups sends out 4 more ships to colonize another solar system. With this model, in 300 years, we could have a million solar systems colonized. Of course, reality is likely to reduce that figure substantially, but it's still an unbelievably fast spreading of humanity.
Don't you think that if it did work, more people would do it, and it would be built into modern cars?
Now THIS is BS. There are innumerable reasons a technology, which can improve fuel efficiency in modern vehicles, might not be used. Things like weight, maintenance, reliability, etc.
The fact that superchargers aren't used in mass-produced automobiles is evidence enough of that. Higher compression ratios and water injection would be a welcome improvement.
without knowing what process they claim to use to separate the hydrogen from the water, how can we reliably debunk it as not obeying the laws of physics?
"Conservation of Energy". There is no magic in the universe that allows for some magical "process" to get more energy out of a system than you've put in.
Just as using the energy from a falling rock won't give me any more energy than I put-in to lift it to that position... you can't possibly get as much energy out of recombining H2 and O as you put in to separate the two, in the first place. You would need an infusion of external energy, such as plugging it in, or using solar power. In either case, it's then a car that runs on grid electricity or solar power, NOT water. What's more, the efficiency of either is terrible, and would make for a woefully impractical vehicle.
A few decades ago, people claimed it was impossible to go to the moon...
Those were people who didn't understand the basic laws of physics... That's the exact OPPOSITE of the situation here...
The earliest physicists KNEW it was possible to go to the moon. See: Newton's Third Law
I'm not sure how you'd know unless you run the BSA's special licensing overwatch software.
For the OS (which is mainly what we're discussing here) as of Windows 2000, just visiting the Windows Update website and running their required "genuine advantage" plug-in is a reasonably good indicator if a piece of software is illegal.
While there are numerous ways around Microsoft's activation, and genuine advantage, they aren't something that is fully automatic... They leave tell-tale signs that I can easily pick up on (eg. improper checksum on winlogon.exe, causing problems after a new service pack, etc., etc.), and are at least easily visible to even the casual user (who has used at least one legit copy before...) in the event of re-installation.
More than that, however, I am usually quite aware of the details of their software licensing... Whenever I need to get access to installation media, I often see a print-out of the site-licensing agreements, or can at least pretty easily count how many pressed Windows CDs there are with the proper holograms and the like, how many booklets they have in their possession, and perhaps how many systems are lacking a Windows OEM sticker, with (unique) key.
Don't believe this assurance. The number of companies that do this is NOT small. In fact, it is nearly universal. I deal with the after-effects of a lot of small and medium-sized computer makers and consultants, and every single one of the people I deal with asks if we can "get us a copy" of this or that software like their last guy did.
After 10 years in the business, dealing with all the machines in the dark corners of innumerable businesses, large and small, I've seen only a very small amount of pirated software.
They'll talk a good line, but every single small time computer maker I've ever dealt with will install unlicensed software if you know how/who to ask in the organization.
Now THAT I do believe... In any company with several employees, you can probably find one with no regard for the legality of the software they install.
but this is like someone setting up a watch store that sells fake Rolexes.
The analogy isn't anywhere close... These aren't software stores that have boxes of counterfeit products on their shelves. These are COMPUTER HARDWARE stores, which just happen to bundle unlicensed copies of Windows with the hardware they sell.
I can assure you, there is a very small number of such companies, and they only get away with it because they are small enough that even Microsoft and law enforcement doesn't care enough to put any effort into closing them down.
Also how about Pirate Amnesty, where people can trade in their pirated copy of Microsoft software in exchange for a discount on genuine Microsoft software?
Microsoft does EXACTLY THAT. When using Microsoft's website to download updates, on a computer with a corrupt registry, I was redirected to a page that offers to sell you a "license" for Windows XP for HALF the retail price, and offering to mail you a CD shortly there-after. As someone who paid full retail price (for Windows 2000, actually, I only have an OEM copy of XP), I was rather pissed about that. It seems pirates get all the breaks, and honest customers get screwed.
but the reality is that there's no way that software companies make software available via a third party for 1/3 of the cost they're selling it on their own website.
In fact "OEM" copies of most software often sell for LESS than 1/3rd of the retail price.
Photoshop isn't one of the apps that normally get bundled by OEMs, however, so it's unlikely there's any special OEM pricing for most Adobe products.
So any additional weight is not detrimental in the hills,
Only in a magical, frictionless, theoretical world. Here on Earth, it's not a zero-sum game at all.
The generators in the Prius can generate up to 60hp. This is nearly equal to the 74hp that the engine is able to produce,
The Prius is the single, exceptional example. It is also, I believe, the only case where a direct comparison to a conventional equivalent is not available, so we don't know exactly how much weight the Prius HSD adds. Lacking such figures, it's impossible to make any real judgements.
Considering that auto manufacturers have only been working on hybrids for approximately 10 years and has only recently really begun to gain marketshare, while they have been working on the ICE for much longer, it's easy to see that we still have a ways to go before hybrid technology begins to reach it's peak.
That's simply "magical thinking". Electric motors and batteries have been around for much longer than internal combustion engines. You can't get electric motors to be any more efficient, battery technology isn't going to jump forward by leaps and bounds just because there's one more customer for the tech, and the drawbacks of hybrids are absolutely inherent.
On the way up the hills, fuel economy drops to between 28-35mpg. On the way down, fuel economy jumps to 75-99+mpg.
If you didn't have the added weight of the hybrid, fuel economy wouldn't be as bad when driving uphill in the first place. And the fuel economy when going downhill in a conventional car is equally impressive... the HSD isn't giving you a net positive at all.
Watching the energy monitor on some hills, the engine shuts off and the electric motor keeps me from losing speed (in other cars, I've gone in to neutral, the hill is not steep enough that you can maintain speed without some power) This is in spite of the fact that above 42mph in the Prius, the engine is forced to turn to keep motor generator 1 from spinning too fast.
When your engine has to be idling anyhow, it can provide a few HP without any additional fuel consumption.
I can't quite decipher what else you were trying to say here... The engine shuts off at freeway speeds, even though it's forced to stay on at freeway speeds?
And BTW, it's not torque that we care about (assuming we have a suitable transmission), it's horsepower that measures how fast you can accelerate.
The electric motors in hybrid vehicles add a minuscule amount of HP. In all hybrids that can be directly compared with a conventional alternative, it's clear that the electric motor provides a higher percentage of added weight, than it does a percent of added HP. In other words, for freeway use, it's a net HP/weight loss, not even mentioning conversion losses.
Unless you are talking about some mythical, 100% flat freeway that you never have to change speeds on. In which case, added weight from a hybrid drivetrain would make little difference in the efficiency of the platform, since the vast majority of drag on the freeway is from aerodynamic drag.
Weight makes a big difference, particularly on non-flat terrain. Remember those fuel economy figures you provided, just a few lines up? Aerodynamic drag doesn't increase as you go uphill... That difference is entirely a question of mass.
Seconds, hybrid drive trains aren't just X amount of weight in an infinitesimally small space. They take up room in the engine compartment, which means the hybrid's body needs to be designed with a larger aerodynamic footprint as well.
Unless I'm mistaken, the discussion in the other thread looks surprisingly similar with raygundan making largely the same points I am.
Indeed, he did make some of the same points, which I addressed one by one. It was intended to keep you from making the same flawed assumptions, or asking the same questions. It did not entirely work, I'm afraid.
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So when is Obama set to take over from God?
Of course not. But be honest. How often is that a critical requirement? Like I said, Firewire has been relegated
Firewire may be able to guarantee 400Mbit/s, but that's not much of an advantage when Ethernet can provide nearly 1000Mbit/s.
Jitter, packet loss, et al., are non-sequiters. They are already handled appropriately and reliably. Collisions are a thing of the past, you can't even find gigabit hubs.
Latency/isochronous transfer is an issue to ONLY a small bit of studio equipment... Which is where Firewire has been relegated to. And with such a small niche, it may go out of fashion there in short order, as other protocols that have better penetration get slightly expanded to eat away at that niche. eg. HDMI, SDI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc.
DV cameras could benefit greatly from the faster-than-realtime transfer that ethernet offers and seem likely to switch away from Firewire in the near future. Eliminating the fixed-data rate realtime transfer would also allow for the use of much better (VBR) compression, with the potential for higher capacity on the same media, and longer battery life as well.
...and game ports, and TOSLINK, and MIDI ports, and PCI slots (to a significant extent), and ADB, and infrared ports, and...
That's exactly what we had with USB 2.0... and it wasn't exactly a flaming failure.
It's not USB2 or SATA that cannibalized Firewire's supposed market... It's Ethernet.
Much better range, lower price, more devices, equally high speed, similar (controller) requirements, easier device sharing, etc.
High-end printers, scanners, CD/DVD duplicators, studio (audio/video) equipment, hard drive arrays, etc. They all have gigabit ethernet connectors now.
Ethernet ate the high-end, USB ate the low-end, Firewire got left out in the cold, with just a few niche applications where Ethernet is inconvenient and its benefits don't apply, and yet USB isn't quite fast/flexible enough. That basically means just digital camcorders, and a handful of studio equipment...
While under a private property system... the thief needs to wait at the property line for the opportunity to steal...
You have every right to have trespassers arrested. Implying that they deserve to be killed for trampling your grass, however, is going WAY too far.
Absolutely not. If you get scared at the sight of guns, it's just a case of the sight of a firearm stirring you out of your happy ignorance at your own vulnerability.
You should be more cautious around people with cars. They kill far more people than guns. Yet few worry about being around cars, and fewer feel the need to mention it.
You should assume everyone is armed, because anyone may be. Also... be much more scared of the people who are concealing the fact that they are armed. In either case, you won't know you should have been cautious, until it's too late. And finally, a guy with tools is every bit as dangerous as a guy with a shotgun.
Bah! I've been doing the same thing with my APC UPSes for decades. And they can power anything that plugs-in, not just laptops!
So? You get a crappy product from a formerly good brand, and you buy elsewhere in the future. Isn't that what branding is FOR? It's underhanded, but how is this a problem?
I would say just the opposite... Now that millions of new brands are popping up all the time, and making crap, while claiming it's pate, is the ideal time to start paying attention to brand names. You can no longer walk into your favorite store and assume everything on the shelves will work just fine, and as described.
Yes, always good advice. You should be sure to try out that pack of gum before you buy it. You should test drive any potential vehicles for 20 years to make sure you know they will hold up. Clearly, that's the real answer. Ignore brand names.
Your tin-foil hat is on too tight...
Let's see... According to ford.co.uk, maintenance on a Focus is every "12,500 miles / 12 months". According to Ford.com, it's every "15k" "miles" / "or every 6 months". And ford.co.uk lists a lot more as 10k miles than 12. Sounds like Europeans are getting screwed at least as much as Americans...
Once you've got the technology to hop to the next solar system, terraforming isn't going to be a major problem for you...
This was just a theoretical example of how quickly life-forms can spread through the universe without Hollywood-movie propulsion systems. The motivation is left entirely as an exercise for the reader.
I'm sure you could easily conceive of some circumstance where a fairly small number of people are capable of taping the full resources of a planet, if not a solar system.
When there is a need for large numbers of offspring, it won't be difficult to motivate people to oblige. Providing monetary incentives, while, at the same time, eliminating as much of the burden of raising children as possible, would easily motivate a significant portion of the population. Not like people need much motivation in the first place.
Except intercoolers don't give all the advantages of water injection. Look a few comments up for some reasons: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=584029&cid=23793877
And in fact BOTH are still being used (though neither is exactly common).
Umm... Not really.
Interstellar colonization could be extremely fast. What would be "slow" is the current model of a few people getting in a ship, and traveling to distant solar systems.
If, instead, you work out a short-hop model, you can have exponentially increasing rates of colonization.
You just need to send a small city's population on a big ship, travel for 5 years to the nearest solar system, colonize, and then start building more identical ships, and start the process over with their children... Each generation only spends 5 years of their lives on a ship, and a few more harnessing the resources of their new world and setting up the same system for their offspring.
Such time-frames are doable for anybody (hey, college is 4 years... why not do it on a space ship?), and each generation results in an exponentially increasing numbers of colonization. As quickly as humans reproduce, it wouldn't be long before we've got a massive chunk of the galaxy partially populated.
Every 20 years, each groups sends out 4 more ships to colonize another solar system. With this model, in 300 years, we could have a million solar systems colonized. Of course, reality is likely to reduce that figure substantially, but it's still an unbelievably fast spreading of humanity.
No, actually it's NOT (entirely) BS. Water injection is a well-known technique which does improve fuel efficiency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_injection_(engines)
Now THIS is BS. There are innumerable reasons a technology, which can improve fuel efficiency in modern vehicles, might not be used. Things like weight, maintenance, reliability, etc.
The fact that superchargers aren't used in mass-produced automobiles is evidence enough of that. Higher compression ratios and water injection would be a welcome improvement.
"Conservation of Energy". There is no magic in the universe that allows for some magical "process" to get more energy out of a system than you've put in.
Just as using the energy from a falling rock won't give me any more energy than I put-in to lift it to that position... you can't possibly get as much energy out of recombining H2 and O as you put in to separate the two, in the first place. You would need an infusion of external energy, such as plugging it in, or using solar power. In either case, it's then a car that runs on grid electricity or solar power, NOT water. What's more, the efficiency of either is terrible, and would make for a woefully impractical vehicle.
Those were people who didn't understand the basic laws of physics... That's the exact OPPOSITE of the situation here...
The earliest physicists KNEW it was possible to go to the moon. See: Newton's Third Law
For the OS (which is mainly what we're discussing here) as of Windows 2000, just visiting the Windows Update website and running their required "genuine advantage" plug-in is a reasonably good indicator if a piece of software is illegal.
While there are numerous ways around Microsoft's activation, and genuine advantage, they aren't something that is fully automatic... They leave tell-tale signs that I can easily pick up on (eg. improper checksum on winlogon.exe, causing problems after a new service pack, etc., etc.), and are at least easily visible to even the casual user (who has used at least one legit copy before...) in the event of re-installation.
More than that, however, I am usually quite aware of the details of their software licensing... Whenever I need to get access to installation media, I often see a print-out of the site-licensing agreements, or can at least pretty easily count how many pressed Windows CDs there are with the proper holograms and the like, how many booklets they have in their possession, and perhaps how many systems are lacking a Windows OEM sticker, with (unique) key.
After 10 years in the business, dealing with all the machines in the dark corners of innumerable businesses, large and small, I've seen only a very small amount of pirated software.
Now THAT I do believe... In any company with several employees, you can probably find one with no regard for the legality of the software they install.
The analogy isn't anywhere close... These aren't software stores that have boxes of counterfeit products on their shelves. These are COMPUTER HARDWARE stores, which just happen to bundle unlicensed copies of Windows with the hardware they sell.
I can assure you, there is a very small number of such companies, and they only get away with it because they are small enough that even Microsoft and law enforcement doesn't care enough to put any effort into closing them down.
Microsoft does EXACTLY THAT. When using Microsoft's website to download updates, on a computer with a corrupt registry, I was redirected to a page that offers to sell you a "license" for Windows XP for HALF the retail price, and offering to mail you a CD shortly there-after. As someone who paid full retail price (for Windows 2000, actually, I only have an OEM copy of XP), I was rather pissed about that. It seems pirates get all the breaks, and honest customers get screwed.
In fact "OEM" copies of most software often sell for LESS than 1/3rd of the retail price.
Photoshop isn't one of the apps that normally get bundled by OEMs, however, so it's unlikely there's any special OEM pricing for most Adobe products.
Only in a magical, frictionless, theoretical world. Here on Earth, it's not a zero-sum game at all.
The Prius is the single, exceptional example. It is also, I believe, the only case where a direct comparison to a conventional equivalent is not available, so we don't know exactly how much weight the Prius HSD adds. Lacking such figures, it's impossible to make any real judgements.
That's simply "magical thinking". Electric motors and batteries have been around for much longer than internal combustion engines. You can't get electric motors to be any more efficient, battery technology isn't going to jump forward by leaps and bounds just because there's one more customer for the tech, and the drawbacks of hybrids are absolutely inherent.
If you didn't have the added weight of the hybrid, fuel economy wouldn't be as bad when driving uphill in the first place. And the fuel economy when going downhill in a conventional car is equally impressive... the HSD isn't giving you a net positive at all.
When your engine has to be idling anyhow, it can provide a few HP without any additional fuel consumption.
I can't quite decipher what else you were trying to say here... The engine shuts off at freeway speeds, even though it's forced to stay on at freeway speeds?
The electric motors in hybrid vehicles add a minuscule amount of HP. In all hybrids that can be directly compared with a conventional alternative, it's clear that the electric motor provides a higher percentage of added weight, than it does a percent of added HP. In other words, for freeway use, it's a net HP/weight loss, not even mentioning conversion losses.
Weight makes a big difference, particularly on non-flat terrain. Remember those fuel economy figures you provided, just a few lines up? Aerodynamic drag doesn't increase as you go uphill... That difference is entirely a question of mass.
Seconds, hybrid drive trains aren't just X amount of weight in an infinitesimally small space. They take up room in the engine compartment, which means the hybrid's body needs to be designed with a larger aerodynamic footprint as well.
Indeed, he did make some of the same points, which I addressed one by one. It was intended to keep you from making the same flawed assumptions, or asking the same questions. It did not entirely work, I'm afraid.