Sorry I was unclear. I was refering to the intercooler, not the ammonia. I have no clue what they use in them. Engineering tradition would suggest some kind of CFC or Freon.
Apparently some aircraft engines do that. I don't have a reference, but I remember a professor talking about failures of certain engines because of the failure of that part. The waste heat doesn't run it though, as the extra machinery would reduce efficiency more than it would help it for that.
This is a service that searches, and more importantly returns article from things such as academic journals, which are not generally free to the public. In other words, it's a clearing house for periodical literature of all forms, where relevant articles can be purchased for much less than the full issue of the journal in question. This is an extremely useful service for anyone in a scientific occupation who cannot afford to subscribe to all the journals relevant to the field, or who frequently must cull information from outside their field of immediate familiarity. This is an extremely useful service for a niche audience, and provided they don't spend too much getting it off the ground (always the catch in internet business endeavors) they should turn a respectable profit on it.
I love my transparent operating system (Linux). You can't sneak stuff in here like you can with windows. This could be a way to take Linux to the mainstream. AOL is good at making software that even my grandmother can use. If a lot of people are presented with the choice, maybe enough of them will switch, and then I'll get some freaking printer drivers, even if I'm not using their distro.
Point and click is wonderful and happy. Every now and then you absolutely have to edit a config file. vi is about the most user-malevolent program I have ever seen. Yes, it's incredibly powerful, and I intend to use it someday. That day is not the day I first install Linux. On my first install (Red Hat 5.0, without external guidance) I was thankfully able to mount my windows partitions so that I could copy over my bashrc to edit it in Windows. Due to disk space concerns I had to abandon that installation, since it was a family computer. Now I have my own, and I'm running Debian. I installed sudo. It demands that you edit the sudoers file with its own version of vi. It took me about ten minutes just to add one line. Afterwards I browsed the package lists and found nano, a pico clone. I love it. I can actually get done what I need done. Yes, it's a very simplistic text editor. That's the point. I think I've passed the beginning phases of understanding Linux, and I have recompiled my kernel. I think that installers should either have different options based on familiarity, or a default (that can be modified) that assumes you're a moron and lets you migrate to being a poweruser.
I heard Vorbis being breathed of early in development, I thought before 2000, so I got all excited really early. You're right about rc1. I love your work, but I haven't seen anything that really does anything with it besides plugins for lame, winamp, xmms and the like. I think the hardware folks are waiting for an official 1.0.
I couldn't find the running Tarkin code. It would seem I didn't look very hard.
Good luck in your efforts. I hope my previous dire predictions are false.
I've been waiting for the 1.0 release of Ogg Vorbis for a few years now. Yes, it's a nice CODEC, but the development timeline has been less than ideal for commercial adoption. Ogg Tarkin is still in extremely early development, without even alpha code to show for the effort. While most new audio CODECs have just been proprietary hacks of standard stuff to avoid patent royalties or optimize for streaming, video CODECs are making advances by leaps and bounds. MPEG-4 has the best compression ratio out there, though that may be at the cost of quality. I think that for handhelds and such things, processor requirements may be just as important as compression ratios, and those formats that keep this in mind will flourish.
I once dated a girl who was disappointed when her 800 MHz Celeron system died and the warranty replacement was a gigahertz P3 with double the RAM. The Celeron system was cuter, apparently.
We designed our own car too. We did it on a shoestring of about $250k. We didn't do all the manufacturing, but the design work was all us. The wheel wells were designed by a first-year Computer Science student (myself). Of course, we came in 24th, so I will refrain from bragging about how much better we are than the teams that got outside assistance that kicked our asses.
As to your question, yes, it is worth every second of those hundred hour work weeks and every penny of the sponsors' money. Easy for me to say about the money, but our biggest sponsors end up hiring a lot of our graduates.
I'll put it this way: I've been using, and programming, at least in some capacity, computers since second grade. I'm now in my second year of a university computer science program. I'm picking up Linux pretty quickly, but there are a whole lot of things that you either have to be told once or screw up before you get it.
I admit I probably wouldn't qualify as an "experienced computer user" by the standards of the slashdot regulars, but I'd probably be pretty competitive even with the slashdot lurkers. There are an awful lot of us out there. My dad's first job out of college was programming. He's in another field now, but if Linux is too idiosyncratic for him, it's clearly not ready to be a "desktop operating system". Maybe my experiences to date have been an aberration.
Every installer I've ever used has sucked in some way, shape, or form. I'm a very experienced computer user, so much so that I do tech support at my university, but I keep running into problems. I think I just got my first real working linux install up and running this afternoon. Here is my analysis, from the point of view of a very technically competent computer user who just doesn't happen to have had that much experience with linux.
Windows: Usually works very well. When it doesn't, you're screwed.
Red Hat: I installed 5.1 a few years ago on a partition-rich windows machine. I got X working, but I don't think I had a window manager installed, or if so, I was not informed of this. Regardless, it was useless. I managed to mount my windows partitions. This was very useful, because it enabled me to copy my bashrc to a windows partition, so I could boot into windows and create an alias setting ls to equal ls --color. If you're wondering why I did such a strange thing, I ask you how you would do with vi if you had no experience and nobody looking over your shoulder. I had to use Norton AntiVirus to remove lilo because it broke the CD player under windows. I'd launch into it from windows, read some man pages, try to get X to work, and give up. Then I got a girlfriend, and uncooperative OSs lost importance. I even had Windows 95 mostly stable.
I tried 7.0 several months ago, and had great difficulty because I was limited to 2 635 MB hard drives (what was laying around). I had gnome-games. Yay. I tried Debian on the same machine, but as my internet connection was a PPPoE DSL, I could never get a connection for apt-get. I'm told it can be done, but I was never told HOW it can be done. I checked the HOWTOs and couldn't find anything.
Debian: A friend helped me install it a few weeks ago, and I didn't get around to hooking it up until a week ago, because I was bogged down with work requiring windows software, and didn't yet have a hub. Last week I hooked it up. I liked it a lot. I wanted an IM/ICQ client. I tried building GAIM from source. It had a GTK+ dependency. I got GTK+, which needed GLIB. I got GLIB, but since they hadn't updated their changelog from 1.2.7 to 1.2.9 I got the wrong version, so GTK+ wouldn't build. I tried getting the right one. The multiple versions made my system very happy. My friend suggested I just apt-get it. I had already tried this, and he explained that I needed to get it from the unstable tree. I modified my sources.list to get unstable. I ran apt-get install gaim. This broke X. I tried changing back to stable and reverting, but couldn't get it to work. I removed X. For some reason, dpkg took the liberty of REMOVING GCC and associated development tools in the process. My machine was now completely fucked. I ran the installer again. I forgot to configure my ethernet card, so I needed to run it again. This required changing my boot order to boot from CD-ROM. I couldn't do this, because something in the installer had apparently mangled my BIOS so it wouldn't read keystrokes until the OS started booting. I did a jumper reset of the BIOS and it installed just fine. There was just one hitch though. While configuring the X server, I couldn't get the mouse to work. I tried various protocols, various device names, but nothing would work. The answer was right in front of my face: the refresh rate was defaulted to 0. WHAT KIND OF IDIOT DEFAULTS A MOUSE REFRESH RATE TO 0? It took a few hours of staring at this to realize something I hadn't really noticed because I considered it's misadjustment to be outside the realm of rational action, as I still do.
If FreeBSD is as easy as I'm hearing, I may try that out the next time Debian self-destructs.
Windows and Linux both suck. The difference is that Linux sucks twice as fast and 10 times more reliably, and since you have the source, it's your fault.
One of the significant aspects of solar car racing is that you're doing it all on a shoestring power budget. These things drive at highway speed using roughly the power of a hair dryer. This requires nice light batteries, efficient motors, and clever aerodynamic and mechanical design. When you're redefining the state of the art, something useful usually comes out of it. Solar car races are also often a proving ground for new technologies that teams are eager to give a try and corporations are eager to get real-world performance data on.
Fuel Cells may be a great technology for normal automobiles, but the cool thing about this race is that these things are quite far removed from normal automobiles.
I am on the University of Virginia solar car team, and I remember some of these teams from the American Solar Challenge this summer. I have a few comments on the teams:
Arizona University:
If memory serves, these are the guys whose car spun out during qualifiers and flew through the air, tearing off the suspension when it landed. When I saw it happen, I thought they were finished. They had it up and running for the race and did quite well, much better than we did.
Futura:
I see they've withdrawn. They had some problems during the ASC. I can't really say what, but they were very far back in the pack despite what should have been a very high-performing solar array.
Kansas State University:
It's sad to see these guys are out of it, because we worked with them during the ASC getting our car and their car to pass scrutineering.
Queens University:
Wow. That car is nice. That's all I can say.
South Bank University:
These guys did pretty well in the ASC. They had an accident during the race and severely damaged their body, but duct tape kept them going and competitive.
University of Michigan:
They rebuilt their car 17 days before the ASC because it was destroyed during testing. They have a GaAs solar array, Lithium Ion or Lithium Polymer batteries, a very sleek design, and 4-wheel steering. Apparently when they redid the 4-wheel steering, they replaced the mechanical linkage with an electronic control. It's the most advanced solar car I've ever seen.
University of Missouri-Rolla:
These guys nearly won the ASC despite only having a 14% efficient array. For reference, some teams had up to 26% efficient arrays. Their car is incredibly light and efficient. Nobody in the race was even close to them on mechanical efficiency.
University of Toronto:
Good car. Nothing much comes to mind. Didn't see them much because they stayed ahead of us.
University of Waterloo:
Yet another very good car. They did a very good job of integrating the wheel farings with the body to keep aerodynamic drag very low.
That's about all I have to say about that. If you want to see how the ASC went, check out their website at http://www.formulasun.org/asc/.
If it says "Compact Disc Digital Audio" on it, then it must conform to the standard, and thus play in my CD-ROM drive. If they make copy-impaired CDs and label them as regular ones, they are committing fraud.
I wonder what Andrew Bunner's slashdot ID is. I also wonder how many more slashdotters we're going to be reading about on slashdot for things like this in coming years.
A knife would have sharp edges. Sharp edges do much stranger things to magnetic fields than keys and coins do. A large knife would probably be detected, though a small boxcutter might still get through. As we now know, it doesn't take much.
Sounds like more kernel work. I'm won't be happy until I can mount file systems in my cache. Think about it. My 286 only had a 40 MB hard drive. Hello, solid state!
He won the election because he promised eliminating the personal property (car) tax. This is a local tax, which he was going to reimburse the localities for out of state funds coming from the temporary budget surplus. This means that localities with a high personal property tax, generally the rich ones, get more money, while the poorer localities get the shaft, as they always have. Now we have a budget crisis in Virginia.
Whatever Gilmore claims about being tech-savvy is a load of BS. He's politically savvy, and he tried to get through a bunch of laws that would give Virginia jurisdiction over the whole internet because of the traffic that gets routed through Northern Virginia. The man wants power and knows how to get it while convincing a lot of people they'll be better off for it.
Curious why Gilmore would be interested in more police powers? Because he's being groomed to be the next Attorney General of the US. I'd personally prefer him over Ashcroft because he doesn't seem to harbor any ethnic biases, but that's about it. Watch out for this man. You'll probably hear from him again.
Soccer moms are stereotypically the ones who involve themselves in the structured activities their children are in, such as sports, Parent-Teacher organizations, etc., buy minivans, and join parents' groups and throw a fit whenever something naughty is in the public eye, but they don't actually communicate with their kids. It's the dysfunction of suburbia like in "American Beauty". It's the blame shifting of "South Park". It's those parents who are shocked to learn that their kids have been drinking and doing drugs for years, when going into their kids' rooms now and then and checking plain sight would have been sufficient evidence. Sure, there are lots of parents at soccer games who are involved not just in their kids' activities, but actually in their lives. I wish there were more though.
It's rare for a law to be overturned because of ambiguity, because an ambiguous law usually has something clearly wrong with it in at least one reasonable interpretation, and thus can be struck down as "overbroad". It happens all the time.
That was the plan back in 1993. Osama bin Laden and company were expecting a quarter million fatalities from that. Fortunately on this attack there was a lot of evacuation time. Fortunate unless you were a rescue worker, that it.
Actually, I was just whistling the theme before I loaded/. I wonder what will happen if I whistle the Titanic theme while visiting/. That would be an interesting sequel...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry I was unclear. I was refering to the intercooler, not the ammonia. I have no clue what they use in them. Engineering tradition would suggest some kind of CFC or Freon.
Apparently some aircraft engines do that. I don't have a reference, but I remember a professor talking about failures of certain engines because of the failure of that part. The waste heat doesn't run it though, as the extra machinery would reduce efficiency more than it would help it for that.
This is a service that searches, and more importantly returns article from things such as academic journals, which are not generally free to the public. In other words, it's a clearing house for periodical literature of all forms, where relevant articles can be purchased for much less than the full issue of the journal in question. This is an extremely useful service for anyone in a scientific occupation who cannot afford to subscribe to all the journals relevant to the field, or who frequently must cull information from outside their field of immediate familiarity. This is an extremely useful service for a niche audience, and provided they don't spend too much getting it off the ground (always the catch in internet business endeavors) they should turn a respectable profit on it.
I love my transparent operating system (Linux). You can't sneak stuff in here like you can with windows. This could be a way to take Linux to the mainstream. AOL is good at making software that even my grandmother can use. If a lot of people are presented with the choice, maybe enough of them will switch, and then I'll get some freaking printer drivers, even if I'm not using their distro.
Point and click is wonderful and happy. Every now and then you absolutely have to edit a config file. vi is about the most user-malevolent program I have ever seen. Yes, it's incredibly powerful, and I intend to use it someday. That day is not the day I first install Linux. On my first install (Red Hat 5.0, without external guidance) I was thankfully able to mount my windows partitions so that I could copy over my bashrc to edit it in Windows. Due to disk space concerns I had to abandon that installation, since it was a family computer. Now I have my own, and I'm running Debian. I installed sudo. It demands that you edit the sudoers file with its own version of vi. It took me about ten minutes just to add one line. Afterwards I browsed the package lists and found nano, a pico clone. I love it. I can actually get done what I need done. Yes, it's a very simplistic text editor. That's the point. I think I've passed the beginning phases of understanding Linux, and I have recompiled my kernel. I think that installers should either have different options based on familiarity, or a default (that can be modified) that assumes you're a moron and lets you migrate to being a poweruser.
I heard Vorbis being breathed of early in development, I thought before 2000, so I got all excited really early. You're right about rc1. I love your work, but I haven't seen anything that really does anything with it besides plugins for lame, winamp, xmms and the like. I think the hardware folks are waiting for an official 1.0.
I couldn't find the running Tarkin code. It would seem I didn't look very hard.
Good luck in your efforts. I hope my previous dire predictions are false.
I've been waiting for the 1.0 release of Ogg Vorbis for a few years now. Yes, it's a nice CODEC, but the development timeline has been less than ideal for commercial adoption. Ogg Tarkin is still in extremely early development, without even alpha code to show for the effort. While most new audio CODECs have just been proprietary hacks of standard stuff to avoid patent royalties or optimize for streaming, video CODECs are making advances by leaps and bounds. MPEG-4 has the best compression ratio out there, though that may be at the cost of quality. I think that for handhelds and such things, processor requirements may be just as important as compression ratios, and those formats that keep this in mind will flourish.
I once dated a girl who was disappointed when her 800 MHz Celeron system died and the warranty replacement was a gigahertz P3 with double the RAM. The Celeron system was cuter, apparently.
Taco, you're scaring me.
We designed our own car too. We did it on a shoestring of about $250k. We didn't do all the manufacturing, but the design work was all us. The wheel wells were designed by a first-year Computer Science student (myself). Of course, we came in 24th, so I will refrain from bragging about how much better we are than the teams that got outside assistance that kicked our asses.
As to your question, yes, it is worth every second of those hundred hour work weeks and every penny of the sponsors' money. Easy for me to say about the money, but our biggest sponsors end up hiring a lot of our graduates.
I'll put it this way: I've been using, and programming, at least in some capacity, computers since second grade. I'm now in my second year of a university computer science program. I'm picking up Linux pretty quickly, but there are a whole lot of things that you either have to be told once or screw up before you get it.
I admit I probably wouldn't qualify as an "experienced computer user" by the standards of the slashdot regulars, but I'd probably be pretty competitive even with the slashdot lurkers. There are an awful lot of us out there. My dad's first job out of college was programming. He's in another field now, but if Linux is too idiosyncratic for him, it's clearly not ready to be a "desktop operating system". Maybe my experiences to date have been an aberration.
I know this isn't technically in the co-op program, but I'm thinking the dean would approve of this.
I was joking when I wrote that. I think I'm starting to get serious.
Every installer I've ever used has sucked in some way, shape, or form. I'm a very experienced computer user, so much so that I do tech support at my university, but I keep running into problems. I think I just got my first real working linux install up and running this afternoon. Here is my analysis, from the point of view of a very technically competent computer user who just doesn't happen to have had that much experience with linux.
Windows: Usually works very well. When it doesn't, you're screwed.
Red Hat: I installed 5.1 a few years ago on a partition-rich windows machine. I got X working, but I don't think I had a window manager installed, or if so, I was not informed of this. Regardless, it was useless. I managed to mount my windows partitions. This was very useful, because it enabled me to copy my bashrc to a windows partition, so I could boot into windows and create an alias setting ls to equal ls --color. If you're wondering why I did such a strange thing, I ask you how you would do with vi if you had no experience and nobody looking over your shoulder. I had to use Norton AntiVirus to remove lilo because it broke the CD player under windows. I'd launch into it from windows, read some man pages, try to get X to work, and give up. Then I got a girlfriend, and uncooperative OSs lost importance. I even had Windows 95 mostly stable.
I tried 7.0 several months ago, and had great difficulty because I was limited to 2 635 MB hard drives (what was laying around). I had gnome-games. Yay. I tried Debian on the same machine, but as my internet connection was a PPPoE DSL, I could never get a connection for apt-get. I'm told it can be done, but I was never told HOW it can be done. I checked the HOWTOs and couldn't find anything.
Debian: A friend helped me install it a few weeks ago, and I didn't get around to hooking it up until a week ago, because I was bogged down with work requiring windows software, and didn't yet have a hub. Last week I hooked it up. I liked it a lot. I wanted an IM/ICQ client. I tried building GAIM from source. It had a GTK+ dependency. I got GTK+, which needed GLIB. I got GLIB, but since they hadn't updated their changelog from 1.2.7 to 1.2.9 I got the wrong version, so GTK+ wouldn't build. I tried getting the right one. The multiple versions made my system very happy. My friend suggested I just apt-get it. I had already tried this, and he explained that I needed to get it from the unstable tree. I modified my sources.list to get unstable. I ran apt-get install gaim. This broke X. I tried changing back to stable and reverting, but couldn't get it to work. I removed X. For some reason, dpkg took the liberty of REMOVING GCC and associated development tools in the process. My machine was now completely fucked. I ran the installer again. I forgot to configure my ethernet card, so I needed to run it again. This required changing my boot order to boot from CD-ROM. I couldn't do this, because something in the installer had apparently mangled my BIOS so it wouldn't read keystrokes until the OS started booting. I did a jumper reset of the BIOS and it installed just fine. There was just one hitch though. While configuring the X server, I couldn't get the mouse to work. I tried various protocols, various device names, but nothing would work. The answer was right in front of my face: the refresh rate was defaulted to 0. WHAT KIND OF IDIOT DEFAULTS A MOUSE REFRESH RATE TO 0? It took a few hours of staring at this to realize something I hadn't really noticed because I considered it's misadjustment to be outside the realm of rational action, as I still do.
If FreeBSD is as easy as I'm hearing, I may try that out the next time Debian self-destructs.
Windows and Linux both suck. The difference is that Linux sucks twice as fast and 10 times more reliably, and since you have the source, it's your fault.
One of the significant aspects of solar car racing is that you're doing it all on a shoestring power budget. These things drive at highway speed using roughly the power of a hair dryer. This requires nice light batteries, efficient motors, and clever aerodynamic and mechanical design. When you're redefining the state of the art, something useful usually comes out of it. Solar car races are also often a proving ground for new technologies that teams are eager to give a try and corporations are eager to get real-world performance data on.
Fuel Cells may be a great technology for normal automobiles, but the cool thing about this race is that these things are quite far removed from normal automobiles.
I am on the University of Virginia solar car team, and I remember some of these teams from the American Solar Challenge this summer. I have a few comments on the teams:
Arizona University:
If memory serves, these are the guys whose car spun out during qualifiers and flew through the air, tearing off the suspension when it landed. When I saw it happen, I thought they were finished. They had it up and running for the race and did quite well, much better than we did.
Futura:
I see they've withdrawn. They had some problems during the ASC. I can't really say what, but they were very far back in the pack despite what should have been a very high-performing solar array.
Kansas State University:
It's sad to see these guys are out of it, because we worked with them during the ASC getting our car and their car to pass scrutineering.
Queens University:
Wow. That car is nice. That's all I can say.
South Bank University:
These guys did pretty well in the ASC. They had an accident during the race and severely damaged their body, but duct tape kept them going and competitive.
University of Michigan:
They rebuilt their car 17 days before the ASC because it was destroyed during testing. They have a GaAs solar array, Lithium Ion or Lithium Polymer batteries, a very sleek design, and 4-wheel steering. Apparently when they redid the 4-wheel steering, they replaced the mechanical linkage with an electronic control. It's the most advanced solar car I've ever seen.
University of Missouri-Rolla:
These guys nearly won the ASC despite only having a 14% efficient array. For reference, some teams had up to 26% efficient arrays. Their car is incredibly light and efficient. Nobody in the race was even close to them on mechanical efficiency.
University of Toronto:
Good car. Nothing much comes to mind. Didn't see them much because they stayed ahead of us.
University of Waterloo:
Yet another very good car. They did a very good job of integrating the wheel farings with the body to keep aerodynamic drag very low.
That's about all I have to say about that. If you want to see how the ASC went, check out their website at http://www.formulasun.org/asc/.
If it says "Compact Disc Digital Audio" on it, then it must conform to the standard, and thus play in my CD-ROM drive. If they make copy-impaired CDs and label them as regular ones, they are committing fraud.
I wonder what Andrew Bunner's slashdot ID is. I also wonder how many more slashdotters we're going to be reading about on slashdot for things like this in coming years.
A knife would have sharp edges. Sharp edges do much stranger things to magnetic fields than keys and coins do. A large knife would probably be detected, though a small boxcutter might still get through. As we now know, it doesn't take much.
Sounds like more kernel work. I'm won't be happy until I can mount file systems in my cache. Think about it. My 286 only had a 40 MB hard drive. Hello, solid state!
He won the election because he promised eliminating the personal property (car) tax. This is a local tax, which he was going to reimburse the localities for out of state funds coming from the temporary budget surplus. This means that localities with a high personal property tax, generally the rich ones, get more money, while the poorer localities get the shaft, as they always have. Now we have a budget crisis in Virginia.
Whatever Gilmore claims about being tech-savvy is a load of BS. He's politically savvy, and he tried to get through a bunch of laws that would give Virginia jurisdiction over the whole internet because of the traffic that gets routed through Northern Virginia. The man wants power and knows how to get it while convincing a lot of people they'll be better off for it.
Curious why Gilmore would be interested in more police powers? Because he's being groomed to be the next Attorney General of the US. I'd personally prefer him over Ashcroft because he doesn't seem to harbor any ethnic biases, but that's about it. Watch out for this man. You'll probably hear from him again.
Soccer moms are stereotypically the ones who involve themselves in the structured activities their children are in, such as sports, Parent-Teacher organizations, etc., buy minivans, and join parents' groups and throw a fit whenever something naughty is in the public eye, but they don't actually communicate with their kids. It's the dysfunction of suburbia like in "American Beauty". It's the blame shifting of "South Park". It's those parents who are shocked to learn that their kids have been drinking and doing drugs for years, when going into their kids' rooms now and then and checking plain sight would have been sufficient evidence. Sure, there are lots of parents at soccer games who are involved not just in their kids' activities, but actually in their lives. I wish there were more though.
It's rare for a law to be overturned because of ambiguity, because an ambiguous law usually has something clearly wrong with it in at least one reasonable interpretation, and thus can be struck down as "overbroad". It happens all the time.
They trust a company named SunnComm to protect their intellectual property from being ripped off?
I'm speechless.
That was the plan back in 1993. Osama bin Laden and company were expecting a quarter million fatalities from that. Fortunately on this attack there was a lot of evacuation time. Fortunate unless you were a rescue worker, that it.
Actually, I was just whistling the theme before I loaded /. I wonder what will happen if I whistle the Titanic theme while visiting /. That would be an interesting sequel...
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction, ice
Is also great
And would suffice
Anyway, a bang and a whimper are the same thing, observed as different on a subjective scale.