here are just way too many questions unanswered for me to buy this. Firstly, how does it work? He doesn't put any effort into explaining how it works. He should demonstrate the full assembly and it's operation. All the abuse of "ultra" also feels very inappropriate.
Sure under optimal conditions the efficiency may be 60% but could this really be sustained under all conditions? The figure 3.5 times seems to be taken out of nowhere. What does he mean with a combustion engine? The Diesel engine is more efficient than the Otto/Gasoline engine but the efficiency can be improved on an Otto engine if you increase the compression (which is possible when using high octane fuels such as ethanol or gas). A Diesel engine can have up to 40-45% efficiency. Since this is intended for hybrid cars, we also have to account for the losses that occur in the conversion to electricity (electrical generators for vehicular use lie at about 60-80%) and the inefficiency of the electrical engine (around 60%). So the overall efficiency in such a system would then be 0.6*0.6*0.6 which is about 20-25%.
Then what about operation and durability. How long does an engine like this engine last before it becomes inoperable? What happens to the efficiency during the lifetime of such an engine? An old engine may only be half as efficient as a new one. What about cooling, can it get overheated in certain situations? Is it reliable or is it prone to stalling? Is it easy to start and stop or does it need extended warm-up and cool down periods.
I feel sad to say this but I cannot feel naught but that this guy is a joke and I cannot take him seriously.
Also remember that the fission reactors are developed apart from the existing reactors that are based on an over 50 years old technology (well most of them are anyway). The next generation reactors use technology that can extract considerably more energy from the same fissile material than the current reactors can. What is nuclear waste today can be used as fuel in these reactors and the current amount of fissile fuel in circulation is said to be able to supply us with as much energy as currently being produced (before the tsunami) for at least another 100 years. The waste material from these reactors have a much shorter half life than the current nuclear waste and only needs to be stored in a safe place for decades and not millennia.
I have seen (breeder) constructions that should be safer than the current reactors. The principle behind this safety is that there needs to be an active regulatory system to keep the reaction alive. If the system fails the reaction will die off without complications other than the difficulty to revive the process again.
The major problem with the next generation nuclear technology is that there is no economic incentives as it is cheaper to design and build old generation reactors. It is capitalism at its best indeed...
The procurement and excavation for uranium material is actually of great environmental concern as open pit mines totally destroys the landscape. If some company finds uranium in the mountains of Arizona there will no longer be a Grand Canyon. But there are other more environmentally friendly ways to extract uranium. There is a lot of it in the sea water and it is estimated that it costs about 5 times as much to extract it from the sea water than it does to get it by an open-pit mine. The nice thing in this crow song is that this additional cost has an almost negligible effect on the cost of producing electricity from nuclear energy.
Let's hope Andrea Rossi's cold fusion process will work, then we will have another viable alternative to the fission reaction process. According to him this fusion process does not produce any radioactive material.
Also note that nuclear reactors can be used to produce other things than just electricity. Apart from the obvious byproduct of heat it can also be used to make hydrogen to normal combustion engine cars. There are technologies that allows this hydrogen to be absorbed into a nanofoam material that can be mixed into the gasoline and be used as fuel in normal cars. Hydrogen is a lot more emission friendly than any other type of fuel that can be used in a combustion/fuel cell engine (such as DME, Eco/BioPar, Fischer-Tropsh Diesel, FAME, RME, Methanol, Ethanol, LPG, CMG,...). I think it's about time that we leave the Middle East and their oil to their fate...
Something, I'm really missing is a stronger "passthrough" implementation than Intel VT-d/AMD IOMMU that allows any hardware to be passed through to a guest OS / domU such that I can use Unix/Linux as Dom0 and play fully-fledged DirectX11 games on a multiway SLI/CrossFire on a Windows guest machine.
I have the dream or vision that operating systems will grow into more simplistic hypervisors in the future. System environments that provide APIs such as.net or DirectX will shrink into wrappers that will provide whatever specific resources that are requested by the program to be run. So if you run a MacOS program the wrapper will parse runtime libraries based on the MacOS frameworks to the program whereas a Windows program will use Windows runtime libraries through this wrapper and so on.
So there will be a separation between the hardware and the operating systems by an abstraction layer where different wrappers (that used to be operating systems) share the underlying hardware with each other. There will no longer be a question whether you use Windows, MacOS or Linux. You just use whatever you prefer as a base OS and use whatever is needed to run the applications you want, which in reality could mean that you run several operating systems simultaneously on the very same machine.
This separation has already begun, ZFS is a good example of that. The ZFS file system looks at the hard drives as a storage pool and the user is not concerned with the physical characteristics of the partitions and where the sectors begin or end. I didn't like it at first but later found that this approach is ingenious. So I see it as a natural step that the rest of the hardware will undergo the same transition. I also think a lot can be done with the UEFI framework in this regard.
I have read that the most part (over 90%) of the semi-conductor manufacturing is located in regions of Japan that are not affected by the Tsunami. It would be interesting to know how much is really produced in Japan at all. Most things are being made in China these days.
My suspicions are that these "shortages" are claimed in an attempt to manipulate the prices. It just like what the people at Enron did when they called up power plants and told them to shut down the electricity for a few hours every now and then to push up the electricity prices on the market.
I wasn't exactly an angel when I was in high-school. I skipped school in junior high for over a year and got away with it because we moved and both schools thought that I had moved to the other. I couldn't take any of what was taught seriously. I was like "OH MAN! Are we gonna go through the table of multiplication, AGAIN! We did it when we were 8 isn't that enough?". The spelling tests were annoying the hell out of me; after the first three years in high school (we start at 7) I found them superfluous. I never made a mistake on these tests and I couldn't understand people who still had problems with spelling, we were like 12-13 years old! Sometimes I feel like I want to sue someone and get compensation for my lost childhood in the high school.
I cheated a lot and had no qualms about it, mostly I copied essays in subjects that didn't interest me; literature, religion and history. At one occasion I wrote a makeup exam. There was no security, we could sit wherever we liked and we should just hand it in putting it on a table in the computer lab while the teacher was having a computer lab session for a bunch of other students. I had no clue about the exam and was hopeless so when I went to the computer lab to hand in my exam, I saw that another guy had already put his exam on the table. So I quickly took his exam, went out the door and wrote his answers into my exam (of course I reformulated the answers - I wasn't stupid). The teacher never noticed me because he was occupied with his students. I got a high pass and he was so impressed at my results that he gave me compliments about it and I just thought "No Shit!" and had a sly smile when he told me. The teachers never suspected me, they thought I was a "very intelligent young boy". Even my mother was proud of me and called me mini-Einstein when she talked to them. I hated high school and I never felt that I learned anything substantial from it. Especially the math and physics was appalling.
Then came the time when I was about to apply for "college" or an undergraduate program at the university. It was tough, my grades were bollocks but I fought and finally got admission a year later after battling with some entry qualification tests. I applied for one of the most difficult programs that one can take in my country; It was Engineering Physics which is a 5 years long program and you graduate with a Masters Degree and a special Engineering certificate. The admission was difficult to get through and it is even more difficult to graduate. It had even been on the news for being the most difficult program since so many students drop out prematurely.
Since I got admitted, cheating has never ever occurred to me. I take my studies with pride and I have passed test after test with pure brawn blood and sweat without cheating. I did that because I take my studies seriously and I feel that I have learned a lot from the courses that were taught.
So you can't generalize and say that people who cheat at high school will always be a cheat. The thing is that high school is a joke, everybody knows it. The exam results from the introductory math courses at the universities have declined steeply since the '70s and the teachers at my university literally laugh students in their face (and so do I) when they cannot even do a simple division without a calculator. The high schools are falling apart and people in the west are getting dumber and dumber while people in the east outsmart us by a million leagues. Go to Russia, China or even countries such as Iran, Pakistan or India, they laugh at out school system!
We are really talking about very different things here. I'm not talking about what's possible or not. I'm talking about what old DOS games used back then and not many games used 480p VGA.
No, you could not get more than 32 colors in standard half-brite mode or 64 colors in extra half-brite mode unless;
a) You used HAM which could yield all those colors which was very uncommon in games because it was slow and the graphics were subject to the undesired effect called fringing. or
b)You used palette switching. One way was to let several screens that use the same screen resolution overlap each other horizontally using their own unique palette. This technique was used in for example the Eye of the Beholder games. Another way was to implement so called copper lists that let the co-processor switch the palette continuously. This technique was popular among demo coders (in e.g. so called "plasma" demos) but I have never seen a serious implementation of it in computer games.
You can't be serious when you say that Wing Commander use 480p VGA? DOS games back in the old days used the so called "Mode 13h" which was/is a mode with 320x200 pixels resolution capable of showing 256 colors. It gives more colors than the pre-AGA Amiga screen modes but actually a lower resolution. But as other people say, WC should work with DOSbox.
But what about virtual servers? One machine may host hundreds if not thousands of virtual servers. I don't believe that they use windows as a host OS (dominator 0) on the physical machine, it usually is Linux based or BSD based.
No, I think this "inefficiency" thing is a misconception. Just to speak from my own experience; I use 200W of halogen lights (which is a form of incandescent light) in my room which usually is cold during winters due to poor insulation. After about 20 minutes of having the lights on I usually have to take off my sweater because of the heat from the lights. I daresay that the inefficiency that arise from placing a heat source near the roof is negligible because air circulates. Sure the air will always be somewhat hotter near the ceiling than near the floor but it will always be that way regardless of where you put the heat source.
I agree with that. I'm actually tired of the whole geek stereotype (even though I do like joking about it). I sometimes hear people saying; "I don't want to do this or that because it is too geeky or that is gay..." and I don't understand it! If there is something that you are genuinely interested in, then GO FOR IT and don't listen to what the society tells us. It' OK to joke about your interests showing that you don't take yourself too seriously but never apologize for them. There's nothing wrong with being passionate about something.
What is wrong, however is if your interests turns into an abuse that affects your social life and so on, but that is different story and has in my opinion little to do with the negative stereotypes associated with them.
I cannot speak for every field of science but I cannot completely agree with SpeedyDX on this one, especially when we are talking about technical science. Most technical scientists and engineers have a solid background in mathematics and mathematical statistics. The problems and the fallacies behind inductive reasoning and the problems with determining causality are more than well covered in these subjects. When looking historically, mathematics is actually a spin-off from Philosophy. Sure, most of what is taught in a university at an introductory level is "applied logic" whatever that is supposed to mean. The thing is that most of the theorems we learn must be proven and understood even when taking a basic Calculus course. If one wants to get more abstract than that and get a deeper understanding, there are courses that deal with concepts such as rings, fields, algebras, set theory, the construction of the real number system, cardinality, vector spaces and so on. And these concepts are dealt with at a much more intellectually challenging level than I can imagine what is done in Philosophy.
Instead of a list of spreadsheet lines, why not put together the lines into acts with continuous story-lines that give support for interaction and context? The acts may even be lined with content that may not be used in the end product just to make it easier for the actors to enter into the plots. Letting the actors interact with each other during the recording sessions may also be a way to improve the acting. That together with good direction ought to improve the results. Of course it requires good script writing and more time but I think it would be worth it.
But if you want to get higher typing speeds, why not use a Stenotype device? According to Wikipedia one can easily reach typing speeds of 300 WPM.
I also come to think of alternative typing software for PDAs and smartphones. Texware solutions claim that one can yield faster typing speeds than a regular QWERTY keyboard with their program called Fitaly. So called Dom Perignon Speed Contests are being arranged regularly which are typing contests using different typing software. The winner of the last contest reached a speed of 80.88 WPM using Fitaly. But the contest was arranged by Texware themselves so there could be reason to suspect that this contest may be biased. Another typing software that promises higher typing speeds is MessagEase which is similar to Fitaly.
I wouldn't agree to that. Autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and allergies is rather a sign that the immune system is "out of tune", not too strong. This means that the immune system is wasting its limited resources on the wrong thing.
But which is best platform to run, FreeBSD or OpenSolaris?
It's difficult to find a good SAS/SATA controller that is well-supported by OpenSolaris. I have found a few cheap LSI MegaRAID conrtollers in China.
I'm willing to admit that a human factor probably has been involved too, contributing to the situation. I also understand that many of us have experienced women panicking for no apparent reason and many times I agree with the disapproval of that kind of behavior in such situations. However, I feel that people are a little too conclusive calling this guy an idiot. If I were on a highway with a lot of cars and in all of a sudden the car started accelerating putting me out of control, I would get freaked out for sure.
The major concern I have when writing my posts on this thread is that the car manufacturers tend not to take the responsibility they should for their products. They keep cutting the costs reducing the quality of their products and their philsophy seems to be; "if something goes wrong it's better to blame it all on the driver". I wish their businesses were more transparent and that people had a higher awareness of what they are doing so that the "bad apples" were quickly forced out of the market.
I'm not saying that everything is bad when it comes to electronic control replacing mechanical components. Just to give an example: Several of the experienced car-mechanics I've talked to say that the fuel injection systems as of today are very stable, reliable and less prone to failures than carburettors before they were phased out of the market. Since the introduction of all emission systems, the carbs became a nightmare to deal with and the lambda control was a god-send when it was introduced.
Remember that industrial machines such as forklifts, skylifts, mining equipment and construction equipment in many cases have this type of control and sometimes work in more corrosive environments than regular automobiles. So I think a drive-by-wire system could be reliable if it is designed properly, but when it comes to car manufacturers I'm afraid that such designs may require a lot more R&D and production costs than they are willing to take, which tends to yield much less reliable applications.
Sometimes, if you are lucky, manuals and schematics can be downloaded from p2p networks, or if you have the right connections, binders with service manuals can be bought at a not too unreasonable price. I also believe that a lot can be achieved using a regular aftermarket OBDII diagnostics unit and a laptop even on modern vehicles. But it really shouldn't be this way. At least when it comes to computers, you can always choose Linux or BSD, but when it comes to cars you usually have no choice. There may be exceptions however, there is a build-your-own fuel injection system called MegaSquirt.
I appriciate your informative posts, opportunities to learn new things about automotive technology becomes fewer and farther between these days. I guess that we armchair rocket scientists always have better ideas than anyone else and we would have an interesting conversation for sure.
Cheers!
I'm not a professional car mechanic with many years of experience but I'm interested in car technology and I work on cars for leisure. I also have been working in car manufacturing plants on occasion.
All of the cars I've been working with (during my leisure time) is from before the era when the car manufacturers started using the CCAN bus. It's near impossible to find useful information about it on the internet, but I've managed to come over some brief but technical articles from an automotive engineering website a few years ago. So my knowledge about this car is rather limited but I'm willing to bet that some of the changes ensuing the introduction of this bus are for worse from a security perspective.
It's a fact that many cars as of today no longer use a key to control the ignition. I'm not able to tell what the RFID cassette looks like on every model that uses this technology. I'm only able to tell how it works on the cars I've been using and assembling. But it's quite obvious that all cars that use this type of ignition control have ditched the mechanical ignition switch entirely and made it completely based on semi-conductor circuitry.
This RFID technology has been used on cars at least since the mid '90s. In such cars there is an antenna around the ignition lock and an RFID chip is fitted in the bow of the key. This is also known as an immobilizer which is made to prevent car theft and makes the car refuse to start if the key is wrongly encoded or when someone tries to bypass the ignition lock manually. In those systems the ignition control is still mechanical and the electronics circuitry cannot prevent the driver from switching the ignition off, only prevent him from switching it on. Problems with the immobilizer is actually a rather common issue for people having problems starting their cars.
When I talked about ABS I only talked about the technical possibilities and not how they actually work. My english vocabulary is rather limited when it comes to car mechanical terms so I said "force calipers open" when I rather meant "force the bleeding valves open". I was merely discussing the technical possibilites and not the likelyhood for this to happen. But the fact is that I have actually experienced when the ABS completely removed all braking pressure from the calipers and weren't just "pulsating" when I made a hard brake. The road was slippery so this was normal operation, but it did happen. On the ABS systems I've worked with I think this kind of malfunction is very unlikely to happen although it is technically possible. But then again, I don't know what changes that have been applied on these systems since the introduction of the CCAN bus.
I was mentioning the TRACS as an illustration on how the electronic systems have become more and more integrated with each other.
Brakes also fail when the system gets overheated. If the brake fluid starts to boil and/or the brake discs and linings gets overheated the brakes usually fail. Braking involves a lot of friction which turns into heat and overheating may and will happen if the brakes are used heavily enough.
Sure the CCAN bus is more robust than the lanes of the southbridge in a computer, but that doesn't make it failproof. Even though its bandwidth is far wider than the components of a car ever would need, it sure can suffer from short-circuit, corrosion, or leaking voltages which could render it useless in a split second. I know that there are measures taken to make the bus less vulnerable to these factors but I'm not so sure that these measures are so failproof as people say. I won't believe a word until I see the construction with my own eyes and draw the conclusions myself.
The automatic transmission is the part of the cars I know the least about although I know its principles and that it is electronically controlled. So it was an interesting insight about this you provided in your post wtfbill. I know that some cars have some kind of blockage that prevents the driver
Many modern cars have electronic ignition which consists of a cassette that is inserted into a slot. The system feeds this cassette electrically into the slot like the tray of a CD player, and scans the chip inside the cassette (this chip is also known as RFID chip). When the ID is verified the driver can push a button to start the car. So the good old mechanical key is gone on these models and the ignition control relies entirely on computer controlled semi-conductor relays.
The parking brake, or the hand brake is not strong enough to brake a moving car, at least not at speeds above 30 kph. At 80 kph the hand brake is most likely to take considerable damage and/or premature wear and even further disable its operation when trying to use it at that speed.
When it comes to the brakes, cars have what is known as ABS. ABS is an electronically controlled braking system which neutralizes the braking force on the wheels that are starting to spin, when you hit the brakes hard or you hit them when the road is slippery. It is technically possible for the electronic control unit (ECU) to hang and force all brake calipers open no matter how strong pressure is applied on the brake pedal.
Even the automatic transmission gearbox is controlled electronically consisting of electronically controlled actuator valves that reroute hydraulic fluid in the box in order to switch operating mode of the gearbox. It is fully possible for the ECU of the automatic transmission to stop responding to "shifting commands" from the shift stick.
Usually there is redundancy in those systems and the systems at least used to be isolated from each other, i.e. they operate independently from each other using their own circuitry and wiring except for perhaps the diagnostics interface (OBD, OBDII, et al). The ABS-system used to be this way on most cars until the TRACS feature came where the ABS system sends commands to the fuel injection box forcing the engine to rev down in order to prevent spin when accelerating. This is also used to enhance the effect of the ABS control when braking.
But my bets are, since the invention of the CCAM bus that all electronic components have become more and more integrated into each other and the manufacturers do what they can to cut their production costs and save copper wire by letting all components communicate over the same CCAM bus which goes around the car in a loop. If this bus breaks, gets congested or overloaded then things don't look good for the driver.
So, all in all, I think this is possible to happen and the cruise control may have overloaded the CCAM bus disabling all electronically controlled operation of the vehicle.
I understand your point but what I really like about AmigaOS is its transparency. I've never had an OS where I could fully understand all components the way I did in the AmigaOS. Everything was so intuitive; the libraries in libs:, the drivers in devs:,...
I don't understand a fraction of Windows and the registry and it's usage of virtual RAM is a disaster. Linux is better than Windows in this regard but the learning curve is pretty steep.
I really don't like the "/" in Linux. I think the way devices are mounted in AmigaOS is much better and the volumes/devices can be named to "Whatever you want:" and not just A:\, B:\, C:\. I also like the assign command (similar to SUBST in MS-DOS) which does not only let you assign one path to : but several paths.
The datatypes were really revolutionary. If say JPEG2000 came recently, all you would have to do is to install its datatype and then all graphical software would automatically support that file-format without update.
So what I really miss in the world of modern technology is an operating system that is truly transparent, organized and intuitive even on a technical level. The AmigaOS sure sets an example of how an OS should look like in my opinion and I think this is particularly important when considering all the viruses, trojans and other security issues one has to deal with on a regular basis. And don't think you can always trust your virus killer, firewall or root-kit detector. The only thing you can trust is your common sense and there is no excuse for an OS to not be designed to support that.
And the equipment they use. The chain is never stronger than its weakest link. There is no point in testing say 24bit@96kHz uncompressed if the audio equipment cannot deliver it.
I think this setup could be considerably easier to program than a regular system with a lot of "general-purpose" cores.
Writing code that gives the user the option of using 1 or 2 cores for GUI is merely a matter of how the instruction stream should be routed. When designing a GUI, multiple threads is inevitable so the problem is to classify them and determine which core is best suited for a given thread (when using both GUI cores).
The multimedia-core shouldn't be too much of a problem to implement.
The only significant problem I see here is how things should be synchronized; if the cores are not well-synced it could get sluggish just because core 1 is waiting for core 2 or the other way around etc...
This makes me think of the good old days when the Amiga was popular. The co-processor, or copper was synced with the video signal which made scrolling really smooth. So programming multiple cores isn't that far fetched; if it was possible in the '80s, it is possible now, and with the aid of open-source communities I'm sure people wouldn't mind the challenge.
I don't know if this would be better setup than a single core solution from a power-consumption perspective. However I feel that a core that is shut down consumes 0W whereas an idling core always consumes something. The advantage with the multiple cores is that they are optimized for their own application so that the first 2 cores could be very lean whereas the second 2 could be a little more power hungry. From a performance perspective this must be a better solution if it is well-implemented, because it could ensure immediate response when using the dialing functions while allowing for some lag when using multimedia functions...
Then you mention the expense of silicon-surface which I'm sure ain't cheap. However, there are a lot of standard components out there for e.g. multimedia, perhaps it is possible to take advantage of them.
But maybe this is too far fetched, these are just ideas that came to my mind...
Perhaps using multiple cores can do the trick. Say that we have the following cores:
1. Basic-core This handles the basic operations on the phone and is run at all time 2. Basic User interface core. When the user starts interacting with the phone this one kicks in and handles the basic operations 3. Advanced User interface This one starts as soon as more CPU intensive tasks are being engaged such as browsing through pictures, writing SMS/MMS (using dictionary lookups) etc 4. Multimedia core This core is activated when playing audio and/or video
Only the first of the 4 cores is active all the time and depending on user operation the others are activated/deactivated accordingly so as to consume minimal wattage. Perhaps the settings can provide the user with the options of forcing core 3 to be disabled to save power and/or forcing it to be enabled (when core 2 is enabled) so as to ensure GUI speed. If the battery runs out the phone can automatically enforce some of the cores to stay disabled until the battery is put on recharge...
The next step is to put equipment on your body that continuously monitors your activities where each Jaywalk and other minor infringements are added to your tax. The government will also add penalty fees for each offending word that comes out of your mouth, pretty much like Demolition Man.
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here are just way too many questions unanswered for me to buy this. Firstly, how does it work? He doesn't put any effort into explaining how it works. He should demonstrate the full assembly and it's operation. All the abuse of "ultra" also feels very inappropriate.
Sure under optimal conditions the efficiency may be 60% but could this really be sustained under all conditions? The figure 3.5 times seems to be taken out of nowhere. What does he mean with a combustion engine? The Diesel engine is more efficient than the Otto/Gasoline engine but the efficiency can be improved on an Otto engine if you increase the compression (which is possible when using high octane fuels such as ethanol or gas). A Diesel engine can have up to 40-45% efficiency. Since this is intended for hybrid cars, we also have to account for the losses that occur in the conversion to electricity (electrical generators for vehicular use lie at about 60-80%) and the inefficiency of the electrical engine (around 60%). So the overall efficiency in such a system would then be 0.6*0.6*0.6 which is about 20-25%.
Then what about operation and durability. How long does an engine like this engine last before it becomes inoperable? What happens to the efficiency during the lifetime of such an engine? An old engine may only be half as efficient as a new one. What about cooling, can it get overheated in certain situations? Is it reliable or is it prone to stalling? Is it easy to start and stop or does it need extended warm-up and cool down periods.
I feel sad to say this but I cannot feel naught but that this guy is a joke and I cannot take him seriously.
Also remember that the fission reactors are developed apart from the existing reactors that are based on an over 50 years old technology (well most of them are anyway). The next generation reactors use technology that can extract considerably more energy from the same fissile material than the current reactors can. What is nuclear waste today can be used as fuel in these reactors and the current amount of fissile fuel in circulation is said to be able to supply us with as much energy as currently being produced (before the tsunami) for at least another 100 years. The waste material from these reactors have a much shorter half life than the current nuclear waste and only needs to be stored in a safe place for decades and not millennia.
...). I think it's about time that we leave the Middle East and their oil to their fate...
I have seen (breeder) constructions that should be safer than the current reactors. The principle behind this safety is that there needs to be an active regulatory system to keep the reaction alive. If the system fails the reaction will die off without complications other than the difficulty to revive the process again.
The major problem with the next generation nuclear technology is that there is no economic incentives as it is cheaper to design and build old generation reactors. It is capitalism at its best indeed...
The procurement and excavation for uranium material is actually of great environmental concern as open pit mines totally destroys the landscape. If some company finds uranium in the mountains of Arizona there will no longer be a Grand Canyon. But there are other more environmentally friendly ways to extract uranium. There is a lot of it in the sea water and it is estimated that it costs about 5 times as much to extract it from the sea water than it does to get it by an open-pit mine. The nice thing in this crow song is that this additional cost has an almost negligible effect on the cost of producing electricity from nuclear energy.
Let's hope Andrea Rossi's cold fusion process will work, then we will have another viable alternative to the fission reaction process. According to him this fusion process does not produce any radioactive material.
Also note that nuclear reactors can be used to produce other things than just electricity. Apart from the obvious byproduct of heat it can also be used to make hydrogen to normal combustion engine cars. There are technologies that allows this hydrogen to be absorbed into a nanofoam material that can be mixed into the gasoline and be used as fuel in normal cars. Hydrogen is a lot more emission friendly than any other type of fuel that can be used in a combustion/fuel cell engine (such as DME, Eco/BioPar, Fischer-Tropsh Diesel, FAME, RME, Methanol, Ethanol, LPG, CMG,
Something, I'm really missing is a stronger "passthrough" implementation than Intel VT-d/AMD IOMMU that allows any hardware to be passed through to a guest OS / domU such that I can use Unix/Linux as Dom0 and play fully-fledged DirectX11 games on a multiway SLI/CrossFire on a Windows guest machine.
.net or DirectX will shrink into wrappers that will provide whatever specific resources that are requested by the program to be run. So if you run a MacOS program the wrapper will parse runtime libraries based on the MacOS frameworks to the program whereas a Windows program will use Windows runtime libraries through this wrapper and so on.
I have the dream or vision that operating systems will grow into more simplistic hypervisors in the future. System environments that provide APIs such as
So there will be a separation between the hardware and the operating systems by an abstraction layer where different wrappers (that used to be operating systems) share the underlying hardware with each other. There will no longer be a question whether you use Windows, MacOS or Linux. You just use whatever you prefer as a base OS and use whatever is needed to run the applications you want, which in reality could mean that you run several operating systems simultaneously on the very same machine.
This separation has already begun, ZFS is a good example of that. The ZFS file system looks at the hard drives as a storage pool and the user is not concerned with the physical characteristics of the partitions and where the sectors begin or end. I didn't like it at first but later found that this approach is ingenious. So I see it as a natural step that the rest of the hardware will undergo the same transition. I also think a lot can be done with the UEFI framework in this regard.
I have read that the most part (over 90%) of the semi-conductor manufacturing is located in regions of Japan that are not affected by the Tsunami. It would be interesting to know how much is really produced in Japan at all. Most things are being made in China these days.
My suspicions are that these "shortages" are claimed in an attempt to manipulate the prices. It just like what the people at Enron did when they called up power plants and told them to shut down the electricity for a few hours every now and then to push up the electricity prices on the market.
But what about NT3.x through NT4? He missed them, and that upgrade path would not have been through the Win95/98/Me systems.
I wasn't exactly an angel when I was in high-school. I skipped school in junior high for over a year and got away with it because we moved and both schools thought that I had moved to the other. I couldn't take any of what was taught seriously. I was like "OH MAN! Are we gonna go through the table of multiplication, AGAIN! We did it when we were 8 isn't that enough?". The spelling tests were annoying the hell out of me; after the first three years in high school (we start at 7) I found them superfluous. I never made a mistake on these tests and I couldn't understand people who still had problems with spelling, we were like 12-13 years old! Sometimes I feel like I want to sue someone and get compensation for my lost childhood in the high school.
I cheated a lot and had no qualms about it, mostly I copied essays in subjects that didn't interest me; literature, religion and history. At one occasion I wrote a makeup exam. There was no security, we could sit wherever we liked and we should just hand it in putting it on a table in the computer lab while the teacher was having a computer lab session for a bunch of other students. I had no clue about the exam and was hopeless so when I went to the computer lab to hand in my exam, I saw that another guy had already put his exam on the table. So I quickly took his exam, went out the door and wrote his answers into my exam (of course I reformulated the answers - I wasn't stupid). The teacher never noticed me because he was occupied with his students. I got a high pass and he was so impressed at my results that he gave me compliments about it and I just thought "No Shit!" and had a sly smile when he told me. The teachers never suspected me, they thought I was a "very intelligent young boy". Even my mother was proud of me and called me mini-Einstein when she talked to them. I hated high school and I never felt that I learned anything substantial from it. Especially the math and physics was appalling.
Then came the time when I was about to apply for "college" or an undergraduate program at the university. It was tough, my grades were bollocks but I fought and finally got admission a year later after battling with some entry qualification tests. I applied for one of the most difficult programs that one can take in my country; It was Engineering Physics which is a 5 years long program and you graduate with a Masters Degree and a special Engineering certificate. The admission was difficult to get through and it is even more difficult to graduate. It had even been on the news for being the most difficult program since so many students drop out prematurely.
Since I got admitted, cheating has never ever occurred to me. I take my studies with pride and I have passed test after test with pure brawn blood and sweat without cheating. I did that because I take my studies seriously and I feel that I have learned a lot from the courses that were taught.
So you can't generalize and say that people who cheat at high school will always be a cheat. The thing is that high school is a joke, everybody knows it. The exam results from the introductory math courses at the universities have declined steeply since the '70s and the teachers at my university literally laugh students in their face (and so do I) when they cannot even do a simple division without a calculator. The high schools are falling apart and people in the west are getting dumber and dumber while people in the east outsmart us by a million leagues. Go to Russia, China or even countries such as Iran, Pakistan or India, they laugh at out school system!
We are really talking about very different things here. I'm not talking about what's possible or not. I'm talking about what old DOS games used back then and not many games used 480p VGA.
No, you could not get more than 32 colors in standard half-brite mode or 64 colors in extra half-brite mode unless;
a) You used HAM which could yield all those colors which was very uncommon in games because it was slow and the graphics were subject to the undesired effect called fringing. or
b)You used palette switching. One way was to let several screens that use the same screen resolution overlap each other horizontally using their own unique palette. This technique was used in for example the Eye of the Beholder games. Another way was to implement so called copper lists that let the co-processor switch the palette continuously. This technique was popular among demo coders (in e.g. so called "plasma" demos) but I have never seen a serious implementation of it in computer games.
You can't be serious when you say that Wing Commander use 480p VGA? DOS games back in the old days used the so called "Mode 13h" which was/is a mode with 320x200 pixels resolution capable of showing 256 colors. It gives more colors than the pre-AGA Amiga screen modes but actually a lower resolution. But as other people say, WC should work with DOSbox.
But what about virtual servers? One machine may host hundreds if not thousands of virtual servers. I don't believe that they use windows as a host OS (dominator 0) on the physical machine, it usually is Linux based or BSD based.
No, I think this "inefficiency" thing is a misconception. Just to speak from my own experience; I use 200W of halogen lights (which is a form of incandescent light) in my room which usually is cold during winters due to poor insulation. After about 20 minutes of having the lights on I usually have to take off my sweater because of the heat from the lights. I daresay that the inefficiency that arise from placing a heat source near the roof is negligible because air circulates. Sure the air will always be somewhat hotter near the ceiling than near the floor but it will always be that way regardless of where you put the heat source.
I agree with that. I'm actually tired of the whole geek stereotype (even though I do like joking about it). I sometimes hear people saying; "I don't want to do this or that because it is too geeky or that is gay ..." and I don't understand it! If there is something that you are genuinely interested in, then GO FOR IT and don't listen to what the society tells us. It' OK to joke about your interests showing that you don't take yourself too seriously but never apologize for them. There's nothing wrong with being passionate about something.
What is wrong, however is if your interests turns into an abuse that affects your social life and so on, but that is different story and has in my opinion little to do with the negative stereotypes associated with them.
I cannot speak for every field of science but I cannot completely agree with SpeedyDX on this one, especially when we are talking about technical science. Most technical scientists and engineers have a solid background in mathematics and mathematical statistics. The problems and the fallacies behind inductive reasoning and the problems with determining causality are more than well covered in these subjects. When looking historically, mathematics is actually a spin-off from Philosophy. Sure, most of what is taught in a university at an introductory level is "applied logic" whatever that is supposed to mean. The thing is that most of the theorems we learn must be proven and understood even when taking a basic Calculus course. If one wants to get more abstract than that and get a deeper understanding, there are courses that deal with concepts such as rings, fields, algebras, set theory, the construction of the real number system, cardinality, vector spaces and so on. And these concepts are dealt with at a much more intellectually challenging level than I can imagine what is done in Philosophy.
Even a fan-less system is not silent, you have to put up with the humming 60Hz noise coming from the power supply unit.
Instead of a list of spreadsheet lines, why not put together the lines into acts with continuous story-lines that give support for interaction and context? The acts may even be lined with content that may not be used in the end product just to make it easier for the actors to enter into the plots. Letting the actors interact with each other during the recording sessions may also be a way to improve the acting. That together with good direction ought to improve the results. Of course it requires good script writing and more time but I think it would be worth it.
But if you want to get higher typing speeds, why not use a Stenotype device? According to Wikipedia one can easily reach typing speeds of 300 WPM.
I also come to think of alternative typing software for PDAs and smartphones. Texware solutions claim that one can yield faster typing speeds than a regular QWERTY keyboard with their program called Fitaly. So called Dom Perignon Speed Contests are being arranged regularly which are typing contests using different typing software. The winner of the last contest reached a speed of 80.88 WPM using Fitaly. But the contest was arranged by Texware themselves so there could be reason to suspect that this contest may be biased. Another typing software that promises higher typing speeds is MessagEase which is similar to Fitaly.
I wouldn't agree to that. Autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and allergies is rather a sign that the immune system is "out of tune", not too strong. This means that the immune system is wasting its limited resources on the wrong thing.
But which is best platform to run, FreeBSD or OpenSolaris? It's difficult to find a good SAS/SATA controller that is well-supported by OpenSolaris. I have found a few cheap LSI MegaRAID conrtollers in China.
I'm willing to admit that a human factor probably has been involved too, contributing to the situation. I also understand that many of us have experienced women panicking for no apparent reason and many times I agree with the disapproval of that kind of behavior in such situations. However, I feel that people are a little too conclusive calling this guy an idiot. If I were on a highway with a lot of cars and in all of a sudden the car started accelerating putting me out of control, I would get freaked out for sure.
The major concern I have when writing my posts on this thread is that the car manufacturers tend not to take the responsibility they should for their products. They keep cutting the costs reducing the quality of their products and their philsophy seems to be; "if something goes wrong it's better to blame it all on the driver". I wish their businesses were more transparent and that people had a higher awareness of what they are doing so that the "bad apples" were quickly forced out of the market.
I'm not saying that everything is bad when it comes to electronic control replacing mechanical components. Just to give an example: Several of the experienced car-mechanics I've talked to say that the fuel injection systems as of today are very stable, reliable and less prone to failures than carburettors before they were phased out of the market. Since the introduction of all emission systems, the carbs became a nightmare to deal with and the lambda control was a god-send when it was introduced.
Remember that industrial machines such as forklifts, skylifts, mining equipment and construction equipment in many cases have this type of control and sometimes work in more corrosive environments than regular automobiles. So I think a drive-by-wire system could be reliable if it is designed properly, but when it comes to car manufacturers I'm afraid that such designs may require a lot more R&D and production costs than they are willing to take, which tends to yield much less reliable applications.
Sometimes, if you are lucky, manuals and schematics can be downloaded from p2p networks, or if you have the right connections, binders with service manuals can be bought at a not too unreasonable price. I also believe that a lot can be achieved using a regular aftermarket OBDII diagnostics unit and a laptop even on modern vehicles. But it really shouldn't be this way. At least when it comes to computers, you can always choose Linux or BSD, but when it comes to cars you usually have no choice. There may be exceptions however, there is a build-your-own fuel injection system called MegaSquirt.
I appriciate your informative posts, opportunities to learn new things about automotive technology becomes fewer and farther between these days. I guess that we armchair rocket scientists always have better ideas than anyone else and we would have an interesting conversation for sure.
Cheers!
I'm not a professional car mechanic with many years of experience but I'm interested in car technology and I work on cars for leisure. I also have been working in car manufacturing plants on occasion.
All of the cars I've been working with (during my leisure time) is from before the era when the car manufacturers started using the CCAN bus. It's near impossible to find useful information about it on the internet, but I've managed to come over some brief but technical articles from an automotive engineering website a few years ago. So my knowledge about this car is rather limited but I'm willing to bet that some of the changes ensuing the introduction of this bus are for worse from a security perspective.
It's a fact that many cars as of today no longer use a key to control the ignition. I'm not able to tell what the RFID cassette looks like on every model that uses this technology. I'm only able to tell how it works on the cars I've been using and assembling. But it's quite obvious that all cars that use this type of ignition control have ditched the mechanical ignition switch entirely and made it completely based on semi-conductor circuitry.
This RFID technology has been used on cars at least since the mid '90s. In such cars there is an antenna around the ignition lock and an RFID chip is fitted in the bow of the key. This is also known as an immobilizer which is made to prevent car theft and makes the car refuse to start if the key is wrongly encoded or when someone tries to bypass the ignition lock manually. In those systems the ignition control is still mechanical and the electronics circuitry cannot prevent the driver from switching the ignition off, only prevent him from switching it on. Problems with the immobilizer is actually a rather common issue for people having problems starting their cars.
When I talked about ABS I only talked about the technical possibilities and not how they actually work. My english vocabulary is rather limited when it comes to car mechanical terms so I said "force calipers open" when I rather meant "force the bleeding valves open". I was merely discussing the technical possibilites and not the likelyhood for this to happen. But the fact is that I have actually experienced when the ABS completely removed all braking pressure from the calipers and weren't just "pulsating" when I made a hard brake. The road was slippery so this was normal operation, but it did happen. On the ABS systems I've worked with I think this kind of malfunction is very unlikely to happen although it is technically possible. But then again, I don't know what changes that have been applied on these systems since the introduction of the CCAN bus.
I was mentioning the TRACS as an illustration on how the electronic systems have become more and more integrated with each other.
Brakes also fail when the system gets overheated. If the brake fluid starts to boil and/or the brake discs and linings gets overheated the brakes usually fail. Braking involves a lot of friction which turns into heat and overheating may and will happen if the brakes are used heavily enough.
Sure the CCAN bus is more robust than the lanes of the southbridge in a computer, but that doesn't make it failproof. Even though its bandwidth is far wider than the components of a car ever would need, it sure can suffer from short-circuit, corrosion, or leaking voltages which could render it useless in a split second. I know that there are measures taken to make the bus less vulnerable to these factors but I'm not so sure that these measures are so failproof as people say. I won't believe a word until I see the construction with my own eyes and draw the conclusions myself.
The automatic transmission is the part of the cars I know the least about although I know its principles and that it is electronically controlled. So it was an interesting insight about this you provided in your post wtfbill. I know that some cars have some kind of blockage that prevents the driver
Many modern cars have electronic ignition which consists of a cassette that is inserted into a slot. The system feeds this cassette electrically into the slot like the tray of a CD player, and scans the chip inside the cassette (this chip is also known as RFID chip). When the ID is verified the driver can push a button to start the car. So the good old mechanical key is gone on these models and the ignition control relies entirely on computer controlled semi-conductor relays.
The parking brake, or the hand brake is not strong enough to brake a moving car, at least not at speeds above 30 kph. At 80 kph the hand brake is most likely to take considerable damage and/or premature wear and even further disable its operation when trying to use it at that speed.
When it comes to the brakes, cars have what is known as ABS. ABS is an electronically controlled braking system which neutralizes the braking force on the wheels that are starting to spin, when you hit the brakes hard or you hit them when the road is slippery. It is technically possible for the electronic control unit (ECU) to hang and force all brake calipers open no matter how strong pressure is applied on the brake pedal.
Even the automatic transmission gearbox is controlled electronically consisting of electronically controlled actuator valves that reroute hydraulic fluid in the box in order to switch operating mode of the gearbox. It is fully possible for the ECU of the automatic transmission to stop responding to "shifting commands" from the shift stick.
Usually there is redundancy in those systems and the systems at least used to be isolated from each other, i.e. they operate independently from each other using their own circuitry and wiring except for perhaps the diagnostics interface (OBD, OBDII, et al). The ABS-system used to be this way on most cars until the TRACS feature came where the ABS system sends commands to the fuel injection box forcing the engine to rev down in order to prevent spin when accelerating. This is also used to enhance the effect of the ABS control when braking.
But my bets are, since the invention of the CCAM bus that all electronic components have become more and more integrated into each other and the manufacturers do what they can to cut their production costs and save copper wire by letting all components communicate over the same CCAM bus which goes around the car in a loop. If this bus breaks, gets congested or overloaded then things don't look good for the driver.
So, all in all, I think this is possible to happen and the cruise control may have overloaded the CCAM bus disabling all electronically controlled operation of the vehicle.
I understand your point but what I really like about AmigaOS is its transparency. I've never had an OS where I could fully understand all components the way I did in the AmigaOS. Everything was so intuitive; the libraries in libs:, the drivers in devs:, ...
I don't understand a fraction of Windows and the registry and it's usage of virtual RAM is a disaster. Linux is better than Windows in this regard but the learning curve is pretty steep.
I really don't like the "/" in Linux. I think the way devices are mounted in AmigaOS is much better and the volumes/devices can be named to "Whatever you want:" and not just A:\, B:\, C:\. I also like the assign command (similar to SUBST in MS-DOS) which does not only let you assign one path to : but several paths.
The datatypes were really revolutionary. If say JPEG2000 came recently, all you would have to do is to install its datatype and then all graphical software would automatically support that file-format without update.
So what I really miss in the world of modern technology is an operating system that is truly transparent, organized and intuitive even on a technical level. The AmigaOS sure sets an example of how an OS should look like in my opinion and I think this is particularly important when considering all the viruses, trojans and other security issues one has to deal with on a regular basis. And don't think you can always trust your virus killer, firewall or root-kit detector. The only thing you can trust is your common sense and there is no excuse for an OS to not be designed to support that.
And the equipment they use. The chain is never stronger than its weakest link. There is no point in testing say 24bit@96kHz uncompressed if the audio equipment cannot deliver it.
I think this setup could be considerably easier to program than a regular system with a lot of "general-purpose" cores.
Writing code that gives the user the option of using 1 or 2 cores for GUI is merely a matter of how the instruction stream should be routed. When designing a GUI, multiple threads is inevitable so the problem is to classify them and determine which core is best suited for a given thread (when using both GUI cores).
The multimedia-core shouldn't be too much of a problem to implement.
The only significant problem I see here is how things should be synchronized; if the cores are not well-synced it could get sluggish just because core 1 is waiting for core 2 or the other way around etc...
This makes me think of the good old days when the Amiga was popular. The co-processor, or copper was synced with the video signal which made scrolling really smooth. So programming multiple cores isn't that far fetched; if it was possible in the '80s, it is possible now, and with the aid of open-source communities I'm sure people wouldn't mind the challenge.
I don't know if this would be better setup than a single core solution from a power-consumption perspective. However I feel that a core that is shut down consumes 0W whereas an idling core always consumes something. The advantage with the multiple cores is that they are optimized for their own application so that the first 2 cores could be very lean whereas the second 2 could be a little more power hungry.
From a performance perspective this must be a better solution if it is well-implemented, because it could ensure immediate response when using the dialing functions while allowing for some lag when using multimedia functions...
Then you mention the expense of silicon-surface which I'm sure ain't cheap. However, there are a lot of standard components out there for e.g. multimedia, perhaps it is possible to take advantage of them.
But maybe this is too far fetched, these are just ideas that came to my mind...
Perhaps using multiple cores can do the trick. Say that we have the following cores:
1. Basic-core This handles the basic operations on the phone and is run at all time
2. Basic User interface core. When the user starts interacting with the phone this one kicks in and handles the basic operations
3. Advanced User interface This one starts as soon as more CPU intensive tasks are being engaged such as browsing through pictures, writing SMS/MMS (using dictionary lookups) etc
4. Multimedia core This core is activated when playing audio and/or video
Only the first of the 4 cores is active all the time and depending on user operation the others are activated/deactivated accordingly so as to consume minimal wattage. Perhaps the settings can provide the user with the options of forcing core 3 to be disabled to save power and/or forcing it to be enabled (when core 2 is enabled) so as to ensure GUI speed. If the battery runs out the phone can automatically enforce some of the cores to stay disabled until the battery is put on recharge...
This is just an idea but maybe it works...
The next step is to put equipment on your body that continuously monitors your activities where each Jaywalk and other minor infringements are added to your tax. The government will also add penalty fees for each offending word that comes out of your mouth, pretty much like Demolition Man.