"... a smaller VW car exists, that can run more than 30 km on a single litre of diesel..."
You refer to the Lupo. Take a look at this page about the 3-liter Lupo TDI (we don't get it here in North America.) An excerpt:
"There are fine details of difference, both inside and outside between the normal Lupo and the three-litre Lupo. It is 150kg lighter because, in order to reduce fuel consumption, it had "to loose a bit of weight". The vehicle body is made of completely galvanized sheet steel. Aluminium was used both for the bonnet and for the doors. In addition, the tail gate consists of aluminium on the outside and magnesium on the inside. Even the heat absorbing glass is lighter. Rolling resistance is lessened by particularly light, narrow tyres which have been mounted on aluminium-forged light wheels."
Go here for more info on the "Around The World In 80 Days On 1,000 Liters Of Fuel" challenge.
VW is unfortunately currently the only passenger car maker still offering diesels in the U.S. (the TDI is a 1.9 liter turbo direct injection engine.) US consumers' aversion to diesels (largely brought on by the disastrous diesels of the early 1980s... don't get me started on my parents' '81 Cutlass Supreme diesel!) has led to other manufacturers' leaving the US market... Mercedes, for instance; you still see some of their diesels on the roads, but no more are being sold in showrooms.
I've got a 2000 2.0L Golf GLS (it's white, and I love it!). Just to see if I should indeed regretting not purchasing a TDI due to the 44/49 ratings, I computed the monthly payment on a TDI (on my current loan) and the 2.0L that I got because gasoline is far easier to find where I am and because the up-front cost was lower.
It turned out that the answer is no; there is no cost savings, at least on my 36-month loan, if I had done so. I pay about $490 a month; a TDI would have cost about $540 monthly. The extra $50 in monthly payments is about the same as what fuel costs, depending on how I drive and what the fuel prices are.
This goes to show that until diesels either sell closer to the cost of a standard gasoline engine, or the price of gasoline and the price of diesel diverge significantly more, many others will also decide to keep the utility and easy fuel availability of a standard gas engine. Furthermore, under current US laws, diesel fuel is higher in sulphur than the fuels available in Europe, so diesel vehicles do put out more pollution. This can be solved by better fuel-content regulations.
On the other hand, I hear the TDI gets a lot of oomph if you put an Upsolute chip in it.:)
Hmm. I amend my statement to say "with the original sensors launched on board in 1993" since I do recall reading such a thing at that time. However, since the telescope can and has been updated in orbit with new instruments, it looks like they've overcome this. Notice that the moon photos were taken with "WFPC-2"... there was a different WFPC earlier on.
"Notice how the military is no longer using the shuttle for its missions... it proved too expensive for the one-shot launches more suited to USAF missions."
Partially true, partially not. When the Shuttle was under development in the 1960s and 1970s, the military specified that it wanted the Shuttle to be able to carry payloads of up to 60 feet in length and 15 feet wide. That is the reason that the Shuttle's cargo bay is the size that it is, and a large part of the overall size, since the orbiter had to be designed around that bay size. This is also the reason for the size of the Soviet Buran shuttle (yes, where my name comes from), since that program largely used the work done on the US shuttle. "If it works just fine," reasoned the Soviets, "then why waste time and money doing the research again?" (You can go here to read more about Buran.)
To this day, the military has not specified what that payload was, though I speculate that it was likely a KH-12 spy satellite or a similar vehicle, which is reportedly very similar to the overall design of the Hubble telescope but optimised for looking back at the Earth instead of toward the stars. Using different sensors, of course; Hubble would be blinded if it pointed at the Moon or Earth. Hubble, incidentally, is one of the few payloads to even come close to filling the entire payload bay. Hubble filled nearly all of it; the emptiest shuttle mission ever was the first flight, STS-1 -- carried out in April of 1981 -- that carried no payload whatsoever.
"... the USAF doesnt really like to work with NASA any more since they were hoodwinked into paying for part of the Shuttle...
Hoodwinked? No. They actually had input on the design and helped to make its development into a working vehicle possible. DoD stopped putting military payloads on the Shuttle because one has been lost. It seems that the military believes that one loss in 25 missions is unacceptable, even though to this day there have been none since in over 75 more missions. This is actually a good record, since there have been mishaps with just about every launch vehicle out there. It's just that the loss of the Space Shuttle results in huge publicity (rightfully so) while the loss of, say, a Delta II results in a collective national yawn and a flip of the channel to a football game. Even the Air Force's workhorse the Titan IV has failed several times, not just once.
The Shuttle fleet is too busy right now to accept a military mission in any case, however, since three of the four shuttles are constantly flying to the space station and the fourth, Columbia, has not reentered service after its last Orbiter Maintenance Down Period (OMDP). Columbia is too heavy to reach the ISS, so she will be flying science missions as the shuttle did for years before the ISS began assembly in 1998.
We've had two missions already that take their names from TV and movies.
Deep Space One is an experimental probe designed to test ion propulsion and semi-autonomous operation. Deep Space Two was an auxiliary payload on the Mars Polar Lander that was designed to send two impact probes to drive into the surface of Mars and perform tests (they were lost along with the lander for unknown reasons.)
What will happen when we get to Deep Space Nine? According to the back of one of my DS9 novels, the phrase is trademarked. Will Paramount raise a fuss when NASA gets far enough along in the project series to argue with them? I hope not, since it'd be great PR. Besides, I don't think you can really trademark the term when used that way. They also tried to trademark "USS Enterprise" some time back, but the Navy understandably got upset and gave them some smackdown. I'm sure the thousands of sailors who have served on her agree with the sentiment.
Still, I look forward to seeing what Deep Impact can do. It'll help us carry out a mission like the Messiah's in the future if it ever becomes necessary in reality. (The Messiah, by the way, is an incredibly cool design. Who would have thought you could combine the Space Shuttle, ISS modules, Energia/Shuttle booster rockets, spare external tanks, and a NERVA engine so exquisitely?)
This didn't work in the copy I had on my machine already (2.74, if I remember right; machine's at home and I'm at work). I couldn't get the server window to let me type one in. However, it does work just fine on the latest version available today (2.75, IIRC.) I have yet to try it, but at least Winamp saved the setting.
The stereo in my 2000 Volkswagen Golf was made by Clarion. If I'd opted to spend a bit of extra money, it would have been made by Monsoon. Only the Monsoon system is labeled as such in documentation or on the readout -- both of them look visually the same (and are badged as VW stereos.)
VW doesn't stop you from going out and putting a different head unit in your car (in fact, some people I know on an owner's board have put in RioCars or whatever they're called these days), but dealers can't run their diagnostic system on the car most of the time if you've done this. The Jetta and Golf (and I suspect the New Beetle, Passat, Cabrio, and Eurovan "suffer" the same problem) depend on the stereo for some of the system functions.
Is that restrictive bundling? Or is it done for a good reason? I personally wonder why the designers didn't better allow for the possibility of aftermarket upgrades.
"Unused closed caption data space"... Is this going to interfere with closed captioning transmission and/or viewing? If it does, then those of us who depend on those closed captions to watch television are out of luck -- and by law, those caption decoding chips must be in all TVs 13" and larger.
I've never had a problem with Register.com, actually. They answered support mail fast, and their web interface is far, far better than what I dealt with while with Network Solutions.
Jetfires are up for auction almost all of the time on Ebay. Prices seem to range from $100 or so for a loose and/or incomplete one (and you can get armor separately, too) to $500 and up for a new one still in the box.
A friend of mine on the East Coast has one; I might ask him to bring it along next time I visit him -- it looks neat in all the pictures I've seen.
Hopefully, speaking as a VW fan, they'll update the Bumblebee/Goldbug. I'd like to see some well-done Volkswagens -- maybe even a white four-door Golf like mine! -- in this line. I collect space shuttles (see my other comment in this thread based on that) and am considering a Goldbug for my VW minis. But updated ones would be sweet. Maybe a lowered GTI with a nice body kit would be suitable for adaptation to the Car Robots.
... not bad.
I just bought a Sky Lynx on Ebay (the one in this pic and in my space collection image gallery) for my space shuttle collection. It was missing the main engines -- the three big nozzles -- so I bid on two more so I'd get at least one complete one. Now I've got three. I'm happy.:) If that seems excessive... well... NASA has four!
I'm very impressed with the accuracy, especially for a toy -- before the decals are applied, nearly every tile line, fill/vent port, and contour are scored in. It seems to be based on Challenger, Discovery, and Atlantis but not Enterprise or Columbia (tile patterns different on the latter two.)
The original Generation 1 Transformers are my favorites. The modern ones are a pale shadow.
I've been trying. The bloody thing doesn't work, and I need to see if this fixes an ethernet G4 in the G4 I'm typing this on. Apple needs to get their heads out of the sand and actually allow you to download the software they spent the entire morning hyping. Mirrors, please.
The local used-book shop near my apartment closed recently, a sell-out to a new used-book shop in the same storefront. The old shop had a wonderful (and huge) sci-fi section that I loved: I could get good-condition books that were out of print or far more expensive at "new" stores. The new shop's sci-fi section is a joke: the huge room that used to hold SF&F lies empty while the new store's excuse for a sci-fi section lies crammed into a corner.
Too bad I didn't get the original owner's name before the signs went down off the doors. I now wish I had; I'd like to write a scathing, but polite, letter for selling out like that. (Literally: the shop vanished overnight.)
I finally found a new store that I hope to visit this weekend. It seems to me that new-book stores are everywhere while the "used but still good" stores are vanishing. Amazon deserves applause for trying to fix this -- and now some bunch of idiots is trying to take away what I grew up with and now may have irretrievably lost.
I have a Lombard (1999 Bronze Keyboard) Powerbook. From what I can tell, there are frankly no real reasons for me to want to get a new PowerBook, even if my employer offered it.
The built-in SCSI port has been removed in order to install a pair of FireWire ports in the same spot where the square 30-pin SCSI connector was. Since we use scanners, CD burners, external hard drives, and other equipment, the loss of built-in SCSI isn't something I find appealing. (You can, however, use a thirdparty PC Card SCSI interface, at least...) I will be getting a PC Card Firewire interface if I need to use that system.
The DVD decoding, which is hardware on the Lombard model, is now software. Other Apple machines, particularly iMacs, have had trouble with the software-based DVD decoding in the past - including video/audio sync problems, and Apple admits that running the software DVD decoder alongside processor-intensive stuff like SETI@home is asking for trouble.
On the upside, batteries and many media bay devices will be compatible between Lombard and FireWire (though the DVD drive will not be). The main difference between the two Powerbooks, other than this, seems to be the built-in AirPort expandability.
Sorry, Apple... I was expecting a bit more from the new PowerBook. I'll wait for the G4 portables to show up, and so will my boss.
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I've got a 2000 2.0L Golf GLS (it's white, and I love it!). Just to see if I should indeed regretting not purchasing a TDI due to the 44/49 ratings, I computed the monthly payment on a TDI (on my current loan) and the 2.0L that I got because gasoline is far easier to find where I am and because the up-front cost was lower.
It turned out that the answer is no; there is no cost savings, at least on my 36-month loan, if I had done so. I pay about $490 a month; a TDI would have cost about $540 monthly. The extra $50 in monthly payments is about the same as what fuel costs, depending on how I drive and what the fuel prices are.
This goes to show that until diesels either sell closer to the cost of a standard gasoline engine, or the price of gasoline and the price of diesel diverge significantly more, many others will also decide to keep the utility and easy fuel availability of a standard gas engine. Furthermore, under current US laws, diesel fuel is higher in sulphur than the fuels available in Europe, so diesel vehicles do put out more pollution. This can be solved by better fuel-content regulations.
On the other hand, I hear the TDI gets a lot of oomph if you put an Upsolute chip in it. :)
Are you on the VWVortex.com forums? :)
Hmm. I amend my statement to say "with the original sensors launched on board in 1993" since I do recall reading such a thing at that time. However, since the telescope can and has been updated in orbit with new instruments, it looks like they've overcome this. Notice that the moon photos were taken with "WFPC-2" ... there was a different WFPC earlier on.
To this day, the military has not specified what that payload was, though I speculate that it was likely a KH-12 spy satellite or a similar vehicle, which is reportedly very similar to the overall design of the Hubble telescope but optimised for looking back at the Earth instead of toward the stars. Using different sensors, of course; Hubble would be blinded if it pointed at the Moon or Earth. Hubble, incidentally, is one of the few payloads to even come close to filling the entire payload bay. Hubble filled nearly all of it; the emptiest shuttle mission ever was the first flight, STS-1 -- carried out in April of 1981 -- that carried no payload whatsoever.
Hoodwinked? No. They actually had input on the design and helped to make its development into a working vehicle possible. DoD stopped putting military payloads on the Shuttle because one has been lost. It seems that the military believes that one loss in 25 missions is unacceptable, even though to this day there have been none since in over 75 more missions. This is actually a good record, since there have been mishaps with just about every launch vehicle out there. It's just that the loss of the Space Shuttle results in huge publicity (rightfully so) while the loss of, say, a Delta II results in a collective national yawn and a flip of the channel to a football game. Even the Air Force's workhorse the Titan IV has failed several times, not just once.The Shuttle fleet is too busy right now to accept a military mission in any case, however, since three of the four shuttles are constantly flying to the space station and the fourth, Columbia, has not reentered service after its last Orbiter Maintenance Down Period (OMDP). Columbia is too heavy to reach the ISS, so she will be flying science missions as the shuttle did for years before the ISS began assembly in 1998.
Deep Space One is an experimental probe designed to test ion propulsion and semi-autonomous operation. Deep Space Two was an auxiliary payload on the Mars Polar Lander that was designed to send two impact probes to drive into the surface of Mars and perform tests (they were lost along with the lander for unknown reasons.)
What will happen when we get to Deep Space Nine? According to the back of one of my DS9 novels, the phrase is trademarked. Will Paramount raise a fuss when NASA gets far enough along in the project series to argue with them? I hope not, since it'd be great PR. Besides, I don't think you can really trademark the term when used that way. They also tried to trademark "USS Enterprise" some time back, but the Navy understandably got upset and gave them some smackdown. I'm sure the thousands of sailors who have served on her agree with the sentiment.
Still, I look forward to seeing what Deep Impact can do. It'll help us carry out a mission like the Messiah's in the future if it ever becomes necessary in reality. (The Messiah, by the way, is an incredibly cool design. Who would have thought you could combine the Space Shuttle, ISS modules, Energia/Shuttle booster rockets, spare external tanks, and a NERVA engine so exquisitely?)
This didn't work in the copy I had on my machine already (2.74, if I remember right; machine's at home and I'm at work). I couldn't get the server window to let me type one in. However, it does work just fine on the latest version available today (2.75, IIRC.) I have yet to try it, but at least Winamp saved the setting.
VW doesn't stop you from going out and putting a different head unit in your car (in fact, some people I know on an owner's board have put in RioCars or whatever they're called these days), but dealers can't run their diagnostic system on the car most of the time if you've done this. The Jetta and Golf (and I suspect the New Beetle, Passat, Cabrio, and Eurovan "suffer" the same problem) depend on the stereo for some of the system functions.
Is that restrictive bundling? Or is it done for a good reason? I personally wonder why the designers didn't better allow for the possibility of aftermarket upgrades.
"Unused closed caption data space" ... Is this going to interfere with closed captioning transmission and/or viewing? If it does, then those of us who depend on those closed captions to watch television are out of luck -- and by law, those caption decoding chips must be in all TVs 13" and larger.
I've never had a problem with Register.com, actually. They answered support mail fast, and their web interface is far, far better than what I dealt with while with Network Solutions.
Jetfires are up for auction almost all of the time on Ebay. Prices seem to range from $100 or so for a loose and/or incomplete one (and you can get armor separately, too) to $500 and up for a new one still in the box.
A friend of mine on the East Coast has one; I might ask him to bring it along next time I visit him -- it looks neat in all the pictures I've seen.
Hopefully, speaking as a VW fan, they'll update the Bumblebee/Goldbug. I'd like to see some well-done Volkswagens -- maybe even a white four-door Golf like mine! -- in this line. I collect space shuttles (see my other comment in this thread based on that) and am considering a Goldbug for my VW minis. But updated ones would be sweet. Maybe a lowered GTI with a nice body kit would be suitable for adaptation to the Car Robots.
I'm very impressed with the accuracy, especially for a toy -- before the decals are applied, nearly every tile line, fill/vent port, and contour are scored in. It seems to be based on Challenger, Discovery, and Atlantis but not Enterprise or Columbia (tile patterns different on the latter two.)
The original Generation 1 Transformers are my favorites. The modern ones are a pale shadow.
I've been trying. The bloody thing doesn't work, and I need to see if this fixes an ethernet G4 in the G4 I'm typing this on. Apple needs to get their heads out of the sand and actually allow you to download the software they spent the entire morning hyping. Mirrors, please.
Too bad I didn't get the original owner's name before the signs went down off the doors. I now wish I had; I'd like to write a scathing, but polite, letter for selling out like that. (Literally: the shop vanished overnight.)
I finally found a new store that I hope to visit this weekend. It seems to me that new-book stores are everywhere while the "used but still good" stores are vanishing. Amazon deserves applause for trying to fix this -- and now some bunch of idiots is trying to take away what I grew up with and now may have irretrievably lost.
I have a Lombard (1999 Bronze Keyboard) Powerbook. From what I can tell, there are frankly no real reasons for me to want to get a new PowerBook, even if my employer offered it.
The built-in SCSI port has been removed in order to install a pair of FireWire ports in the same spot where the square 30-pin SCSI connector was. Since we use scanners, CD burners, external hard drives, and other equipment, the loss of built-in SCSI isn't something I find appealing. (You can, however, use a thirdparty PC Card SCSI interface, at least...) I will be getting a PC Card Firewire interface if I need to use that system.
The DVD decoding, which is hardware on the Lombard model, is now software. Other Apple machines, particularly iMacs, have had trouble with the software-based DVD decoding in the past - including video/audio sync problems, and Apple admits that running the software DVD decoder alongside processor-intensive stuff like SETI@home is asking for trouble.
On the upside, batteries and many media bay devices will be compatible between Lombard and FireWire (though the DVD drive will not be). The main difference between the two Powerbooks, other than this, seems to be the built-in AirPort expandability.
Sorry, Apple ... I was expecting a bit more from the new PowerBook. I'll wait for the G4 portables to show up, and so will my boss.