I often thought about doing this to the small (van-chassis) RV we used for a hot-air balloon chase vehicle. From the balloon, you can always see which backroad goes to the field you're aiming for...and those in the basket are always cursing the idiots on the ground who are going down what is obviously (from 500') a dead end.
Existing vehicle systems are pretty well set up for this in the modern American land-yacht. All that effort to isolate you from actual vehicle dynamics mean that they've presented you with controls that are pretty much just servo inputs. (Yes, there is a mechanical link in most cases, but they're servo-assisted)
Steering and brake are both heavily boosted, and throttle doesn't require much force.
We were talking about this fifteen years ago...doesn't seem like much of a challenge now.;)
I've thought about using this to announce network events at home (I run a couple of servers useful to those outside my home.)
I figure, I can spend a lot of time trying to make SNMP traps go to my pager/cell-phone/forwarded phone/mobile email widget, or I can just pipe them to the fish.
Because if the fish on the living room wall starts talking, my wife *will* find me to tell me about it.
Of course, I thought about this a couple of years ago...back when/. first linked to this site.;)
There are two of us in a software startup, and so I'm at home most of the time. Two things that have helped:
Driving to the other home-office once or twice a week. It's a mother of a commute (Santa Cruz to Berkeley) but the social interaction and productivity gains are worth it. (Plus, there are >50% backroad routes that don't add much time)
Get a gig that requires client visits. To keep food on the table, I've taken an occasional gig that requires going to customer sites.
With these two things, and a separated home office, you can stay quite sane and enjoy the 50' commute most of the time.
Number of Linux distributions: There's no way to make a good installer that will install a commercial app on Linux and have everything work. There are too many dependencies for specific versions of libraries and things that would make this sort of thing worse than any kind of Windows DLL hell.
You're joking.
I just finished the installers for a simple commercial app for Linux (RPM and DEB) and Win32.
My.spec file is all of about 50 lines, the control file for the.deb is even smaller, and the.nsi file for the Win32 installer (Using NSIS) is...uh...800 lines of special cases.
Oh, and the only reason I have.rpm and.debs available is so I don't have to make the Debian zealots* install alien.
You're right about OS X though. I use OS X on the desktop and Debian on servers, when given the choice.
-Z
*I'd be a Debian zealot if there were a distro that kept more current than 'testing', but wasn't allowed to be broken as Sid seems to be.
Then there's someone on the ThinkPad team that's outlived his/her usefulness.
The lm-sensors package has all sorts of dire warnings about never, ever running on a ThinkPad, because so much as probing the i2c bus will trash the firmware.
Thank you so much for the pointer to Joon. I've been searching for a while for a fountain/stylus combo, and they carry the Rotring Initial Data, which looks ideal.
I've never used a Rotring pen...pencils certainly, they were the mainstay of all the draftsmen I knew. (Note to the historically impaired: Drafting is CAD without the computer)
And the Initial is cheap enough that I should be able to keep it for a while. Like sunglasses, the amount of time it takes me to lose a pen is inversely proportional to its price...hence my tendency to use Pilot Varsities. They're horrible as fountain pens go, but they're cheap and disposable...and a bad fountain is better than a good roller, IMO.
You can't do ten-finger touch-typing on a cell phone, so there's no advantage for touch-typists.
Dead wrong. I have a Treo 180, and I'm reasonably fast with it. I'm a touch-typist (60+WPM uncorrected...and as a child of the word processor, my effective speed is much higher than my corrected speed.)
I use a Brady labeller at work that has the keys in Alpha order, and its a nightmare to use. Even though the keyboard on the Treo is too small to touch-type, at least I *know* where the keys are.
I have a set of three SB52G2's that I use as a travelling demo kit. The fans aren't the quietest I've ever heard, but they're far from loud. Under normal usage they stay throttled down, and are barely audible. I actually think that the little 40mm fan in the PS is louder.
That said, I can set up three of them on the conference room table during a meeting, and they aren't really noticeable. The fan in the inFocus is usually MUCH louder.
Snapping the throttle shut when you use the brakes strikes me as astonishingly dangerous, the sort of thing that can put you backwards into the guardrail in a heartbeat.
Seriously, this means that attempting to left-foot or heel/toe to settle the nose a bit (especially when trail-braking) would result in the car trying to kill you. Doesn't seem like a "safety" feature to me.
I've been an open track instructor for five years. I'd like to know the student car I'm about to sit in is going to do something this stupid.;)
Which icon are you going to rename to make webmail work offline?
There are a host of other things (web browsers have terrible editors) that make webmail suck, no matter how well implemented. It's a nice alternative/backup, but it doesn't cut it for heavy use.
How long was the problem fixed for? My guess would be "only as long as it took people to get used to the longer yellow".
This is a really good question, and one not answered by the source report.
The lights go to yellow not just between green and red, but also between red and green. The only reason that it's safe for this to happen is that people stop for yellows.
But it's not legal to enter the intersection on Red/Yellow going to green, is it? This is common in Europe, but I thought it had to do with preparing people to go (so you don't have to wait as long for the guy in front of you to wake up). Any Europeans care to comment here?
(Obviously there needs to be a minimum duration. Something along the lines of: ceiling(SpeedLimitInMPH/10)*seconds. A 35 MPH road has a 4 sec yellow, while a 45 MPH road has a 5 sec.)
I think that's the real problem. Here's the NMA's recommendation, which is very close to yours:
The minimum yellow light interval shall be 4 seconds for intersection signals on streets with actual 85th percentile approach speeds of 30 mph, or less. The yellow light interval shall be increased ½ second for each 5-mph increase in 85th percentile approach speeds above 30 mph.
ABS basically has no serious drawbacks. At least good ABS doesn't. If you're truly braking at the threshold, you're not triggering well calibrated ABS. GM's crap systems are another story, but I can threshold brake my BMW without the ABS getting in the way, and stopping distances are shorter than just mashing the pedal. Just mashing the pedal gives shorter stops than locking up the tires. No loss here.
But you're somewhat misinformed about Power steering and brakes, and I disagree with your conclusions. Power Steering is unfortunate in cars that don't really need it. I have driven two Miatas back to back, one with PS, one without. There is MUCH, MUCH more feedback through the steering in a manual steering car than PS. You're correct that cars that are equipped with power steering have quicker ratios, but the ratio doesn't change if the PS fails. In fact, many autocrossers use the PS rack but disable the pump to get the quick ratio without the "numb" feeling of the power assist.
Now, where do you get the idea that power brakes don't work the the engine off? I don't think power brakes have a downside either. The Vacuum reservoir is still there on modern cars, though smaller now. But the vacuum isn't required to stop the car: the hydraulic circuits are still there. If you turn off the car, and push the pedal, the car stops, and unless you have exactly zero lower body strength (how do you push the clutch?) it will stop much, much faster than using the handbrake.
And I'll chime in here. Those who have never been to an SCCA street school shouldn't talk about them. They *do* make a huge difference in the ability of the driver to control the car. It's the only real driver training available in this country, sadly.
Regular driving exams, say every three to five years: great idea.
Graduated licensing programs: great idea.
Mandatory driver training: great idea.
Stop right there. You were on a great roll there. We have hideous safety statistics in this country precisely because we give out driver's licenses in Crackerjack boxes. And we respond by lowering speed limits, which doesn't really work.
You want safe roads at any cost? Really? OK, simple: National 15 MPH speed limit, enforced with severe jail time. Or maybe death. Didn't think so.
You make a few great points here. Driver training and licensing in this country is a joke. I don't have his statistics handy, but there is an ER doctor in Southern California who is tracking the DMV records of a group of drivers who participate in performance driving schools (NASA and SCCA street schools, Open Tracks, AutoX schools and the like). He's seeing better than 90% reductions in both accident and moving violation rates. Ninety Percent! From better driver training. Not automagic systems that drive for you, just having a human that can actually control the machine.
Black boxes reporting accident data: great idea.
There are very real privacy concerns here. And very real property right concerns. It's not that having good data in a real accident is bad, it's the legal environment surrounding such data in the country that is horrifying. We have an environment where speed limits are set for political (I don't want them going fast near *my* house) and revenue reasons, not actual safety and engineering reasons. Yet exceeding those artificial speed limits is prima facie evidence of fault in any situation.
Automatic safety systems: great idea.
Maybe. Have you ever been in a situation where avoiding the accident required accelerating? How do you think the brake grabbing systems described here are going to react?
Photo radar: great idea.
If it were actually being used to enhance safety in places where the speed limits are set rationally, yes. But they're not. They're used to enhance revenue in places where the speed limits are set arbitrarily.
Let's look at a related issue, one that based on your comment is near and dear to your heart: Red light cameras. There have been numerous cases over the past couple of years of municipalities reducing yellow light duration to increase revenue. In Fairfax County, VA, cameras were installed at one intersection because of high incidences of red light runners. The cameras were catching an average of 52 events a day. Increasing the duration of the yellow from 4s to 5.5s reduced that number from 52 to less than 1. Engineering fixed the problem, not enforcement.
Hell, GPS tracking of vehicles would, if it reduced traffic deaths by a few percent, would be well worth the loss of privacy.
Do I *have* to quote Franklin?
I'm not worried that I'll be the cause of an accident. But I'm scared shitless of your driving, because you are, in all probability, one of the drivers who is a threat to my continued well-being.
I hear you. The average joe out there can't drive. The solution is to *teach them to drive*. It really is that simple.
Let's get our streets safe.
Through training and safety engineering, yes. Trying to idiot proof the roads and cars isn't going to work. Reducing the idiocy of the average driver will. (And does!)
Why is tampering with airbags a bad thing? Should we not actually be allowed to choose what to do with our own property?
I've removed them from all of the '90 to '98 cars I've owned, because first-generation US-spec airbags were ineffective and dangerous. My mother was in a low-speed collision in an early airbag-equipped car. She suffered permanent partial hearing loss in one ear, and second and third degree burns on her hands and face. The passenger (no airbag) didn't even have bruises from the seat belts. A friend of mine is an ER doctor, and has dozens of stories of ocular trauma caused by airbags breaking eyeglasses or sunglasses and driving the broken pieces into the victims eyes.
Once they took the unbelted-driver requirement out of the spec, they got reasonable, as they always were in Europe.
I find the notion of airbag (and any current automotive) EDR's being admissible as evidence absolutely horrifying. Automotive sensors produce erroneous data all the time. There was a high-profile case in the early '90s mentioned the last time this came around on the guitar, where the family claimed that the airbags fired erroneously, causing the accident. The airbag computer reported that the system functioned correctly, and the family lost the case on this basis. Well, of course the airbag computer thought it should have fired the bag...it fired it, after all. Fast-forward to 1995, where my Mazda was recalled because airbags were firing in cars that bottomed out over speed bumps.
I don't have any problem with any of these technologies existing, but I have a huge problem with these technologies being mandated, and that's the very next step. It's only a matter of time before insurance companies start requiring these devices, overtly or through "incentives," and then it's all over. Speed traps scanning OBD computers and so on.
There are already insurance companies (Geico) buying radar guns for cops, "to improve safety." Safety, and revenue.
Re:OT, may the mods have mercy on my karma
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 1
Well, flipping 5 1/4" disks was sorta OK. The problem is that all of the dust that the liner picked up when you were spinning the media one direction came pouring out when you spun it the other. You could do this with good results with new floppies, but if you decided to add capacity to a disk you'd been using for a while, you were hosed.
I used to work for a duplication equipment manufacturer, and we actually had software that would write the bits on the back of the disk backwards, so we could write both sides of a flippy at the same time.
The HD/DD thing is totally different. The coercivity, (and thus the "resolution") of the magnetic material was different. If you had a drive with a good write channel, and a very forgiving read channel, you could get away with it, but it wasn't real likely to interchange.
But these super-CD formats are much more like the wacky 1.7-1.9MB HD formats with trimmed sector gaps, extra sectors, and even extra tracks in some cases. M$ used 1.77MB HD floppies to distribute Win95, for instance.
Let's do some math... using _your_ 2k as an example (real pros really want 4k [arri wants to make a 4k digital movie camera with lockheed martin for example)
And a 4k digital camera will produce a much better image than a 4k datacine of film. There's much, much less noise in a digital sensor than the filim->datacine process.
2048x1120: I see you shoot soft-matte.;)
As to RAIDs not being practical in a production environment, you should look at what director's friend is doing. I spoke to these folks last year, and it's a really interesting approach. The Philips Viper can output unprocessed data, which saves you from Sony's notion of a "good image" and lets you do the processing in post where it belongs. They offer ruggedized RAIDs (look at the XDReel) that are designed specifically for the production environment.
And the serious win here: You effectively get to make your film stock decision in post. Since you're dealing with unprocessed bits off the sensor, you can make all the contrast/color rendering decisions later.
You have a good point on off-speed shooting, but I think with the raw output from the Viper, the latitude issues are somewhat ameliorated. (I don't have hard numbers here, but ISTR 7 stops being mentioned.)
You're right, we aren't there yet. But I do think we're closer than your post would have us believe. I'd say film has at most 5-10years left for mainstream shooting. For certain effects and applications, though: Film will never die.
He pulled them out of professional experience. 2k Datacine is the workhorse of the industry. 4k is high-end stuff, but not uncommon.
That number is horizontal resolution, and the frames are always 4:3. (Film frames are always 4:3. If you're seeing anything wider, it's either matted or anamorphic)
So we're talking about 2048x1536 or 4096x3072. Not sure about color depth, but I'd guess 36bpp.
And, quite frankly, motion picture film sucks compared to 35mm still film. Nobody cares about grain, because at 24fps, it really doesn't stand out. Remember Seattle Filmworks? The guys that gave you prints and slides cheap from their film? They were repackaging motion picture film (5294 and one other...) and processing it. The quality stank, because mp film is designed to be cheap, not good.;)
Actually, I'd quite like to have open-source 8048 code for a keyboard, such that I could build a sensible PCB for a custom keyboard, and not screw around with lunacy like this.
This might be moot with USB hardware, though. Don't know, haven't looked.
Sorry, but you're quite wrong about the lack of a CPU. Most (all?) PC keyboards have an 8048, or an 8048 core in an ASIC. 'Twas the stuff of legendary hackery to harness that 8048 for your own purposes, back in the day.
OK, lots of people have adequately made the point that taxi tests aren't interesting, and to be honest, this isn't a new airframe.
To understand what's actually being worked on here, you'd have to do two things that exceed the ability of the average slashdotter...
a) read the article b) think
The article says that they're also working on Fuel Cell aircraft. Even the average/. reader will know that the output of a Fuel Cell is electricity.
So here's the plan, such as I can infer from the press coverage:
1. Take existing airframe 2. Retrofit for electric power 3. Prove electric power in flight tests from batteries...and only after you have that working... 4. Replace batteries with Fuel Cells
Actually, if there's room in the weight budget, you could keep all or part of the batteries as emergency reserve. It would be pretty compelling to have 100NM of reserve in the event of a fuel cell failure, though the motor itself seems far more likely to fail.
Slashdot Mirror
Godwin applies to Hitler, not Himmler.
;)
Maybe you had it right the first time.
Yes, we had radios. Never used them, though...seemed to take the fun out of it.
/., what do reason, logic, or simplicity have to do with anything?
Besides, if it's just instructor and student (as it often was), you didn't have a chase crew (they only show up for paying customers).
So we'd have one guy hitchhike back to get the van.
Besides...this is
-Z
I often thought about doing this to the small (van-chassis) RV we used for a hot-air balloon chase vehicle. From the balloon, you can always see which backroad goes to the field you're aiming for...and those in the basket are always cursing the idiots on the ground who are going down what is obviously (from 500') a dead end.
;)
Existing vehicle systems are pretty well set up for this in the modern American land-yacht. All that effort to isolate you from actual vehicle dynamics mean that they've presented you with controls that are pretty much just servo inputs. (Yes, there is a mechanical link in most cases, but they're servo-assisted)
Steering and brake are both heavily boosted, and throttle doesn't require much force.
We were talking about this fifteen years ago...doesn't seem like much of a challenge now.
-Z
Actually, it's not a VFD either. It's a row of blue LEDs on the end of a spinning bar.
It relies on persistence of vision to paint the text.
I'd still like to see if a serial port could be hacked into one.
-Z
I've thought about using this to announce network events at home (I run a couple of servers useful to those outside my home.)
/. first linked to this site. ;)
I figure, I can spend a lot of time trying to make SNMP traps go to my pager/cell-phone/forwarded phone/mobile email widget, or I can just pipe them to the fish.
Because if the fish on the living room wall starts talking, my wife *will* find me to tell me about it.
Of course, I thought about this a couple of years ago...back when
There are two of us in a software startup, and so I'm at home most of the time. Two things that have helped:
Driving to the other home-office once or twice a week. It's a mother of a commute (Santa Cruz to Berkeley) but the social interaction and productivity gains are worth it. (Plus, there are >50% backroad routes that don't add much time)
Get a gig that requires client visits. To keep food on the table, I've taken an occasional gig that requires going to customer sites.
With these two things, and a separated home office, you can stay quite sane and enjoy the 50' commute most of the time.
Number of Linux distributions: There's no way to
.spec file is all of about 50 lines, the control file for the .deb is even smaller, and the .nsi file for the Win32 installer (Using NSIS) is...uh...800 lines of special cases.
.rpm and .debs available is so I don't have to make the Debian zealots* install alien.
make a good installer that will install a commercial app on Linux and have everything work. There are too many dependencies for specific versions of libraries and things that would make this sort of thing worse than any kind of Windows DLL hell.
You're joking.
I just finished the installers for a simple commercial app for Linux (RPM and DEB) and Win32.
My
Oh, and the only reason I have
You're right about OS X though. I use OS X on the desktop and Debian on servers, when given the choice.
-Z
*I'd be a Debian zealot if there were a distro that kept more current than 'testing', but wasn't allowed to be broken as Sid seems to be.
Then there's someone on the ThinkPad team that's outlived his/her usefulness.
The lm-sensors package has all sorts of dire warnings about never, ever running on a ThinkPad, because so much as probing the i2c bus will trash the firmware.
I have one, but it's the token Windoze machine.
Thank you so much for the pointer to Joon. I've been searching for a while for a fountain/stylus combo, and they carry the Rotring Initial Data, which looks ideal.
I've never used a Rotring pen...pencils certainly, they were the mainstay of all the draftsmen I knew. (Note to the historically impaired: Drafting is CAD without the computer)
And the Initial is cheap enough that I should be able to keep it for a while. Like sunglasses, the amount of time it takes me to lose a pen is inversely proportional to its price...hence my tendency to use Pilot Varsities. They're horrible as fountain pens go, but they're cheap and disposable...and a bad fountain is better than a good roller, IMO.
There's an image of the new logo in the article. It's a sad day indeed when the editors (sic) don't even read the articles.
You can't do ten-finger touch-typing on a cell phone, so there's no advantage for touch-typists.
Dead wrong. I have a Treo 180, and I'm reasonably fast with it. I'm a touch-typist (60+WPM uncorrected...and as a child of the word processor, my effective speed is much higher than my corrected speed.)
I use a Brady labeller at work that has the keys in Alpha order, and its a nightmare to use. Even though the keyboard on the Treo is too small to touch-type, at least I *know* where the keys are.
I have a set of three SB52G2's that I use as a travelling demo kit. The fans aren't the quietest I've ever heard, but they're far from loud. Under normal usage they stay throttled down, and are barely audible. I actually think that the little 40mm fan in the PS is louder.
That said, I can set up three of them on the conference room table during a meeting, and they aren't really noticeable. The fan in the inFocus is usually MUCH louder.
Can you provide a reference for this?
;)
Snapping the throttle shut when you use the brakes strikes me as astonishingly dangerous, the sort of thing that can put you backwards into the guardrail in a heartbeat.
Seriously, this means that attempting to left-foot or heel/toe to settle the nose a bit (especially when trail-braking) would result in the car trying to kill you. Doesn't seem like a "safety" feature to me.
I've been an open track instructor for five years. I'd like to know the student car I'm about to sit in is going to do something this stupid.
From what I've read, the buffer overflow is in an XDK call. In other words, it's Microsoft that blew it.
Chances are the'll never catch on...
Until the next time they're on an airplane.
Which icon are you going to rename to make webmail work offline?
There are a host of other things (web browsers have terrible editors) that make webmail suck, no matter how well implemented. It's a nice alternative/backup, but it doesn't cut it for heavy use.
This is a really good question, and one not answered by the source report.
The lights go to yellow not just between green and red, but also between red and green. The only reason that it's safe for this to happen is that people stop for yellows.
But it's not legal to enter the intersection on Red/Yellow going to green, is it? This is common in Europe, but I thought it had to do with preparing people to go (so you don't have to wait as long for the guy in front of you to wake up). Any Europeans care to comment here?
(Obviously there needs to be a minimum duration. Something along the lines of: ceiling(SpeedLimitInMPH/10)*seconds. A 35 MPH road has a 4 sec yellow, while a 45 MPH road has a 5 sec.)
I think that's the real problem. Here's the NMA's recommendation, which is very close to yours:
ABS basically has no serious drawbacks. At least good ABS doesn't. If you're truly braking at the threshold, you're not triggering well calibrated ABS. GM's crap systems are another story, but I can threshold brake my BMW without the ABS getting in the way, and stopping distances are shorter than just mashing the pedal. Just mashing the pedal gives shorter stops than locking up the tires. No loss here.
But you're somewhat misinformed about Power steering and brakes, and I disagree with your conclusions. Power Steering is unfortunate in cars that don't really need it. I have driven two Miatas back to back, one with PS, one without. There is MUCH, MUCH more feedback through the steering in a manual steering car than PS. You're correct that cars that are equipped with power steering have quicker ratios, but the ratio doesn't change if the PS fails. In fact, many autocrossers use the PS rack but disable the pump to get the quick ratio without the "numb" feeling of the power assist.
Now, where do you get the idea that power brakes don't work the the engine off? I don't think power brakes have a downside either. The Vacuum reservoir is still there on modern cars, though smaller now. But the vacuum isn't required to stop the car: the hydraulic circuits are still there. If you turn off the car, and push the pedal, the car stops, and unless you have exactly zero lower body strength (how do you push the clutch?) it will stop much, much faster than using the handbrake.
And I'll chime in here. Those who have never been to an SCCA street school shouldn't talk about them. They *do* make a huge difference in the ability of the driver to control the car. It's the only real driver training available in this country, sadly.
Regular driving exams, say every three to five years: great idea.
Graduated licensing programs: great idea.
Mandatory driver training: great idea.
Stop right there. You were on a great roll there. We have hideous safety statistics in this country precisely because we give out driver's licenses in Crackerjack boxes. And we respond by lowering speed limits, which doesn't really work.
You want safe roads at any cost? Really? OK, simple: National 15 MPH speed limit, enforced with severe jail time. Or maybe death. Didn't think so.
You make a few great points here. Driver training and licensing in this country is a joke. I don't have his statistics handy, but there is an ER doctor in Southern California who is tracking the DMV records of a group of drivers who participate in performance driving schools (NASA and SCCA street schools, Open Tracks, AutoX schools and the like). He's seeing better than 90% reductions in both accident and moving violation rates. Ninety Percent! From better driver training. Not automagic systems that drive for you, just having a human that can actually control the machine.
Black boxes reporting accident data: great idea.
There are very real privacy concerns here. And very real property right concerns. It's not that having good data in a real accident is bad, it's the legal environment surrounding such data in the country that is horrifying. We have an environment where speed limits are set for political (I don't want them going fast near *my* house) and revenue reasons, not actual safety and engineering reasons. Yet exceeding those artificial speed limits is prima facie evidence of fault in any situation.
Automatic safety systems: great idea.
Maybe. Have you ever been in a situation where avoiding the accident required accelerating? How do you think the brake grabbing systems described here are going to react?
Photo radar: great idea.
If it were actually being used to enhance safety in places where the speed limits are set rationally, yes. But they're not. They're used to enhance revenue in places where the speed limits are set arbitrarily.
Let's look at a related issue, one that based on your comment is near and dear to your heart: Red light cameras. There have been numerous cases over the past couple of years of municipalities reducing yellow light duration to increase revenue. In Fairfax County, VA, cameras were installed at one intersection because of high incidences of red light runners. The cameras were catching an average of 52 events a day. Increasing the duration of the yellow from 4s to 5.5s reduced that number from 52 to less than 1. Engineering fixed the problem, not enforcement.
Hell, GPS tracking of vehicles would, if it reduced traffic deaths by a few percent, would be well worth the loss of privacy.
Do I *have* to quote Franklin?
I'm not worried that I'll be the cause of an accident. But I'm scared shitless of your driving, because you are, in all probability, one of the drivers who is a threat to my continued well-being.
I hear you. The average joe out there can't drive. The solution is to *teach them to drive*. It really is that simple.
Let's get our streets safe.
Through training and safety engineering, yes. Trying to idiot proof the roads and cars isn't going to work. Reducing the idiocy of the average driver will. (And does!)
Why is tampering with airbags a bad thing? Should we not actually be allowed to choose what to do with our own property?
I've removed them from all of the '90 to '98 cars I've owned, because first-generation US-spec airbags were ineffective and dangerous. My mother was in a low-speed collision in an early airbag-equipped car. She suffered permanent partial hearing loss in one ear, and second and third degree burns on her hands and face. The passenger (no airbag) didn't even have bruises from the seat belts. A friend of mine is an ER doctor, and has dozens of stories of ocular trauma caused by airbags breaking eyeglasses or sunglasses and driving the broken pieces into the victims eyes.
Once they took the unbelted-driver requirement out of the spec, they got reasonable, as they always were in Europe.
I find the notion of airbag (and any current automotive) EDR's being admissible as evidence absolutely horrifying. Automotive sensors produce erroneous data all the time. There was a high-profile case in the early '90s mentioned the last time this came around on the guitar, where the family claimed that the airbags fired erroneously, causing the accident. The airbag computer reported that the system functioned correctly, and the family lost the case on this basis. Well, of course the airbag computer thought it should have fired the bag...it fired it, after all. Fast-forward to 1995, where my Mazda was recalled because airbags were firing in cars that bottomed out over speed bumps.
I don't have any problem with any of these technologies existing, but I have a huge problem with these technologies being mandated, and that's the very next step. It's only a matter of time before insurance companies start requiring these devices, overtly or through "incentives," and then it's all over. Speed traps scanning OBD computers and so on.
There are already insurance companies (Geico) buying radar guns for cops, "to improve safety." Safety, and revenue.
Well, flipping 5 1/4" disks was sorta OK. The problem is that all of the dust that the liner picked up when you were spinning the media one direction came pouring out when you spun it the other. You could do this with good results with new floppies, but if you decided to add capacity to a disk you'd been using for a while, you were hosed.
I used to work for a duplication equipment manufacturer, and we actually had software that would write the bits on the back of the disk backwards, so we could write both sides of a flippy at the same time.
The HD/DD thing is totally different. The coercivity, (and thus the "resolution") of the magnetic material was different. If you had a drive with a good write channel, and a very forgiving read channel, you could get away with it, but it wasn't real likely to interchange.
But these super-CD formats are much more like the wacky 1.7-1.9MB HD formats with trimmed sector gaps, extra sectors, and even extra tracks in some cases. M$ used 1.77MB HD floppies to distribute Win95, for instance.
Let's do some math... using _your_ 2k as an example (real pros really want 4k [arri wants to make a 4k digital movie camera with lockheed martin for example)
;)
And a 4k digital camera will produce a much better image than a 4k datacine of film. There's much, much less noise in a digital sensor than the filim->datacine process.
2048x1120: I see you shoot soft-matte.
As to RAIDs not being practical in a production environment, you should look at what director's friend is doing. I spoke to these folks last year, and it's a really interesting approach. The Philips Viper can output unprocessed data, which saves you from Sony's notion of a "good image" and lets you do the processing in post where it belongs. They offer ruggedized RAIDs (look at the XDReel) that are designed specifically for the production environment.
And the serious win here: You effectively get to make your film stock decision in post. Since you're dealing with unprocessed bits off the sensor, you can make all the contrast/color rendering decisions later.
You have a good point on off-speed shooting, but I think with the raw output from the Viper, the latitude issues are somewhat ameliorated. (I don't have hard numbers here, but ISTR 7 stops being mentioned.)
You're right, we aren't there yet. But I do think we're closer than your post would have us believe. I'd say film has at most 5-10years left for mainstream shooting. For certain effects and applications, though: Film will never die.
He pulled them out of professional experience. 2k Datacine is the workhorse of the industry. 4k is high-end stuff, but not uncommon.
;)
That number is horizontal resolution, and the frames are always 4:3. (Film frames are always 4:3. If you're seeing anything wider, it's either matted or anamorphic)
So we're talking about 2048x1536 or 4096x3072. Not sure about color depth, but I'd guess 36bpp.
And, quite frankly, motion picture film sucks compared to 35mm still film. Nobody cares about grain, because at 24fps, it really doesn't stand out. Remember Seattle Filmworks? The guys that gave you prints and slides cheap from their film? They were repackaging motion picture film (5294 and one other...) and processing it. The quality stank, because mp film is designed to be cheap, not good.
Actually, I'd quite like to have open-source 8048 code for a keyboard, such that I could build a sensible PCB for a custom keyboard, and not screw around with lunacy like this.
This might be moot with USB hardware, though. Don't know, haven't looked.
Sorry, but you're quite wrong about the lack of a CPU. Most (all?) PC keyboards have an 8048, or an 8048 core in an ASIC. 'Twas the stuff of legendary hackery to harness that 8048 for your own purposes, back in the day.
OK, lots of people have adequately made the point that taxi tests aren't interesting, and to be honest, this isn't a new airframe.
/. reader will know that the output of a Fuel Cell is electricity.
...and only after you have that working...
To understand what's actually being worked on here, you'd have to do two things that exceed the ability of the average slashdotter...
a) read the article
b) think
The article says that they're also working on Fuel Cell aircraft. Even the average
So here's the plan, such as I can infer from the press coverage:
1. Take existing airframe
2. Retrofit for electric power
3. Prove electric power in flight tests from batteries
4. Replace batteries with Fuel Cells
Actually, if there's room in the weight budget, you could keep all or part of the batteries as emergency reserve. It would be pretty compelling to have 100NM of reserve in the event of a fuel cell failure, though the motor itself seems far more likely to fail.