Throttle body fuel injection sucks. If you want to be efficient, you either inject it directly in the cylinder or you inject it just ahead of the valve.
The efficiency claims sound preposterous initially, until you sit down and think through the theoretical energy capacity of gasoline and then consider how much of that power really reaches the tires in an IC engine. Drivetrain losses are pretty much unavoidable, but the engine itself is wildly inefficient.
There was another new idea that came out a couple of years ago involving applying an electric current to gasoline just prior to injection, reducing surface tension and greatly increasing atomization. In that case, the claimed efficiency increase was over 20%.
I have no doubts that either of these ideas work as intended, but I do doubt the efficiency improvement numbers they claim. They seem oddly round.
Indeed. I helped my girlfriend's mother access a website and she was freaking out saying she broke the internet. I walked her through getting to the website she wanted to see without getting sent to a phishing site(she clicked a bad link in an email to her bank).
She simply could not get her head around the concept of distinguishing between IE and the internet. To her, IE IS the internet. To her, you can't see websites without IE.
Development costs money. Linux itself couldn't have come as far as it has so quickly without corporate investment. They took a shot at an ad-supported development model and it didn't work. I can't blame them for trying.
We can't all have sugar daddies like the Mozilla Foundation.
I think you dramatically overestimate the cost of redundancy.
poetmatt's theory that Ubisoft may have simply underestimated the packet rates needed to keep the auth servers up and responsive is interesting. It's entirely possible. Blizzard has faced such challenges several times with their authentication servers going down, although this is likely on a much larger scale than anything Ubisoft has had to deal with.
Don't be stupid. Toyota is marginally more foreign than GM. They both buy parts heavily from foreign manufacturers. Toyota itself, although based in Japan, has been assembling cars right here in the US for over 30 years.
I'd rather buy Toyota than shop at WalMart.
GM isn't forgotten. I'm just hoping they complete this death spiral to its finality. They've been producing a glut of crappy cars(and a few great ones) for a very long time. I blame the auto unions as much as the workers for this - they resisted automation and the end result was a heavily debt saddled company with too many workers and low value products.
I'm ashamed that my government felt compelled to save a company that should have seen its own demise 20 years ago and refused to make the difficult decisions needed to stay competitive.
Yes, it is a poor decision on it's face. Even a strict need for Microsoft Windows doesn't mean Linux can't play an important role in the organization. For instance, Linux is an excellent platform for mail or other basic services. It's very easy to manage mail, FTP and NFS services in Linux. Maybe no easier than on Windows, but it's cheaper.
Also, and I think more importantly, Linux is an excellent platform for hosting Windows VM's. It can play a vital role in any organization hosting a variety of Windows and Linux services on the same box.
Being able to look at alternative technologies and make long term planning decisions that are strategically sound is a primary CTO responsibility. Any CTO who refuses to look into cheaper and/or better alternatives is pig-headed IMO and shouldn't be in that position.
That's true, but procurement laws often DO describe what steps an organization must follow when choosing software vendors. This could be as simple as a formal review of software requirements with specific criteria and how a decision was reached, written on paper.
Laws vary a lot by state, but slashdot is very US-centric and I have to assume that the submitter is in the US. Even if I knew where s/he was from, I wouldn't do them a favor and look up the laws myself. Contacting the AG is a sensible step in every state if you believe a publicly funded organization is breaking the law.
There is no guarantee of a positive outcome and from my experience, attorneys general offices are very slow to respond.
There's a reason for professional support services in the Linux sector. That can buy you back-porting, bug fixes, a whole host of other services that allow an organization to standardize on a single linux distribution for years. No sane company using Linux to their benefit is using "the flavor of the month". They weigh their needs, their budget, the pros and cons of each distribution that meets their criteria, pick a version and test rigorously. Then you don't fuck with it or upgrade for a few years.
Linux can only be successful in an organization that is open to change and this is very much culture dependent. Your example of tools that are put together hodge-podge that nobody knows about happens plenty in Windows also. The most egregious example of this is managers who think they can write VB applications in Microsoft Office. They can bastardize code and make something work on their computer, but the code is often so poorly written that it won't work across MS Office versions and crashes on the next upgrade.
Bad practices aren't limited to any one operating system.
They share marketing money with customers who are pro-microsoft, so there is financial incentive for some to be MS only.
The biggest potential cause of action here is that the hospital may have violated state procurement laws for publicly funded institutions. I would contact the state attorney general by snail mail letting them know of the situation and asking them if this is a violation of state procurement laws.
The hospital might have a strong argument though by saying the healthcare specific software they need is Windows only, limiting their OS choice to a single vendor. As for firefox, not much you can do about that. Both Firefox and IE are monetarily free and it's quite common in the IT industry to standardize the software across departments or organizations. This makes support cheaper. From a security standpoint alone, I think IE is a bad choice but sadly it isn't illegal to use insecure software - unless of course HIPPA has requirements for software security(which I have no knowledge of).
I'm surprised they left it in there that long. PCB's have a lot of materials in them that are extremely hazardous to your health. The PCB itself is compressed fiberclass impregnated with thermosetting plastics or other resins.
Don't be intentionally dense. It's theft, no way around it. Instead of stealing from you personally, the counterfeiter steals a marginal amount of value from everyone holding that currency by just a small amount. All objects have value, which is a combination of the effort that went into creating it, the demand for that object and the scarcity of that object.
Without a fixed or regulated amount of money in existence, it has no value. If I print $1 trillion in cash tomorrow and hand it out on the streets, suddenly your house and everything you own is worth less. You still have a house, I didn't take that from you. I just stole it's value.
You're spot on about international companies, and even countries are this way sometimes. Money has no boundaries.
During the Iran-Iraq war, we sold weapons to Iran through Israel. Talk about weird.
Weapons produced in the US have found their way all over the world to places we don't really like, yet we sell them because they pay.
Korean and Japanese companies may be competitors, but if they find a way to collude and make more money, I wouldn't trust them not to do it as far as I can throw them.
While I agree with your sentiment, the IOC had contractual exclusivity to copyright for all video and audio images produced by cameras owned by licensees.
Now if someone was redistributing a video of the lugers unfortunate demise taken on a cell phone or other non-IOC related person, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Agreed, but the privacy implications for subversive P2P programs are significant. It's also likely easier to single out a buzzword like P2P than it is a concept like FTP or HTTP protocols.
I think the reasons for singling out P2P explicitly are due to the secondary effect of the law - closing the plausible deniability avenue for those defending themselves of copyright infringement.
A bittorrent client is typically harmless. It's malware writers who silently install P2P software on your computer and use your bandwidth without your knowledge that is a problem.
Now, if Ubuntu installed a Bittorrent tracker on your computer and it was enabled by default at bootup, that would be a much larger problem that this legislation is designed to avoid.
After reading this, I understand it's an underhanded attempt to remove plausible deniability as a defense in court, but it's surprisingly evenhanded and well written considering it's from Amy Klobuchar, the bad senator from my state.
The speculative bubble as you say it affected millions of recent homebuyers.
Employer provided healthcare isn't wealth redistribution. It's a way for employers to provide a benefit to employees so they can pay them less, and simultaneously decrease their tax exposure. Benefits also attract better employees. It's a business decision, not some massive wealth redistribution conspiracy.
The real conspiracy is the single-payer healthcare system we have now. We need basic health services back on a fee-for-service system whereby consumers can see, understand and be responsible for the cost of basic preventative services. Right now, there is no downward pressure on healthcare providers to reduce costs because insurance pays what they charge.
Consumers demand the world from providers because they don't see, care or understand the costs associated with the services they demand.
The system lacks transparency. If you disagree, call the nearest hospital and ask how much an MRI is. They will say they can't tell you, which means you couldn't shop around without insurance even if you wanted to.
One fatal flaw with capitalism is that it leads to runaway wealth and poverty distribution. Socioeconomic mobility is essentially destroyed. The "land of opportunity" as we've been called for so long becomes no more as time goes on. The rich get much richer every year, while the poor get relatively poorer over time.
We're seeing this now as the standards of living for the middle class have been in slow decline for over 15 years. The super-rich continue to amass wealth above the rate of inflation, while many middle class have had to deal with layoffs, pay freezes and massive asset loss in the housing market(much of which was caused by banks seeking higher and higher profits, at any cost).
I don't support socialism as a means of redistribution of wealth. I just have a fundamentally different opinion of what services I expect my government to provide. As the mightiest and richest nation in the world, I find it despicable that we can't even provide universal health care for our citizens. Born rich or old, everyone deserves access to a doctor.
If you question the fairness of the rich paying the healthcare of the poor, just remember: many of the rich got rich on the backs of the poor.
Submission to ECMA standardization does not limit Microsoft's ability to seek remedy for patent infringement by other implementations of the device or format. This is a common misconception about standardization in software. ECMA only requires Microsoft issue reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing. The problem therein is that only for-profit implementations can afford the licensing.
I am not aware if they did or did not submit FAT or FAT32 to ECMA, but even if they did, they could continue to sue other implementors to force them into revenue sharing license agreements. The funny thing is if you've seen graphs of Microsoft's revenue, this money is a tiny tiny fraction of their income and is likely counterproductive. FAT support is included in a huge array of devices because Windows is ubiquitous and Microsoft shouldn't do anything to dissuade device manufacturers from supporting Windows out of the box with as little hassle as possible.
As Linux and OSX slowly creep up in marketshare, device manufacturers may start to natively support other operating systems to save money, forcing their products to use a serial protocol and host software to access it(much like many smartphones or graphing calculators). This is a hassle for consumers because the device manufacturers often don't work with the newest operating systems like Win7 or Vista 64.
Not to lunge off topic or anything but I think you dramatically miscalculate his airtime. He was airborne for no longer than.3-.4 seconds.
I'm not nitpicking as this difference in airtime is significant when it comes to reaction time and his ability to deflect his trajectory. At that speed, putting his arms in front of himself would have done little, but had he been going slower he could have sacrificed his arms to protect his head or torso. They say the average persons reaction time is a half second or so, but in the video he doesn't even get his hands in front of his head. He likely knew he was going to hit the column mere milliseconds before he died.
Yes, assertions of copyright do exist in header files. There could be artistic aspects of a header file that are copyrightable, but the functional aspects cannot be copyrighted. If you're not sure which parts are copyrightable, but you have a good faith belief that some aspect of a file could be considered artistic, it's better to put the notice in the file as a CYA. This holds true despite the fact that in Berne convention signatory countries it should be assumed to be copyrighted by default.
Saga v. Accolade(FN89: 977 F.2d 1510, 24 USPQ2d 1561 (9th Cir. 1992)) established that it is fair use to use header files, but narrowly defines them as interoperable function-only definition files.
The only artistic aspects of a header file that I can imagine would be a complex macro, lengthy comments or header-defined media data(static byte arrays representing audio sounds or pixmaps).
The IOC has taken an extreme protectionist stance on all its content for many years. It doesn't matter if it's fair use or not, the IOC will object on principle.
You can't copyright a protocol. A protocol is a logical construct. Compare it to something like COM. Microsoft couldn't copyright COM. They could patent it though. They copyrighted MSDN articles about COM, and the COM libraries themselves are copyrighted, but the interface itself is not encumbered by copyrights.
You could however copyright a manual or other "artistic" work describing the protocol, but not the header files required to use the library. Additionally, a protocol could be patented. The MySQL name was trademarked as well. They had their bases covered, but saying the MySQL protocol itself was copyrighted is just blowing hot smoke.
Slashdot Mirror
Throttle body fuel injection sucks. If you want to be efficient, you either inject it directly in the cylinder or you inject it just ahead of the valve.
The efficiency claims sound preposterous initially, until you sit down and think through the theoretical energy capacity of gasoline and then consider how much of that power really reaches the tires in an IC engine. Drivetrain losses are pretty much unavoidable, but the engine itself is wildly inefficient.
There was another new idea that came out a couple of years ago involving applying an electric current to gasoline just prior to injection, reducing surface tension and greatly increasing atomization. In that case, the claimed efficiency increase was over 20%.
I have no doubts that either of these ideas work as intended, but I do doubt the efficiency improvement numbers they claim. They seem oddly round.
Indeed. I helped my girlfriend's mother access a website and she was freaking out saying she broke the internet. I walked her through getting to the website she wanted to see without getting sent to a phishing site(she clicked a bad link in an email to her bank).
She simply could not get her head around the concept of distinguishing between IE and the internet. To her, IE IS the internet. To her, you can't see websites without IE.
Windows script host is an integral part of the windows operating system. Most scripted automation tasks rely on it in Windows.
WSH, by default supports both JScript and VBScript.
Development costs money. Linux itself couldn't have come as far as it has so quickly without corporate investment. They took a shot at an ad-supported development model and it didn't work. I can't blame them for trying.
We can't all have sugar daddies like the Mozilla Foundation.
I think you dramatically overestimate the cost of redundancy.
poetmatt's theory that Ubisoft may have simply underestimated the packet rates needed to keep the auth servers up and responsive is interesting. It's entirely possible. Blizzard has faced such challenges several times with their authentication servers going down, although this is likely on a much larger scale than anything Ubisoft has had to deal with.
Don't be stupid. Toyota is marginally more foreign than GM. They both buy parts heavily from foreign manufacturers. Toyota itself, although based in Japan, has been assembling cars right here in the US for over 30 years.
I'd rather buy Toyota than shop at WalMart.
GM isn't forgotten. I'm just hoping they complete this death spiral to its finality. They've been producing a glut of crappy cars(and a few great ones) for a very long time. I blame the auto unions as much as the workers for this - they resisted automation and the end result was a heavily debt saddled company with too many workers and low value products.
I'm ashamed that my government felt compelled to save a company that should have seen its own demise 20 years ago and refused to make the difficult decisions needed to stay competitive.
Isn't the white house exempt from a lot of workplace laws? Wouldn't surprise me if they're exempt from procurement requirements also.
Yes, it is a poor decision on it's face. Even a strict need for Microsoft Windows doesn't mean Linux can't play an important role in the organization. For instance, Linux is an excellent platform for mail or other basic services. It's very easy to manage mail, FTP and NFS services in Linux. Maybe no easier than on Windows, but it's cheaper.
Also, and I think more importantly, Linux is an excellent platform for hosting Windows VM's. It can play a vital role in any organization hosting a variety of Windows and Linux services on the same box.
Being able to look at alternative technologies and make long term planning decisions that are strategically sound is a primary CTO responsibility. Any CTO who refuses to look into cheaper and/or better alternatives is pig-headed IMO and shouldn't be in that position.
That's true, but procurement laws often DO describe what steps an organization must follow when choosing software vendors. This could be as simple as a formal review of software requirements with specific criteria and how a decision was reached, written on paper.
Laws vary a lot by state, but slashdot is very US-centric and I have to assume that the submitter is in the US. Even if I knew where s/he was from, I wouldn't do them a favor and look up the laws myself. Contacting the AG is a sensible step in every state if you believe a publicly funded organization is breaking the law.
There is no guarantee of a positive outcome and from my experience, attorneys general offices are very slow to respond.
There's a reason for professional support services in the Linux sector. That can buy you back-porting, bug fixes, a whole host of other services that allow an organization to standardize on a single linux distribution for years. No sane company using Linux to their benefit is using "the flavor of the month". They weigh their needs, their budget, the pros and cons of each distribution that meets their criteria, pick a version and test rigorously. Then you don't fuck with it or upgrade for a few years.
Linux can only be successful in an organization that is open to change and this is very much culture dependent. Your example of tools that are put together hodge-podge that nobody knows about happens plenty in Windows also. The most egregious example of this is managers who think they can write VB applications in Microsoft Office. They can bastardize code and make something work on their computer, but the code is often so poorly written that it won't work across MS Office versions and crashes on the next upgrade.
Bad practices aren't limited to any one operating system.
They share marketing money with customers who are pro-microsoft, so there is financial incentive for some to be MS only.
The biggest potential cause of action here is that the hospital may have violated state procurement laws for publicly funded institutions. I would contact the state attorney general by snail mail letting them know of the situation and asking them if this is a violation of state procurement laws.
The hospital might have a strong argument though by saying the healthcare specific software they need is Windows only, limiting their OS choice to a single vendor. As for firefox, not much you can do about that. Both Firefox and IE are monetarily free and it's quite common in the IT industry to standardize the software across departments or organizations. This makes support cheaper. From a security standpoint alone, I think IE is a bad choice but sadly it isn't illegal to use insecure software - unless of course HIPPA has requirements for software security(which I have no knowledge of).
I'm surprised they left it in there that long. PCB's have a lot of materials in them that are extremely hazardous to your health. The PCB itself is compressed fiberclass impregnated with thermosetting plastics or other resins.
It's just nasty shit.
Don't be intentionally dense. It's theft, no way around it. Instead of stealing from you personally, the counterfeiter steals a marginal amount of value from everyone holding that currency by just a small amount. All objects have value, which is a combination of the effort that went into creating it, the demand for that object and the scarcity of that object.
Without a fixed or regulated amount of money in existence, it has no value. If I print $1 trillion in cash tomorrow and hand it out on the streets, suddenly your house and everything you own is worth less. You still have a house, I didn't take that from you. I just stole it's value.
You're spot on about international companies, and even countries are this way sometimes. Money has no boundaries.
During the Iran-Iraq war, we sold weapons to Iran through Israel. Talk about weird.
Weapons produced in the US have found their way all over the world to places we don't really like, yet we sell them because they pay.
Korean and Japanese companies may be competitors, but if they find a way to collude and make more money, I wouldn't trust them not to do it as far as I can throw them.
While I agree with your sentiment, the IOC had contractual exclusivity to copyright for all video and audio images produced by cameras owned by licensees.
Now if someone was redistributing a video of the lugers unfortunate demise taken on a cell phone or other non-IOC related person, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Agreed, but the privacy implications for subversive P2P programs are significant. It's also likely easier to single out a buzzword like P2P than it is a concept like FTP or HTTP protocols.
I think the reasons for singling out P2P explicitly are due to the secondary effect of the law - closing the plausible deniability avenue for those defending themselves of copyright infringement.
A bittorrent client is typically harmless. It's malware writers who silently install P2P software on your computer and use your bandwidth without your knowledge that is a problem.
Now, if Ubuntu installed a Bittorrent tracker on your computer and it was enabled by default at bootup, that would be a much larger problem that this legislation is designed to avoid.
After reading this, I understand it's an underhanded attempt to remove plausible deniability as a defense in court, but it's surprisingly evenhanded and well written considering it's from Amy Klobuchar, the bad senator from my state.
The speculative bubble as you say it affected millions of recent homebuyers.
Employer provided healthcare isn't wealth redistribution. It's a way for employers to provide a benefit to employees so they can pay them less, and simultaneously decrease their tax exposure. Benefits also attract better employees. It's a business decision, not some massive wealth redistribution conspiracy.
The real conspiracy is the single-payer healthcare system we have now. We need basic health services back on a fee-for-service system whereby consumers can see, understand and be responsible for the cost of basic preventative services. Right now, there is no downward pressure on healthcare providers to reduce costs because insurance pays what they charge.
Consumers demand the world from providers because they don't see, care or understand the costs associated with the services they demand.
The system lacks transparency. If you disagree, call the nearest hospital and ask how much an MRI is. They will say they can't tell you, which means you couldn't shop around without insurance even if you wanted to.
One fatal flaw with capitalism is that it leads to runaway wealth and poverty distribution. Socioeconomic mobility is essentially destroyed. The "land of opportunity" as we've been called for so long becomes no more as time goes on. The rich get much richer every year, while the poor get relatively poorer over time.
We're seeing this now as the standards of living for the middle class have been in slow decline for over 15 years. The super-rich continue to amass wealth above the rate of inflation, while many middle class have had to deal with layoffs, pay freezes and massive asset loss in the housing market(much of which was caused by banks seeking higher and higher profits, at any cost).
I don't support socialism as a means of redistribution of wealth. I just have a fundamentally different opinion of what services I expect my government to provide. As the mightiest and richest nation in the world, I find it despicable that we can't even provide universal health care for our citizens. Born rich or old, everyone deserves access to a doctor.
If you question the fairness of the rich paying the healthcare of the poor, just remember: many of the rich got rich on the backs of the poor.
Not to nitpick, but plastic bags are a lot cheaper than paper bags.
Grocery stores often stop using plastic bags because they're banned on a city or township level.
Submission to ECMA standardization does not limit Microsoft's ability to seek remedy for patent infringement by other implementations of the device or format. This is a common misconception about standardization in software. ECMA only requires Microsoft issue reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing. The problem therein is that only for-profit implementations can afford the licensing.
I am not aware if they did or did not submit FAT or FAT32 to ECMA, but even if they did, they could continue to sue other implementors to force them into revenue sharing license agreements. The funny thing is if you've seen graphs of Microsoft's revenue, this money is a tiny tiny fraction of their income and is likely counterproductive. FAT support is included in a huge array of devices because Windows is ubiquitous and Microsoft shouldn't do anything to dissuade device manufacturers from supporting Windows out of the box with as little hassle as possible.
As Linux and OSX slowly creep up in marketshare, device manufacturers may start to natively support other operating systems to save money, forcing their products to use a serial protocol and host software to access it(much like many smartphones or graphing calculators). This is a hassle for consumers because the device manufacturers often don't work with the newest operating systems like Win7 or Vista 64.
Not to lunge off topic or anything but I think you dramatically miscalculate his airtime. He was airborne for no longer than .3-.4 seconds.
I'm not nitpicking as this difference in airtime is significant when it comes to reaction time and his ability to deflect his trajectory. At that speed, putting his arms in front of himself would have done little, but had he been going slower he could have sacrificed his arms to protect his head or torso. They say the average persons reaction time is a half second or so, but in the video he doesn't even get his hands in front of his head. He likely knew he was going to hit the column mere milliseconds before he died.
Yes, assertions of copyright do exist in header files. There could be artistic aspects of a header file that are copyrightable, but the functional aspects cannot be copyrighted. If you're not sure which parts are copyrightable, but you have a good faith belief that some aspect of a file could be considered artistic, it's better to put the notice in the file as a CYA. This holds true despite the fact that in Berne convention signatory countries it should be assumed to be copyrighted by default.
Saga v. Accolade(FN89: 977 F.2d 1510, 24 USPQ2d 1561 (9th Cir. 1992)) established that it is fair use to use header files, but narrowly defines them as interoperable function-only definition files.
The only artistic aspects of a header file that I can imagine would be a complex macro, lengthy comments or header-defined media data(static byte arrays representing audio sounds or pixmaps).
The IOC has taken an extreme protectionist stance on all its content for many years. It doesn't matter if it's fair use or not, the IOC will object on principle.
The Olympics are big money.
You can't copyright a protocol. A protocol is a logical construct. Compare it to something like COM. Microsoft couldn't copyright COM. They could patent it though. They copyrighted MSDN articles about COM, and the COM libraries themselves are copyrighted, but the interface itself is not encumbered by copyrights.
You could however copyright a manual or other "artistic" work describing the protocol, but not the header files required to use the library. Additionally, a protocol could be patented. The MySQL name was trademarked as well. They had their bases covered, but saying the MySQL protocol itself was copyrighted is just blowing hot smoke.