In fundamentalist Protestantism, the only thing that will get you into heaven is belief in Christ. That's it. End of story.
I believe. I believe there had to be some really cool dude who lived about 2,000 years ago and we're still talking about him and trying to be as good as he was. That should be a good thing - "Lord, save me from your followers."
Usually this combined with the first argument about biblical literalism ensures that it will indeed be a cold day in Hell before protestants can reconcile their beliefs with mainstream science.
Then, as one who is in a position to hire people in scientific fields, I should be able to ask applicants if they're Protestants so that I may be able to weed them out as unsuitable for positions. After all, if you can't accept the fossil record over the Bible, your judgement as a scientist must be seriously called into question.
Prior to the early 1900s many conservative theologians (most notably, B.B. Warfield) had no problem with evolution.
Sure... they've been *real* advocates of science. If it were up to organized Christianity, the Earth would still be a flat disk, riding on the backs of giant tortoises, in the center of the solar system.
What developed the West, what set it apart from the rest, was *science*, not religion.
In that respect, religious rednecks are very much like the fundamentalist muslims they fear and loathe so much.
So, I have an issue. I know an aerospace engineer - qualified to design turbine blades for jet engines, boys and girls. This aerospace engineer was born in a *highly* religious evangelical family, grew up knowing he was gay, and finally came out... for about a week before his pastor convinced him he was going to go to hell.
Now, he's still gay - I've asked him if he finds women physically attractive. Not at all. But he's getting married in a rush wedding arranged to get him away from his homosexuality.
Now, he's going to hurt her and his future kids. He's gonna be the 40-year-old guy who gets arrested for getting his rocks off with a stranger in a public restroom while his wife is lonely and miserable. He's gonna live a lie (God doesn't know you're gay?) and in quiet resentment of his family. But some guy who is arrogant and self-satisfied enough to call himself a "pastor" (look up the meaning of the word) has assured him that he is being a good person for living this lie.
A Muslim fundamentalist whacko who flies an airplane into a building or blows himself up on a subway is hurting others in the (selfish) name of his religious convictions. The only difference with this gay "Christian" is the magnitude of the injuries.
Is that "do unto others"?
Furthermore, as an engineer, he is an applied scientist. He has university training in the scientific method. Which is the more plausible answer - the Bible or the fossil record? You're gonna ignore the story God himself carved in stone, and trust an oft-translated 2,000 year old science fiction novel? Am I gonna trust someone who, especially in the face of scientific training, can ignore such fundamental precepts as evolution?
Is he gonna apply the scientific method, or will he use faith and prayer to ensure the turbine blade won't come apart?
For *any* scientific job, I should very well be allowed to ask an applicant at the very least if they're a creationist, since it speaks so deeply to their qualifications for the position.
Don't get me wrong. I don't knock faith. Myself, I'm pretty sure there's something out there - mathematical probability does not favor the way many things in my life have turned out. I give thanks for it, and I try to make the world a better place; I hope the Big Guy (or whatever) will be okay with that. What I knock is people who are backwards enough to believe in a literal interpretation of a *document*, written by human beings, translated by human beings, and full of human contractictions.
Of course the USA used to be 110 volts, but is now 120 volts, but so many Americans still don't know that. It actually causes problems with old tube radios.
Well within tolerance. Most old radios (AA5, transformer-operated, whatever) were built with +/-20% tolerances on all components. Compounded tolerance is therefore about 20%. The only issue is that rural power would often be lower - say 100V RMS though supposed to be 110V - and to avoid warranty issues, the radios would be designed to run down at lower voltages.
Having paid my university tuition in electrical engineering by restoring old radios and TVs, I can assure you that most old radios will work (and most 1940s-1960s TV sets will produce a picture) when they're on a variac down as low as 70 volts. But remember to reform the capacitors properly - I drive 'em up to 140V and leave 'em there for a couple of hours. Never had a line voltage, capacitor shorting or tube life issue even with my solid 120V RMS service. Worst thing was a little audio distortion and white clipping at 140V RMS.
But notice he needs 32Ah at 240V. Your battery is presumably at 12V; you will need 240/12*32=640 Ah of capacity. So 6 of those batteries, in parallel. Perhaps more to compensate for inefficiencies in the inverter.
I think the theoretical limit on the efficiency of the inverter would be sqrt(2), because if you're cutting the DC up into a sinewave with an RMS value, you're doing the inverse of RMS-->peak rectification. ie., lots of power is wasted in resistive loads of MOSFETs. Of course, that's if you're wanting a real sinewave; I doubt if most inverters actually do that, likewise, I doubt most inverters would actually achieve a practical efficiency near this.
Thoughts:
Keep the batteries inside for warmth, because cold decreases efficiency. Use an AC-powered fan (with a brushless induction motor) to keep them ventilated when the power is on (during charging). When the power is out, H2 is not generated by the batteries.
Keep the inverter inside. If you're dealing with 4A @ 240V, that's 960 watts going through that thing. In Ottawa, Canada I heated my entire bungalow (~1200 square feet between the ground floor and the basement) last winter with nothing but 20 Pentium-I class computers crunching distributed projects. Since computers are nearly 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat, that's about 2kW nearly continuously. Let's estimate that your inverter is 60% efficient - good ballpark - 0.4*960 gives about 400 watts of heat. That's a substantial portion of the electrical load which kept my 1947 bungalow comfortably warm in a winter which routinely gets to -30C.
Keep the batteries charged by jumping with a car or something similar. Mount two bolts onto a big piece of plastic and connect them to (relatively cheap) arc welding cable going down to the (indoor) batteries. Start your car and keep it idling - most modern fuel-injected cars are quite efficient at idle, and most of them will automatically adjust the engine speed to keep the battery properly charged. If you don't have a car or it's too far away, replace the blade with a pulley on a junked gasoline lawnmower and stick an alternator on the deck. The lawnmower-alternator combination is handy for all sorts of things - weld a frame on for a tool and parts carrier for going out into junkyards, and you can use it to crank over dead cars to check compression and oil pressure. One Briggs and Stratton 3hp lawnmower motor will happily drive 4 AC-Delco 100 amp alternators. Each one is good for about 1200 watts, though if you connect it to a *really dead* car battery, the engine will stall.:)
That "radium" is not a radioactive compound. Those luminous dials are produced by a special paint, I used to know its composition, but I forgot it. It used to be described in my high-school chemistry book.
Actually, until the 1950s or so, yeah, luminous dials really *did* use radium to excite the fluorescent compounds. Grab a geiger counter and go to an antique shop if you don't believe me.
What's worse is that the women (primarily women) who used to paint the faces would often be in the habit of twirling the brush into a point on their tongues. Lots of bone cancer ensued 10+ years later.
No matter what, *do not* scrape the paint off an old luminous-face clock or gauge. If dust gets into your lungs, you're playing with cancer - lots of massive He nuclei with 3.2E-19 coulombs on each; great for causing genetic damage in delicate lung tissue. Leave it alone.
A better bet to build a nuclear-powered small device would be to gut an ionizing smoke detector for the Am-241. Maybe a nuclear-powered Casio FX-991MS calculator to take to engineering classes? Again, be careful - after all, it's only you who'll get hurt. Wash your hands. Handle the stuff outside where there's good ventilation to counter the dust. Remember that cancer is usually a slow and painful death.
(Re: the calculator. In my first year of engineering, a buddy of mine was in mechanical. He had a tiny little working model steam engine, powered off alcohol. Yanked the batteries from his calculator and asked me (electrical) to come up with a generator/rectifier/regulator setup for him. Tiny little hobby motor, bridge of low-drop germanium 1N34 diodes, and a zener regulator mounted right onto the back of the motor. He fuelled up the steam engine with vodka and brought it to our first-year calculus exam. Unfortunately, he spent more time tinkering with the wick on the alcohol burner than actually writing the exam, and dropped out that year.)
The whole reason for people's interest in Howard is that he is always something other than how he presents himself... He provokes the worst from people, but also manages to keep a strong core audience. It's impossible to have a well-defined concept of him without contradiction, which is at the root of people's fascination with him.
I'm not sure. Part of why I like Stern so much is because I can identify with all aspects of his personality. I wear a shirt and tie to work, but I drive there in a 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck. I can do Big Math (tm) - on a sliderule, at that - but I like to roll up the sleeves and get up to my arms in greasy old car engine. And lemme tell you about the sorts of conversations which happen when a couple of electrical engineers are hanging around in the garage drinking beer with a couple of mechanical engineers. Where do you think this and this came from?
Nah, for the most part, Stern is really just a regular guy, abeit missing the part of the brain which censors out what most of us say. Shrewd businessman? Yup. Well informed and well read? Yup. One of the most intelligent people in the public view? Undoubtedly. But all that different from most regular joes? Nope.
Consumer grade broadband routers are notorious for causing problems, and are almost always badly underpowered. Using a PC based router to handle nat generally works much better, provided you have the know-how to set it up.
Well, the only real problem I've encountered with my D-Link DI-604 is a lack of flexibility - I can forward any port I want to any machine I want, but I think there's a limit of 24 ports. Couple of people running Torrent clients with that list of ports they need opened up, and you start to run out of space.
The other problem is, with only 4 ports on it, I've had to throw a switch onto it to extend the LAN, and sometimes that arrangement seems to get flaky.
But overall, I'm quite happy. I save a lot of electricity over running the old Pentium 75 firewall I had before (Pentium class rather than a 486 because the Pentium has a HALT instruction to save power!). The D-Link uses a lot less space, and without fans, it's silent. As a one piece dedicated unit, it's likely to be more reliable - less card connectors, worn out boot floppies, etc. And compared to having the server pulling NAT/firewall duty (to save power and space over two machines), this will be a lot easier to fix if something happens to the server - I'll still be able to hit www.tldp.org while the server is giving me a kernel panic!:)
Overall, not perfect, but I'm a satisfied customer.
Time-shifting the broadcasts using Total Recorder.
Excellent!
But for right now, I really want to find out who it is putting all the Howard Stern radio shows up on Kazaa. I need to buy that dude at least a few dozen beers.
I mean, come on, they are selling crappy midi files for outrageous (comparatively) prices.
I have no problem with companies selling the ringtones at whatever the market will bear, as long as there's no collusion.
What I have a problem with, is any idiot who butchers *any* piece of music by playing it through a 1.5" diameter piezoelectric speaker. Even rap "music" deserves more respect than that.
It's bad enough that I have to cope with cellphones ringing everywhere I go, but it's worse still when it's another anime-loving dimwitted 17-year-old whose cellphone is playing Britney Spears' Toxic from the back of a Hello Kitty schoolbag, or some poseur with a 3-series BMW who wants to appear cultured with a rousing rendition of the 1812 Overture.
I hope every single person with a ringtone on his or her cellphone contracts inoperable colon cancer.
Then what's the point of using a calculator in the first place?
Little. There's very little.
They had the opportunity to ship Windows with a convenient little applet, maybe modelled on a Casio FX-991 or similar - at the very least, give it a scrolling multiline output!
Instead, the Square Root function disappears in scientific mode (real issue, annoying, forces you to enter the square root a longer way, but not a big problem to anyone who actually uses the scientific functions).
But the real problem: how do you do arc-trig functions? They *must* be there, because there's absolutely no point in having trig functions without arc-trig, and they're kinda basic features in any calculator calling itself "scientific".
No hyperbolic trig functions, either.
This is what you get when you let a bunch of arts degrees from the marketing department design grown-up adult tools.
I have seen examples of FreeBSD and BSDI with over 1000 days, and one of my associates boasts about his Linux server that has wrapped the uptime counter 3 times, which means it is over 4 years. For some unixes and VMS apparently 10 years plus isn't out of the question. 90 days, *chortle*
My personal record with Windows was 49 days, consistently, with Windows 95B. This was in an airport, with custom-written software which didn't run in Windows NT. We never managed to get Windows 98 to stay up that long.
Impressive for Microsoft, but it's still a joke compared to everything else:
Most impressive is not the operating system or the ten-year-old hard disk drive still whirring away. Most impressive is Ottawa Hydro's reliability: I don't have a UPS.
(Well, actually, I do have a UPS, but I was waiting for the next reboot to install it. The uptime has now outlasted the UPS's warranty, and the thing is waiting to be plugged in.)
Where unions as you know them are a state guaranteed right and hold 50%-1 vote on every company board.
Good! Just what I need to try to keep my company from going under: A bunch of high school dropouts who make $35/hr doing work that any chimpanzee could do, telling me how I need to run my car company so that I can compete with cheap labor in third-world shitholes like Korea, China and France.
Buzz Hargrove (leader of Canadian Auto Workers union) once described a business plan for Chrysler by analogy to an episode of Cheers. Yes, that's right, he's using sitcoms to describe (and probably understand) economics. As a shareholder in DaimlerChrysler, it galls me to no end that idiots like that are allowed to have any voice whatsoever.
Screw the unions: If they don't like their jobs on the assembly line, I would invite them to quit and find work elsewhere. Nothing pays them what they perceive to be enough? Then they can go back to school so that they have some actual marketable skills or paper evidence of their work ethic.
before explaining them how to use this "ZoneAlarm thing" on their computer. Then I put them behind a NAT as well. Next time I come home, the computer is plugged straight into the cable modem, and zonealarm has been uninstalled. WTF!/me smacks head
That's when you shake your head and say, "Okay. You've removed software and hardware that I spent time installing. You've decided that you know more about networking and computers than I do. You don't need my help with your computer anymore." After that, simply refuse to help them with any computer problems ever again. I've cut off my father.
My father is familiar with Windows 98 and Outlook; it's what he had where he worked. I built a machine for him - Windows 2000 with Eudora. Of course, having to enter your name and password to log in was "too complicated". He couldn't handle Eudora (probably because he took a 10 hour employer-sponsored course explaining how to use Outlook).
Now, how difficult will it be to use Windows 2000 if you're already familiar with Windows 98? How difficult will it be to use an e-mail client you've never used before? I likened the whole thing to getting into a rental car. All cars have essentially the same controls, but you should spend the first few minutes in the parking lot, figuring out where the windshield wiper and headlight switches are.
I told him, very simply, to enter his username and password to log in. Using Eudora: click on the little icon of the envelope without the blue arrows to make a new message. Type the message. Send it. Even with a 10 hour training course, he still didn't know how to send attachments in Outlook, so I wasn't worried about him not being able to handle highly advanced features like signatures and spell-checkers.
Anyway, next time I was there, he asked me to check a problem with his computer. It was now running Windows 98, Outlook, and about 50 pieces of spyware and virii.
I shrugged, shook my head, and told him that I wouldn't support the machine if he would no longer trust my judgement in software.
So, he took it to a local electronics chain store which offers computer service. For $150, he lost all the data on his hard drive but got a fresh install of Windows 98 and Outlook. Which were promptly screwed again.
Why does it seem like each and every massive pickup truck I see on the road that has the double tires in back look shiny brand new like it's never been used for any form of work? I drive a long commute these days, through a lot of types of traffic, and I never ever can recall seeing one of those quad-rear-tire trucks in an application as an actual working truck. The beat up real tradesmen trucks all seem to be normal single-tires-in-rear vehicles.
They're called "duallies". They offer an increased load capacity, but the car companies massively mark them up - unless you need it, a regular pickup truck offers far more bang for the buck. (Preferably with rubber floormats instead of carpets, no power windows, no silly "features" that jack up the price stupidly.)
Given the cost - in purchase, fuel, cost of extra tires, and because registration is more expensive in many places - most people who have them do actually need them. Next time you see one, look in the bed and see if you see a large greasy plate like on the back of a semi without its trailer. That's called a 5th wheel hitch; they probably tow anything from a big RV to horses to car trailers.
In a perfect world, you'd buy a duallie truck for towing your horses and a regular one for more mundane tasks (carrying a few sheets of drywall, helping a friend move), but the reality is that pickup trucks are now so expensive due to gas-guzzler taxes and the current fashion for balding middle-aged accountants to drive trucks, that you simply can't afford the cute little Dakota to park beside the Ram 3500.
I'm starting to feel like it's some sort of a dicksize or inadequacy thing.
See the comment about balding middle-aged accountants.
I can understand wanting to drive a truck even if you don't need one - I don't like front wheel drive and it's getting pretty hard to find a real car (body on frame construction, rear wheel drive) these days, so even if I was only commuting to work, I'd be buying a truck, too.
(In actual fact, I have a truck, but it actually gets used as a truck. It has to do double-duty as a car because it's far too expensive to keep two vehicles licensed at once here. An intelligent solution would be to make licensing a car free if you've already got a truck or van on the road, to encourage more people to purchase and drive cars for grocery shopping and commuting.)
A lot of that is due to shock-loading.:) Chrysler's mighty 727 TorqueFlite automatic was designed to live behind a 426 Hemi; even slamming it into gear with the throttle pegged won't hurt it thanks to the torque converter's isolation.
The problem is not that the losses are associated with gear changing (frankly most electronic autos can change gears faster and more reliably than a person ever can)..
And this is why most drag racers use modified automatics - essentially, an "brainless" automatic which needs you to tell it when to shift. It's called a manual valve body. Even a very primitive automatic like the (two speed and bulletproof) GM PowerGlide of the 1950s and 1960s can shift faster than most human beings. And being able to use the clutch consistently is very difficult when you're dealing in terms of tenths of a second; automatics are free of that.
It's the torque converter. There is constant 4-8% (or better) loss of energy due to friction in the torque converter alone.
A big improvement in fuel efficiency could be had by simply removing that overlap (as anyone building an automatic for performance or racing will do, check out the RWD Valve Body Assembly on the 18th page of this Mopar Performance Catalog PDF) but Joe Consumer will complain if the car accelerates like a heavy-clutched stickshift. (Note the "Race Only" warning on the valve body assembly's caption.)
I admit to not knowing a lot about electric motors (other than the basic concept of how they work). However, I am positive that what you say about them not having an 'optimal' RPM is wrong. I can prove this to you simply by taking a look at some extremes:
You're very right. I know people with degrees in electrical engineering who don't understand what you do.
If you apply very little juice to an electric motor, it will not spin, not having enough power to overcome friction. So clearly, electric motors are not efficient at the extreme low end (since you get no output power for an input power).
This is true for universal motors (which use brushes). Torque is most when the motor is stalled. But remember that torque is NOT power! Power is work over time; torque is just a moment (engineering term for force around a point). Power (at a given speed) is, of course, related to force (in this case torque) by basic high school physics equations which I seem to forget right now. [grin]
A universal motor consists of a bunch of coils of wire. We'll take them as running off DC or such low frequency AC that we can ignore its effects. As the coils of wire rotate on the armature, brushes and the commutator ring switch different coils in and out of the circuit. This switching causes the rotating coils to be receiving AC power. Coils are inductors, and inductors have reactance (fancy term for resistance to AC) on top of their DC resistance.
When the motor is running, the impedance (resistance at AC) of the coils in the armature is given by Impedance = InductiveReactance + DCResistance. Ohm's law then applies as usual, where P=I*I*R=I*I*Z where Z is the impedance instead of the resistance.
When the motor is stalled, the current flowing through the windings is DC, and inductance has no effect. The only limit to the current is the DC resistance of the windings.
The magnetic field generated by a coil of wire is proportional to the amount of current flowing through the wire. And the speed (for a given load, whether that's just friction or something useful) will therefore be proportional to the current through the windings.
So, when the motor is running, the impedance ("resistance" at AC) of its windings increases, and the current flowing drops. Then the speed drops, the impedance drops, more current flows, and the motor speeds back up. In reality, it finds a happy medium.
But this all means that the more you load a universal motor, the more current it consumes. It also means that sticking an ohmmeter across the motor will let you calculate the stalled current but will give you no useful information about how much current the motor will use when it's spinning.
Of course, a universal motor doesn't care if it's running off AC or DC. The commutator ring will switch poles back and forth far faster than 50/60Hz AC power, so the effects of 60Hz AC are so small as to be negligible.
In general, the complete opposite is true for stepper motors.
With pure AC motors, there's a lot more variety. You should consider a brushless motor (whether in a computer fan or an electric car) as being an AC motor. Most common AC motors (washing machines, furnace blowers, etc.) are of the squirrel-cage induction variety. They're essentially rotating transformers, and use almost no current when they have no load. When you stall them, the effect is similar to shorting the output of a transformer. The transformer's secondary (or motor's rotor) will suck up all the magnetic field in the core. As a result, the input power will be limited only by the DC resistance of the windings, and you'll eventually blow the motor.
Most AC motors will only run happily at a given frequency and related speed.
Neither the universal motor or the garden-variety induction motor is even remotely suitable for use as traction motors in cars. The universal motor is horribly inefficient, and the induction motor has to be designed to run at a given frequency and its speed is directly related to that
Is it even possible to build a stick shift hybrid car? Doesn't the onboard computer have to constantly adjust the amount of power coming from the gasoline engine and the electric batteries?
I can't imagine why not.
As things are, the motor/generator is located between the engine and transmission. Slowing down involves engine braking (downshifting and using the engine's compression to slow the car); most automatics do this, but the Hondamatics are particularly well suited to it because of their non-conventional design. In a hybrid, that energy would be captured by the motor/generator.
During acceleration, automatic or standard transmission, the throttle would have to be adjusted to correspond to the power supplied by the motor/generator. The same mechanisms used in automatic hybrids would apply.
It probably has to do more with the customers. Think of guys like Raplh Nader and Dharma's father on Dharma and Greg. Do you think either one of them is capable of driving a stickshift?
Uhh, locking torque converters are common in all new cars. My 2001 Honda Accord has one; you can actually feel it locking up; it feels like a subtle additional shift when you reach 40MPH or so and stop accelerating.
Actually, they go back a lot further than that. GM was using them with the Iron Duke (2.5L I4) and 2.8L V6 in Celebrities, 6000s, Fieros, Calais, etc. as far back as 1984.
My big question is why would you rather donate to a large commercial organization well funded from it's previous Shreck flick
I'm sure a lot of people would happily do it, just for the knowledge that they were a part of making the movie. Unpredictability aside, it would probably put a dent in their rendering requirements and save Hollywood some hardware costs.
However, the frames would have to be seriously encrypted to avoid pre-release leakage of parts of the movie. Maybe after the movie has been released, the screensaver could display frames it rendered, while it works on frames for the next feature.
I'm tall, and I hate bumping my head on the inside of Japanese tinfoil. So I have a 1976 Dodge Ram.
I saw a bumper sticker with that and the "replace you with a very small shell script" joke on the back window of a souped-up F-150. I've seen similar geekiness on other trucks.
My old-yet-paradoxically-newer truck was an '83 Dodge Ram that I bought for $350. I liked it, and it was solid, reliable, good on gas (Slant-6, A-833 manual overdrive). But the body was horrible - it was a poorly-maintained former drywall truck, and there were rust holes all over the body when I got it. So out comes the welder and the sheet steel, and I patched it. Big-assed stitch welds, didn't grind 'em down or anything. Coat of Tremclad over the patches. Replaced the roof, welded on one from a junkyard. More raw welds with Tremclad. Perfect. Spent a Saturday afternoon patching the body, Sunday rebuilding the brakes and suspension. Ice-cold AC when I sold the R-12 and modified it for R-134a.
My friends named my truck Patches.
I drove Patches from 1997 to 2000. At work, I would wear a shirt and tie, sometimes a suit. I loved sitting in the middle of a traffic jam, in a shirt and tie, floating in a sea of Lexus and Grand Cherokees in a vehicle which I purchased free and clear for less than one of their monthly payments, playing classical music loudly on the stereo, my window rolled up on the hottest day of summer. "That thing has air conditioning?" Complete non-sequitur, seemed to upset a lot of people.
In the winter, I'd drive it around with an old car engine chained down over the rear axle. And in the rear window, a white Apple sticker, as came with the then-current Macs.
Every now and then, someone in an Acura, BMW, etc. would honk and wave as he passed me on the freeway, an Apple sticker in the rear window of his $whatever.
What happened to Patches? The Peel Regional Gestapo was having a crackdown on "unsafe" vehicles (rather than doing anything about drivers with cellphones, or idiots with clear taillights). They made me report for an "inspection" where a police officer (not a mechanic) looked over the vehicle and decided it was unsafe because the battery was held down with a rubber strap. (Never mind that the entire suspension and brakes were in perfect shape, or that the body (though ugly) passed the MOT inspection, or that the exhaust system and frame were perfect, or that all the lights and signals and horn worked...) They tore off my license plates with a pair of Vise Grips (apparently, higher tools are too complicated for them) and told me that I had ten minutes to remove the vehicle from their lot before it would be towed to the impound yard. I had it towed home ($400, from the other side of Toronto area) and went over the paperwork. It was a horrible nightmare to put it back on the road after having the plates pulled, so I parted it out and bought my '76 instead. And I haven't bought so much as a cup of coffee anywhere in Peel region since.
Remote Desktop works fine for this type of application. You log into the box as needed, do what needs doing and then log out or disconnect.
Great! You have 1,000 machines to do this on. Get to work. (Ahh, yes. GUIs are *renowned* for their scriptability!)
Windows has come a long way since you knew you'd see the blue screen of death twice before lunch. On decent hardware it's very stable.
Agreed. And the process control, from the GUI, is actually leaps and bounds better than in Linux. If I have anything in X eat the processor, my recourse is to log in by telnet, hit top, and kill the errant process. Joe Sixpack can figure out Windows three-fingered salute, but what if he doesn't have another computer to telnet in from? (Of course, I could just kill X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, but then I'd also lose everything I was working on in the non-hung processes.) At least in Windows NT/2K/XP, I can just bring up the task manager and kill it.
(KDE and Gnome need a key combination to immediately renice the process eating the most CPU time and then bringing up their own version of Task Manager.)
Denying the current stability of Windows is no different than Bill and Co. denying the stability and power of Linux. It's pointless and it makes you look out of touch.
I agree. But the desktop is what Windows is inherently good at; servers and Big Iron is what Unix is inherently good at. Use the best tool for the job. Like Linux is not a good desktop operating system YET, Windows is not a good server, cluster or mainframe OS yet.
The difference is, of course, that I believe Linux will - one day - be an excellent desktop operating system, whereas limitations inherent in the underlying Windows concepts will prevent it from ever amounting to anything substantial in that arena. Sell your Microsoft shares.
Umm.. Are you sure about that? Kde 3.2.2 rocks windows socks off. It is the most usable interface I have ever used (I have never used OSX, so don't ask me).
KDE is nice, and I like it. For one thing, they seem to push the standard "look and feel" to developers very well, so you generally can fire up a new program and know exactly where everything is. Default installs are usually pleasant and functional, and reskinning it is a snap. But it has many problems:
The combination of KDE/X makes an Athlon 800 unusably slow as even an e-mail and MP3-playing drone. By contrast, even bloated and fat Windows XP runs happily on a PII-266 for the same tasks. Note that this is a very big problem - just about all intelligent people that I've met will try out a new operating system on their old machine before installing it on their xGHz main computer.
Not all apps will have been written specifically for KDE, and no one seems to be able to agree on standards for things like Copy and Paste.
OLE. Can I make a "PowerPoint"-style presentation which embeds and plays a video in *anything* on Unix, KDE or not? I can do it very easily in Office 95 on Windows 95. That's 9 years ago, boys and girls!
KDE's help system is horrible, lacking any information on how to configure the underlying operating system. Windows XP's is marginal at best, but still leaps and bounds ahead of KDE's.
One "Home" button in every default install of Konqueror that I've ever seen. One "Home" button works great in Windows file/web browser - there's no concept of/home/$username in Windows. But really doesn't work well at all in a Unix environment where Home can be/home/ or www.yahoo.com.
KDE is only as good as its applications. Many of them are no better than bad Windows shareware, with few poorly-implemented features and lots of silent crashes and bombs.
These all limit its usefulness as a desktop, and generally serve to reinforce Windows position, since there's no credible desktop alternative on the x86 platform... yet.
Windows only asset is 90+% market share. If they didn't have that, and were open to real competition, they would have died a long time ago
Part of the reason they still have +90% market share is that they actually sit ordinary users down in focus groups and ask them what they do and don't like. They have expert graphic designers (not 14-year-old kids with home-drawn anime posters on the walls) design icons and the general cosmetic details. The applications software pool is large and, for the most part, more stable than its free counterparts.
As a desktop operating system, the best thing that Linux currently has going for it is its stability. Of course, that won't stop KMail from segfaulting instead of dying gracefully when it runs out of disk space or any number of other user annoyances.
I love this whole idea of Windows on a supercomputer! Just think of how fast a spam drone it would make!
Windows only technical asset is a (relatively) good GUI.
And, as we all know, *ALL* mainframes, supercomputers and servers absolutely must have GUIs!
After all,
GUIs are less resource-intensive than a CLI (but why would you care, having invested millions to get a couple of teraflops, about squeezing every last little drop of power out of it?)
GUIs save you time and effort! Rather than a simple shell, Perl, $whatever script to do things, have an operator point-and-click for that human touch!
GUIs, by virtue of being based on less code and with less features than a CLI, are inherently more secure. Microsoft, as we know, is the field's foremost expert in security and reliability.
Memo at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory:
"Please be advised that Deep Blue will be rebooted this afternoon at 5:PM in order to complete the installation of Service Pack 11. All jobs currently running and queued will be lost, even those which have already accumulated several years of processor time. We expect Deep Blue to resume normal operation sometime in early August. Thank you for your cooperation, LANL Informatics Department"
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In fundamentalist Protestantism, the only thing that will get you into heaven is belief in Christ. That's it. End of story.
I believe. I believe there had to be some really cool dude who lived about 2,000 years ago and we're still talking about him and trying to be as good as he was. That should be a good thing - "Lord, save me from your followers."
Usually this combined with the first argument about biblical literalism ensures that it will indeed be a cold day in Hell before protestants can reconcile their beliefs with mainstream science.Then, as one who is in a position to hire people in scientific fields, I should be able to ask applicants if they're Protestants so that I may be able to weed them out as unsuitable for positions. After all, if you can't accept the fossil record over the Bible, your judgement as a scientist must be seriously called into question.
Prior to the early 1900s many conservative theologians (most notably, B.B. Warfield) had no problem with evolution.
Sure... they've been *real* advocates of science. If it were up to organized Christianity, the Earth would still be a flat disk, riding on the backs of giant tortoises, in the center of the solar system.
What developed the West, what set it apart from the rest, was *science*, not religion. In that respect, religious rednecks are very much like the fundamentalist muslims they fear and loathe so much.
So, I have an issue. I know an aerospace engineer - qualified to design turbine blades for jet engines, boys and girls. This aerospace engineer was born in a *highly* religious evangelical family, grew up knowing he was gay, and finally came out... for about a week before his pastor convinced him he was going to go to hell.
Now, he's still gay - I've asked him if he finds women physically attractive. Not at all. But he's getting married in a rush wedding arranged to get him away from his homosexuality.
Now, he's going to hurt her and his future kids. He's gonna be the 40-year-old guy who gets arrested for getting his rocks off with a stranger in a public restroom while his wife is lonely and miserable. He's gonna live a lie (God doesn't know you're gay?) and in quiet resentment of his family. But some guy who is arrogant and self-satisfied enough to call himself a "pastor" (look up the meaning of the word) has assured him that he is being a good person for living this lie.
A Muslim fundamentalist whacko who flies an airplane into a building or blows himself up on a subway is hurting others in the (selfish) name of his religious convictions. The only difference with this gay "Christian" is the magnitude of the injuries.
Is that "do unto others"?
Furthermore, as an engineer, he is an applied scientist. He has university training in the scientific method. Which is the more plausible answer - the Bible or the fossil record? You're gonna ignore the story God himself carved in stone, and trust an oft-translated 2,000 year old science fiction novel? Am I gonna trust someone who, especially in the face of scientific training, can ignore such fundamental precepts as evolution?
Is he gonna apply the scientific method, or will he use faith and prayer to ensure the turbine blade won't come apart?
For *any* scientific job, I should very well be allowed to ask an applicant at the very least if they're a creationist, since it speaks so deeply to their qualifications for the position.
Don't get me wrong. I don't knock faith. Myself, I'm pretty sure there's something out there - mathematical probability does not favor the way many things in my life have turned out. I give thanks for it, and I try to make the world a better place; I hope the Big Guy (or whatever) will be okay with that. What I knock is people who are backwards enough to believe in a literal interpretation of a *document*, written by human beings, translated by human beings, and full of human contractictions.
Of course the USA used to be 110 volts, but is now 120 volts, but so many Americans still don't know that. It actually causes problems with old tube radios.
Well within tolerance. Most old radios (AA5, transformer-operated, whatever) were built with +/-20% tolerances on all components. Compounded tolerance is therefore about 20%. The only issue is that rural power would often be lower - say 100V RMS though supposed to be 110V - and to avoid warranty issues, the radios would be designed to run down at lower voltages.
Having paid my university tuition in electrical engineering by restoring old radios and TVs, I can assure you that most old radios will work (and most 1940s-1960s TV sets will produce a picture) when they're on a variac down as low as 70 volts. But remember to reform the capacitors properly - I drive 'em up to 140V and leave 'em there for a couple of hours. Never had a line voltage, capacitor shorting or tube life issue even with my solid 120V RMS service. Worst thing was a little audio distortion and white clipping at 140V RMS.
Lawrence Wade, BOFH
www.glowingplate.com
But notice he needs 32Ah at 240V. Your battery is presumably at 12V; you will need 240/12*32=640 Ah of capacity. So 6 of those batteries, in parallel. Perhaps more to compensate for inefficiencies in the inverter.
I think the theoretical limit on the efficiency of the inverter would be sqrt(2), because if you're cutting the DC up into a sinewave with an RMS value, you're doing the inverse of RMS-->peak rectification. ie., lots of power is wasted in resistive loads of MOSFETs. Of course, that's if you're wanting a real sinewave; I doubt if most inverters actually do that, likewise, I doubt most inverters would actually achieve a practical efficiency near this.
Thoughts:
That "radium" is not a radioactive compound. Those luminous dials are produced by a special paint, I used to know its composition, but I forgot it. It used to be described in my high-school chemistry book.
Actually, until the 1950s or so, yeah, luminous dials really *did* use radium to excite the fluorescent compounds. Grab a geiger counter and go to an antique shop if you don't believe me.
What's worse is that the women (primarily women) who used to paint the faces would often be in the habit of twirling the brush into a point on their tongues. Lots of bone cancer ensued 10+ years later.
No matter what, *do not* scrape the paint off an old luminous-face clock or gauge. If dust gets into your lungs, you're playing with cancer - lots of massive He nuclei with 3.2E-19 coulombs on each; great for causing genetic damage in delicate lung tissue. Leave it alone.
A better bet to build a nuclear-powered small device would be to gut an ionizing smoke detector for the Am-241. Maybe a nuclear-powered Casio FX-991MS calculator to take to engineering classes? Again, be careful - after all, it's only you who'll get hurt. Wash your hands. Handle the stuff outside where there's good ventilation to counter the dust. Remember that cancer is usually a slow and painful death.
(Re: the calculator. In my first year of engineering, a buddy of mine was in mechanical. He had a tiny little working model steam engine, powered off alcohol. Yanked the batteries from his calculator and asked me (electrical) to come up with a generator/rectifier/regulator setup for him. Tiny little hobby motor, bridge of low-drop germanium 1N34 diodes, and a zener regulator mounted right onto the back of the motor. He fuelled up the steam engine with vodka and brought it to our first-year calculus exam. Unfortunately, he spent more time tinkering with the wick on the alcohol burner than actually writing the exam, and dropped out that year.)
The whole reason for people's interest in Howard is that he is always something other than how he presents himself... He provokes the worst from people, but also manages to keep a strong core audience. It's impossible to have a well-defined concept of him without contradiction, which is at the root of people's fascination with him.
I'm not sure. Part of why I like Stern so much is because I can identify with all aspects of his personality. I wear a shirt and tie to work, but I drive there in a 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck. I can do Big Math (tm) - on a sliderule, at that - but I like to roll up the sleeves and get up to my arms in greasy old car engine. And lemme tell you about the sorts of conversations which happen when a couple of electrical engineers are hanging around in the garage drinking beer with a couple of mechanical engineers. Where do you think this and this came from?
Nah, for the most part, Stern is really just a regular guy, abeit missing the part of the brain which censors out what most of us say. Shrewd businessman? Yup. Well informed and well read? Yup. One of the most intelligent people in the public view? Undoubtedly. But all that different from most regular joes? Nope.
Porn? Dwarf? There's a joke in there somewhere, but it's kind of sticky and gross and I don't want to touch it.
Hey man, be nice when you're talking about Beetlejuice.
P2P search: video / stern beetlejuice midget porn
Wait at least an hour after eating before you view it.
Consumer grade broadband routers are notorious for causing problems, and are almost always badly underpowered. Using a PC based router to handle nat generally works much better, provided you have the know-how to set it up.
Well, the only real problem I've encountered with my D-Link DI-604 is a lack of flexibility - I can forward any port I want to any machine I want, but I think there's a limit of 24 ports. Couple of people running Torrent clients with that list of ports they need opened up, and you start to run out of space.
The other problem is, with only 4 ports on it, I've had to throw a switch onto it to extend the LAN, and sometimes that arrangement seems to get flaky.
But overall, I'm quite happy. I save a lot of electricity over running the old Pentium 75 firewall I had before (Pentium class rather than a 486 because the Pentium has a HALT instruction to save power!). The D-Link uses a lot less space, and without fans, it's silent. As a one piece dedicated unit, it's likely to be more reliable - less card connectors, worn out boot floppies, etc. And compared to having the server pulling NAT/firewall duty (to save power and space over two machines), this will be a lot easier to fix if something happens to the server - I'll still be able to hit www.tldp.org while the server is giving me a kernel panic! :)
Overall, not perfect, but I'm a satisfied customer.
Time-shifting the broadcasts using Total Recorder.
Excellent!
But for right now, I really want to find out who it is putting all the Howard Stern radio shows up on Kazaa. I need to buy that dude at least a few dozen beers.
I mean, come on, they are selling crappy midi files for outrageous (comparatively) prices.
I have no problem with companies selling the ringtones at whatever the market will bear, as long as there's no collusion.
What I have a problem with, is any idiot who butchers *any* piece of music by playing it through a 1.5" diameter piezoelectric speaker. Even rap "music" deserves more respect than that.
It's bad enough that I have to cope with cellphones ringing everywhere I go, but it's worse still when it's another anime-loving dimwitted 17-year-old whose cellphone is playing Britney Spears' Toxic from the back of a Hello Kitty schoolbag, or some poseur with a 3-series BMW who wants to appear cultured with a rousing rendition of the 1812 Overture.
I hope every single person with a ringtone on his or her cellphone contracts inoperable colon cancer.
Then what's the point of using a calculator in the first place?
Little. There's very little.
They had the opportunity to ship Windows with a convenient little applet, maybe modelled on a Casio FX-991 or similar - at the very least, give it a scrolling multiline output!
Instead, the Square Root function disappears in scientific mode (real issue, annoying, forces you to enter the square root a longer way, but not a big problem to anyone who actually uses the scientific functions).
But the real problem: how do you do arc-trig functions? They *must* be there, because there's absolutely no point in having trig functions without arc-trig, and they're kinda basic features in any calculator calling itself "scientific".
No hyperbolic trig functions, either.
This is what you get when you let a bunch of arts degrees from the marketing department design grown-up adult tools.
I have seen examples of FreeBSD and BSDI with over 1000 days, and one of my associates boasts about his Linux server that has wrapped the uptime counter 3 times, which means it is over 4 years. For some unixes and VMS apparently 10 years plus isn't out of the question. 90 days, *chortle*
My personal record with Windows was 49 days, consistently, with Windows 95B. This was in an airport, with custom-written software which didn't run in Windows NT. We never managed to get Windows 98 to stay up that long.
Impressive for Microsoft, but it's still a joke compared to everything else:
$ uptime12:22pm up 305 days, 22:10, 2 users, load average: 0.01, 0.17, 0.22
Most impressive is not the operating system or the ten-year-old hard disk drive still whirring away. Most impressive is Ottawa Hydro's reliability: I don't have a UPS.
(Well, actually, I do have a UPS, but I was waiting for the next reboot to install it. The uptime has now outlasted the UPS's warranty, and the thing is waiting to be plugged in.)
Where unions as you know them are a state guaranteed right and hold 50%-1 vote on every company board.
Good! Just what I need to try to keep my company from going under: A bunch of high school dropouts who make $35/hr doing work that any chimpanzee could do, telling me how I need to run my car company so that I can compete with cheap labor in third-world shitholes like Korea, China and France.
Buzz Hargrove (leader of Canadian Auto Workers union) once described a business plan for Chrysler by analogy to an episode of Cheers. Yes, that's right, he's using sitcoms to describe (and probably understand) economics. As a shareholder in DaimlerChrysler, it galls me to no end that idiots like that are allowed to have any voice whatsoever.
Screw the unions: If they don't like their jobs on the assembly line, I would invite them to quit and find work elsewhere. Nothing pays them what they perceive to be enough? Then they can go back to school so that they have some actual marketable skills or paper evidence of their work ethic.
I'd fire them all in a heartbeat.
before explaining them how to use this "ZoneAlarm thing" on their computer. Then I put them behind a NAT as well. Next time I come home, the computer is plugged straight into the cable modem, and zonealarm has been uninstalled. WTF!
That's when you shake your head and say, "Okay. You've removed software and hardware that I spent time installing. You've decided that you know more about networking and computers than I do. You don't need my help with your computer anymore." After that, simply refuse to help them with any computer problems ever again. I've cut off my father.
My father is familiar with Windows 98 and Outlook; it's what he had where he worked. I built a machine for him - Windows 2000 with Eudora. Of course, having to enter your name and password to log in was "too complicated". He couldn't handle Eudora (probably because he took a 10 hour employer-sponsored course explaining how to use Outlook).
Now, how difficult will it be to use Windows 2000 if you're already familiar with Windows 98? How difficult will it be to use an e-mail client you've never used before? I likened the whole thing to getting into a rental car. All cars have essentially the same controls, but you should spend the first few minutes in the parking lot, figuring out where the windshield wiper and headlight switches are.
I told him, very simply, to enter his username and password to log in. Using Eudora: click on the little icon of the envelope without the blue arrows to make a new message. Type the message. Send it. Even with a 10 hour training course, he still didn't know how to send attachments in Outlook, so I wasn't worried about him not being able to handle highly advanced features like signatures and spell-checkers.
Anyway, next time I was there, he asked me to check a problem with his computer. It was now running Windows 98, Outlook, and about 50 pieces of spyware and virii.
I shrugged, shook my head, and told him that I wouldn't support the machine if he would no longer trust my judgement in software.
So, he took it to a local electronics chain store which offers computer service. For $150, he lost all the data on his hard drive but got a fresh install of Windows 98 and Outlook. Which were promptly screwed again.
Why does it seem like each and every massive pickup truck I see on the road that has the double tires in back look shiny brand new like it's never been used for any form of work? I drive a long commute these days, through a lot of types of traffic, and I never ever can recall seeing one of those quad-rear-tire trucks in an application as an actual working truck. The beat up real tradesmen trucks all seem to be normal single-tires-in-rear vehicles.
They're called "duallies". They offer an increased load capacity, but the car companies massively mark them up - unless you need it, a regular pickup truck offers far more bang for the buck. (Preferably with rubber floormats instead of carpets, no power windows, no silly "features" that jack up the price stupidly.)
Given the cost - in purchase, fuel, cost of extra tires, and because registration is more expensive in many places - most people who have them do actually need them. Next time you see one, look in the bed and see if you see a large greasy plate like on the back of a semi without its trailer. That's called a 5th wheel hitch; they probably tow anything from a big RV to horses to car trailers.
In a perfect world, you'd buy a duallie truck for towing your horses and a regular one for more mundane tasks (carrying a few sheets of drywall, helping a friend move), but the reality is that pickup trucks are now so expensive due to gas-guzzler taxes and the current fashion for balding middle-aged accountants to drive trucks, that you simply can't afford the cute little Dakota to park beside the Ram 3500.
I'm starting to feel like it's some sort of a dicksize or inadequacy thing.See the comment about balding middle-aged accountants.
I can understand wanting to drive a truck even if you don't need one - I don't like front wheel drive and it's getting pretty hard to find a real car (body on frame construction, rear wheel drive) these days, so even if I was only commuting to work, I'd be buying a truck, too.
(In actual fact, I have a truck, but it actually gets used as a truck. It has to do double-duty as a car because it's far too expensive to keep two vehicles licensed at once here. An intelligent solution would be to make licensing a car free if you've already got a truck or van on the road, to encourage more people to purchase and drive cars for grocery shopping and commuting.)
Just adding to what you have to say here...
It's easier to make a durable automatic...A lot of that is due to shock-loading. :) Chrysler's mighty 727 TorqueFlite automatic was designed to live behind a 426 Hemi; even slamming it into gear with the throttle pegged won't hurt it thanks to the torque converter's isolation.
The problem is not that the losses are associated with gear changing (frankly most electronic autos can change gears faster and more reliably than a person ever can)..And this is why most drag racers use modified automatics - essentially, an "brainless" automatic which needs you to tell it when to shift. It's called a manual valve body. Even a very primitive automatic like the (two speed and bulletproof) GM PowerGlide of the 1950s and 1960s can shift faster than most human beings. And being able to use the clutch consistently is very difficult when you're dealing in terms of tenths of a second; automatics are free of that.
It's the torque converter. There is constant 4-8% (or better) loss of energy due to friction in the torque converter alone.Remember shift overlap. Passenger car automatics engage a gear then release the previous one - you're in first, you're in first and second, then you're in second. The reason this is done is to reduce jerk. In fact, in Calculus, the term "jerk" (derivative of acceleration) was coined by GM engineers.
A big improvement in fuel efficiency could be had by simply removing that overlap (as anyone building an automatic for performance or racing will do, check out the RWD Valve Body Assembly on the 18th page of this Mopar Performance Catalog PDF) but Joe Consumer will complain if the car accelerates like a heavy-clutched stickshift. (Note the "Race Only" warning on the valve body assembly's caption.)
I admit to not knowing a lot about electric motors (other than the basic concept of how they work). However, I am positive that what you say about them not having an 'optimal' RPM is wrong. I can prove this to you simply by taking a look at some extremes:
You're very right. I know people with degrees in electrical engineering who don't understand what you do.
If you apply very little juice to an electric motor, it will not spin, not having enough power to overcome friction. So clearly, electric motors are not efficient at the extreme low end (since you get no output power for an input power).
This is true for universal motors (which use brushes). Torque is most when the motor is stalled. But remember that torque is NOT power! Power is work over time; torque is just a moment (engineering term for force around a point). Power (at a given speed) is, of course, related to force (in this case torque) by basic high school physics equations which I seem to forget right now. [grin]
A universal motor consists of a bunch of coils of wire. We'll take them as running off DC or such low frequency AC that we can ignore its effects. As the coils of wire rotate on the armature, brushes and the commutator ring switch different coils in and out of the circuit. This switching causes the rotating coils to be receiving AC power. Coils are inductors, and inductors have reactance (fancy term for resistance to AC) on top of their DC resistance.
When the motor is running, the impedance (resistance at AC) of the coils in the armature is given by Impedance = InductiveReactance + DCResistance. Ohm's law then applies as usual, where P=I*I*R=I*I*Z where Z is the impedance instead of the resistance.
When the motor is stalled, the current flowing through the windings is DC, and inductance has no effect. The only limit to the current is the DC resistance of the windings.
The magnetic field generated by a coil of wire is proportional to the amount of current flowing through the wire. And the speed (for a given load, whether that's just friction or something useful) will therefore be proportional to the current through the windings.
So, when the motor is running, the impedance ("resistance" at AC) of its windings increases, and the current flowing drops. Then the speed drops, the impedance drops, more current flows, and the motor speeds back up. In reality, it finds a happy medium.
But this all means that the more you load a universal motor, the more current it consumes. It also means that sticking an ohmmeter across the motor will let you calculate the stalled current but will give you no useful information about how much current the motor will use when it's spinning.
Of course, a universal motor doesn't care if it's running off AC or DC. The commutator ring will switch poles back and forth far faster than 50/60Hz AC power, so the effects of 60Hz AC are so small as to be negligible.
In general, the complete opposite is true for stepper motors.
With pure AC motors, there's a lot more variety. You should consider a brushless motor (whether in a computer fan or an electric car) as being an AC motor. Most common AC motors (washing machines, furnace blowers, etc.) are of the squirrel-cage induction variety. They're essentially rotating transformers, and use almost no current when they have no load. When you stall them, the effect is similar to shorting the output of a transformer. The transformer's secondary (or motor's rotor) will suck up all the magnetic field in the core. As a result, the input power will be limited only by the DC resistance of the windings, and you'll eventually blow the motor.
Most AC motors will only run happily at a given frequency and related speed.
Neither the universal motor or the garden-variety induction motor is even remotely suitable for use as traction motors in cars. The universal motor is horribly inefficient, and the induction motor has to be designed to run at a given frequency and its speed is directly related to that
Is it even possible to build a stick shift hybrid car? Doesn't the onboard computer have to constantly adjust the amount of power coming from the gasoline engine and the electric batteries?
I can't imagine why not.
As things are, the motor/generator is located between the engine and transmission. Slowing down involves engine braking (downshifting and using the engine's compression to slow the car); most automatics do this, but the Hondamatics are particularly well suited to it because of their non-conventional design. In a hybrid, that energy would be captured by the motor/generator.
During acceleration, automatic or standard transmission, the throttle would have to be adjusted to correspond to the power supplied by the motor/generator. The same mechanisms used in automatic hybrids would apply.
It probably has to do more with the customers. Think of guys like Raplh Nader and Dharma's father on Dharma and Greg. Do you think either one of them is capable of driving a stickshift?
Uhh, locking torque converters are common in all new cars.
My 2001 Honda Accord has one; you can actually feel it locking up; it feels like a subtle additional shift when you reach 40MPH or so and stop accelerating.
Actually, they go back a lot further than that. GM was using them with the Iron Duke (2.5L I4) and 2.8L V6 in Celebrities, 6000s, Fieros, Calais, etc. as far back as 1984.
My big question is why would you rather donate to a large commercial organization well funded from it's previous Shreck flick
I'm sure a lot of people would happily do it, just for the knowledge that they were a part of making the movie. Unpredictability aside, it would probably put a dent in their rendering requirements and save Hollywood some hardware costs.
However, the frames would have to be seriously encrypted to avoid pre-release leakage of parts of the movie. Maybe after the movie has been released, the screensaver could display frames it rendered, while it works on frames for the next feature.
Geeks must like trucks.
I'm tall, and I hate bumping my head on the inside of Japanese tinfoil. So I have a 1976 Dodge Ram.
I saw a bumper sticker with that and the "replace you with a very small shell script" joke on the back window of a souped-up F-150. I've seen similar geekiness on other trucks.My old-yet-paradoxically-newer truck was an '83 Dodge Ram that I bought for $350. I liked it, and it was solid, reliable, good on gas (Slant-6, A-833 manual overdrive). But the body was horrible - it was a poorly-maintained former drywall truck, and there were rust holes all over the body when I got it. So out comes the welder and the sheet steel, and I patched it. Big-assed stitch welds, didn't grind 'em down or anything. Coat of Tremclad over the patches. Replaced the roof, welded on one from a junkyard. More raw welds with Tremclad. Perfect. Spent a Saturday afternoon patching the body, Sunday rebuilding the brakes and suspension. Ice-cold AC when I sold the R-12 and modified it for R-134a.
My friends named my truck Patches.
I drove Patches from 1997 to 2000. At work, I would wear a shirt and tie, sometimes a suit. I loved sitting in the middle of a traffic jam, in a shirt and tie, floating in a sea of Lexus and Grand Cherokees in a vehicle which I purchased free and clear for less than one of their monthly payments, playing classical music loudly on the stereo, my window rolled up on the hottest day of summer. "That thing has air conditioning?" Complete non-sequitur, seemed to upset a lot of people.
In the winter, I'd drive it around with an old car engine chained down over the rear axle. And in the rear window, a white Apple sticker, as came with the then-current Macs.
Every now and then, someone in an Acura, BMW, etc. would honk and wave as he passed me on the freeway, an Apple sticker in the rear window of his $whatever.
What happened to Patches? The Peel Regional Gestapo was having a crackdown on "unsafe" vehicles (rather than doing anything about drivers with cellphones, or idiots with clear taillights). They made me report for an "inspection" where a police officer (not a mechanic) looked over the vehicle and decided it was unsafe because the battery was held down with a rubber strap. (Never mind that the entire suspension and brakes were in perfect shape, or that the body (though ugly) passed the MOT inspection, or that the exhaust system and frame were perfect, or that all the lights and signals and horn worked...) They tore off my license plates with a pair of Vise Grips (apparently, higher tools are too complicated for them) and told me that I had ten minutes to remove the vehicle from their lot before it would be towed to the impound yard. I had it towed home ($400, from the other side of Toronto area) and went over the paperwork. It was a horrible nightmare to put it back on the road after having the plates pulled, so I parted it out and bought my '76 instead. And I haven't bought so much as a cup of coffee anywhere in Peel region since.
Remote Desktop works fine for this type of application. You log into the box as needed, do what needs doing and then log out or disconnect.
Great! You have 1,000 machines to do this on. Get to work. (Ahh, yes. GUIs are *renowned* for their scriptability!)
Windows has come a long way since you knew you'd see the blue screen of death twice before lunch. On decent hardware it's very stable.Agreed. And the process control, from the GUI, is actually leaps and bounds better than in Linux. If I have anything in X eat the processor, my recourse is to log in by telnet, hit top, and kill the errant process. Joe Sixpack can figure out Windows three-fingered salute, but what if he doesn't have another computer to telnet in from? (Of course, I could just kill X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, but then I'd also lose everything I was working on in the non-hung processes.) At least in Windows NT/2K/XP, I can just bring up the task manager and kill it.
(KDE and Gnome need a key combination to immediately renice the process eating the most CPU time and then bringing up their own version of Task Manager.)
Denying the current stability of Windows is no different than Bill and Co. denying the stability and power of Linux. It's pointless and it makes you look out of touch.I agree. But the desktop is what Windows is inherently good at; servers and Big Iron is what Unix is inherently good at. Use the best tool for the job. Like Linux is not a good desktop operating system YET , Windows is not a good server, cluster or mainframe OS yet.
The difference is, of course, that I believe Linux will - one day - be an excellent desktop operating system, whereas limitations inherent in the underlying Windows concepts will prevent it from ever amounting to anything substantial in that arena. Sell your Microsoft shares.
Umm.. Are you sure about that? Kde 3.2.2 rocks windows socks off. It is the most usable interface I have ever used (I have never used OSX, so don't ask me).
KDE is nice, and I like it. For one thing, they seem to push the standard "look and feel" to developers very well, so you generally can fire up a new program and know exactly where everything is. Default installs are usually pleasant and functional, and reskinning it is a snap. But it has many problems:
These all limit its usefulness as a desktop, and generally serve to reinforce Windows position, since there's no credible desktop alternative on the x86 platform... yet.
I've ranted about this before.
Windows only asset is 90+% market share. If they didn't have that, and were open to real competition, they would have died a long time agoPart of the reason they still have +90% market share is that they actually sit ordinary users down in focus groups and ask them what they do and don't like. They have expert graphic designers (not 14-year-old kids with home-drawn anime posters on the walls) design icons and the general cosmetic details. The applications software pool is large and, for the most part, more stable than its free counterparts.
As a desktop operating system, the best thing that Linux currently has going for it is its stability. Of course, that won't stop KMail from segfaulting instead of dying gracefully when it runs out of disk space or any number of other user annoyances.
I love this whole idea of Windows on a supercomputer! Just think of how fast a spam drone it would make!
Windows only technical asset is a (relatively) good GUI.
And, as we all know, *ALL* mainframes, supercomputers and servers absolutely must have GUIs!
After all,
Memo at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory:
"Please be advised that Deep Blue will be rebooted this afternoon at 5:PM in order to complete the installation of Service Pack 11. All jobs currently running and queued will be lost, even those which have already accumulated several years of processor time. We expect Deep Blue to resume normal operation sometime in early August. Thank you for your cooperation, LANL Informatics Department"