Some of the beauty of this device is that it's the *size* of a Palm and the *power* of a laptop (albeit a limited one). If you don't need the power, fair enough. But nobody can fault a 640x480 screen on a PDA.
Wow! That thing is adorable! But...
More pixels means more battery consumption, and frankly, I don't need more pixels than my Palm III.
Color means more pixels again. So 3x640x480 versus 160x160...
More processor power means more battery power...
More RAM means more battery power...
My Palm IIIxe is big enough as it is. (Both RAM and physical dimensions.)
Most of what I use my Palm for is telephone numbers, quick notes and reading documents on the bus or subway (saves me having to waste 20 pages of paper for a document I'll only read once - in fact, it's Acrobat files that make me use the IIIxe for its 8 megs of RAM rather than the IIIe). As a result, the thing is on for prolonged periods everywhere that I have downtime. Part of the joy of my Palm is that a pair of batteries will last me a month. And if I need to do more than jot a quick note or I'm looking for something to do on a flight - I'll unfold the keyboard.
Power in the Palm III series? Well, it's a derivative of the Motorola 68000 running at twice the CPU speed of my old Amigas, and it solves linear equations comparably quickly. No problems there: I'm not analyzing the aerodynamics of a 747 in my hand.
I'd love something the size of my existing Palm III series, with a built-in digital camera, MP3/Ogg playing capabilities, cellphone with integrated modem for Internet connectivity and HotSyncing. Basically, all the little gadgets built into one tiny package. But until I can have all that without having to worry about keeping spare batteries with me everywhere I go, I'll stick with my little Palm IIIxe.
Despite it serving a need, the only no-frills PDA I see out there is now is the Zire, and that just feels horribly cheap.
(Forgive me if this is starting to sound like a rant along the lines of "what the hell do you need carpets in a pickup truck for?" but...really. Ever try to get drywall compound or mud out of a carpet? PDAs are like pickup trucks: I want mine practical. I want to be able to point a hose at my floor to get the muddy boot prints off the rubber mats. Keep the marketing droids away from it.)
Not that this Linux-powered Zaurus isn't really neat, but I'm thinking of it more as a sub-notebook. (Too small to type on, but too big to be in your back pocket everywhere you go.)
You are supposed to post humour with a few clues, like:)
Oh no. I'm far too angry with the tools they provide to be laughing.
.... You were tottering along very nicely until you threw in the statement.. Hell, they even think rebooting servers is a *normal* thing. (My boss, for example, is a Novell fan, and he flatly refuses to believe that the 115-or-so day current uptime of my webserver is possible.) er, who does? At least one of our NW5.1 boxes had an uptime of 140+ days until we threw on SP6 and rebooted, and we only applied the SP because of third party software.
Heh. Actually, I should have qualified that. I don't really feel that uptime problems are caused by the server software (though the client software is damned annoying and good at hanging a workstation, all the way down to the infuriating Novell-delivered Applications window).
The bigger problem with Novell server uptime is the sorts of people who administer them. Hiccup? Reboot. Need to make the server re-read its configuration? Reboot. Getting people used to point-and-click administration might be the problem, but I think it's that the Novell administrators generally come from the shallow (Windows) end of the admin pool.
How shallow? I needed to suppress the Novell-delivered Applications window in a workstation belonging to a blind person in a high-profile position. Of course, this individual has a custom Windows image with a screen reader and a few other things, and we don't really want to be taking risks by pushing crap at it. (Lots of the stuff that gets pushed doesn't get read by the screen reader, leaving my very intrepid and inspirational user literally blindly hitting the enter key until he can hear where he is). In the field, call the chief Novell zealot, and first off, it takes me half an hour to explain to him why we *can't* have the crap which he pushes on a whim getting onto this machine. So he *edits the login script* the clients run on boot to include the MAC address of this guy's Ethernet adapter. (Apparently, he can't figure out how to block the Novell-delivered Annoyances by username.)
The punchline is that my blind friend has a notebook computer and the office is *festooned* with docking stations, each with their own hardware addresses.
After he turned his back on the computer for a second and a secretary decided to "help him out" by docking it to recharge the batteries, I was inspired to go out to my garage and fabricate a 1/8" thick steel plate - including the word NO! stencilled in large letters of fluorescent red paint - which is now bolted over the docking port and provides him endless amusement and an excellent icebreaker at meetings.
Yes, I do believe that the poor uptime of our servers is because of the culture of Novell zealots, rather than the server software itself.
I can't think of a server problem other than hardware that has ever caused us non-trivial loss of service.
Ironically, as I write this, my own webserver has about a 2 hour uptime. We had a big storm today, and the power has been up and down. (Just scooped a dead UPS, must fix it!)
Engineers Drinking Song (MIT Traditional)
on
Another Beer Please
·
· Score: 1
"Somehow, it seems, I cannot think
until I've had a little drink.
And when I've had that little drink,
somehow, its seems, I cannot think."
Heheh... Got a bigger one for you. Hit Kazaa, and you should catch it from time to time.
To really fit in with your fellow Engineering students (and I mean the right ones, the ones who are there because they built stuff as kids, not the ones who are there because some dumbass guidance counsellor said, "Hey, you're good at math and physics, you should take engineering!"), you need to be able to sing a couple of verses of The Engineer's Drinking Song between drinking games.
We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers
We can, we can, we can, we can, demolish forty beers
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum all day, and come along with us
'Cause we don't give a damn for any old man who don't give a damn for us!
Godiva was a lady well-endowed there is no doubt
She never wore a stitch of clothes, just wound her hair about
The first man who did make her was a Engineer, of course,
But on just one beer an artsie queer had made Godiva's horse
An MIT surveyor once found the gates of Hell
He looked the devil in the eye, and said "You're looking well"
The devil looked right back at him, and said "Why visit me -
You've been through Hell already; you went to MIT!"
An artsman and an Engineer once found a gallon can
Said the artsman, "Match me drink for drink, let's see if you're a man."
They drank three drinks, the artsman fell, his face was turning green
But the Engineer drank on and said, "It's only gasoline!"
An Engineer once stumbled through the halls of Building 10
That night he'd drunken rum enough to drown a dozen men
In fact, the only things there were that kept him on his course
Were the boundary conditions and the Coriolis force
An MIT computer man got drunk one fateful night
He opened up the console and smashed everything in sight
When they finally subdued him, the judge he stood before,
Said, "Lock him up for twenty years, he's rotten to the core!"
Novell is certainly not dead and has greatly fallen to the fud of NT. NDS and Novell provide the best NOS administration environment period!
What Technicolor (TM) world are you living in?
My experience with Novell is 600 user environment at a large government organization.
I started collecting notes on the UI flaws that drive me nuts. Flaws in everything from GroupWise taking up half my screen to empty space in the Compose window (and if you change your UI preferences you stop getting e-mail because the recipient's view of your message is changed to match your own and your users can't find the Reply button!) to the stupidity of ConsoleOne. My notes are now in a three-ring binder that I wish to publish as a book before Novell's inevitable and too-long postponed death.
Another great problem with Novell is that it tries to simplify things too much, so you end up with people who don't know that you can telnet into a mail server (Oops, I'm sorry, GWIA) in order to see if it's responding properly. The whole idea of point-and-click administration is okay for small networks, but when you've got a mail admin at the helm of a 600 user network who thinks it's perfectly normal to be dealing in terms of proprietary binary mail spools that trap your information within their application like a Ph.D thesis written in Word, you've got a problem. Say "firewall". What's that? Oh... wait a minute, we have to remember that in this little patch of the world, it's called BorderManager.
Hell, they even think rebooting servers is a *normal* thing. (My boss, for example, is a Novell fan, and he flatly refuses to believe that the 115-or-so day current uptime of my webserver is possible.)
If Novell were a car, the hood ornament would be a 9-foot-tall big red N blocking your view through the windshield. Despite the road being clear to the horizon, you'd be unable to start the car until you cleared away a warning message on the dashboard saying, "Are you sure you wish to start your car? There's a tree 11 miles away and you might crash into it." When you finally manage to start your car, you need fear the tree less than the fact that all the passenger seats fall through the floor.
Unfortunately, they also have a rabid fan base, primarily composed (from what I can tell) of people who don't know any better. All the zeal of Apple fanatics but without the core of real superiority that Mac users can take comfort in. We're talking Novell golf shirts being worn proudly everywhere, Novell coffee mugs, etc. They keey on sending them to me, and I keep on sending them back to Utah. (All except the Novell golf shirt... I took that to an embroidery shop and had the big red N surrounded by a red circle with a line crossing it out.)
Novell and Corel are in the very rarefied position of being the only two companies in the world that I would thank Microsoft for running into the ground.
Engineers Always Invent The Best Stuff Over Beers
on
Another Beer Please
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Why is it that engineers always invent the best stuff over beers?
At [former employer, large defense contractor], our entire design staff came up the best things at the local bar. Of course, it meant we usually went to the design meeting bleary-eyed and with notes scribbled all over beer-stained cocktail napkins (sometimes still damp).
Many employers give programmers free all-you-can-drink soft drinks. Engineers should get free all-you-can-drink beer. As caffeine boosts productivity for some, alcohol boosts creativity for others.
Who cares about homosexuals / IV drug users in this case anyway? They should neither donate organs nor receive them. Obvious-fucking-ly. Jeebus, does everything have to revolve around the exception? The OP has a good idea, and this contrived monkey-wrench is just plain silly.
I am the OP.:) I don't suggest any special exceptions for HIV infected individuals. They're obviously unsuitable donors, and the reply was asking me about that.
If they signed the card before becoming infected, then they obviously intended to help out and be a part of the organ transplant system. With that in mind, then they should benefit fron an idea that they bought into before they were sick.
Similarly, it would be a little late when you're on the waiting list for a kidney to be signing your organ donor card.
Besides, if I needed an organ, I wouldn't care if it came from a midget drag queen IV drug user, as long as it was disease free, functional and a close match. A liver or a cornea won't change your sexual orientation or even cause an inexplicable desire to listen to the Village People.
I guess this will be modded down because, well, it's not politically correct or sensitive. But it would take considerably more effort (and be much more potentially enlightening to those like me who sincerely don't know why we should care) to argue why this idea should be in any way hampered by the exceedingly minor exception of HIV-infected donors/recipients. Please, help me understand.
Wouldn't be hampered at all:
"Sir, it seems that you need a kidney. While you're HIV-infected, your T-cell count is still good. Now, if you can produce proof that you were an organ donor before discovering that you were HIV infected, we'll put you on the transplant waiting list."
I think also that the small number of organs "wasted" (using that word because I sense you feel that way) to terminally ill patients would be more than offset by the increase in donations across the board, resulting in a net increase in the availability of tissues. If you were to start refusing to allow transplants to people who didn't have any pre-existing conditions when they signed their organ donation agreements, you'd undermine the public's faith in the fairness of such a system. (Think of a health insurance company that refused to renew the policy you'd paid into for 20 years when you're diagnosed with prostate cancer...)
That is like saying if you don't vote you waive your bill of rights.
I'm all for that. If you don't vote, you don't get to complain about whatever idiot is in office.
By the way, I think your shift key is intermittent. You didn't capitalize Bill of Rights as you should have. It's a document which demands your formal respect, in case you haven't read it recently.
Many recipients of organ donation are children. Children in America are not responsible for entering contracts such as the organ donation program and it would be ludicrous to assume they would.
Parents can enter into contracts for their children.
The same goes for the sick and poor which would be likely candidates for donation that may not sign up as donors for obvious reasons.
Aren't you a little paranoid? If I'm reading you right, you're suggesting that the poor/sick/otherwise_weak might be murdered for their organs? If it will assuage your fears, a signed, dated and witnessed card on the deceased's body should be sufficient proof rather than a parseable centrally-located database.
We aren't a socialist state yet but at least we're human.
Ahhh... Here's the problem. Another conflicted socialist. You want to help people, but when someone proposes a real-world solution to a problem, you're upset. This scheme would increase organ donation, and therefore transplants, and therefore the health of the people. Why is socialism always at odds with common sense?
I live in a socialist country. Please don't try to tell me about socialism. It sounds good on paper, but it completely ignores the fact that all people, when you get right down to it, are selfish.
Now, when you have an intelligent reason why my solution wouldn't work, you can feel free to get back to me.
Smoke 2 packs of cigarettes a day and if you pay your insurance you get a double lung transplant by the time you're 40. It might cost $2 million that someone else has to pay but you get to breathe again for a few thousand in insurance premiums. Or maybe eat butter and french fries and then get a heart transplant with your quadruple bypass? Drink a case of beer every day with your bottle of whiskey and you get a liver transplant?
Are you a registered organ donor? Let me assure you from personal experience that signing the forms makes you painfully aware of your own mortality. It's not an easy or fun thing to do.
Awareness of mortality is probably the first best step to reminding people that they will eventually die, and smoking/drinking/obesity simply will allow your retinal tissues to be harvested sooner.
Besides, even a fat alcoholic smoker is a worthy candidate to donate lots of tissues. Think retinas and corneas, for two things. I know two people who walk with canes from macular degeneration, and one of them is a doctor whose computer I was fixing years before I had to install screader and festival so he could use read his e-mail. A doctor who knows the system inside and out and yet still can't get a transplant himself is pretty good evidence that ANY increase in the number of donors would be most welcome. There are a lot more blind people than there are heart or liver transplant recipients.
Suggesting that someone might get a heart transplant thrown in with a bypass is pretty ridiculous. Heart transplants are still only slightly more dangerous than having a computer store repair tech with rubber-soled shoes carry your quad Xeon motherboard around a nylon-carpeted shop unnecessarily on the dryest day in January. I have faith in the goodness of most medical professionals (if not insurance companies) that they won't take unnecessary risks with their patients.
Eat and live right and stop relying on insurance and "miracle" medicine to save your ass from irresponsible living at the last minute.
Transplants are hardly miracle medicine.
Want to live right and eat right? Even if you're monsterously fat ("But it's a *glandular* problem!"), you can imagine your corneas being harvested. That's a pretty good incentive.
This idea is viscerally satifying this moment, but wrongheaded nonetheless. What if no other registered donors need your fresh organ? Just let it rot away while some non-donor needs it?
Which is exactly what would happen if I didn't sign my organ donor card...
It's unpleasant, but so is imagining the doctors harvesting your corneas. Most people will (apparently, based on the number of donors) not do it. Maybe they would if there was something in it for them.
Think about it. Health insurance companies would love it. If you signed your organ donor card, you'd be more likely to get the organs you needed should you fall ill. Therefore, less life support and other healthcare costs when you're in for weekly dialysis or whatever else. Therefore, a break on your insurance costs.
There's another benefit to registering as an organ donor. In Ontario, you get a little sticker to affix to your driver's license (primary ID). When you get pulled over, the cop sees the sticker and most of them have seen enough unpleasantness that they are firm believers in organ donation. I had one tell me that he thought I was generous for a teenager, and that I didn't deserve a speeding ticket. (I was 16 with my freshly minted license and a 1973 Plymouth Duster with a 340-4bbl. He pulled me over for doing 120MPH on an empty freeway in the middle of the night. He'd been sitting on an overpass when I blew past with the exhaust dumps open, and it took him a couple of miles to catch up with me. If I'd had an accident, I'd have been an ideal donor if anything was left in the hamburger meat.)
Sure they can. AIDS patients can donate to other AIDS patients.
There's a little more to it than that. The HIV virus has several (many?) different strains; cross-infecting an individual with different strains would be A Very Bad Thing.
However, if a given AIDS patient could produce proof that they'd signed their organ donor card prior to infection (or to discovering they were infected), then I'd have no problem whatsoever to posthumously helping them out.
Condoms do break. I've had it happen. (Though not tonight... everything at the bar was skanky tonight. [sigh] Small towns.)
ahhh...the Dtroit PR man spews his FUD on slashdot, it's nice and early in the thread too....YAAAYY..
FUD? Ha! I wish. Any idiot with half a brain should be able to look at the power crisis in California a few years ago and see that the situation isn't gonna be improved by electric cars. You only need to take a look at the horsepower of a conventional car (say, 100). Multiply that by 746 (there are 746 watts in a horsepower) and you have an idea of what the peak electrical consumption of the car's motor will be. Assume about 50% of that peak for most of the drive, an average round-trip commute of 2 hours per day in CA. You come back to 74.6kWh of electricity consumed per car per day. Charging and discharging most batteries are ~50% efficient (how hot does a battery get on the charger?), so the actual energy usage per car per day will approach 150kWh per day.
Around here, electricity costs 4.3c/kWh. That's *dirt* cheap. Even with that, it's $6.45 in electricity every day - all consumed by the battery charger when the car is plugged in at night - and lots more expensive that running the air conditioner!
Never mind the quantity of electricity lost in the distribution from the power plant to the consumer's house.
Because hospitals are too afraid of being sued by the families if they take the organs anyway. Personally, I think it's disgusting that a family would ignore a person's request like that, and that our legal system is screwed up enough that a lawsuit would probably prevail in such a case...
How about this:
If you want to be eligible to receive transplanted organs should you ever need them, you must be a registered organ donor.
Otherwise, too bad.
This way, you encourage people to register as organ donors (as I have, for example) *and* you cut down on the leeches. If someone has a religious or other dumbass objection to donating organs, then how is it fair for them to be able to receive them while other people who are willing to contribute to the system die on waiting lists?
It's just like any peer-to-peer filesharing system: if you want to download, you really have to share for the system to work.
Alternatively, they could have used Ni-Mh or NiCads, which will last 5 times longer and have a considerably higher energy density and therefore range. If lead-acid batteries will take the car 80 miles, Ni-Mh's or Nicads would probably take it from LA to San Diego on one charge.
I'm not sure if the charge density difference is that great...
And while they've come up with something very neat, let's face it, the electric car is far from the panacea that most environmentalists claim...
To achieve reasonable range, these things are stuffed with batteries. The greater the energy density of a battery, the more reactive (ie. hazardous and toxic) the chemicals it uses must be. Every car accident on roads filled with electric cars is going to be a Haz-Mat team call, passengers with chemical burns, etc. Gasoline is unpleasant but pretty harmless in comparison to having lead-acid (or worse) batteries splashing their electrolyte in your face.
And that's not the worst of this folly:
Where are 7 million Los Angeles commuters going to get the power to recharge their electric cars every night? Coal kind of defeats the purpose and has less overall efficiency when you count all the energy distribution and conversion steps than simply running an internal combustion engine. Getting solar or wind power (both of which are still (hash) pipe-dreams in any commercially usable quantity) onto the grid requires an energy storage and inversion system to ensure it's a 60Hz sinewave in precise phase with the grid. At best this might one day be (1/sqrt(2))x100% efficient. Never mind that solar energy is only captured during the day, which is precisely when the huge electric demands of most commuters *won't* be parked at home with the car plugged in. Since there aren't too many rivers you can dam in the desert, the slack will have to be taken up by coal and nuclear plants.
Electric cars are a great PR scam. They make the public feel better because the public is stupid and ignorant.
I don't know if you realized this, but writing software is *HARD*. Harder than anything else in the physical world, mostly because there's no one right way to do things. I have, in a binder at work, 30 some odd distinct solutions for the relatively simple problem of how to make the database transparent both to customers and to programmers. Can you imagine if there were thirty different ways to lay bricks? Because it is so hard, software bugs are nobody's "fault." They are not a "mistake" in the same way that recalled car parts are mistakes. The greatest coders in th
Okay. I agree with you, but I have to take exception.
Most automotive recalls are because of faulty design, not faulty manufacturing. Faulty manufacturing is generally limited to small numbers of cars which make it out the door with defective seatbelt latches or other errors before the QA teams pick it up.
Programming *is* more difficult than designing any other kind of system, because just about any other thing you could build is tangible on some level. Not because there are more ways of solving a given problem.
Want proof?
Go to your local auto parts counter and ask how many different kinds of brake calipers they keep in stock. Or, if you don't like asking silly questions of the scary-looking guy behind the counter, wander through the spark plug aisles.
All of these represent different solutions to their same respective problems - clamping a rotating disk to cause friction, or using an electrical impulse to ignite gasoline vapor. Either one is as easily summed up as your transparent database.
Why the diversity? Well, I'm pretty sure that if I spent enough time in the machine shop, I could hack the calipers and rotors from my 1976 Dodge Ram Heavy Half with a class 5 towing package onto a Chevy Sprint. I'm also pretty sure that the extra 45lbs of cast iron in the front of a Chevy Sprint would cause a reduction in efficiency (gas mileage and performance) as well as eliminating all steering control in a front wheel lockup every time I touched the brakes.
As the designer of the system, it is *your* responsibility to figure out which overall design works best for your particular situation, and then see to it that it is executed flawlessly.
Actualy Canada (Toronto specificaly) export garbage to the United States. I waiting for some pissed off Customs Agent to ask "Any Fruits or Vegitable back there?" and making the driver open it up for inspection.
Heheh... I hadn't thought of that.
Here's something about that whole situation which strikes me as very stupid:
The 401 is crowded and the city is choking in traffic.
The city has a vast number of rail lines heading down to Windsor and Michigan (the garbage's destination).
The garbage doesn't have to be anywhere for any specific time, if it spends a couple of days in transit, it's not the end of the world.
Trucks offer flexibility and speed since the container can be delivered door to door.
Now, you can't honestly tell me that a fleet of at least 20, if not 40, trucks doing endless day-night runs to Michigan is cheaper or more efficient than using rail?
Have the unions really blown the cost of rail transportation so high that it's not even suitable for bulk overland anymore? Why is a train operator (I refuse to call them engineers unless they know the pain of 4 years of differential equations) paid more than a truck driver, when the truck drivers have the added responsibility of steering?
Why is it that the most staunch pro-union activists are also the most militant environmentalists, and don't they see the folly of this situation?
I'm a common sense environmentalist (ie. low-flush toilets are a false economy because you have to flush them 6 times to dispose of the...dark matter), and this just burns me up.
looking for mates on slashdot? wow, thats a prime location. i, myself, was going to go to a local LAN counter-strike tournament to pick up chicks. im sure well both soon have more than we know what to do with.
Heh. I've gotten lucky off Slashdot before. Dating - and, in fact, just getting laid - is simply a numbers game.
Don't forget the joys of removing the heads from you BBC while leaning across the 4' span of fenders on a '70 Impala.
Ah, yes. My '76 Ram is good for that.:)
Then there's the fun of trying to loosen 1 1/4" bolts on the front suspension while pulling with your arms and pushing with your legs, hoping the bolt will break free before you back does.
Suspension is a whole different kind of hell; it's how you get a body like a wrestler. Here, we have Winter. Note the capital W. That means rust - corroded front suspension parts are *always* fun to get off. I refuse to give in to oxy-acetylene and try to keep the air hammer on the pickle fork as a last resort... There's nothing that freaks out the neighbors more than going to town on your upper balljoints with a 20lb sledgehammer.
Of course, some of it is less satisfying... the keyhole hacksaw in painfully tiny 1" strokes, trying to take out a hardened steel control arm bolt which is forever bound to the sleeves in your control arm bushings.
When it comes to beer, try making your own. Tossing around 5 gallon batchs of beer gives you a good workout. Just make sure you make 5 gallons a week to get a regular workout. The easiest part is the consumption. Speaking of which, my latest beer (Erik Bloodaxe Strong Red Ale) should be ready.
Sounds good!
I like to buy, and bring Canadian beer with me when I'm visiting American friends. "Bring us some Canadian beer! I know you guys must have something better than the Labatt stuff!"
Okay... So, pulling up to the border in my old Ram. Customs guy asks me if I have anything to declare.
"Yeah, I've got a case of beer for the party I'm going to."
"Okay... can I see it?"
"Sure!" Digging it out from the spare tire carrier under the truck, a 24 with a distinctive case for the customs guy to doubtfully consider: Satan looking down on a canoe flying over a lake of fire.
Maudite. Literally translated from Francais Canadien, the name of the beer is Damned.
Then there's La Fin du Monde. A gentle beer with a delicate 9% precious ethanol, its name is French for The End Of The World.
I gave him a bottle of Maudite. He was a nice guy; I hope he enjoyed it at the end of his shift.
Forget the girlfriend, just send a picture of the bike. I can just take the seat off and kill two birds with one stone.
Forget the bike!
Buy a real musclecar. Not some silly Honda with a bunch of stickers and a 3" exhaust tip on the 1" diameter manifold-back pipe, but something old and with a V8 driving the rear wheels. And restore it for the fun and love of the machine.
*Nothing* keeps you in shape better than lying on the floor of your garage trying to hold a transmission above your head with one hand while you fumble the bolts in place with the other hand. The threat of having a transmission fall on your head makes you discover strength you never knew that you had.
Carrying an engine block into your house to keep it from flash-rusting over the winter, or dragging a pair of cast iron cylinder heads *and* a toolbox from one end of a self-service junkyard to the other, all serve to keep you in excellent shape.
Never mind the feeling down below when you start that motor up for the first time, freshly rebuilt with 12:1 compression, a lopey camshaft and solid motor mounts... forget the bike!:)
Also, I drink like an Irishman, I eat like a pig, and I walk a lot because I like it.
Dating isn't a problem. (But make a habit of holding the drink in the left hand so that the right isn't cold and clammy when you shake hands with potential mates...)
Are you fat? If you want to fix the situation, the solution is really easy, but often overlooked. Stop eating so much, and/or get more exercise. That's it, that's all.
You can replace the LM741 with any number of audibly superior amplifiers. Here are some to try (in Order of quality). AD711, TLE2071, 5534 (must put a 20 Pf capacitor beween pins 1 and 8), TLO72, LF351, TLO81 (available at Radio Shack). Any of these will blow away the LM741 sound wise.
Precisely. I think Fairchild only designed the 741 as an instrumentation amplifier, so I don't know why they even ended up in audio. That being said...
Lots of audio equipment through the years has used the LM741, which is very noisy (hiss in the audio). I've even seen a 1970s Allan and Heath professional 64 channel mixing console. I pulled the line card out of every single channel and plopped in an LF351, all of a sudden the board was useful for more than just PA at stadiums.
Old Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16s (long 16-bit ISA cards with hardware settings jumpers) had LM741 on the output stages, later versions used a dual LM741 (an MC1458, if memory serves). These ICs are still made mostly only for compatibility; there are lots and lots of pin-for-pin low noise equivalents that you simply put in place of the 741/1458. The old SB16s also had good spacing between the digital and analog sections (build a Faraday cage, soldered to ground, around the analog stages!), used conventional components (none of this SMT crap) and had the same excellent D/A converters as some CD players. In later SoundBlasters, much of the logic and the D/A converters have been folded into the same custom chip to cut costs. But you want to keep the audio as far from the computer's bus as possible; the other side of an IC is not far enough away.
Computers: No. Can't even scoop one for myself. Each computer is accompanied through its life cycle by a pile of papers which would make the IRS jealous. It's horrible, it's tragic, I agree.
486 not playing MP3s?: When Napster first came out, all I had was a 486DX2-50. (I didn't do any multimedia stuff, so I didn't need power.) It played MP3s fine, and so has every other properly configured 486DX I've tried - WinAMP or Windows Media Player or mpg123 - under Windows 95, NT4, Red Hat 5.2. Sure, the CPU is 83% busy to play one song, but it works, without skipping or kicking down to half or mono modes. Turn off all the crap in your Windows startup and system tray.
DMA is your friend. DON'T try to stream an MP3 to a 486 using an NE-2000 network card. Get something a little more refined for the NIC.
you could network tablet PC's to it and use wireless speakers, that would work
Sure, if you've got more money than brains, you could do that.
But if you're going to wireless speakers (which invariably suck because there's another stage of conversion or modulation, then transmission, then demodulation), you could simply use centrally-located older machines (ie. cheap) and use wireless keyboards or other means to remote control them.
Lots of the solutions under consideration seem to involve having VNC hosts and other junk like that. Why? I don't get it. Here's how this former professional audio technician would do it:
Use notebook computers. Old 486 and Pentium-class systems with sound cards are basically worthless, will play MP3 and Ogg just fine, and can be networked easily to a central file server. Command line (ie. "I wrote my own shell which does nothing but play MP3s entirely with Perl") or GUI-driven media players should work depending on the hardware available.
Use old desktops. We're throwing away PIII-600s at my work, but a 486 or better with an ISA sound card will be fine. Grab a multiline LCD display and hack it into a drive bay with a few pushbuttons. Put it onto your entertainment rack between the VCR and the CD player.
Remember, sound quality is dependent on the electronic quality of the sound card you're using, not on the CPU speed of the processor. Generally, if it can play an MP3 without skipping, it's fast enough. DO look for *old* Creative Labs 16-bit ISA sound cards where the output amplifiers are in 8 pin DIP packages with "LM741" on them; in under 10 minutes you can bring them to almost the sound quality of the finest $2000 CD players.
And don't do stupid things that say "I think car audio is KEWL" and run unbalanced line-level audio all over the house unnecessarily. Run Cat-5 all over the house; run the sound card outputs to the amplifier as neatly and as shortly as possible in each room.
If you do it that way and have a good quality stereo system (ie. the speakers are actually made of wood and the amp claims it's only 50W but seems to weigh over 75lbs anyway), your fidelity will be limited mostly by the quality of the MP3s you're playing.
If these guys weren't able to speak their minds on technical matters entirely without retribution from Bill and Steve, they wouldn't be at MS at all. They don't have to be.
What *anyone* with any moral compass is doing as a Microsoft employee is simply beyond my comprehension.
I can't imagine what a hell it must be for anyone with any actual knowledge to exist within a corporate culture where MCSEs are lauded.
(Then again, one MCSE once made the mistake of calling himself an engineer in front of me. A 6 month marketing department indoctrination is not even remotely comparable to four years of vector calculus.)
I wonder how well a standard compressor (relatively cheap) would do with Hydrogen. I expect that the pressure in the fuel tank is likely higher than an average compressor can reach.
Part of the problem is the size of hydrogen. Hydrogen doesn't just hang around as hydrogen, it forms H2 molecules for a little more chemical stability. Even though these are larger than H atoms, the molecules are still tiny enough that they seep through the walls of cast iron tanks (the way acetylene does, but worse). Anything which will seep through cast iron is not suitable for use on a motor vehicle, for what should be obvious safety reasons.
The coupler (...) has to close on disconnect so that your tanks don't leak and you don't wind up getting your skull crushed when the hose recoils (think uncontrolled fire hose here).
Yes. And given both the pressure and the extremely tiny size of the molecules, the coupler will be non-trivial. Ordinary wear and tear - what's that coupler gonna look like after 5 Boston winters? How safe will it be?
Will the coupler be reliable enough that we can safely park these things in underground parking garages? (Unlike many propane vehicles.)
Hydrogen generation is just water+electricity, although I'm not sure what goes into seperating the H2 from the O2 in the air. I've never bothered, since my goal in generating hydrogen was to make a test tube explode. (there are also chemical reactions which generate only H2, however these require something else to be added to the water... like aluminumm, which forms aluminum oxide and H2.)
In any case, in our atmosphere and environment (as opposed to space), hydrogen's lowest energy state is in compounds. When you break hydrogen out of water, for example, you're increasing the potential energy of the system. Which means that you have to add energy to the system.
Hydrogen as a fuel is often pushed by tree-huggers with arts degrees as being a panacea, a clean source of energy. It's not. Like a rechargeable battery, it's merely a tool to store energy.
The energy to split the hydrogen out of compounds must be coming from somewhere. How do you do it? Primarily with existing electric generation techniques - coal, nuclear, hydroelectric dams... there's no free lunch, and solar, wind, wave power have yet to demonstrate economic or even environmental viability despite Greenpeace and David Suzuki jumping up and down telling us to use them.
So your non-pollutiong hydrogen car actually pollutes. However, because the pollution isn't coming from a familiar tailpipe, it's out of sight and out of mind.
On top of that, the chemical process of burning hydrogen generates only water vapor, the exact same amount of water which was destroyed to make the hydrogen in the first place. There's no net change. That's all well and good, but so far, practical hydrogen engines (as opposed to fuel cells) are still internal combustion engines. They still operate on the four-stroke or two-stroke Otto cycles. And presumably, you're not gonna carry a stoichiometrically correct tank of pure oxygen with you in yout vehicle when O2 makes up 21% of the atmosphere.
Therefore, you will be burning hydrogen in air, firing a spark plug when the piston is at the top of its travel, therefore in a compressed environment. Funny thing is that air is mostly nitrogen, and that nitrogen does actually burn at high temperatures and pressures.
N2 combines with O2 to form NOx compounds, which create the yellow haze in smog.
NOx compounds are unstable at our temperatures and pressures, so eventually NOx compounds break down on their own. But they're unpleasant. In the 1970s, the EPA pushed EGR systems (Exhaust Gas Recirculation) onto cars and reduced the compression ratios to reduce the peak flame temperatures in the engine and lessen NOx production. Indeed, these "enhancements" also cut efficiency and power of the engine, which decreased gas mileage and meant that more CO2 was being generated. (Essentially, the tree huggers decided
Indeed, it was a Scotsman, Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt. See here:
Interestingly too, during the 1940s, record companies were pretty high-tech - the technology was still pretty cutting-edge.
Decca Records made a name for itself by helping with a lot of wartime research. In postwar times, this spawned Decca Navigator and Decca Radar, names well known to any mariner.
Disclaimer: Decca Radar is a former employer of mine.
Well, in 50 years, we'll all have to get back together and talk about which professional HDTV video formats lasted longest.
I think, a few years from now with semiconductor companies making more and more HDTV solutions, that more and more formats will be simplified and streamlined. The weak will die out as newer, more compact and more robust formats are introduced.
I make no particular denigration against DVC Pro, but the fact is... well, when was the last time you saw a CED videodisk? (Note the use of the disk spelling, indicating that this is not an optical media.)
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the beauty of this device is that it's the *size* of a Palm and the *power* of a laptop (albeit a limited one). If you don't need the power, fair enough. But nobody can fault a 640x480 screen on a PDA.
Wow! That thing is adorable! But...
Most of what I use my Palm for is telephone numbers, quick notes and reading documents on the bus or subway (saves me having to waste 20 pages of paper for a document I'll only read once - in fact, it's Acrobat files that make me use the IIIxe for its 8 megs of RAM rather than the IIIe). As a result, the thing is on for prolonged periods everywhere that I have downtime. Part of the joy of my Palm is that a pair of batteries will last me a month. And if I need to do more than jot a quick note or I'm looking for something to do on a flight - I'll unfold the keyboard.
Power in the Palm III series? Well, it's a derivative of the Motorola 68000 running at twice the CPU speed of my old Amigas, and it solves linear equations comparably quickly. No problems there: I'm not analyzing the aerodynamics of a 747 in my hand.
I'd love something the size of my existing Palm III series, with a built-in digital camera, MP3/Ogg playing capabilities, cellphone with integrated modem for Internet connectivity and HotSyncing. Basically, all the little gadgets built into one tiny package. But until I can have all that without having to worry about keeping spare batteries with me everywhere I go, I'll stick with my little Palm IIIxe.
Despite it serving a need, the only no-frills PDA I see out there is now is the Zire, and that just feels horribly cheap.
(Forgive me if this is starting to sound like a rant along the lines of "what the hell do you need carpets in a pickup truck for?" but ...really. Ever try to get drywall compound or mud out of a carpet? PDAs are like pickup trucks: I want mine practical. I want to be able to point a hose at my floor to get the muddy boot prints off the rubber mats. Keep the marketing droids away from it.)
Not that this Linux-powered Zaurus isn't really neat, but I'm thinking of it more as a sub-notebook. (Too small to type on, but too big to be in your back pocket everywhere you go.)
In fact, does this thing have a hard disk drive?
You are supposed to post humour with a few clues, like
Oh no. I'm far too angry with the tools they provide to be laughing.
Heh. Actually, I should have qualified that. I don't really feel that uptime problems are caused by the server software (though the client software is damned annoying and good at hanging a workstation, all the way down to the infuriating Novell-delivered Applications window).
The bigger problem with Novell server uptime is the sorts of people who administer them. Hiccup? Reboot. Need to make the server re-read its configuration? Reboot. Getting people used to point-and-click administration might be the problem, but I think it's that the Novell administrators generally come from the shallow (Windows) end of the admin pool.
How shallow? I needed to suppress the Novell-delivered Applications window in a workstation belonging to a blind person in a high-profile position. Of course, this individual has a custom Windows image with a screen reader and a few other things, and we don't really want to be taking risks by pushing crap at it. (Lots of the stuff that gets pushed doesn't get read by the screen reader, leaving my very intrepid and inspirational user literally blindly hitting the enter key until he can hear where he is). In the field, call the chief Novell zealot, and first off, it takes me half an hour to explain to him why we *can't* have the crap which he pushes on a whim getting onto this machine. So he *edits the login script* the clients run on boot to include the MAC address of this guy's Ethernet adapter. (Apparently, he can't figure out how to block the Novell-delivered Annoyances by username.)
The punchline is that my blind friend has a notebook computer and the office is *festooned* with docking stations, each with their own hardware addresses.
After he turned his back on the computer for a second and a secretary decided to "help him out" by docking it to recharge the batteries, I was inspired to go out to my garage and fabricate a 1/8" thick steel plate - including the word NO! stencilled in large letters of fluorescent red paint - which is now bolted over the docking port and provides him endless amusement and an excellent icebreaker at meetings.
Yes, I do believe that the poor uptime of our servers is because of the culture of Novell zealots, rather than the server software itself.
I can't think of a server problem other than hardware that has ever caused us non-trivial loss of service.Ironically, as I write this, my own webserver has about a 2 hour uptime. We had a big storm today, and the power has been up and down. (Just scooped a dead UPS, must fix it!)
"Somehow, it seems, I cannot think until I've had a little drink. And when I've had that little drink, somehow, its seems, I cannot think."
Heheh... Got a bigger one for you. Hit Kazaa, and you should catch it from time to time.
To really fit in with your fellow Engineering students (and I mean the right ones, the ones who are there because they built stuff as kids, not the ones who are there because some dumbass guidance counsellor said, "Hey, you're good at math and physics, you should take engineering!"), you need to be able to sing a couple of verses of The Engineer's Drinking Song between drinking games.
We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers
We can, we can, we can, we can, demolish forty beers
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum all day, and come along with us
'Cause we don't give a damn for any old man who don't give a damn for us!
Godiva was a lady well-endowed there is no doubt
She never wore a stitch of clothes, just wound her hair about
The first man who did make her was a Engineer, of course,
But on just one beer an artsie queer had made Godiva's horse
An MIT surveyor once found the gates of Hell
He looked the devil in the eye, and said "You're looking well"
The devil looked right back at him, and said "Why visit me -
You've been through Hell already; you went to MIT!"
An artsman and an Engineer once found a gallon can
Said the artsman, "Match me drink for drink, let's see if you're a man."
They drank three drinks, the artsman fell, his face was turning green
But the Engineer drank on and said, "It's only gasoline!"
An Engineer once stumbled through the halls of Building 10
That night he'd drunken rum enough to drown a dozen men
In fact, the only things there were that kept him on his course
Were the boundary conditions and the Coriolis force
An MIT computer man got drunk one fateful night
He opened up the console and smashed everything in sight
When they finally subdued him, the judge he stood before,
Said, "Lock him up for twenty years, he's rotten to the core!"
Novell is certainly not dead and has greatly fallen to the fud of NT. NDS and Novell provide the best NOS administration environment period!
What Technicolor (TM) world are you living in?
My experience with Novell is 600 user environment at a large government organization.
I started collecting notes on the UI flaws that drive me nuts. Flaws in everything from GroupWise taking up half my screen to empty space in the Compose window (and if you change your UI preferences you stop getting e-mail because the recipient's view of your message is changed to match your own and your users can't find the Reply button!) to the stupidity of ConsoleOne. My notes are now in a three-ring binder that I wish to publish as a book before Novell's inevitable and too-long postponed death.
Another great problem with Novell is that it tries to simplify things too much, so you end up with people who don't know that you can telnet into a mail server (Oops, I'm sorry, GWIA) in order to see if it's responding properly. The whole idea of point-and-click administration is okay for small networks, but when you've got a mail admin at the helm of a 600 user network who thinks it's perfectly normal to be dealing in terms of proprietary binary mail spools that trap your information within their application like a Ph.D thesis written in Word, you've got a problem. Say "firewall". What's that? Oh... wait a minute, we have to remember that in this little patch of the world, it's called BorderManager.
Hell, they even think rebooting servers is a *normal* thing. (My boss, for example, is a Novell fan, and he flatly refuses to believe that the 115-or-so day current uptime of my webserver is possible.)
If Novell were a car, the hood ornament would be a 9-foot-tall big red N blocking your view through the windshield. Despite the road being clear to the horizon, you'd be unable to start the car until you cleared away a warning message on the dashboard saying, "Are you sure you wish to start your car? There's a tree 11 miles away and you might crash into it." When you finally manage to start your car, you need fear the tree less than the fact that all the passenger seats fall through the floor.
Unfortunately, they also have a rabid fan base, primarily composed (from what I can tell) of people who don't know any better. All the zeal of Apple fanatics but without the core of real superiority that Mac users can take comfort in. We're talking Novell golf shirts being worn proudly everywhere, Novell coffee mugs, etc. They keey on sending them to me, and I keep on sending them back to Utah. (All except the Novell golf shirt... I took that to an embroidery shop and had the big red N surrounded by a red circle with a line crossing it out.)
Novell and Corel are in the very rarefied position of being the only two companies in the world that I would thank Microsoft for running into the ground.
Why is it that engineers always invent the best stuff over beers?
At [former employer, large defense contractor], our entire design staff came up the best things at the local bar. Of course, it meant we usually went to the design meeting bleary-eyed and with notes scribbled all over beer-stained cocktail napkins (sometimes still damp).
Many employers give programmers free all-you-can-drink soft drinks. Engineers should get free all-you-can-drink beer. As caffeine boosts productivity for some, alcohol boosts creativity for others.
MmmMM... beer.
Who cares about homosexuals / IV drug users in this case anyway? They should neither donate organs nor receive them. Obvious-fucking-ly. Jeebus, does everything have to revolve around the exception? The OP has a good idea, and this contrived monkey-wrench is just plain silly.
I am the OP. :) I don't suggest any special exceptions for HIV infected individuals. They're obviously unsuitable donors, and the reply was asking me about that.
If they signed the card before becoming infected, then they obviously intended to help out and be a part of the organ transplant system. With that in mind, then they should benefit fron an idea that they bought into before they were sick.
Similarly, it would be a little late when you're on the waiting list for a kidney to be signing your organ donor card.
Besides, if I needed an organ, I wouldn't care if it came from a midget drag queen IV drug user, as long as it was disease free, functional and a close match. A liver or a cornea won't change your sexual orientation or even cause an inexplicable desire to listen to the Village People.
I guess this will be modded down because, well, it's not politically correct or sensitive. But it would take considerably more effort (and be much more potentially enlightening to those like me who sincerely don't know why we should care) to argue why this idea should be in any way hampered by the exceedingly minor exception of HIV-infected donors/recipients. Please, help me understand.
Wouldn't be hampered at all:
"Sir, it seems that you need a kidney. While you're HIV-infected, your T-cell count is still good. Now, if you can produce proof that you were an organ donor before discovering that you were HIV infected, we'll put you on the transplant waiting list."
I think also that the small number of organs "wasted" (using that word because I sense you feel that way) to terminally ill patients would be more than offset by the increase in donations across the board, resulting in a net increase in the availability of tissues. If you were to start refusing to allow transplants to people who didn't have any pre-existing conditions when they signed their organ donation agreements, you'd undermine the public's faith in the fairness of such a system. (Think of a health insurance company that refused to renew the policy you'd paid into for 20 years when you're diagnosed with prostate cancer...)
That is like saying if you don't vote you waive your bill of rights.
I'm all for that. If you don't vote, you don't get to complain about whatever idiot is in office.
By the way, I think your shift key is intermittent. You didn't capitalize Bill of Rights as you should have. It's a document which demands your formal respect, in case you haven't read it recently.
Many recipients of organ donation are children. Children in America are not responsible for entering contracts such as the organ donation program and it would be ludicrous to assume they would.Parents can enter into contracts for their children.
The same goes for the sick and poor which would be likely candidates for donation that may not sign up as donors for obvious reasons.Aren't you a little paranoid? If I'm reading you right, you're suggesting that the poor/sick/otherwise_weak might be murdered for their organs? If it will assuage your fears, a signed, dated and witnessed card on the deceased's body should be sufficient proof rather than a parseable centrally-located database.
We aren't a socialist state yet but at least we're human.Ahhh... Here's the problem. Another conflicted socialist. You want to help people, but when someone proposes a real-world solution to a problem, you're upset. This scheme would increase organ donation, and therefore transplants, and therefore the health of the people. Why is socialism always at odds with common sense?
I live in a socialist country. Please don't try to tell me about socialism. It sounds good on paper, but it completely ignores the fact that all people, when you get right down to it, are selfish.
Now, when you have an intelligent reason why my solution wouldn't work, you can feel free to get back to me.
Smoke 2 packs of cigarettes a day and if you pay your insurance you get a double lung transplant by the time you're 40. It might cost $2 million that someone else has to pay but you get to breathe again for a few thousand in insurance premiums. Or maybe eat butter and french fries and then get a heart transplant with your quadruple bypass? Drink a case of beer every day with your bottle of whiskey and you get a liver transplant?Are you a registered organ donor? Let me assure you from personal experience that signing the forms makes you painfully aware of your own mortality. It's not an easy or fun thing to do.
Awareness of mortality is probably the first best step to reminding people that they will eventually die, and smoking/drinking/obesity simply will allow your retinal tissues to be harvested sooner.
Besides, even a fat alcoholic smoker is a worthy candidate to donate lots of tissues. Think retinas and corneas, for two things. I know two people who walk with canes from macular degeneration, and one of them is a doctor whose computer I was fixing years before I had to install screader and festival so he could use read his e-mail. A doctor who knows the system inside and out and yet still can't get a transplant himself is pretty good evidence that ANY increase in the number of donors would be most welcome. There are a lot more blind people than there are heart or liver transplant recipients.
Suggesting that someone might get a heart transplant thrown in with a bypass is pretty ridiculous. Heart transplants are still only slightly more dangerous than having a computer store repair tech with rubber-soled shoes carry your quad Xeon motherboard around a nylon-carpeted shop unnecessarily on the dryest day in January. I have faith in the goodness of most medical professionals (if not insurance companies) that they won't take unnecessary risks with their patients.
Eat and live right and stop relying on insurance and "miracle" medicine to save your ass from irresponsible living at the last minute.Transplants are hardly miracle medicine.
Want to live right and eat right? Even if you're monsterously fat ("But it's a *glandular* problem!"), you can imagine your corneas being harvested. That's a pretty good incentive.
This idea is viscerally satifying this moment, but wrongheaded nonetheless. What if no other registered donors need your fresh organ? Just let it rot away while some non-donor needs it?
Which is exactly what would happen if I didn't sign my organ donor card...
It's unpleasant, but so is imagining the doctors harvesting your corneas. Most people will (apparently, based on the number of donors) not do it. Maybe they would if there was something in it for them.
Think about it. Health insurance companies would love it. If you signed your organ donor card, you'd be more likely to get the organs you needed should you fall ill. Therefore, less life support and other healthcare costs when you're in for weekly dialysis or whatever else. Therefore, a break on your insurance costs.
There's another benefit to registering as an organ donor. In Ontario, you get a little sticker to affix to your driver's license (primary ID). When you get pulled over, the cop sees the sticker and most of them have seen enough unpleasantness that they are firm believers in organ donation. I had one tell me that he thought I was generous for a teenager, and that I didn't deserve a speeding ticket. (I was 16 with my freshly minted license and a 1973 Plymouth Duster with a 340-4bbl. He pulled me over for doing 120MPH on an empty freeway in the middle of the night. He'd been sitting on an overpass when I blew past with the exhaust dumps open, and it took him a couple of miles to catch up with me. If I'd had an accident, I'd have been an ideal donor if anything was left in the hamburger meat.)
Sure they can. AIDS patients can donate to other AIDS patients.
There's a little more to it than that. The HIV virus has several (many?) different strains; cross-infecting an individual with different strains would be A Very Bad Thing.
However, if a given AIDS patient could produce proof that they'd signed their organ donor card prior to infection (or to discovering they were infected), then I'd have no problem whatsoever to posthumously helping them out.
Condoms do break. I've had it happen. (Though not tonight... everything at the bar was skanky tonight. [sigh] Small towns.)
ahhh...the Dtroit PR man spews his FUD on slashdot, it's nice and early in the thread too....YAAAYY..
FUD? Ha! I wish. Any idiot with half a brain should be able to look at the power crisis in California a few years ago and see that the situation isn't gonna be improved by electric cars. You only need to take a look at the horsepower of a conventional car (say, 100). Multiply that by 746 (there are 746 watts in a horsepower) and you have an idea of what the peak electrical consumption of the car's motor will be. Assume about 50% of that peak for most of the drive, an average round-trip commute of 2 hours per day in CA. You come back to 74.6kWh of electricity consumed per car per day. Charging and discharging most batteries are ~50% efficient (how hot does a battery get on the charger?), so the actual energy usage per car per day will approach 150kWh per day.
Around here, electricity costs 4.3c/kWh. That's *dirt* cheap. Even with that, it's $6.45 in electricity every day - all consumed by the battery charger when the car is plugged in at night - and lots more expensive that running the air conditioner!
Never mind the quantity of electricity lost in the distribution from the power plant to the consumer's house.
All of that energy has to come from somewhere.
Because hospitals are too afraid of being sued by the families if they take the organs anyway. Personally, I think it's disgusting that a family would ignore a person's request like that, and that our legal system is screwed up enough that a lawsuit would probably prevail in such a case...
How about this:
If you want to be eligible to receive transplanted organs should you ever need them, you must be a registered organ donor.
Otherwise, too bad.
This way, you encourage people to register as organ donors (as I have, for example) *and* you cut down on the leeches. If someone has a religious or other dumbass objection to donating organs, then how is it fair for them to be able to receive them while other people who are willing to contribute to the system die on waiting lists?
It's just like any peer-to-peer filesharing system: if you want to download, you really have to share for the system to work.
Alternatively, they could have used Ni-Mh or NiCads, which will last 5 times longer and have a considerably higher energy density and therefore range. If lead-acid batteries will take the car 80 miles, Ni-Mh's or Nicads would probably take it from LA to San Diego on one charge.
I'm not sure if the charge density difference is that great...
And while they've come up with something very neat, let's face it, the electric car is far from the panacea that most environmentalists claim...
To achieve reasonable range, these things are stuffed with batteries. The greater the energy density of a battery, the more reactive (ie. hazardous and toxic) the chemicals it uses must be. Every car accident on roads filled with electric cars is going to be a Haz-Mat team call, passengers with chemical burns, etc. Gasoline is unpleasant but pretty harmless in comparison to having lead-acid (or worse) batteries splashing their electrolyte in your face.
And that's not the worst of this folly:
Where are 7 million Los Angeles commuters going to get the power to recharge their electric cars every night? Coal kind of defeats the purpose and has less overall efficiency when you count all the energy distribution and conversion steps than simply running an internal combustion engine. Getting solar or wind power (both of which are still (hash) pipe-dreams in any commercially usable quantity) onto the grid requires an energy storage and inversion system to ensure it's a 60Hz sinewave in precise phase with the grid. At best this might one day be (1/sqrt(2))x100% efficient. Never mind that solar energy is only captured during the day, which is precisely when the huge electric demands of most commuters *won't* be parked at home with the car plugged in. Since there aren't too many rivers you can dam in the desert, the slack will have to be taken up by coal and nuclear plants.
Electric cars are a great PR scam. They make the public feel better because the public is stupid and ignorant.
I don't know if you realized this, but writing software is *HARD*. Harder than anything else in the physical world, mostly because there's no one right way to do things. I have, in a binder at work, 30 some odd distinct solutions for the relatively simple problem of how to make the database transparent both to customers and to programmers. Can you imagine if there were thirty different ways to lay bricks? Because it is so hard, software bugs are nobody's "fault." They are not a "mistake" in the same way that recalled car parts are mistakes. The greatest coders in th
Okay. I agree with you, but I have to take exception.
Most automotive recalls are because of faulty design, not faulty manufacturing. Faulty manufacturing is generally limited to small numbers of cars which make it out the door with defective seatbelt latches or other errors before the QA teams pick it up.
Programming *is* more difficult than designing any other kind of system, because just about any other thing you could build is tangible on some level. Not because there are more ways of solving a given problem.
Want proof?
Go to your local auto parts counter and ask how many different kinds of brake calipers they keep in stock. Or, if you don't like asking silly questions of the scary-looking guy behind the counter, wander through the spark plug aisles.
All of these represent different solutions to their same respective problems - clamping a rotating disk to cause friction, or using an electrical impulse to ignite gasoline vapor. Either one is as easily summed up as your transparent database.
Why the diversity? Well, I'm pretty sure that if I spent enough time in the machine shop, I could hack the calipers and rotors from my 1976 Dodge Ram Heavy Half with a class 5 towing package onto a Chevy Sprint. I'm also pretty sure that the extra 45lbs of cast iron in the front of a Chevy Sprint would cause a reduction in efficiency (gas mileage and performance) as well as eliminating all steering control in a front wheel lockup every time I touched the brakes.
As the designer of the system, it is *your* responsibility to figure out which overall design works best for your particular situation, and then see to it that it is executed flawlessly.
Actualy Canada (Toronto specificaly) export garbage to the United States. I waiting for some pissed off Customs Agent to ask "Any Fruits or Vegitable back there?" and making the driver open it up for inspection.
Heheh... I hadn't thought of that.
Here's something about that whole situation which strikes me as very stupid:
Now, you can't honestly tell me that a fleet of at least 20, if not 40, trucks doing endless day-night runs to Michigan is cheaper or more efficient than using rail?
Have the unions really blown the cost of rail transportation so high that it's not even suitable for bulk overland anymore? Why is a train operator (I refuse to call them engineers unless they know the pain of 4 years of differential equations) paid more than a truck driver, when the truck drivers have the added responsibility of steering?
Why is it that the most staunch pro-union activists are also the most militant environmentalists, and don't they see the folly of this situation?
I'm a common sense environmentalist (ie. low-flush toilets are a false economy because you have to flush them 6 times to dispose of the ...dark matter), and this just burns me up.
looking for mates on slashdot? wow, thats a prime location. i, myself, was going to go to a local LAN counter-strike tournament to pick up chicks. im sure well both soon have more than we know what to do with.
Heh. I've gotten lucky off Slashdot before. Dating - and, in fact, just getting laid - is simply a numbers game.
The true sign of someone unsure of his sexuality.
Heh. I'm quite sure of my sexuality, thank you very much.
Are you trying to be buff, or just trolling for mates?Well, probably the latter. I'm single, and it's been almost two weeks since I last had sex.
Don't forget the joys of removing the heads from you BBC while leaning across the 4' span of fenders on a '70 Impala.
Ah, yes. My '76 Ram is good for that. :)
Then there's the fun of trying to loosen 1 1/4" bolts on the front suspension while pulling with your arms and pushing with your legs, hoping the bolt will break free before you back does.Suspension is a whole different kind of hell; it's how you get a body like a wrestler. Here, we have Winter. Note the capital W. That means rust - corroded front suspension parts are *always* fun to get off. I refuse to give in to oxy-acetylene and try to keep the air hammer on the pickle fork as a last resort... There's nothing that freaks out the neighbors more than going to town on your upper balljoints with a 20lb sledgehammer.
Of course, some of it is less satisfying... the keyhole hacksaw in painfully tiny 1" strokes, trying to take out a hardened steel control arm bolt which is forever bound to the sleeves in your control arm bushings.
When it comes to beer, try making your own. Tossing around 5 gallon batchs of beer gives you a good workout. Just make sure you make 5 gallons a week to get a regular workout. The easiest part is the consumption. Speaking of which, my latest beer (Erik Bloodaxe Strong Red Ale) should be ready.Sounds good!
I like to buy, and bring Canadian beer with me when I'm visiting American friends. "Bring us some Canadian beer! I know you guys must have something better than the Labatt stuff!"
Okay... So, pulling up to the border in my old Ram. Customs guy asks me if I have anything to declare.
"Yeah, I've got a case of beer for the party I'm going to."
"Okay... can I see it?"
"Sure!" Digging it out from the spare tire carrier under the truck, a 24 with a distinctive case for the customs guy to doubtfully consider: Satan looking down on a canoe flying over a lake of fire.
Maudite. Literally translated from Francais Canadien, the name of the beer is Damned.
Then there's La Fin du Monde. A gentle beer with a delicate 9% precious ethanol, its name is French for The End Of The World.
I gave him a bottle of Maudite. He was a nice guy; I hope he enjoyed it at the end of his shift.
Forget the girlfriend, just send a picture of the bike. I can just take the seat off and kill two birds with one stone.
Forget the bike!
Buy a real musclecar. Not some silly Honda with a bunch of stickers and a 3" exhaust tip on the 1" diameter manifold-back pipe, but something old and with a V8 driving the rear wheels. And restore it for the fun and love of the machine.
*Nothing* keeps you in shape better than lying on the floor of your garage trying to hold a transmission above your head with one hand while you fumble the bolts in place with the other hand. The threat of having a transmission fall on your head makes you discover strength you never knew that you had.
Carrying an engine block into your house to keep it from flash-rusting over the winter, or dragging a pair of cast iron cylinder heads *and* a toolbox from one end of a self-service junkyard to the other, all serve to keep you in excellent shape.
Never mind the feeling down below when you start that motor up for the first time, freshly rebuilt with 12:1 compression, a lopey camshaft and solid motor mounts... forget the bike! :)
Also, I drink like an Irishman, I eat like a pig, and I walk a lot because I like it.
Net effect? 6'4", 34" waist, 200lbs even, toned all over, and I can lift and hold a LaserJet 4si above my head. Also, mechanics coveralls and a welding helmet make a good Halloween costume when you're too lazy to go shopping.
Dating isn't a problem. (But make a habit of holding the drink in the left hand so that the right isn't cold and clammy when you shake hands with potential mates...)
Are you fat? If you want to fix the situation, the solution is really easy, but often overlooked. Stop eating so much, and/or get more exercise. That's it, that's all.
You can replace the LM741 with any number of audibly superior amplifiers. Here are some to try (in Order of quality). AD711, TLE2071, 5534 (must put a 20 Pf capacitor beween pins 1 and 8), TLO72, LF351, TLO81 (available at Radio Shack). Any of these will blow away the LM741 sound wise.
Precisely. I think Fairchild only designed the 741 as an instrumentation amplifier, so I don't know why they even ended up in audio. That being said...
Lots of audio equipment through the years has used the LM741, which is very noisy (hiss in the audio). I've even seen a 1970s Allan and Heath professional 64 channel mixing console. I pulled the line card out of every single channel and plopped in an LF351, all of a sudden the board was useful for more than just PA at stadiums.
Old Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16s (long 16-bit ISA cards with hardware settings jumpers) had LM741 on the output stages, later versions used a dual LM741 (an MC1458, if memory serves). These ICs are still made mostly only for compatibility; there are lots and lots of pin-for-pin low noise equivalents that you simply put in place of the 741/1458. The old SB16s also had good spacing between the digital and analog sections (build a Faraday cage, soldered to ground, around the analog stages!), used conventional components (none of this SMT crap) and had the same excellent D/A converters as some CD players. In later SoundBlasters, much of the logic and the D/A converters have been folded into the same custom chip to cut costs. But you want to keep the audio as far from the computer's bus as possible; the other side of an IC is not far enough away.
Computers: No. Can't even scoop one for myself. Each computer is accompanied through its life cycle by a pile of papers which would make the IRS jealous. It's horrible, it's tragic, I agree.
486 not playing MP3s?: When Napster first came out, all I had was a 486DX2-50. (I didn't do any multimedia stuff, so I didn't need power.) It played MP3s fine, and so has every other properly configured 486DX I've tried - WinAMP or Windows Media Player or mpg123 - under Windows 95, NT4, Red Hat 5.2. Sure, the CPU is 83% busy to play one song, but it works, without skipping or kicking down to half or mono modes. Turn off all the crap in your Windows startup and system tray.
DMA is your friend. DON'T try to stream an MP3 to a 486 using an NE-2000 network card. Get something a little more refined for the NIC.
Sure, if you've got more money than brains, you could do that.
But if you're going to wireless speakers (which invariably suck because there's another stage of conversion or modulation, then transmission, then demodulation), you could simply use centrally-located older machines (ie. cheap) and use wireless keyboards or other means to remote control them.
Lots of the solutions under consideration seem to involve having VNC hosts and other junk like that. Why? I don't get it. Here's how this former professional audio technician would do it:
Remember, sound quality is dependent on the electronic quality of the sound card you're using, not on the CPU speed of the processor. Generally, if it can play an MP3 without skipping, it's fast enough. DO look for *old* Creative Labs 16-bit ISA sound cards where the output amplifiers are in 8 pin DIP packages with "LM741" on them; in under 10 minutes you can bring them to almost the sound quality of the finest $2000 CD players.
And don't do stupid things that say "I think car audio is KEWL" and run unbalanced line-level audio all over the house unnecessarily. Run Cat-5 all over the house; run the sound card outputs to the amplifier as neatly and as shortly as possible in each room.
If you do it that way and have a good quality stereo system (ie. the speakers are actually made of wood and the amp claims it's only 50W but seems to weigh over 75lbs anyway), your fidelity will be limited mostly by the quality of the MP3s you're playing.
If these guys weren't able to speak their minds on technical matters entirely without retribution from Bill and Steve, they wouldn't be at MS at all. They don't have to be.
What *anyone* with any moral compass is doing as a Microsoft employee is simply beyond my comprehension.
I can't imagine what a hell it must be for anyone with any actual knowledge to exist within a corporate culture where MCSEs are lauded.
(Then again, one MCSE once made the mistake of calling himself an engineer in front of me. A 6 month marketing department indoctrination is not even remotely comparable to four years of vector calculus.)
I wonder how well a standard compressor (relatively cheap) would do with Hydrogen. I expect that the pressure in the fuel tank is likely higher than an average compressor can reach.
Part of the problem is the size of hydrogen. Hydrogen doesn't just hang around as hydrogen, it forms H2 molecules for a little more chemical stability. Even though these are larger than H atoms, the molecules are still tiny enough that they seep through the walls of cast iron tanks (the way acetylene does, but worse). Anything which will seep through cast iron is not suitable for use on a motor vehicle, for what should be obvious safety reasons.
The coupler (...) has to close on disconnect so that your tanks don't leak and you don't wind up getting your skull crushed when the hose recoils (think uncontrolled fire hose here).
Yes. And given both the pressure and the extremely tiny size of the molecules, the coupler will be non-trivial. Ordinary wear and tear - what's that coupler gonna look like after 5 Boston winters? How safe will it be?
Will the coupler be reliable enough that we can safely park these things in underground parking garages? (Unlike many propane vehicles.)
Hydrogen generation is just water+electricity, although I'm not sure what goes into seperating the H2 from the O2 in the air. I've never bothered, since my goal in generating hydrogen was to make a test tube explode. (there are also chemical reactions which generate only H2, however these require something else to be added to the water... like aluminumm, which forms aluminum oxide and H2.)
In any case, in our atmosphere and environment (as opposed to space), hydrogen's lowest energy state is in compounds. When you break hydrogen out of water, for example, you're increasing the potential energy of the system. Which means that you have to add energy to the system.
Hydrogen as a fuel is often pushed by tree-huggers with arts degrees as being a panacea, a clean source of energy. It's not. Like a rechargeable battery, it's merely a tool to store energy.
The energy to split the hydrogen out of compounds must be coming from somewhere. How do you do it? Primarily with existing electric generation techniques - coal, nuclear, hydroelectric dams... there's no free lunch, and solar, wind, wave power have yet to demonstrate economic or even environmental viability despite Greenpeace and David Suzuki jumping up and down telling us to use them.
So your non-pollutiong hydrogen car actually pollutes. However, because the pollution isn't coming from a familiar tailpipe, it's out of sight and out of mind.
On top of that, the chemical process of burning hydrogen generates only water vapor, the exact same amount of water which was destroyed to make the hydrogen in the first place. There's no net change. That's all well and good, but so far, practical hydrogen engines (as opposed to fuel cells) are still internal combustion engines. They still operate on the four-stroke or two-stroke Otto cycles. And presumably, you're not gonna carry a stoichiometrically correct tank of pure oxygen with you in yout vehicle when O2 makes up 21% of the atmosphere.
Therefore, you will be burning hydrogen in air, firing a spark plug when the piston is at the top of its travel, therefore in a compressed environment. Funny thing is that air is mostly nitrogen, and that nitrogen does actually burn at high temperatures and pressures.
N2 combines with O2 to form NOx compounds, which create the yellow haze in smog.
NOx compounds are unstable at our temperatures and pressures, so eventually NOx compounds break down on their own. But they're unpleasant. In the 1970s, the EPA pushed EGR systems (Exhaust Gas Recirculation) onto cars and reduced the compression ratios to reduce the peak flame temperatures in the engine and lessen NOx production. Indeed, these "enhancements" also cut efficiency and power of the engine, which decreased gas mileage and meant that more CO2 was being generated. (Essentially, the tree huggers decided
Indeed, it was a Scotsman, Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt. See here:
Interestingly too, during the 1940s, record companies were pretty high-tech - the technology was still pretty cutting-edge.
Decca Records made a name for itself by helping with a lot of wartime research. In postwar times, this spawned Decca Navigator and Decca Radar, names well known to any mariner.
Disclaimer: Decca Radar is a former employer of mine.
Is that the kind of pressure and stress you experienced?
Yes.
EARLY FORMATS?
Well, in 50 years, we'll all have to get back together and talk about which professional HDTV video formats lasted longest.
I think, a few years from now with semiconductor companies making more and more HDTV solutions, that more and more formats will be simplified and streamlined. The weak will die out as newer, more compact and more robust formats are introduced.
I make no particular denigration against DVC Pro, but the fact is... well, when was the last time you saw a CED videodisk? (Note the use of the disk spelling, indicating that this is not an optical media.)