90% of all employees do not need the applications that are incompatible. If 90% of all employees do not need Office XP then you simply do not buy that them.Can their spread sheets be read by others?
No doubt they can without a single problem.
Apparently you utterly ignored my previous points, and you also have absolutely no experience whatsoever in supporting Microsoft Office.
90% of my employees *DO* need the ability to do polynomial regressions. Therefore, since OO's Calc is sorely lacking, 90% of my employees *DO* need Excel.
Sure, I could save money by switching the other 10% to Calc, but then when they try to share documents with the Excel users, there will be no end to the headaches.
You see, Excel is part of the Microsoft Office family. As anyone who hasn't been living under a rock will attest, Office file formats are not backwards compatible, nor are they based on published specifications so that non-M$ developers will have interoperability.
I don't know what sort of crack you prefer to smoke, but in my world, when the computers don't work (ie. "Open Office can't open this Excel XP document!"), then my pager will beep or my telephone will ring.
Heck, most of them do not even need a spread sheet at all.
Sure. Tell me what my users do and do not need.
In most offices where work is actually done (including government offices), spreadsheets are a requirement. Check with your bank (and not the tellers and other drones like that), your insurance company, your utility companies, your investment firms, accountants, etc. I don't know what weird-assed industry you plan on working in.
The concept here which completely alludes you is that you only need to buy the applications that are actually needed.
The concept here which completely eludes you is that using a combination of Microsoft Office and any competitive products quickly becomes a practical impossibility due to Microsoft's practices. Further, apparently only Microsoft has *bothered* to check with consumers to see what they want and provide standard data analysis tools.
That means that 90% of the employees get by just fine with OpenOffice or other selections.
About 10% of my user base would get along just fine with OpenOffice until the 90% who needed Excel for its features started sending XP-editionb.XLS files to the 10% using OO.
Very few computer users need those higher math functions.
I disagree. If you knew what a regression was, you probably wouldn't even think of it as a higher math function. They have practical applications in virtually every industry.
And, a large percentage of the users who think they need Office XP have no idea what you are talking about.
If they need to perform data analysis, they will need Microsoft Excel's data analysis tools, which they have been using since about Excel 95. They need Excel XP simply because Microsoft no longer sells or supports Excel 95, 97 or other alternatives, and because OO simply does not include such basic and simple features as decent data analysis tools.
Microsoft Office suites are not dominant because of their ability to do any high level function.
I contest that. Microsoft Office is, overall, quite a mature and good product. Yes, part of why they dominate is the operating system, and the predatory file save practices, and lack of backward compatibility.
However, I'm reasonably confident that I've used more office suites than you have ever heard of. At the moment, even with all those things aside, Microsoft Office is the best out there.
And, NO, it is not necessary to include all of the essoteric functions found in the highly overpriced applications for them to be highly marketable. And, why is that? Because 80% to 90% of the users simply do not need them.
I'm not sure how much real world exposure you have. I'm not asking for a built-in function which calculates the attenuation of microwave energy as it travels through waveguide - that, I have to agree, would be esoteric.
I'm asking for a feature which allows you to take a scatter plot of data and draw a line of best fit, then present the equation of the line of best fit for all linear, quadratics and cubics.
The closest OO seems to come is the SLOPE and INTERCEPT, which don't even return a complete function and are limited to linear regressions.
Why does one want the function of the line of best fit? So that one can use calculus to analyze the data.
Now, given that you probably don't even know what a derivative is, let alone how to take the derivative of a super-complicated function like e^x, I'm not going to bother to explain to you that calculus is central to *any* economics, engineering, science or even political science degree. In fact, I've often heard it said that the distinction between a useful degree and a basketweaving degree is the study of calculus.
With your obvious expertise in real-world affairs, I can only assume an arts degree of some sort. Calculating your IQ would probably involve taking the square root of a negative number.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying one Microsoft box with every single application they write if you can find an employee that requires that exclusive capability. But, you do not buy a hundred or a thousand copies of a $400 application just because a few need this feature or that.
Again, you lack real-world experience or knowledge of what happens when you try to mix Microsoft Office with anything else in a business environment.
That is a complete waste of resources.
No more so than reading your ill-informed and ill-considered arguments.
Sure, some users need highly specialized software. Some even need the more expensive versions of key applications. But, 80% do not.
Again, using your apparent style of cyclical arguments, we come back to this.
Okay. My conjecture is that you have no idea what a regression is, therefore you consider it to be highly complicated and sophisticated math which is therefore not provided within OO.
I'm not asking OO to be able to perform symbolic integration of functions of complex numbers. I'm not even asking OO to multiply matrices. I'm asking for the same simple statistical analysis tools as the market leader in spreadsheets has.
So, you buy the least expensive (or free) for 80% of the employees and standardize on that. Not the other way around.
Your lack of practical knowledge is stunning.
You do not find companies buying BMWs for all employees simply cause some idiot at the top thinks that is the car he must have.
No, but when the exhaust from one BMW keeps all the Hyundais, Toyotas and Chevrolets from running, then if one needs the features of the BMW, then all need to have the BMW.
OpenOffice, StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc meet the needs of 80% to 90%. So, buy those applications for the majority of the users and the high priced packages for those who can justify that expense. Otherwise, not.
[sigh] I give up. You're far more intelligent and better informed than I am. Continuing this debate with such a luminary as yourself is a waste of precious time when you could be using your creative and mathematical genius to cure cancer and AIDS. For the benefit of mankind, I shall no longer discuss this with you so as to avoid wasting your finite productive years.
LOL a) a linux distro can't be slower than another linux distro. all linux distros with the same kernel are equaly fast. a distro is just linux(the same linux in all distros) with added software. b) who uses kde? not any sane person i hope. Gnome imo is alot better if u feel the need for startmenu etc.. I personally use fluxbox. c) a spellchecker? ispell kthx d) mplayer 4 prez!
Oh, shut up.
One Linux distro can indeed be slower than another. Default kernel, daemons loaded and running, etc. I don't know how many mass deployments you've managed, but I quite simply don't have time to compile a kernel for each individual machine (which all happen to be different). Nor do I feel I should have to in order to build a simple e-mail drone out of a Pentium III-500. That is utterly ridiculous inefficiency.
I like the Start menu concept; it makes almost everything as conveniently accessible as Desk Accessories were on early Macintosh machines.I need the Start/KDE Gear/Footprint menu to be able to migrate Windows users to Linux with a minimum of training and user resistance.
ispell or aspell is the backend to KDE's speller which is certainly invoked by KMail if not a few other things. The dictionary sucks (ie. flags "mL" as a capitalization error and tries to replace it with the incorrect "ml"), and the UI is archaic. I type quickly and I have to write a lot on highly technical concepts. When I'm banging out an e-mail to someone, I don't want the thing interrupting me every third word to get me to manually confirm the spelling of every word. I don't think that I'll be able to convince hundreds of former Windows users that going back to the old way is the better way, either. Much like I'm not going to convince you that you'd be better served by upgrading your computer's memory to core memory. (What's core memory? Look it up.)
mplayer is great, probably technically superior to xine. But even ignoring the gcc 2.96 bullcrap essentially shutting it out of two of the most popular Linux distributions (and I do fault Red Hat for that), it still isn't suitable for a corporate desktop because I cannot refer users with questions to mplayer's maintainers. They act like children. While that's their perogative, they will not be taken seriously in the corporate world as a result. Personally, I like mplayer and the developers, but I simply cannot deploy it.
You waste money on 600 Microsoft PCs because the OpenOffice spredsheet does not do "linear regression"?
How many of those 600 employees do that work? One? Two?
Since polynomial regressions are standard statistical tools, probably quite a few. As in, anyone there who isn't a secretary.
Polynomial regressions - from linear and up - are neither exotic nor highly specialized. They're very basic data analysis tools. And they're lacking.
What's worse is that I only used the lack of data analysis tools as a glaring example which is all the more baffling considering OO's affiliation with Sun and Sun's affiliation with the engineering profession (ie. engineers buy most of the Sun workstations sold).
If 10 need linear regression capability in their spreadsheet, then buy 10 copies of the software they need and 590 copies of OpenOffice.
Anyone who has tried to mix versions of Microsoft Office in a closed environment knows that it doesn't work. Excel 2000 files cannot be opened with Excel 97, which cannot be opened with Excel 95.
Sure, it would be easy enough to try to institute an "Interoperability Policy" which tells people to always save their files as Excel 97 or some other older alternative which is well supported by OO Calc. But you know that doesn't work. People forget, or resist because of the hurdles that Excel throws up, essentially screaming: "WARNING! You will lose data!". They revert to defaults, and the OO users are left out in the cold.
Oh, I forgot. 590 copies of Openoffice are free. So, just buy the 10.
This attitude is the fundamental problem and the reason why Microsoft will continue to dominate the desktop (and creep more into the server space by leveraging the desktop monopoly through closed protocols and extensions).
To most people, the Microsoft name is a good thing. "Oh, it's from Microsoft, it MUST be good!". Remember, to most people, when their computer crashes, it's the computer's fault, not the operating system.
Most people will not have heard of Sun, or know why Linux and Unix are good things. In fact, they may think of Unix as being the operating system on the nasty old timesharing machine for which they had to write programs on punchcards back in college.
Open Office - or even Star Office, with the Sun name more prominent - are going to be viewed with skepticism by these people, most of whom will have been using Microsoft software since the early 1980s (ie. when you were born). They'll have seen the progression from MS-DOS 3.3 to Windows/286 to Windows 3.0 and 3.1, eventually through 95 and up. Not knowing or caring anything about computers more than you know or care how your monitor draws an image on its screen, they won't question Microsoft's position.
To get accepted into this environment, equivalent features are mere credibility.
If we don't get our shit together to fix this and get Linux on the desktops, we're screwed.
Historically, people bought home computers based on what they had at the office - familiarity and the ability to bring files (and pirated software!) back and forth drove the market. Taking the corporate desktop is the key to driving Windows out of the home computer. For Linux to have the majority share of desktop PCs is the only way to stop Microsoft being able to creep into the server space.
Now stop whining, buy a book on statistics, learn what regressions are, and start coding.
Hey, it's definitely not out of the question when we're talking about all things Hello Kitty.
You know what terrifies me about Hello Kitty?
Apparently, it's a *big thing* in Japan. No, I've never been to Japan, nor am I a Nipponophile ("Nippophile" sounds racist somehow...). Hell, I don't even like anime. But I hear the stories from friends who've been there.
I wake up in the middle of the night with a scream caught in my throat, with visions of Japanese engineers designing brakes and steering systems for Honda and Toyota cars, doing their back-of-the-envelope sketches and calculations on Hello Kitty stationary. The senior engineers in my nightmares have Hello Kitty sliderules.
Not coincidentally, people often wonder why I drive a 1976 Dodge Ram. I figure, if I'm going to share the road with cars whose balljoints were designed using Hello Kitty pocket calculators, I may as well keep myself wrapped up in some good thick steel.
How about the bow tied on one of the cat's ears? I tried that on my cat, and she had it off in nanoseconds. Hot melt glue was only slightly more effective, but not enough to build a franchise on the concept. A staple gun is the only alternative that I can think of - I'm simply amazed that PETA isn't up in arms about the tacit advocacy of using staple guns to affix bows to fluffy little pussycats.
I'm trying to incite riots, with "I'll show him!" bouts of productivity.
You see, I'm in a position where I might be able to get 600 machines with the Canadian Federal Government switched from Windows to Linux. But I can't - for a variety of reasons, Linux simply isn't ready for the desktops of the masses.
Why? www.glowingplate.com/dissent. Linux simply cannot be heralded as a viable replacement to Windows while the most common off-the-shelf distro (RH) is as slow as it is, KDE lacks such basic things as a spellchecker which doensn't suck, and xine's developers are having long debates about which logo to choose (all of which look like they were designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin) while the xine UI lacks something as simple and common sense as a friggin' repeat button.
And while Open Office is a great start, it amazes me that, despite its Sun ancestry which is the bread and butter of engineering workstations - OO's Calc apparently lacks the ability to do a simple linear regression. Excel's been doing them for years. (It's worth noting that I've RTFM and even though I've designed radar equipment for a living, I still can't figure out how to turn on OO Writer's page numbering...)
As Linux advocates, these things must be addressed. The party lines must be crossed, distro wars must be ended, and a concerted effort to actually get a real 100% ready x86 desktop operating system must be mustered. After all, Linux is almost there.
If I'm so passionate, why don't I program? While I can make Hello World in about a dozen different languages, my programming style ranges from brute force to ignorance. It's so horrible that Microsoft keeps on trying to hire me to work on the IIS Development Team. You don't want to commit my code. I'll contribute in advocacy, documentation, and fanning the flames instead.
Now it's 10:30PM on a Saturday night. Time to go out and drink beer.
(BTW, just kidding about Microsoft trying to hire me. Well, I think I am, anyway; there's a headhunter trying to scout me for an undisclosed position just outside of Seattle.)
I 100% agree with you. I *am* using Linux on my desktop and have been for quite some time now, but it's painful.
I've been deliberately sticking with RH because it's the most common distro. But there are many problems not isolated to Red Hat's overzealous behavior (and gcc 2.96).
KDE lacks an underlining spellchecker, in particular for KMail. Do you know how much you come to take a passive and unobtrusive underlining spellchecker for granted, especially when presented with a popup window asking you for interaction on *every single word* it thinks you've misspelled?
Allegedly, that feature is coming in KDE 3.2. But most Windows apps have had that feature since 1996. And we wonder why Gates is a rich man.
Xine is a great video player, but rather than adding something as basic as a repeat button or as essential as a working GUI that doesn't have decorative do-nothing buttons, the developers are running around trying to devise a logo for it. All the logos so far have looked like they were made by 14-year-old East Berlin Run Lola Run fans. I cannot show my boss software with logos and GUIs which are that tacky: there's no way I'll get it onto the desktops.
Browsing a collection of 2,800 MP3s on a local hard drive is dead slow. It takes my Pentium III-500 several minutes to show the contents of this directory. Why? I think KDE/Gnome are checking EACH and EVERY file. A similar problem occurs when I open a directory full of images, and it appears attempt to generate several thousand thumbnails on-the-fly, rather than using a caching scheme and merely checking for new ones. And no, I think a PIII-500 should be perfectly adequate for browsing a directory full of MP3s. I'm not bitching about the fact that it's too slow to play DVDs in xine (but oddly enough, PowerDVD in Windows is just fine).
OpenOffice is a good start, but that's all I'll call it. OpenOffice Calc doesn't have half the statistical functions of Excel, which amazes me given the fact that it springs from Sun. Sun is, of course, the engineer's workstation of choice, so it blows my mind that I can't find a built-in function to do a linear (let alone quadratic) regression from Calc. Excel has done them for years. OO is slow, fat, and quite frankly, ugly. And while I have designed radar video processing systems in use on ships around the world, I still haven't figured out how to get OO to put fucking page numbers on my documents.
I sometimes suspect that the people who write this software don't actually use it.
There has to be some sort of organization dedicated to improving the desktop Linux experience, or else we're all screwed.
"KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk."
Okay. But the Knoppix install option which is really lacking is for use on the display machines at the local computer store:
Insert CD ROM into machine on display at local computer store.
Reboot machine. When Knoppix boot menu appears, hit a specific key - maybe Alt-L or something similar.
Ctrl-Alt-Delete is ignored. A Windows XP desktop, complete with a moving cursor and a Windows error message "Internet Explorer is organizing your shortcuts" or some other nonsense, is drawn and remains on the screen for the rest of the operation.
The hard disk is formatted and partitioned. Knoppix is installed using a conservative and good-looking color scheme. Again, during this entire process, a reproduction of a Windows XP desktop remains on the screen. As with Knoppix from CD, there is no prompt for a username or password
The computer reboots. The process is completely automatic. If the Knoppix CD happens to still be in the drive, the machine simply starts up off that.
If Knoppix were to add that feature, I guarantee you I'd be buying a lot of cheap blank CDs to get the local Best Buy, Future Shop, Radio Shack, Staples, etc.
"What do you mean, someone installed Linux on all the machines in our showroom? Where were you guys?"
I dashed off an e-mail to the guy after I saw on his website that he seemed to be interested in building a linear power supply with designs from a Radio Shack book.
Given the apparent quality of his project so far, that didn't seem right... here's the e-mail for others to consider if they're trying similar projects.
Please remember that opening a computer power supply does expose you to potentially lethal amounts of power. Also, they run off the line power (120V/240V), and component failures or other problems can cause fires. Don't play with them unless you know what you're doing.
######
Hey,
Cool project. Kinda disappointed to see ?irreversible? modifications to
something as rare as an SX64, but your artistry is evident.
I was planning on doing something similar with an old PET I have with a
fried motherboard. The PET was retired from a school - while the front decal
is in pretty good shape, the cabinet needs to be repainted and a few other
things. Of course, the difficulty in building the SuperPET Ultra will be less than
yours.:) And I'm certainly not worried about putting a CD/DVD-ROM behind a
floppy drive door; almost everything I do comes across the ethernet.
Color CRT into the PET? Nah, I'll probably hack an old monochrome NEC
MultiSync to drive the PET's green phosphor monochrome CRT and call it good.
(I want 800x600 or better; of course, on a 5" SX64 CRT, that's less of an
issue...)
i bought a book down at radio-shack, "Building Power Supplies" (RS#276-5025),
which gave me all the calculations i needed to come up with a decent design.
Uhh... having never seen that book, I'm not sure if it book covers
switching supplies in sufficient depth to design one for a computer. And you
don't want a linear ~250W computer power supply, they're very heavy. (See
http://www.glowingplate.com/ticard/ for a similar situation which TI built.)
the only problem now is that all the parts will run me around $60, which i
don't have (it's so high because i need seperate supplies for the +3.3v,
+5v, +12v, and -12v. a normal ATX PSU actually uses a single multi-tapped
transformer-style coil to step the voltage down, whereas i'll need seperate
coils and controllers for each voltage). since i do have a power supply
that works for now, this will probably be my last part of this project.
At this point, you have a PC board template planned out. My suggestion is
labor-intensive but less so than attempting to design a switching supply from
scratch (trust me on that). Don't underestimate how much time it will take
you to get through stuff like the Power_Good comparator circuit or the ATX
controls.
Switching supplies are a nightmare to build on your own. The tiny little
transformer on your board steps down ~250W of power. To do this with a linear
supply requires a huge and heavy transformer because it's running off the
line frequency of 60Hz. All other things being equal, transformers get
smaller as the frequency increases.
Since you're a Commodore man, you might know the transformer in a PET. I
figure it's rated for about 100W of power at 60Hz. Open up any modern supply
and you'll find a tiny one on the board which handles about 250W. This is not
Moore's Law of Power Supply Design.:)
Most modern computer power supplies are probably running around 50kHz. Of
course, the chopper which cuts up the incoming power must be very accurately
tuned to the resonance of the transformer; generally, you're dealing with
(impractical in single unit quantities) a custom transformer.
But someone else has already done all this stuff for you...
Get yourself a good ATX supply; two identical ones are preferable so that
you can compare notes along the way. Open it up; discharge all the
capacitors. Place the PC board on the stage of an overhead projector, then
map out the schematic using that backlighting. Even if you don't know what
all the windings in the transformers and chokes do, just represent those
components as little boxes with pin numbers on your schematic. Label *every*
component by type number.
Once you've got the schematic completed, get a friend (or several) to go
over a copy, crossing off each and every connection to every component as
soon as they're confirmed to be correct.
Transcribe the schematic into Eagle CAD or another PC board autorouter.
(OrCAD is good if you're running Windows, but I hate Windows, so I don't use
it.) Import the PC board template, place large/special components where you
need them to be, then tell it to route the board.
Check it over again. Etch the board. (Apparently, this isn't a problem to
you, judging from your work.) Transfer the corresponding components one at a
time from the original PC board to your new PC board.
All consumer electronics are cheap crap, using the lowest-rated (ie
cheapest) components possible. While you're transferring components, replace
electrolytic capacitors with ones having the same values (in uF) but higher
voltage, temperature and ripple current ratings. Replace 1/4 watt resistors
with same-value 1/2 watt resistors. If you can find a given transistor or
MOSFET type, look it up and choose the one with the same parameters but the
next-highest voltage, current and dissipation ratings. Get an electrical
engineer or technician friend to help you. This supply should now last an
order of magnitude longer than it would with its original components.
Your 10lb aluminum heatsink will, without any question, cool the power
supply's power transistors enough to eliminate the fan. Make sure you put
mica insulating hardware between the transistors and the heatsink; you want
to be able to ground the aluminum. The heatsink might get warm but should not
get too hot to touch; the attached transistors will almost definitely be
running cooler (and will last longer) than they would in the original supply.
The airflow through the original power supply case also cools the
transformers. I'd place the main transformer right next to the aluminum
heatsink and devise a thermally-conductive clamp to hold the transformer
against it. Heatsink grease will be your friend. I don't think the magnetic
field leaking from the transformer will be sufficient to cause worrysome eddy
currents in an aluminum clamp pulling heat away from the transformer.
Just a couple of thoughts for you. Should cut your costs and yield a more
practical/reliable project.
Gates himself is quite a philanthropist, and deserves brownie points for spending some of his enourmous fortune on helping people out.
The problems with Microsoft don't stem from Bill Gates being evil. I've met the man (albeit briefly), and I don't believe that he's evil. I don't even believe that it's the money.
I believe that Bill Gates is utterly convinced that the Microsoft way is the right way. Mercilessly killing the competition saves the world from the threats of what he perceives as unreliable and overcomplicated software produced by everyone else.
His vision is powerful, and he's (through luck and ruthlessness) achieved a position where he's capable of realizing it. Of course, he's blind to its inherent flaws. His competitive streak is so fierce that *everything* gets turned into a game, including (and I'm not kidding), "Let's see if I can run this lavalier microphone through my shirt faster than you can put a battery into the transmitter."
Similarly, I don't doubt for a second that Adolph Hitler was convinced that everything he did was for the good of the German people. Of course, the recants of history tend to be less forgiving than the heat of the moment. Something about hindsight being 20/20, and the discovery that Auschwitz wasn't really a sausage factory.
Bill Gates would never have ended up as an ordinary average Joe. He's too intelligent, too competitive by nature and too committed to his dream. I have a lot of admiration for the man, as flawed as his vision and his horrible software may be.
This is what seems to be a very cool application of putting old equipment to good work. And hey, if it turns out that it doesn't work, he has a cheep and effective form of birth control...
Well, hey. Chances are you're staring at a linear particle accelerator right now.
Disconnect the high voltage regulator in your monitor and you'll throw off enough X-rays to cloud photographic film. The kinetic energy of accelerated electrons flying from the gun is turned into X-ray photons as they collide with the inside of the glass. The electrical energy, of course, lights the phosphors which bring you my many words of wisdom.
Modern TV sets and monitors, of course, use a variety of methods to prevent the high voltage from the flyback getting to be high enough to cause lots of hard X-rays. The thick (usually leaded) glass in the front and sides of your monitor help to cut the rays down, as well as providing structural integrity to allow it to withstand the thousands of pounds of atmospheric air pressure with are trying very hard to crush it. But this remains a very critical design safety issue, and has gone so far as a Simpsons episode. (Remember Homer's old farmhouse, with the "Radiation King" TV set?)
If you want to have an effective toy, yank out the electron gun from the back of the CRT, mount it at one end of a long piece of plastic or glass pipe, mount a really thin piece of sheetmetal at the other end, and at 6" intervals band it with smooth rings of metal connected to each other by 10 Mohm resistors.
Suck a vacuum into it (vacuum pump), apply 500kV (from your homebuilt Van De Graaf generator) to the ring on the far end from the gun, apply 6V or so to heat the filaments and about -100V DC relative to the first grid in the electron gun to the cathode of the gun, and presto! you'll have a stream of electrons travelling at almost light speed out the other end. Essentially, beta particles, produced without a radioactive source.
To a lesser extent, that's what the inside of your monitor's picture tube is being whacked with.
Congratulations, Professor Science. You've just built your very own linear accelerator.
Not extraordinarily high tech, I think Thompson did it, without the benefit of a modern CRT's thoriated cathode or the prior knowledge that it would work, sometime around the turn of the last century.
The lights are just mean, but the chainsaw would trigger Dad tearing down the sidewalk, if he wasn't already standing near the kids to reassure them about the scary house. Expect a similar reaction if you stabbed them with a fake knife, or shot them with blanks. The last few years, I've assisted my brother running a haunt; while it's very scary, he enforces a strict no-touching rule. We also ease up on the little ones, the scariest folks keep out of sight as they go through.
Chalk it up to the indiscretions of youth. Nowadays, I'd be a little bit more tame.
Laws and lawsuits kill all the fun. They killed Napster, they killed drinking and driving (why shouldn't I be able to have a beer while I drive home from work, as long as I stay below the legal limit?), they killed the musclecar.
Next thing you're gonna tell me that all coffee cups are gonna have to come with a warning about the contents being hot... oh, wait.
I did like the overturned car, wired for sound.
The car was a 1984 Toyota Tercel 4WD station wagon with a blown rear differential and rusted through *everywhere*. I was going to attach a furnace blower motor to spin the axle so that one of the wheels was spinning, but I couldn't figure out a way of doing it where kids wouldn't potentially touch the tire spinning in the air (and get caught and lose a finger), so I decided to veto that idea. It was too bad, too - the sound of the worn-out diff spinning was A Very Bad Sound.
Thanks!:)
Re:Theory: Suck air over ice to chill air for fogg
on
Fun with Fog Generators
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A summary of the site is that you can suck cool air into your fog machine and make the fog hug the ground.
Use an ice chest with vents cut in both ends, filled with ice (or dry ice) and place the fog machine inlet close to the outlet of the ice chest.
I don't know if you've just accidentally reversed the steps or not, but let me clarify some aspects of fog machines...
I've never seen a fog machine with an air inlet. I've seen lots of professional fog machines with fluid inputs, though, so that you could run hose through your lighting grids or props and not have to disrupt them if the machine ran out of fog juice (especially in the middle of a show!).
A fog machine works by pumping fog juice into a small heated cavity with a very small exit hole. Usually, the heating cavity is built into a cylindrical rod or pipe. As it's pumped into the confined cavity, the fog juice expands very suddenly, which increases the pressure inside the cavity and causes it to blast out the front of the machine, under great pressure. (150PSI or so, I would think; I've seen fog machines explode their heater assemblies.) Surrounding the heater assembly is generally an insulated box (which *always* gets really gross with leaked fog juice). The insulation is to prevent people from getting burned should they touch it - and to reduce the running time of the heater element inside the heater assembly.
The heater assembly is usually set back sufficiently far inside the nozzle that it's difficult to touch the heater assembly accidentally.
While the concentric shape of the fog machine's nozzle might lead you to believe that there's a system to draw air through the fog machine, I assure you that there isn't.
If you were to create a hole inside an existing fog machine and attempt to pump chilled air through it, I think it's very unlikely that you would manage to make fog which sinks to the ground. More likely, the fog machine's thermostat would detect that the heater assembly was cold, and would keep the heater on longer. The fog would remain at normal operating temperature as it left the nozzle - if not, there will be no fog. Most fog machines will not pump fog juice into their heater assemblies until the thermostat reports that the heater assembly is up to the correct running temperature.
The system works as follows:
[FOG JUICE BOTTLE] --> fog juice --> [FOG MACHINE] --> hot fog --> [CHILLER] --> cool fog --> [STAGE]
Being known to your neighbors as "that Damned Nutcase at the end of the street" and forming a first-name relationship with the police... Priceless!
Lest you forget, I'm the Bobo guy. And Mike's car was a 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme in primer. But we did find out that Tremclad (based on the empty spray can in the middle of the street) is very hard to sand off a quarter panel.
Heh. Those were fun days.
Re:Chainsaws, Fog Machines and Stage Lighting
on
Fun with Fog Generators
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· Score: 5, Funny
OK, I HAVE to ask. How many kids braved the whole thing and actually claimed that half bag of candy that was given out?
Well, the 1/2 bag of candy that I gave out was mostly to bribe the three who were still screaming after I shut off the chainsaw. And the father who wet himself.
Most of the others were gone by the time they heard the chewing noise from under the hood of the car. Lots didn't even come down the driveway, because seeing a car on its side with an arm poking out from underneath is a little too intense for most 4 to 10-year-olds.
The kids who stayed for the chainsaw were all older (12-15 range) and were psyching each other up, afraid of their friends seein their fear. But there's something about the sound of a gasoline engine running inside a house that makes people decide that they're not going to stick around to see what's coming.
You should have taken photos. That sounds like something on par with what I want to do once I get a house off campus.
One of my neighbors was a photographer with the community newspaper and she came by to take a photo of the Toyota on its side in my front yard the next morning. But I never saw the article.
Yeah, I should've. Hindsight is 20/20.
I might do something similar again this year - I've been feeling bored lately.
In only a few hours, I will be helping in the construction of one of these! We already have all of the materials.
A fog chiller like this will work almost as well as a professional one. The professional fog coolers essentially blow the fog through an refrigerator evaporator.
Halloween of 1994, I had the police at my house 6 times, each time with them begging me to stop doing what I was doing... he so badly wanted a reason to arrest me, but could think of none.
Picture it: The doorbell was connected through an optocoupler to my computer's keyboard. Everytime the doorbell rang, there was a pause (as the stereo audio file loaded) then a loud scream played from a speaker (left) hidden in the trunk of one of the cars in the driveway. The right channel had a nasty kind of chewing sound, and it was played through a speaker hidden in the engine compartment of another car which was parked close to the door.
My roommate and I were car nuts, and we had a junked Toyota that we were waiting for the scrapyard to haul off. With the chain hoist, we put it on its side in the front yard, with a mannequin's arm sticking out from underneath. We hooked its electrical system up to a car battery charger and left some of the parking lights on, with a turnblinker flashing and the AM radio playing quietly inside.
I was working in the professional sound and lighting business then, so I borrowed a fog machine, fog chiller and 6,000 watts of Leko stagelighting.
The fog machine and the chiller from work went outside to provide a ground mist, but not too much. I needed for the kids to see, by the light of the flashing signal, the arm sticking out from under the Toyota.
The Lekos and my own fog machine were set up inside. The Leko dimmer pack was powered off the 40 amp 240V service to the stove outlet, and all 6 lights, at 1000W apiece, were pointed and focused to a point 1 foot outside of my front door.
And then there was the chainsaw. Beg, borrow, steal or rent a chainsaw. Take off the chain and protect the kids from the potentially sharp edge of the chain guide with a rubber edging like people use around the outlines of their car doors.
The Spectacle:
Mom or Dad would stand at the end of the driveway as Little Tommy would walk past the Toyota with the flashing lights and the arm poking out of the ground mist.
Little Tommy, dressed in his finest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume would press the doorbell. He'd hear the ring of the bell, then a couple of seconds later, the scream from the trunk of one of the cars he'd just passed. Gradually, he'd become aware of a wet chewing sound right behind him.
If Little Tommy was still standing at the door by the time I got downstairs, he'd be greeted to the sound of the door opening, and a wall of fog in front of him; invisible foggy blackness.
Of course, wearing black and a black ski mask, I'd be standing there watching the look of fear on the kid's face as it flashed on and off in time with the doomed Toyota's right turn. And then, just when we thought Tommy was getting ready to leave, Mike would kick the foot-pedal that turned on all 6kW of stagelights, focused right at the kid's face.
Blinded and disoriented, Little Tommy would start to retreat as I started up the chainsaw. And his first sight of me would be the silhouette, through the fog, of a black shadow with a running gas chainsaw.
Frozen, the kid would stand there, a deer caught in the headlights, as the chainsaw-wielding black shadow pressed the blade of the saw to his neck and revved the motor.
Of course at this point, the parent, standing at the end of the driveway, would feel that Little Tommy was in mortal danger, scream, drop the bag of candy, and attempt to rescue him from the chainsaw which would have already taken off the kid's head if it still had a chain.
The next morning, I had 4 broken windows, hate messages spray-painted onto the side of my roommate's car, the smell of two-cycle oil in my living room, and a hell of a lot of toilet paper and broken eggs to clean up. But I only had to give out 1/2 bag of candies, so I think I did okay.
The REAL question is why have batteries at all if the car can keep them at 100% the whole time, and still move. Drop the batteries, save a few hundred pounds of weight, and let the dohickey that charges the batteries drive the motor.
For sure. Without the device, it allegedly goes for 9.8 miles using conventional battery power. Fine. If you need 144V with reasonable power capability, you don't need to carry around 12 car batteries; 12 gel-cel batteries or even a big stack of Ni-MH D-cells ought to get the thing moving for a second or two to kick in The Magical Device. They claim ordinary car batteries, which are about 40lb each.
Of course, there is a REASON why they do this. It's yet another 'perpetual motion' device. You show me a molecule that will last forver, and then MAYBE I'll waste valueable toilet-reading time to your device.:)
Oh come now. You know this is powered by cold fusion. Fleischman, Pons and the University of Utah are somehow behind this one, too. [grin]
If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Especially when it disobeys the most fundamental laws of nature. Take the silly little golf cart motor out of the DeLorean they butchered, put the original Renault-Volvo V6 back in there, and stop dreaming about saving the world with Radio Shack science.
Tesla would be rolling over in his grave over having his name being spouted in the same sentence as these guys.
Yes. All you need are two of those 2U cases and a blowtorch. Be sure to remove your two motherboards first.:)
I agree. If it's some ridiculous political or semantical issue, take what are obviously two computers, weld their cases together, and reassemble. It has a certain, "Well, fsck you too!" undertone.
My suggestion would be a couple of ordinary, cheap desktop cases. You will no longer be using the lid on the lower computer so weld some sidepanels onto the chassis. Weld a fairly robust piano hinge on the top rear of the lower case to the bottom rear on the upper case, so that the two machines "clamshell" apart to allow you access to the innards of the lower one. Weld a pair of toolbox clasps to the fronts of the machines, and doctor up the faces to allow it to fit together. Modify the power supplies so that the two machines use only one outlet - just parallel them. Be sure to use grommets in the holes where the wires go from the upper to the lower chassis.
A really nice touch is if you don't do any cosmetic work on the machines after this. Raw welds, grinder marks, scorching are all good when you wish to make a statement about the meaning of a given arbitrary rule.
I've done IT in government, military and airport environments. I know your pain.... In my case, it was only one modem (but no limits on the number of telephone lines). So I hacked two external modems into one case, called it the BigBlockMopar Systems Inc Dually Modem DM-01, and put it in there.
Use a MIG welder or take it to a good auto body shop to have them do it for you. Don't paint it unless you have to. Put on a big sticker calling it a "Fully Independent SMP" machine. They'll be pissed off at your loophole around the rules, but I don't think they're gonna update the rules to say "Clients shall not be allowed to weld two conventional computers together, create a fake model name, and pretend it's one machine."
But I should say that given the high voltages (high for the human body, that is), the plugs must be quite large to guarantee a certain level of mechanical sturdiness. I don't want to have a RJ45-sized 100v plug for fear it may someday break when I plug it in.
Heh. Your telephone already does this:
Off-hook voltage: About 5V DC.
On-hook voltage: About 48V DC.
Ring voltage: About 105V 20Hz AC, pulsed in the familiar cycle.
Okay, so, there's no current behind it.
The reason the voltages are so high is to allow for the voltage drop otherwise caused by the line resistance, if they used lower voltages with higher currents.
And, absolutely, I agree with you. But you couldn't draw 1.8kW (120V @ 15A AC line) through an RJ45 anyway. Try it sometime for amusement.
Basically, all I want in a ZE/LE car is three things:
(Team of electrical and mechanical engineers with careers of experience building motor controllers, batteries, and automobiles put down their sliderules and listen with rapt attention to you.)
1. Costs under 10k. I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less? Electric cars are greatly simplified in many cases - hell most of them dont even need transmissions.
Issues:
Battery technology is the limiting factor on price. Ideally, the battery would be no bigger than the gas tank, contain no caustic or dangerous chemicals, recharge in a few seconds, last thousands of charges, and contain enough energy to drive the vehicle for at least 500km. But batteries are a mature technology; unlike memory chips and hard drives, they don't double in capacity every 18 months. Exotic batteries used in current electric cars are expensive, partially due to weird chemicals, partially due to limited production.
Electric cars would remain expensive because they're not being mass produced, because they suck. They don't do the things that people have come to expect of modern automobiles. Therefore, consumers will never buy them.
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.
That would be, like, so kewl! Maybe you can call up our buddy Sol, at the center of our solar system, and ask him to increase the energy density of the light hitting our fair planet, so that even with a 100% efficient solar panel, this would be possible! (Unless you're gonna design a way of unfolding enough solar cells from somewhere in the car to cover a couple of football fields of ground?)
3. It must not look like a plastic toy. Make it look like any other car I've owned. I dont want people to look at my car and say "hey, look at the guy in an electric car". I don't want a piece of molded plastic with four tiny wheels. I want a normal 4-door sedan.
Ahem. All modern cars look like plastic toys. For example, you described a Toyota Echo perfectly (molded plastic with 4 tiny wheels).
Lightweight, flimsy tinfoil designs are essential to reduce the mass of the vehicle. Since accelerating a greater mass to a given speed requires more energy, lighter mass cars are more energy efficient.
While the car companies have to make these trade-offs, I don't. I continue to drive a full-frame all-steel American made vehicle, because momentum=mass*velocity, and I don't really feel like dying at the hands of some incompetent Honda Civic driver on his cellphone running a red light.
Give me those three things, and I will never look back.
Give you those three things, and superluminal travel will seem easy.
Instead, what we get are 1000 pound plastic attempt-to-look-like-the-future pieces of junk. Not interested, thanks.
Okay. Let's make electric cars look like my 1976 Dodge Ram. Why?
The 1976 Dodge Ram doesn't look futuristic. Its timeless lines were retained in Dodge pickup trucks built from 1974 to 1993, almost unchanged.
The 1976 Dodge Ram has a steel body, steel bumpers, aluminum grille. When one pulls up behind a small car in traffic, all the small car driver sees in the rear view mirror is a wall of metal coming at them. It weighs in at somewhere over 4,000lbs.
The 1976 Dodge Ram provides a suitable platform for trying various options highly desirable in an energy-efficient vehicle. We could easily build a stake truck, an RV, a 4x4 pickup with a Confederate flag motif, or even an SUV with electrically heated leather seats!
The flying brick aerodynamics of a 1976 Dodge Ram are unparalleled and ideal for testing new vehicle energy systems at highway speeds.
Reminds me of my father's friend back in grade school (oh, like 1960's) who had invented furniture that hid behind walls
For The People Who Live Inside Of Your Walls?
We're the people inside of your walls,
We live here inside of your walls
We're watching you daily with great fascination,
At night we curl up inside pink insulation,
We're the people inside of your walls.
Of course, we're not like average people you know,
We eat tiny bugs for our dinner
We're all just as tall as your average joe,
But why, we'll admit we're much thinner,
We're the people inside of your walls.
- The Frantics, "Four On The Floor" TV series, 1986, this song was the source of many childhood nightmares.
Shhhh! My parents think you need a high-end PC for studying computer science (hah!) and duly support me buying one, you're costing me real money here!;)
Hey, I needed a Pentium IV at 2.0GHz just to be able to get KDE 3's file browser to display my MP3 directory in under a minute.
And if there were truth in advertising, it wouldn't be called Ximian Evolution. Instead, it would be called Ximian Continental Drift.
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You missed the point.
No. You utterly ignored mine.
90% of all employees do not need the applications that are incompatible. If 90% of all employees do not need Office XP then you simply do not buy that them.Can their spread sheets be read by others?
No doubt they can without a single problem.
Apparently you utterly ignored my previous points, and you also have absolutely no experience whatsoever in supporting Microsoft Office.
90% of my employees *DO* need the ability to do polynomial regressions. Therefore, since OO's Calc is sorely lacking, 90% of my employees *DO* need Excel.
Sure, I could save money by switching the other 10% to Calc, but then when they try to share documents with the Excel users, there will be no end to the headaches.
You see, Excel is part of the Microsoft Office family. As anyone who hasn't been living under a rock will attest, Office file formats are not backwards compatible, nor are they based on published specifications so that non-M$ developers will have interoperability.
I don't know what sort of crack you prefer to smoke, but in my world, when the computers don't work (ie. "Open Office can't open this Excel XP document!"), then my pager will beep or my telephone will ring.
Heck, most of them do not even need a spread sheet at all.
Sure. Tell me what my users do and do not need.
In most offices where work is actually done (including government offices), spreadsheets are a requirement. Check with your bank (and not the tellers and other drones like that), your insurance company, your utility companies, your investment firms, accountants, etc. I don't know what weird-assed industry you plan on working in.
The concept here which completely alludes you is that you only need to buy the applications that are actually needed.
The concept here which completely eludes you is that using a combination of Microsoft Office and any competitive products quickly becomes a practical impossibility due to Microsoft's practices. Further, apparently only Microsoft has *bothered* to check with consumers to see what they want and provide standard data analysis tools.
That means that 90% of the employees get by just fine with OpenOffice or other selections.
About 10% of my user base would get along just fine with OpenOffice until the 90% who needed Excel for its features started sending XP-editionb .XLS files to the 10% using OO.
Very few computer users need those higher math functions.
I disagree. If you knew what a regression was, you probably wouldn't even think of it as a higher math function. They have practical applications in virtually every industry.
And, a large percentage of the users who think they need Office XP have no idea what you are talking about.
If they need to perform data analysis, they will need Microsoft Excel's data analysis tools, which they have been using since about Excel 95. They need Excel XP simply because Microsoft no longer sells or supports Excel 95, 97 or other alternatives, and because OO simply does not include such basic and simple features as decent data analysis tools.
Microsoft Office suites are not dominant because of their ability to do any high level function.
I contest that. Microsoft Office is, overall, quite a mature and good product. Yes, part of why they dominate is the operating system, and the predatory file save practices, and lack of backward compatibility.
However, I'm reasonably confident that I've used more office suites than you have ever heard of. At the moment, even with all those things aside, Microsoft Office is the best out there.
And, NO, it is not necessary to include all of the essoteric functions found in the highly overpriced applications for them to be highly marketable. And, why is that? Because 80% to 90% of the users simply do not need them.
I'm not sure how much real world exposure you have. I'm not asking for a built-in function which calculates the attenuation of microwave energy as it travels through waveguide - that, I have to agree, would be esoteric.
I'm asking for a feature which allows you to take a scatter plot of data and draw a line of best fit, then present the equation of the line of best fit for all linear, quadratics and cubics.
The closest OO seems to come is the SLOPE and INTERCEPT, which don't even return a complete function and are limited to linear regressions.
Why does one want the function of the line of best fit? So that one can use calculus to analyze the data.
Now, given that you probably don't even know what a derivative is, let alone how to take the derivative of a super-complicated function like e^x, I'm not going to bother to explain to you that calculus is central to *any* economics, engineering, science or even political science degree. In fact, I've often heard it said that the distinction between a useful degree and a basketweaving degree is the study of calculus.
With your obvious expertise in real-world affairs, I can only assume an arts degree of some sort. Calculating your IQ would probably involve taking the square root of a negative number.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying one Microsoft box with every single application they write if you can find an employee that requires that exclusive capability. But, you do not buy a hundred or a thousand copies of a $400 application just because a few need this feature or that.
Again, you lack real-world experience or knowledge of what happens when you try to mix Microsoft Office with anything else in a business environment.
That is a complete waste of resources.
No more so than reading your ill-informed and ill-considered arguments.
Sure, some users need highly specialized software. Some even need the more expensive versions of key applications. But, 80% do not.
Again, using your apparent style of cyclical arguments, we come back to this.
Okay. My conjecture is that you have no idea what a regression is, therefore you consider it to be highly complicated and sophisticated math which is therefore not provided within OO.
I'm not asking OO to be able to perform symbolic integration of functions of complex numbers. I'm not even asking OO to multiply matrices. I'm asking for the same simple statistical analysis tools as the market leader in spreadsheets has.
So, you buy the least expensive (or free) for 80% of the employees and standardize on that. Not the other way around.
Your lack of practical knowledge is stunning.
You do not find companies buying BMWs for all employees simply cause some idiot at the top thinks that is the car he must have.
No, but when the exhaust from one BMW keeps all the Hyundais, Toyotas and Chevrolets from running, then if one needs the features of the BMW, then all need to have the BMW.
OpenOffice, StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc meet the needs of 80% to 90%. So, buy those applications for the majority of the users and the high priced packages for those who can justify that expense. Otherwise, not.
[sigh] I give up. You're far more intelligent and better informed than I am. Continuing this debate with such a luminary as yourself is a waste of precious time when you could be using your creative and mathematical genius to cure cancer and AIDS. For the benefit of mankind, I shall no longer discuss this with you so as to avoid wasting your finite productive years.
LOL a) a linux distro can't be slower than another linux distro. all linux distros with the same kernel are equaly fast. a distro is just linux(the same linux in all distros) with added software. b) who uses kde? not any sane person i hope. Gnome imo is alot better if u feel the need for startmenu etc.. I personally use fluxbox. c) a spellchecker? ispell kthx d) mplayer 4 prez!
Oh, shut up.
You waste money on 600 Microsoft PCs because the OpenOffice spredsheet does not do "linear regression"?
How many of those 600 employees do that work? One? Two?
Since polynomial regressions are standard statistical tools, probably quite a few. As in, anyone there who isn't a secretary.
Polynomial regressions - from linear and up - are neither exotic nor highly specialized. They're very basic data analysis tools. And they're lacking.
What's worse is that I only used the lack of data analysis tools as a glaring example which is all the more baffling considering OO's affiliation with Sun and Sun's affiliation with the engineering profession (ie. engineers buy most of the Sun workstations sold).
If 10 need linear regression capability in their spreadsheet, then buy 10 copies of the software they need and 590 copies of OpenOffice.
Anyone who has tried to mix versions of Microsoft Office in a closed environment knows that it doesn't work. Excel 2000 files cannot be opened with Excel 97, which cannot be opened with Excel 95.
Sure, it would be easy enough to try to institute an "Interoperability Policy" which tells people to always save their files as Excel 97 or some other older alternative which is well supported by OO Calc. But you know that doesn't work. People forget, or resist because of the hurdles that Excel throws up, essentially screaming: "WARNING! You will lose data!". They revert to defaults, and the OO users are left out in the cold.
Oh, I forgot. 590 copies of Openoffice are free. So, just buy the 10.
This attitude is the fundamental problem and the reason why Microsoft will continue to dominate the desktop (and creep more into the server space by leveraging the desktop monopoly through closed protocols and extensions).
To most people, the Microsoft name is a good thing. "Oh, it's from Microsoft, it MUST be good!". Remember, to most people, when their computer crashes, it's the computer's fault, not the operating system.
Most people will not have heard of Sun, or know why Linux and Unix are good things. In fact, they may think of Unix as being the operating system on the nasty old timesharing machine for which they had to write programs on punchcards back in college.
Open Office - or even Star Office, with the Sun name more prominent - are going to be viewed with skepticism by these people, most of whom will have been using Microsoft software since the early 1980s (ie. when you were born). They'll have seen the progression from MS-DOS 3.3 to Windows/286 to Windows 3.0 and 3.1, eventually through 95 and up. Not knowing or caring anything about computers more than you know or care how your monitor draws an image on its screen, they won't question Microsoft's position.
To get accepted into this environment, equivalent features are mere credibility.
If we don't get our shit together to fix this and get Linux on the desktops, we're screwed.
Historically, people bought home computers based on what they had at the office - familiarity and the ability to bring files (and pirated software!) back and forth drove the market. Taking the corporate desktop is the key to driving Windows out of the home computer. For Linux to have the majority share of desktop PCs is the only way to stop Microsoft being able to creep into the server space.
Now stop whining, buy a book on statistics, learn what regressions are, and start coding.
Hey, it's definitely not out of the question when we're talking about all things Hello Kitty.
You know what terrifies me about Hello Kitty?
Apparently, it's a *big thing* in Japan. No, I've never been to Japan, nor am I a Nipponophile ("Nippophile" sounds racist somehow...). Hell, I don't even like anime. But I hear the stories from friends who've been there.
I wake up in the middle of the night with a scream caught in my throat, with visions of Japanese engineers designing brakes and steering systems for Honda and Toyota cars, doing their back-of-the-envelope sketches and calculations on Hello Kitty stationary. The senior engineers in my nightmares have Hello Kitty sliderules.
Not coincidentally, people often wonder why I drive a 1976 Dodge Ram. I figure, if I'm going to share the road with cars whose balljoints were designed using Hello Kitty pocket calculators, I may as well keep myself wrapped up in some good thick steel.
How about the bow tied on one of the cat's ears? I tried that on my cat, and she had it off in nanoseconds. Hot melt glue was only slightly more effective, but not enough to build a franchise on the concept. A staple gun is the only alternative that I can think of - I'm simply amazed that PETA isn't up in arms about the tacit advocacy of using staple guns to affix bows to fluffy little pussycats.
BTW, Linux is not ready for the desktop.
I'm trying to incite riots, with "I'll show him!" bouts of productivity.
You see, I'm in a position where I might be able to get 600 machines with the Canadian Federal Government switched from Windows to Linux. But I can't - for a variety of reasons, Linux simply isn't ready for the desktops of the masses.
Why? www.glowingplate.com/dissent. Linux simply cannot be heralded as a viable replacement to Windows while the most common off-the-shelf distro (RH) is as slow as it is, KDE lacks such basic things as a spellchecker which doensn't suck, and xine's developers are having long debates about which logo to choose (all of which look like they were designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin) while the xine UI lacks something as simple and common sense as a friggin' repeat button.
And while Open Office is a great start, it amazes me that, despite its Sun ancestry which is the bread and butter of engineering workstations - OO's Calc apparently lacks the ability to do a simple linear regression. Excel's been doing them for years. (It's worth noting that I've RTFM and even though I've designed radar equipment for a living, I still can't figure out how to turn on OO Writer's page numbering...)
As Linux advocates, these things must be addressed. The party lines must be crossed, distro wars must be ended, and a concerted effort to actually get a real 100% ready x86 desktop operating system must be mustered. After all, Linux is almost there.
If I'm so passionate, why don't I program? While I can make Hello World in about a dozen different languages, my programming style ranges from brute force to ignorance. It's so horrible that Microsoft keeps on trying to hire me to work on the IIS Development Team. You don't want to commit my code. I'll contribute in advocacy, documentation, and fanning the flames instead.
Check it out.
Now it's 10:30PM on a Saturday night. Time to go out and drink beer.
(BTW, just kidding about Microsoft trying to hire me. Well, I think I am, anyway; there's a headhunter trying to scout me for an undisclosed position just outside of Seattle.)
I 100% agree with you. I *am* using Linux on my desktop and have been for quite some time now, but it's painful.
I've been deliberately sticking with RH because it's the most common distro. But there are many problems not isolated to Red Hat's overzealous behavior (and gcc 2.96).
KDE lacks an underlining spellchecker, in particular for KMail. Do you know how much you come to take a passive and unobtrusive underlining spellchecker for granted, especially when presented with a popup window asking you for interaction on *every single word* it thinks you've misspelled?
Allegedly, that feature is coming in KDE 3.2. But most Windows apps have had that feature since 1996. And we wonder why Gates is a rich man.
Xine is a great video player, but rather than adding something as basic as a repeat button or as essential as a working GUI that doesn't have decorative do-nothing buttons, the developers are running around trying to devise a logo for it. All the logos so far have looked like they were made by 14-year-old East Berlin Run Lola Run fans. I cannot show my boss software with logos and GUIs which are that tacky: there's no way I'll get it onto the desktops.
Browsing a collection of 2,800 MP3s on a local hard drive is dead slow. It takes my Pentium III-500 several minutes to show the contents of this directory. Why? I think KDE/Gnome are checking EACH and EVERY file. A similar problem occurs when I open a directory full of images, and it appears attempt to generate several thousand thumbnails on-the-fly, rather than using a caching scheme and merely checking for new ones. And no, I think a PIII-500 should be perfectly adequate for browsing a directory full of MP3s. I'm not bitching about the fact that it's too slow to play DVDs in xine (but oddly enough, PowerDVD in Windows is just fine).
OpenOffice is a good start, but that's all I'll call it. OpenOffice Calc doesn't have half the statistical functions of Excel, which amazes me given the fact that it springs from Sun. Sun is, of course, the engineer's workstation of choice, so it blows my mind that I can't find a built-in function to do a linear (let alone quadratic) regression from Calc. Excel has done them for years. OO is slow, fat, and quite frankly, ugly. And while I have designed radar video processing systems in use on ships around the world, I still haven't figured out how to get OO to put fucking page numbers on my documents.
I sometimes suspect that the people who write this software don't actually use it.
There has to be some sort of organization dedicated to improving the desktop Linux experience, or else we're all screwed.
Check out this link on Linux desktops: www.glowingplate.com/dissent
"KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk."
Okay. But the Knoppix install option which is really lacking is for use on the display machines at the local computer store:
If Knoppix were to add that feature, I guarantee you I'd be buying a lot of cheap blank CDs to get the local Best Buy, Future Shop, Radio Shack, Staples, etc.
"What do you mean, someone installed Linux on all the machines in our showroom? Where were you guys?"
I dashed off an e-mail to the guy after I saw on his website that he seemed to be interested in building a linear power supply with designs from a Radio Shack book.
Given the apparent quality of his project so far, that didn't seem right... here's the e-mail for others to consider if they're trying similar projects.
Please remember that opening a computer power supply does expose you to potentially lethal amounts of power. Also, they run off the line power (120V/240V), and component failures or other problems can cause fires. Don't play with them unless you know what you're doing.
######
Hey,
Cool project. Kinda disappointed to see ?irreversible? modifications to something as rare as an SX64, but your artistry is evident.
I was planning on doing something similar with an old PET I have with a fried motherboard. The PET was retired from a school - while the front decal is in pretty good shape, the cabinet needs to be repainted and a few other things. Of course, the difficulty in building the SuperPET Ultra will be less than yours. :) And I'm certainly not worried about putting a CD/DVD-ROM behind a
floppy drive door; almost everything I do comes across the ethernet.
Color CRT into the PET? Nah, I'll probably hack an old monochrome NEC MultiSync to drive the PET's green phosphor monochrome CRT and call it good. (I want 800x600 or better; of course, on a 5" SX64 CRT, that's less of an issue...)
i bought a book down at radio-shack, "Building Power Supplies" (RS#276-5025), which gave me all the calculations i needed to come up with a decent design.
Uhh... having never seen that book, I'm not sure if it book covers switching supplies in sufficient depth to design one for a computer. And you don't want a linear ~250W computer power supply, they're very heavy. (See http://www.glowingplate.com/ticard/ for a similar situation which TI built.)
the only problem now is that all the parts will run me around $60, which i don't have (it's so high because i need seperate supplies for the +3.3v, +5v, +12v, and -12v. a normal ATX PSU actually uses a single multi-tapped transformer-style coil to step the voltage down, whereas i'll need seperate coils and controllers for each voltage). since i do have a power supply that works for now, this will probably be my last part of this project.
At this point, you have a PC board template planned out. My suggestion is labor-intensive but less so than attempting to design a switching supply from scratch (trust me on that). Don't underestimate how much time it will take you to get through stuff like the Power_Good comparator circuit or the ATX controls.
Switching supplies are a nightmare to build on your own. The tiny little transformer on your board steps down ~250W of power. To do this with a linear supply requires a huge and heavy transformer because it's running off the line frequency of 60Hz. All other things being equal, transformers get smaller as the frequency increases.
Since you're a Commodore man, you might know the transformer in a PET. I figure it's rated for about 100W of power at 60Hz. Open up any modern supply and you'll find a tiny one on the board which handles about 250W. This is not Moore's Law of Power Supply Design. :)
Most modern computer power supplies are probably running around 50kHz. Of course, the chopper which cuts up the incoming power must be very accurately tuned to the resonance of the transformer; generally, you're dealing with (impractical in single unit quantities) a custom transformer.
But someone else has already done all this stuff for you...
Get yourself a good ATX supply; two identical ones are preferable so that you can compare notes along the way. Open it up; discharge all the capacitors. Place the PC board on the stage of an overhead projector, then map out the schematic using that backlighting. Even if you don't know what all the windings in the transformers and chokes do, just represent those components as little boxes with pin numbers on your schematic. Label *every* component by type number.
Once you've got the schematic completed, get a friend (or several) to go over a copy, crossing off each and every connection to every component as soon as they're confirmed to be correct.
Transcribe the schematic into Eagle CAD or another PC board autorouter. (OrCAD is good if you're running Windows, but I hate Windows, so I don't use it.) Import the PC board template, place large/special components where you need them to be, then tell it to route the board.
Check it over again. Etch the board. (Apparently, this isn't a problem to you, judging from your work.) Transfer the corresponding components one at a time from the original PC board to your new PC board.
All consumer electronics are cheap crap, using the lowest-rated (ie cheapest) components possible. While you're transferring components, replace electrolytic capacitors with ones having the same values (in uF) but higher voltage, temperature and ripple current ratings. Replace 1/4 watt resistors with same-value 1/2 watt resistors. If you can find a given transistor or MOSFET type, look it up and choose the one with the same parameters but the next-highest voltage, current and dissipation ratings. Get an electrical engineer or technician friend to help you. This supply should now last an order of magnitude longer than it would with its original components.
Your 10lb aluminum heatsink will, without any question, cool the power supply's power transistors enough to eliminate the fan. Make sure you put mica insulating hardware between the transistors and the heatsink; you want to be able to ground the aluminum. The heatsink might get warm but should not get too hot to touch; the attached transistors will almost definitely be running cooler (and will last longer) than they would in the original supply.
The airflow through the original power supply case also cools the transformers. I'd place the main transformer right next to the aluminum heatsink and devise a thermally-conductive clamp to hold the transformer against it. Heatsink grease will be your friend. I don't think the magnetic field leaking from the transformer will be sufficient to cause worrysome eddy currents in an aluminum clamp pulling heat away from the transformer.
Just a couple of thoughts for you. Should cut your costs and yield a more practical/reliable project.
Thanks for the great read,
Lawrence
Gates himself is quite a philanthropist, and deserves brownie points for spending some of his enourmous fortune on helping people out.
The problems with Microsoft don't stem from Bill Gates being evil. I've met the man (albeit briefly), and I don't believe that he's evil. I don't even believe that it's the money.
I believe that Bill Gates is utterly convinced that the Microsoft way is the right way. Mercilessly killing the competition saves the world from the threats of what he perceives as unreliable and overcomplicated software produced by everyone else.
His vision is powerful, and he's (through luck and ruthlessness) achieved a position where he's capable of realizing it. Of course, he's blind to its inherent flaws. His competitive streak is so fierce that *everything* gets turned into a game, including (and I'm not kidding), "Let's see if I can run this lavalier microphone through my shirt faster than you can put a battery into the transmitter."
Similarly, I don't doubt for a second that Adolph Hitler was convinced that everything he did was for the good of the German people. Of course, the recants of history tend to be less forgiving than the heat of the moment. Something about hindsight being 20/20, and the discovery that Auschwitz wasn't really a sausage factory.
Bill Gates would never have ended up as an ordinary average Joe. He's too intelligent, too competitive by nature and too committed to his dream. I have a lot of admiration for the man, as flawed as his vision and his horrible software may be.
Having said that, there are a few reasons why Linux isn't yet ready for mass adoption on the desktop.
This is what seems to be a very cool application of putting old equipment to good work. And hey, if it turns out that it doesn't work, he has a cheep and effective form of birth control...
Well, hey. Chances are you're staring at a linear particle accelerator right now.
Disconnect the high voltage regulator in your monitor and you'll throw off enough X-rays to cloud photographic film. The kinetic energy of accelerated electrons flying from the gun is turned into X-ray photons as they collide with the inside of the glass. The electrical energy, of course, lights the phosphors which bring you my many words of wisdom.
Modern TV sets and monitors, of course, use a variety of methods to prevent the high voltage from the flyback getting to be high enough to cause lots of hard X-rays. The thick (usually leaded) glass in the front and sides of your monitor help to cut the rays down, as well as providing structural integrity to allow it to withstand the thousands of pounds of atmospheric air pressure with are trying very hard to crush it. But this remains a very critical design safety issue, and has gone so far as a Simpsons episode. (Remember Homer's old farmhouse, with the "Radiation King" TV set?)
If you want to have an effective toy, yank out the electron gun from the back of the CRT, mount it at one end of a long piece of plastic or glass pipe, mount a really thin piece of sheetmetal at the other end, and at 6" intervals band it with smooth rings of metal connected to each other by 10 Mohm resistors.
Suck a vacuum into it (vacuum pump), apply 500kV (from your homebuilt Van De Graaf generator) to the ring on the far end from the gun, apply 6V or so to heat the filaments and about -100V DC relative to the first grid in the electron gun to the cathode of the gun, and presto! you'll have a stream of electrons travelling at almost light speed out the other end. Essentially, beta particles, produced without a radioactive source.
To a lesser extent, that's what the inside of your monitor's picture tube is being whacked with.
Congratulations, Professor Science. You've just built your very own linear accelerator.
Not extraordinarily high tech, I think Thompson did it, without the benefit of a modern CRT's thoriated cathode or the prior knowledge that it would work, sometime around the turn of the last century.
The lights are just mean, but the chainsaw would trigger Dad tearing down the sidewalk, if he wasn't already standing near the kids to reassure them about the scary house. Expect a similar reaction if you stabbed them with a fake knife, or shot them with blanks. The last few years, I've assisted my brother running a haunt; while it's very scary, he enforces a strict no-touching rule. We also ease up on the little ones, the scariest folks keep out of sight as they go through.
Chalk it up to the indiscretions of youth. Nowadays, I'd be a little bit more tame.
Laws and lawsuits kill all the fun. They killed Napster, they killed drinking and driving (why shouldn't I be able to have a beer while I drive home from work, as long as I stay below the legal limit?), they killed the musclecar.
Next thing you're gonna tell me that all coffee cups are gonna have to come with a warning about the contents being hot... oh, wait.
I did like the overturned car, wired for sound.The car was a 1984 Toyota Tercel 4WD station wagon with a blown rear differential and rusted through *everywhere*. I was going to attach a furnace blower motor to spin the axle so that one of the wheels was spinning, but I couldn't figure out a way of doing it where kids wouldn't potentially touch the tire spinning in the air (and get caught and lose a finger), so I decided to veto that idea. It was too bad, too - the sound of the worn-out diff spinning was A Very Bad Sound.
Thanks! :)
A summary of the site is that you can suck cool air into your fog machine and make the fog hug the ground.
Use an ice chest with vents cut in both ends, filled with ice (or dry ice) and place the fog machine inlet close to the outlet of the ice chest.
I don't know if you've just accidentally reversed the steps or not, but let me clarify some aspects of fog machines...
I've never seen a fog machine with an air inlet. I've seen lots of professional fog machines with fluid inputs, though, so that you could run hose through your lighting grids or props and not have to disrupt them if the machine ran out of fog juice (especially in the middle of a show!).
A fog machine works by pumping fog juice into a small heated cavity with a very small exit hole. Usually, the heating cavity is built into a cylindrical rod or pipe. As it's pumped into the confined cavity, the fog juice expands very suddenly, which increases the pressure inside the cavity and causes it to blast out the front of the machine, under great pressure. (150PSI or so, I would think; I've seen fog machines explode their heater assemblies.) Surrounding the heater assembly is generally an insulated box (which *always* gets really gross with leaked fog juice). The insulation is to prevent people from getting burned should they touch it - and to reduce the running time of the heater element inside the heater assembly.
The heater assembly is usually set back sufficiently far inside the nozzle that it's difficult to touch the heater assembly accidentally.
While the concentric shape of the fog machine's nozzle might lead you to believe that there's a system to draw air through the fog machine, I assure you that there isn't.
If you were to create a hole inside an existing fog machine and attempt to pump chilled air through it, I think it's very unlikely that you would manage to make fog which sinks to the ground. More likely, the fog machine's thermostat would detect that the heater assembly was cold, and would keep the heater on longer. The fog would remain at normal operating temperature as it left the nozzle - if not, there will be no fog. Most fog machines will not pump fog juice into their heater assemblies until the thermostat reports that the heater assembly is up to the correct running temperature.
The system works as follows:
[FOG JUICE BOTTLE] --> fog juice --> [FOG MACHINE] --> hot fog --> [CHILLER] --> cool fog --> [STAGE]
Being known to your neighbors as "that Damned Nutcase at the end of the street" and forming a first-name relationship with the police... Priceless!
Lest you forget, I'm the Bobo guy. And Mike's car was a 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme in primer. But we did find out that Tremclad (based on the empty spray can in the middle of the street) is very hard to sand off a quarter panel.
Heh. Those were fun days.
OK, I HAVE to ask. How many kids braved the whole thing and actually claimed that half bag of candy that was given out?
Well, the 1/2 bag of candy that I gave out was mostly to bribe the three who were still screaming after I shut off the chainsaw. And the father who wet himself.
Most of the others were gone by the time they heard the chewing noise from under the hood of the car. Lots didn't even come down the driveway, because seeing a car on its side with an arm poking out from underneath is a little too intense for most 4 to 10-year-olds.
The kids who stayed for the chainsaw were all older (12-15 range) and were psyching each other up, afraid of their friends seein their fear. But there's something about the sound of a gasoline engine running inside a house that makes people decide that they're not going to stick around to see what's coming.
if you do, make a site respond to this comment with the link to the pictures you take.
I'm a lamer. Anyone in the Ottawa area have a digital camera they won't be using on the 31st?
You should have taken photos. That sounds like something on par with what I want to do once I get a house off campus.
One of my neighbors was a photographer with the community newspaper and she came by to take a photo of the Toyota on its side in my front yard the next morning. But I never saw the article.
Yeah, I should've. Hindsight is 20/20.
I might do something similar again this year - I've been feeling bored lately.
In only a few hours, I will be helping in the construction of one of these! We already have all of the materials.
A fog chiller like this will work almost as well as a professional one. The professional fog coolers essentially blow the fog through an refrigerator evaporator.
Halloween of 1994, I had the police at my house 6 times, each time with them begging me to stop doing what I was doing... he so badly wanted a reason to arrest me, but could think of none.
Picture it: The doorbell was connected through an optocoupler to my computer's keyboard. Everytime the doorbell rang, there was a pause (as the stereo audio file loaded) then a loud scream played from a speaker (left) hidden in the trunk of one of the cars in the driveway. The right channel had a nasty kind of chewing sound, and it was played through a speaker hidden in the engine compartment of another car which was parked close to the door.
My roommate and I were car nuts, and we had a junked Toyota that we were waiting for the scrapyard to haul off. With the chain hoist, we put it on its side in the front yard, with a mannequin's arm sticking out from underneath. We hooked its electrical system up to a car battery charger and left some of the parking lights on, with a turnblinker flashing and the AM radio playing quietly inside.
I was working in the professional sound and lighting business then, so I borrowed a fog machine, fog chiller and 6,000 watts of Leko stagelighting.
The fog machine and the chiller from work went outside to provide a ground mist, but not too much. I needed for the kids to see, by the light of the flashing signal, the arm sticking out from under the Toyota.
The Lekos and my own fog machine were set up inside. The Leko dimmer pack was powered off the 40 amp 240V service to the stove outlet, and all 6 lights, at 1000W apiece, were pointed and focused to a point 1 foot outside of my front door.
And then there was the chainsaw. Beg, borrow, steal or rent a chainsaw. Take off the chain and protect the kids from the potentially sharp edge of the chain guide with a rubber edging like people use around the outlines of their car doors.
The Spectacle:
Mom or Dad would stand at the end of the driveway as Little Tommy would walk past the Toyota with the flashing lights and the arm poking out of the ground mist.
Little Tommy, dressed in his finest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume would press the doorbell. He'd hear the ring of the bell, then a couple of seconds later, the scream from the trunk of one of the cars he'd just passed. Gradually, he'd become aware of a wet chewing sound right behind him.
If Little Tommy was still standing at the door by the time I got downstairs, he'd be greeted to the sound of the door opening, and a wall of fog in front of him; invisible foggy blackness.
Of course, wearing black and a black ski mask, I'd be standing there watching the look of fear on the kid's face as it flashed on and off in time with the doomed Toyota's right turn. And then, just when we thought Tommy was getting ready to leave, Mike would kick the foot-pedal that turned on all 6kW of stagelights, focused right at the kid's face.
Blinded and disoriented, Little Tommy would start to retreat as I started up the chainsaw. And his first sight of me would be the silhouette, through the fog, of a black shadow with a running gas chainsaw.
Frozen, the kid would stand there, a deer caught in the headlights, as the chainsaw-wielding black shadow pressed the blade of the saw to his neck and revved the motor.
Of course at this point, the parent, standing at the end of the driveway, would feel that Little Tommy was in mortal danger, scream, drop the bag of candy, and attempt to rescue him from the chainsaw which would have already taken off the kid's head if it still had a chain.
The next morning, I had 4 broken windows, hate messages spray-painted onto the side of my roommate's car, the smell of two-cycle oil in my living room, and a hell of a lot of toilet paper and broken eggs to clean up. But I only had to give out 1/2 bag of candies, so I think I did okay.
Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet.
The REAL question is why have batteries at all if the car can keep them at 100% the whole time, and still move. Drop the batteries, save a few hundred pounds of weight, and let the dohickey that charges the batteries drive the motor.
For sure. Without the device, it allegedly goes for 9.8 miles using conventional battery power. Fine. If you need 144V with reasonable power capability, you don't need to carry around 12 car batteries; 12 gel-cel batteries or even a big stack of Ni-MH D-cells ought to get the thing moving for a second or two to kick in The Magical Device. They claim ordinary car batteries, which are about 40lb each.
Of course, there is a REASON why they do this. It's yet another 'perpetual motion' device. You show me a molecule that will last forver, and then MAYBE I'll waste valueable toilet-reading time to your device.Oh come now. You know this is powered by cold fusion. Fleischman, Pons and the University of Utah are somehow behind this one, too. [grin]
If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Especially when it disobeys the most fundamental laws of nature. Take the silly little golf cart motor out of the DeLorean they butchered, put the original Renault-Volvo V6 back in there, and stop dreaming about saving the world with Radio Shack science.
Tesla would be rolling over in his grave over having his name being spouted in the same sentence as these guys.
Yes. All you need are two of those 2U cases and a blowtorch. Be sure to remove your two motherboards first.
I agree. If it's some ridiculous political or semantical issue, take what are obviously two computers, weld their cases together, and reassemble. It has a certain, "Well, fsck you too!" undertone.
My suggestion would be a couple of ordinary, cheap desktop cases. You will no longer be using the lid on the lower computer so weld some sidepanels onto the chassis. Weld a fairly robust piano hinge on the top rear of the lower case to the bottom rear on the upper case, so that the two machines "clamshell" apart to allow you access to the innards of the lower one. Weld a pair of toolbox clasps to the fronts of the machines, and doctor up the faces to allow it to fit together. Modify the power supplies so that the two machines use only one outlet - just parallel them. Be sure to use grommets in the holes where the wires go from the upper to the lower chassis.
A really nice touch is if you don't do any cosmetic work on the machines after this. Raw welds, grinder marks, scorching are all good when you wish to make a statement about the meaning of a given arbitrary rule.
I've done IT in government, military and airport environments. I know your pain.... In my case, it was only one modem (but no limits on the number of telephone lines). So I hacked two external modems into one case, called it the BigBlockMopar Systems Inc Dually Modem DM-01, and put it in there.
Use a MIG welder or take it to a good auto body shop to have them do it for you. Don't paint it unless you have to. Put on a big sticker calling it a "Fully Independent SMP" machine. They'll be pissed off at your loophole around the rules, but I don't think they're gonna update the rules to say "Clients shall not be allowed to weld two conventional computers together, create a fake model name, and pretend it's one machine."
But I should say that given the high voltages (high for the human body, that is), the plugs must be quite large to guarantee a certain level of mechanical sturdiness. I don't want to have a RJ45-sized 100v plug for fear it may someday break when I plug it in.
Heh. Your telephone already does this:
Off-hook voltage: About 5V DC.
On-hook voltage: About 48V DC.
Ring voltage: About 105V 20Hz AC, pulsed in the familiar cycle.
Okay, so, there's no current behind it.
The reason the voltages are so high is to allow for the voltage drop otherwise caused by the line resistance, if they used lower voltages with higher currents.
And, absolutely, I agree with you. But you couldn't draw 1.8kW (120V @ 15A AC line) through an RJ45 anyway. Try it sometime for amusement.
It takes about 30 volts to punch a hole through the gate layer of a MOSFET.
It takes about 3,000 volts to make a static electric spark jump 1 millimeter (thickness of a dime).
Every memory chip has at least three MOSFETs per bit of storage.
Now, are you gonna take static seriously? I sure as hell am.
(Team of electrical and mechanical engineers with careers of experience building motor controllers, batteries, and automobiles put down their sliderules and listen with rapt attention to you.)
1. Costs under 10k. I mean, if you take a lot of parts out of something, and reduce its weight a lot, shouldn't it cost less? Electric cars are greatly simplified in many cases - hell most of them dont even need transmissions.Issues:
Battery technology is the limiting factor on price. Ideally, the battery would be no bigger than the gas tank, contain no caustic or dangerous chemicals, recharge in a few seconds, last thousands of charges, and contain enough energy to drive the vehicle for at least 500km. But batteries are a mature technology; unlike memory chips and hard drives, they don't double in capacity every 18 months. Exotic batteries used in current electric cars are expensive, partially due to weird chemicals, partially due to limited production.
Electric cars would remain expensive because they're not being mass produced, because they suck. They don't do the things that people have come to expect of modern automobiles. Therefore, consumers will never buy them.
2. Can be charged/refilled in many ways - including a fast charge at some type of service station. Also, a fold out/attachable solar array (maybe folds out of trunk, or from underneath the car). It must be able to be charged to at least 2 hrs worth of driving in the same amount of time as a normal "fill up". Absolute longest is five minutes.That would be, like, so kewl! Maybe you can call up our buddy Sol, at the center of our solar system, and ask him to increase the energy density of the light hitting our fair planet, so that even with a 100% efficient solar panel, this would be possible! (Unless you're gonna design a way of unfolding enough solar cells from somewhere in the car to cover a couple of football fields of ground?)
3. It must not look like a plastic toy. Make it look like any other car I've owned. I dont want people to look at my car and say "hey, look at the guy in an electric car". I don't want a piece of molded plastic with four tiny wheels. I want a normal 4-door sedan.Ahem. All modern cars look like plastic toys. For example, you described a Toyota Echo perfectly (molded plastic with 4 tiny wheels).
Lightweight, flimsy tinfoil designs are essential to reduce the mass of the vehicle. Since accelerating a greater mass to a given speed requires more energy, lighter mass cars are more energy efficient.
While the car companies have to make these trade-offs, I don't. I continue to drive a full-frame all-steel American made vehicle, because momentum=mass*velocity, and I don't really feel like dying at the hands of some incompetent Honda Civic driver on his cellphone running a red light.
Give me those three things, and I will never look back.Give you those three things, and superluminal travel will seem easy.
Instead, what we get are 1000 pound plastic attempt-to-look-like-the-future pieces of junk. Not interested, thanks.Okay. Let's make electric cars look like my 1976 Dodge Ram. Why?
Does that make you happy?
Reminds me of my father's friend back in grade school (oh, like 1960's) who had invented furniture that hid behind walls
For The People Who Live Inside Of Your Walls?
We're the people inside of your walls,
We live here inside of your walls
We're watching you daily with great fascination,
At night we curl up inside pink insulation,
We're the people inside of your walls.
Of course, we're not like average people you know,
We eat tiny bugs for our dinner
We're all just as tall as your average joe,
But why, we'll admit we're much thinner,
We're the people inside of your walls.
- The Frantics, "Four On The Floor" TV series, 1986, this song was the source of many childhood nightmares.
Almost as many nightmares as this.
Way to go Israel.
This solar scalpel is gonna be a boon to mohels. Reduce the rate of infection by having the ultimate scalpel, a beam of light, anywhere in the world.
"The Bris will be in eight days... weather permitting."
Shhhh! My parents think you need a high-end PC for studying computer science (hah!) and duly support me buying one, you're costing me real money here!
Hey, I needed a Pentium IV at 2.0GHz just to be able to get KDE 3's file browser to display my MP3 directory in under a minute.
And if there were truth in advertising, it wouldn't be called Ximian Evolution. Instead, it would be called Ximian Continental Drift.
www.glowingplate.com/dissent