Right there is a good example of clean, efficient transportation. Until chemical/energy storage becomes more efficient, a clean IC engine is the way to go. Bonus points for multi-fuel.
Heh. My Ram is hardly efficient. It's got a 400 and gets about 7 MPG on whatever I pour down the tank.
But the point is well taken, and when I slap a Slant-6 and A-833 four speed with overdrive manual transmission in there, I'll be running about 25 MPG. Not bad for a brand-new full-size pickup truck, let alone one that is 25 years old.
As for the fuel flexibility, that's the beauty of older cars. Stick an oxygen sensor into the exhaust system and a meter under the hood. Make sure your carb has a soldered brass float, not a plastic one. Replace your fuel pump with an aftermarket hi-perf pump, and the little 1" long sections of hose on your fuel filter. Pour in the methanol, tune and time for best meter readings, and take her cruising. Ideally, you should get a cam ground for the new fuel and play with your ignition timing curves, but they both burn similarly enough to gasoline that the engines run perfectly happily and cleaner than the law requires 'em to.
On a similar note, I have a 1974 Dodge Dart with a 383.
Very nice! I've also got a 1970 Dodge Dart and a 1974 Valiant Brougham. They're both 4-door. The Dart is a little granny car with that great front end. Since its motor isn't original, I think I'll put the big block from my truck in there so that I can have a bit of a sleeper. The Valiant is like a miniature New Yorker, born of the oil crisis: smallest car Chrysler made at the time, but with a gorgeous crushed velour and leather interior. Oh, and shag carpeting; it was the 70s.
With no catalytic converter, and no emissions equipment whatsoever, it passed the IM inspection with better marks than my wife's poorly tuned toyota tercel.
Yup. Few of the tree-huggers who promote catalytic converters know that it reduces gas mileage which causes more gas to be burned and therefore more pollutants to be released. They also don't understand the basic chemistry behind it, and how it is that cataclysmic converters help to cause acid rain. But they're all happy, sitting around in healing circles, playing folk guitar and slapping themselves on the back for being good people.
What a crime. Think of how nice the exhaust from a modern fuel-injected multivalve car, running without a catalytic converter, would be.
This isn't "welcome to the 21st century", this is a step backward to the 1890's. Pure hydrogen gleaned from fuel cells is the future of electric personal locomotion, not antiquidated chemical/electric storage systems.
Absolutely, and I wouldn't want to be in this vehicle surrounded by soccer moms in SUVs. I'll stick with my trusty and rugged 1976 Dodge Ram, thank you very much.
Now, prior to modding me down or flaming me because you disagree with me, I'm a BSc EE. So, unless you're capable of explaining to me - mathematically, no less - how a ferrous laminate core in saturation will behave, I suggest you sit down and shut up.
Unfortunately, I think most Slashdot readers have a problem with reality. They're conditioned to hard disks that double in capacity every 16 months and processors that double in speed every 18 months and have been doing so for the 15 years they've been alive.
However, they fail to understand that battery technology is mature, or that the electric car is not a new idea being stifled by the big mean oil companies.
Edison built an electric car in the 1890s, before the internal combustion engine (or any other technology) had emerged as the way of powering cars. Many other people tried it, too. Electric cars of the 1890s weren't too different from the electric cars of today - big pile of lead-acid batteries (which some modern electric cars use), electric motor(s) driving the wheels directly, some even had simple regenerative braking. And yet the rickety and cumbersome internal combustion engines of the day still took over, for much the same reasons as the gasoline engine still rules today: electric cars simply are not practical.
Let's look at Los Angeles as an example, since they've got millions of commuters and a smog problem.
Remember California's power crisis in the summer of 2000? Rotating blackouts, etc? How do you think that's gonna be when 10,000,000 people are plugging in their electric cars every night? That power has to come from somewhere, you know.
So, since SoCal really doesn't have enough water to build too many more hydroelectric dams, the electricity to recharge the cars will have to come from either coal or nuclear power plants. Forget the solar cells, wind and wave power; they still haven't graduated from the realm of high school science fair projects and the whimsey of Bachelor of Arts in English Literature people who think they can solve the world's problems.
With either coal or nuclear, you have the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome. I don't think political pressures would allow sufficient power plants to be built close enough to L.A. to recharge all those cars without transmission (power line) losses wasting more energy than you're actually using.
Net effect? If electric cars start to catch on, start buying candles; the laws of supply and demand suggest that electricity will become very expensive.
The cars themselves are an issue, too: a comparatively small container of gasoline is dangerous enough. Electric cars will have to be packed to the tits full of efficient batteries to maintain the kind of range people need from their cars. And the more efficient the battery, by necessity, the more nasty the chemicals it's got inside it. Fender-benders will mean haz-mat team calls and chemical burns, as batteries are ruptured onto the highway. Gasoline is unpleasant and flammable, but it's relatively benign compared to the sulphuric acid in a typical car battery (1890s technology), let alone the bizarre concoctions in a modern highly efficient battery.
I'm not too keen on driving around in a car with raw hydrogen on board, either. Hydrogen sweats through cast iron tanks like acetylene, and is far more flammable. I don't feel like being incinerated the first time someone cuts me off on the 405.
Yup. I'll stick with my internal combustion engine, thank you very much. My 1976 Dodge Ram burns ethanol, methanol and gasoline very happily with only minor adjustments between fuel types.
oh, come on! what is this, the Inquisition?! i am so sick and tired of this "anyone who uses Windows is an idiot" dogma, which is why this is the first time I have been to Slashdot in months.
Nope, not true. In fact, I think M$ still has the best compromise between GUI and features and available software. I run Windows 2000 on my main desktop machine; believe me, I'll be running *NIX as soon as KDE has the very few remaining things that I need it to have. (KDE is *so* pretty.)
However, running Windows 2000 on a routable IP addess is dangerous and irresponsible for Handsome Hubby to surf the net, let alone for someone to actually serve pages.
You'll be pleased to note that the machine from which I am typing this does not run IIS, and has an IP address of 192.168.0.1.
It's like a Corvair: the only safe way to drive it is in slow little circles in a parking lot.
if that's all you ever have to contribute, you must be a real putz.
No, that's not all that I have to contribute. Though I am a real putz.
Even though it's called a "Time Machine", it won't work on live telivision.
You know the instant replay feature on Tivo? This is just the reverse of that.
More interestingly... TV has a kinda standard 22 minutes of program per 1/2 hour show. This number evolved not because broadcasters didn't want to run more advertisements, but because it's the point at which balance is achieved between the numbers of spots run and the number of viewers you have to see them.
The revenue plot can be likened to a negative quadratic equation. Too many commercials and people stop tuning in, hence lost ratings and lost $$. The other side of the scale is not enough commercials, therefore not enough advertising dollars.
The vertex, if you will, is around 8 minutes of programming in a 30 minute program, and it's a number which has remained pretty constant since the mass-acceptance of television in the 1950s.
This technique will therefore really only be of value in attempting to adjust a TV show to appeal to the same sorts of people who watch infomercials. (Who the hell watches those, anyway?)
Metropolis (the original) was ripped off by Madonna for her "Express Yourself" video.
Feh. I'm not much of a Madonna fan, so I didn't notice. I guess I'm a somewhat atypical homosexual: we're supposed to love Madonna. (I, however, prefer Jimi Hendrix and Howard Stern.)
Hmmm... Maybe my distaste for anime stems from the fact that there are no hot anime guys?
I liked the original much better.
Oh yeah, for sure. Though I'll hit Gnutella and see if I can check out Madonna's video.
that up to around 50 users or so, you are unlikely to step on each others toes except under exceptional circumstances (not more than 4 or 5 are likely to be on at the same time
Over 6,000 MP3s on a fileserver, being shared by TWO roommates through TWO Gnutella clients cranked up to 10 hosts each.
That's it : if your ip is typical from a home subnet, you'r using NAT.
Or, maybe you're just running a separate firewall to prevent your Windows box from being a sitting duck to script kiddieZ.
Myself, there are about 8 machines running behind my DSL. But a system I set up for a friend is OpenBSD on a Rogers cable modem, driving a Windows box. There's not even a hub involved - just a crossover.
He and I agree: Running Windows on a routable IP address is an act of great stupidity. The ISPs should be grateful for the reduced liability.
This setup doesn't violate the spirit of the service agreement - there's still only one computer connected to the ISP's network. And, in this particular case, it doesn't violate the spirit of the TOS agreement - the OpenBSD box does nothing more than ZoneAlarm, only better.
Heh. Of course, the ISPs will act short-sightedly.
I was just recalling hairball speculations have been made before and asking others to see connections.
However, sigh, you got 2 points, I got none -- you win.
Nah. I had few new ideas there, I merely packaged yours in such a way that the average dimwit surfing in from seach.msn.com can figure it out. I guess I'm gonna be the next Bill Gates.
No. When the vehicle is mine personally, and I can leave my crap kicking around on the front seat, and most importantly that it goes where I point the steering wheel, then I'll call it a car.
Public transit proponents apparently don't understand the visceral pleasure of punching the gas pedal and peeling the rear wheels. Much like I don't understand the pleasure of hugging a tree.
The first is a Maintenance Nightmare, the second proposes the smart highway/smart vehicle system in which a driver can allow the system to drive the vehicle or drive the vehicle manually. Any design which imposes a mandatory track and vehicle configuration such as that depicted in the article is a hole into which one can through one's money.
I should think those would be the least of their worries. If the car isn't my own vehicle and I'm given sovereignty over it, there'd better be a rental company paperwork nightmare every time I get into a vehicle by myself.
Otherwise, I would think that going to work in a car where the seats were still full of the back-from-the-pub puke of the previous patron would be the *least* of Cardiff's worries.
How do *you* treat a car that you don't care about? Spilled ice cream? Overloading it by carrying 20 sheets of drywall? Kicking doors open?How are you going to track down who did the damage to a vehicle which appears to function autonomously?
Quoted from BBC's article:
vandal-proof
That sounds like a challenge. But, to paraphrase an old saying, invent a vandal-proof device, and someone invents a better vandal.
This is just another reason for anyone who can afford to leave a place which imposes high taxes and affords no standard of living to do so: if this is forced on the city, they can expect an exodus of doctors, scientists and engineers.
Most disturbingly, those who would normally espouse public transit at all costs are also usually the most staunch advocates of privacy rights. And yet, there appears to be no great outcry from the fact that your access card would, by necessity, have to track your every movement for fare calculations, and your ID for damage control. Don't want the government to know that you go to a gay bar every Tuesday night? Or that you're a closet white supremacist? Or even what supermarkets you shop at? Tough. They'll know.
This is sheer idiocy. I was born in Cardiff. This and Tom Jones are both good reasons not to go back.
Re:SUV = Big-Assed RWD Station Wagon of Olden Days
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Unfortunately, people are not required to have a truck license for SUVs and minivans...
No. But I don't believe the rise of minivans and SUVs is coincidental to the fall of the full-size land yacht American station wagon.
I'm sure this is gonna cost me karma, but I don't care: if the environmental lobby hadn't pushed to improve automotive gas mileage, the SUV would have remained the niche vehicle it was in the late 1970s. *Billions* of barrels of oil would have been saved if the Caprice Estate Wagon was still in production.
Think of how much oil is wasted to the aerodynamic drag of taller SUVs and minivans, to the inefficient tires and heavy 4x4 drivetrain which were used as marketing devices to get Joe Accountant to trade in the family wagon on a Blazer.
And yet, the environmentalists want to impose CAFE on trucks. This will mean the death of the domestic tough-as-nails pickup truck, and will result it pickup trucks based on such lightweight and flimsy platforms as the Honda CR-V, the Toyota RAV-4, and domestic equivalents we haven't seen yet.
Naturally, any farmer who has to move three quarters of a ton of sheep manure to the neighbor's fields isn't going to try to do it with a unibody vehicle powered by a transverse mounted four-cylinder engine. He's gonna fire up his old V8-powered rear-wheel-drive full-frame Chevrolet Cheyenne, and move the sheep shit.
If CAFE causes these vehicles to suddenly become unavailable on the new market, the intent of CAFE will be utterly thwarted as used pickup trucks depreciate even more slowly than they currently do, and those people who need a real truck will work very hard to keep their aging vehicles on the road - despite old technology like carburetors, transmissions without overdrive, rudimentary spark timing systems - not to mention the effects of age and wear on these systems.
CAFE will backfire again. Check back with me in 20 years. I'm quite convinced I'll still have my 1976 Dodge Ram: They don't make 'em like they used to, and that will be even more apparent in the years to come.
and the stuff you dismiss casually as marketing crap appeals to a wider market than audiophile would, which means more dollars for the card manufactuers
It's a slippery slope between "32 Voices" (Who actually uses the synth in their sound card anyway? Tell me about the D/A converters, not crap like that) and today's "200 Watt" computer speakers which display efficiency in defiance of the basic physics law of conservation of energy by being powered off a 9V 300mA wall wart.
Yeah, admittedly, Joe Consumer is a fool, too stupid to be entrusted to spend his dollar intelligently. VHS vs. Beta, Commodore 64 vs. TI-99/4A, IBM PC vs. Amiga. Yeah, it *is* a niche market. But a niche market with money, educated consumers who are conscious of quality. If that no longer existed, Maytags and Macintoshes would be gone.
I'll take a little comfort in knowing that there are at least a couple of companies that pride themselves on innovation without sacrificing quality.
SUV = Big-Assed RWD Station Wagon of Olden Days
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I believe that last year, more trucks/SUVs were sold in the US than cars. Compare that to Australia, where it's about 20:1 cars:trucks.
Here's where I think it comes from.
Americans have always loved a kind of car that exists nowhere else in the world - the full-size, full-frame rear-wheel-drive land yacht. You know, the Ford LTD and the Chevy Caprice Classics.
And, being that I'm 6'3", I don't fit very comfortably into anything smaller, so I can understand the special appeal of these cars.
Unfortunately, instead of letting the free market decide what size Americans want their cars, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) laws were imposed on the automakers, and the land yachts were discontinued.
Interestingly enough, as the land yachts were phased out, sales of SUVs increased. And I don't mean the silly little Japanese tinfoil SUVs like Sidekicks, CR-Vs and Toyota Rectal Assault Vehicles; I mean the real ones - Grand Cherokee, Ford Exploder, and the granddaddy of 'em all, the Suburban - so named because it's as big as a Wal*Mart parking lot.
Since trucks are exempt from CAFE laws, you can give the buying public what they want very easily: stick a station wagon body onto a pickup truck frame, sell it on image, and the Crown Victorias and Caprice Estate wagons of yesteryear really haven't gone anywhere... though they may be a little taller (less aerodynamic) and have more weight and drag from carrying around a transfer case and front differential...
If things had been left alone, the millions of barrels of oil being wasted to the poorer aerodynamics and the greater weight of an SUV would still be awaiting their turn at the refinery. Accountants wouldn't be feeling foolishly invulnerable as they turn on the four wheel drive because of three inches of snow on the ground.
CAFE is now or soon to be applied to trucks. It'll be interesting to see how the free market works its way around this next round of government interference, how it will backfire.
Don't laugh, either. If the tree-hugging energy zealots knew how much energy your Athlon "wasted", they'd be trying to ban that, too.
"every possible audio connector"? No. I want XLR.
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and looking at the specs, it appears as though it's got every possible audio connector you can possibly think of
No. There's no XLR.
All my stereo equipment uses XLR patch cables because XLR is balanced and therefore induces almost no noise into the signal. It's a professional format, commonly seen on microphones.
I had to build it into my faithful old SB16; nuked the on-board output amplifier and replaced it with a pair of 12AX7 vacuum tubes because their high operating voltages make induced noise less significant than with comparable gain from semiconductors. And having tubes inside your computer is cool. The tubes are driven directly off the D/A converter outputs and drive my balanced line outputs.
The rest of the system puts to shame the plastic crap most people use as computer sound systems. The amplifier is an early semiconductor model, a Sound A-5000 from about 1968. The noisy germanium preamplifier stage was replaced with 12AX7s with DC filament supplies, zener B+ regulation and a few other hacks. These drive the original transistor output stage, which is surprisingly good. The speakers are Acoustic Research AR-4x, which sit on either side of my monitors (dual-headed display). I'm not really much of an Enya fan, but I've made people weep by playing an MP3 of "Only Time" with that system.
I would imagine that there is a burgeoning market for audiophile sound cards; solid engineering and impeccable quality are more important to me than "3D Simulation" or "32 voices" or any of the other crap that the marketing department invents.
For better protection, spray paint the crate in really bright, catchy colors. I would use yellow/red/black/green/blue spray paint and paint swirls, spots, lines, outline corners and 12 inch tall letters saying FRAGILE.
That's a great idea.
I used to work for a division of Litton, and often had to ship radar displays as rush deliveries for customers whose ships couldn't leave port until the radar was arrived and installed. (It's a safety thing, you wounldn't drive your car on a long trip if windshield wipers and headlights didn't work, would you?)
Imagine a ship, costing $10,000 an hour in crew, port fees, diesel fuel, shore power and water, late penalties from their own customers, waiting for a radar transceiver before they can sail.... and, as I'm sure you can also imagine, radar equipment, while built tougher than consumer electronics, tends to be delicate.
Yes, $10k/hr sounds huge. And it is. To put it in perspective, we're also talking about operating costs of a vehicle with a four-story tall diesel engine.
In my experience, UPS loses stuff. FedEx gets it there, but it's broken when it arrives. And Purolator does either at random. At $10,000/hr, if you want to win brownie points with your customers, you toss the crates into the back of your pickup truck and drive them there.
Finally, looking at the devastation wrought on the poor guy's little server farm there, how did that RCA jack on his video card get bent? It looks suspiciously like something was plugged into it when it was shipped; I can't imagine any other way to obtain sufficient leverage to bend it that far.
Do you have a page where we can watch a real-time view of your site getting slashdotted?
Heh. I should do that, but I think it could become a vicious circle.
The best I can offer right now is that you go to my main page (www.glowingplate.com/welcome.shtml) and look at the uptime at the bottom of the page. The server load is currently running about 1.50; most CPU cycles are still going to SETI@Home or to the script which sniffs out the worm attacks.
Violence induces more violence. Retaliation will only lead to more deaths. If you are a citizen of the U.S. of America, please write your representative right now and ask him to join a plea for peace. Historically the U.S. reaction to this kind of attack is to counter strike. It's highly probably that it's already being planned or even carried on. That will solve nothing.
Dude. This is worse than Pearl Harbor.
Get with the real world. You're dealing, most likely, with Arab terrorists. They're born and raised to think martyrdom after destroying civilian targets is the way to Mecca.
The only thing they understand is violence. This is the start of World War III. Make no mistake about it.
It's time to clean up the Middle East. And I'm afraid that will mean a lot of collateral damage to their civilians, but *the fucking World Trade Center* went down.
I don't care about a few Syrian or Afghani or whoever women and children in the face of *at least 50,000 innocent civilians* dying.
I've been to the World Trade Center dozens of times. I know (knew?) people who worked there. I can't believe they're gone. I'm watching CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS all at once on my antique TV set collection, and it's all so surreal.
I'm a Canadian computer geek with military radar and electronics experience working for a huge American defense contractor. I've held IATA airport security clearance.
I fear World War III is following. I'm willing to help. I'm willing.
Allow me to take a moment to voice my solidarity with the people of the United States, the American government and even President Bush.
... is to make sure all my windows are placed in exact positions on the screen. I even make sure that windows that auto-dock to corners of the screen are positioned in such a way that they're close enough but not really docking at all. (e.g. making sure XMMS/Winamp is exactly 10 pixels from the screen borders) Call me obsessive-compulsive.;-)
One word: Prozac.
Explanation: Do you know what a car looks like when it's stored in thousands of little ziplock baggies? Every nut, bolt, screw, and washer labelled as to where it came from?
I bought so many Ziplock baggies from my local warehouse-style super-saver grocery store that they had the cops meet me outside. They thought I was a big-time drug trafficker. When I invited them to my house to show they my car, they couldn't stop laughing and shaking their heads.
That was when I got help.
OTOH, it's very easy to find a water pump pulley bolt as I reassemble the engine.
While I take no responsibility for anyone getting killed by following my suggestion, I've built my own EDM system for taking broken iron bolts out of aluminum automotive castings. It uses a microwave oven transformer and a bank of oil-filled capacitors. It's a profoundly dangerous machine if you build it wrong. But I've also blown 1/2" Grade-8 bolts out of aluminum castings in a matter of hours.
The idea that a machine running Apache is "vunerable" to a trojan that depends on a superuser saving and running an email attachment of unkown origin
Indeed. Ironic, isn't it, that this is essentially what the majority of Outlook users do when funky stuff appears in their e-mail boxes.
Interesting how the author of this warning is attributing the same level of intelligence to Apache sysadmins as one attributes to a donut-eating secretary who festoons her machine with screen-mates and horsehead screensavers.
I noticed also that the first pop-up ad which hit me after I opened the article at vnunet.com was for Microsoft's Enterprise Server software. And Vnunet's logo has the same font and feel as the top of a page at microsoft.com.
This feels like a M$ publicity stunt. It's time to shut the bastards down somehow.
Oops. I posted a link to my video of that as a reply to the first post, just to make sure that it was about the first thing you see if you read the comments. (Yeah, I'm a karma whore, and I'm looking for work, so I'm trying to keep myself Slashdotted.)
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. My Ram is hardly efficient. It's got a 400 and gets about 7 MPG on whatever I pour down the tank.
But the point is well taken, and when I slap a Slant-6 and A-833 four speed with overdrive manual transmission in there, I'll be running about 25 MPG. Not bad for a brand-new full-size pickup truck, let alone one that is 25 years old.
As for the fuel flexibility, that's the beauty of older cars. Stick an oxygen sensor into the exhaust system and a meter under the hood. Make sure your carb has a soldered brass float, not a plastic one. Replace your fuel pump with an aftermarket hi-perf pump, and the little 1" long sections of hose on your fuel filter. Pour in the methanol, tune and time for best meter readings, and take her cruising. Ideally, you should get a cam ground for the new fuel and play with your ignition timing curves, but they both burn similarly enough to gasoline that the engines run perfectly happily and cleaner than the law requires 'em to.
On a similar note, I have a 1974 Dodge Dart with a 383.Very nice! I've also got a 1970 Dodge Dart and a 1974 Valiant Brougham. They're both 4-door. The Dart is a little granny car with that great front end. Since its motor isn't original, I think I'll put the big block from my truck in there so that I can have a bit of a sleeper. The Valiant is like a miniature New Yorker, born of the oil crisis: smallest car Chrysler made at the time, but with a gorgeous crushed velour and leather interior. Oh, and shag carpeting; it was the 70s.
With no catalytic converter, and no emissions equipment whatsoever, it passed the IM inspection with better marks than my wife's poorly tuned toyota tercel.Yup. Few of the tree-huggers who promote catalytic converters know that it reduces gas mileage which causes more gas to be burned and therefore more pollutants to be released. They also don't understand the basic chemistry behind it, and how it is that cataclysmic converters help to cause acid rain. But they're all happy, sitting around in healing circles, playing folk guitar and slapping themselves on the back for being good people.
What a crime. Think of how nice the exhaust from a modern fuel-injected multivalve car, running without a catalytic converter, would be.
Absolutely, and I wouldn't want to be in this vehicle surrounded by soccer moms in SUVs. I'll stick with my trusty and rugged 1976 Dodge Ram, thank you very much.
Now, prior to modding me down or flaming me because you disagree with me, I'm a BSc EE. So, unless you're capable of explaining to me - mathematically, no less - how a ferrous laminate core in saturation will behave, I suggest you sit down and shut up.
Unfortunately, I think most Slashdot readers have a problem with reality. They're conditioned to hard disks that double in capacity every 16 months and processors that double in speed every 18 months and have been doing so for the 15 years they've been alive.
However, they fail to understand that battery technology is mature, or that the electric car is not a new idea being stifled by the big mean oil companies.
Edison built an electric car in the 1890s, before the internal combustion engine (or any other technology) had emerged as the way of powering cars. Many other people tried it, too. Electric cars of the 1890s weren't too different from the electric cars of today - big pile of lead-acid batteries (which some modern electric cars use), electric motor(s) driving the wheels directly, some even had simple regenerative braking. And yet the rickety and cumbersome internal combustion engines of the day still took over, for much the same reasons as the gasoline engine still rules today: electric cars simply are not practical.
Let's look at Los Angeles as an example, since they've got millions of commuters and a smog problem.
Remember California's power crisis in the summer of 2000? Rotating blackouts, etc? How do you think that's gonna be when 10,000,000 people are plugging in their electric cars every night? That power has to come from somewhere, you know.
So, since SoCal really doesn't have enough water to build too many more hydroelectric dams, the electricity to recharge the cars will have to come from either coal or nuclear power plants. Forget the solar cells, wind and wave power; they still haven't graduated from the realm of high school science fair projects and the whimsey of Bachelor of Arts in English Literature people who think they can solve the world's problems.
With either coal or nuclear, you have the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome. I don't think political pressures would allow sufficient power plants to be built close enough to L.A. to recharge all those cars without transmission (power line) losses wasting more energy than you're actually using.
Net effect? If electric cars start to catch on, start buying candles; the laws of supply and demand suggest that electricity will become very expensive.
The cars themselves are an issue, too: a comparatively small container of gasoline is dangerous enough. Electric cars will have to be packed to the tits full of efficient batteries to maintain the kind of range people need from their cars. And the more efficient the battery, by necessity, the more nasty the chemicals it's got inside it. Fender-benders will mean haz-mat team calls and chemical burns, as batteries are ruptured onto the highway. Gasoline is unpleasant and flammable, but it's relatively benign compared to the sulphuric acid in a typical car battery (1890s technology), let alone the bizarre concoctions in a modern highly efficient battery.
I'm not too keen on driving around in a car with raw hydrogen on board, either. Hydrogen sweats through cast iron tanks like acetylene, and is far more flammable. I don't feel like being incinerated the first time someone cuts me off on the 405.
Yup. I'll stick with my internal combustion engine, thank you very much. My 1976 Dodge Ram burns ethanol, methanol and gasoline very happily with only minor adjustments between fuel types.
oh, come on! what is this, the Inquisition?! i am so sick and tired of this "anyone who uses Windows is an idiot" dogma, which is why this is the first time I have been to Slashdot in months.
Nope, not true. In fact, I think M$ still has the best compromise between GUI and features and available software. I run Windows 2000 on my main desktop machine; believe me, I'll be running *NIX as soon as KDE has the very few remaining things that I need it to have. (KDE is *so* pretty.)
However, running Windows 2000 on a routable IP addess is dangerous and irresponsible for Handsome Hubby to surf the net, let alone for someone to actually serve pages.
You'll be pleased to note that the machine from which I am typing this does not run IIS, and has an IP address of 192.168.0.1.
It's like a Corvair: the only safe way to drive it is in slow little circles in a parking lot.
if that's all you ever have to contribute, you must be a real putz.No, that's not all that I have to contribute. Though I am a real putz.
Even though it's called a "Time Machine", it won't work on live telivision.
You know the instant replay feature on Tivo? This is just the reverse of that.
More interestingly... TV has a kinda standard 22 minutes of program per 1/2 hour show. This number evolved not because broadcasters didn't want to run more advertisements, but because it's the point at which balance is achieved between the numbers of spots run and the number of viewers you have to see them.
The revenue plot can be likened to a negative quadratic equation. Too many commercials and people stop tuning in, hence lost ratings and lost $$. The other side of the scale is not enough commercials, therefore not enough advertising dollars.
The vertex, if you will, is around 8 minutes of programming in a 30 minute program, and it's a number which has remained pretty constant since the mass-acceptance of television in the 1950s.
This technique will therefore really only be of value in attempting to adjust a TV show to appeal to the same sorts of people who watch infomercials. (Who the hell watches those, anyway?)
Metropolis (the original) was ripped off by Madonna for her "Express Yourself" video.
Feh. I'm not much of a Madonna fan, so I didn't notice. I guess I'm a somewhat atypical homosexual: we're supposed to love Madonna. (I, however, prefer Jimi Hendrix and Howard Stern.)
Hmmm... Maybe my distaste for anime stems from the fact that there are no hot anime guys?
I liked the original much better.Oh yeah, for sure. Though I'll hit Gnutella and see if I can check out Madonna's video.
Perhaps even bigger news is that the mega anime film hit Metropolis is being release at the same time
Oh, for Christ's sake, that's not the real Metropolis. This is the real Metropolis.
<sigh> All you young pups, just wanting your talkies, their 3 FPS scantily-clad cartoon characters with their monolithic teeth.
Quoted from www.furthernet.com:
Ack... Furthur's been slashdotted!Our slogan is now: "We should have used Apache!"
Well, d'uh.
When I saw the IIS Server Busy error, they lost all their credibility with me.
that up to around 50 users or so, you are unlikely to step on each others toes except under exceptional circumstances (not more than 4 or 5 are likely to be on at the same time
Over 6,000 MP3s on a fileserver, being shared by TWO roommates through TWO Gnutella clients cranked up to 10 hosts each.
2.2Mbps DSL is enough for anyone, my ass.
Heheheh...
That's it : if your ip is typical from a home subnet, you'r using NAT.
Or, maybe you're just running a separate firewall to prevent your Windows box from being a sitting duck to script kiddieZ.
Myself, there are about 8 machines running behind my DSL. But a system I set up for a friend is OpenBSD on a Rogers cable modem, driving a Windows box. There's not even a hub involved - just a crossover.
He and I agree: Running Windows on a routable IP address is an act of great stupidity. The ISPs should be grateful for the reduced liability.
This setup doesn't violate the spirit of the service agreement - there's still only one computer connected to the ISP's network. And, in this particular case, it doesn't violate the spirit of the TOS agreement - the OpenBSD box does nothing more than ZoneAlarm, only better.
Heh. Of course, the ISPs will act short-sightedly.
I was just recalling hairball speculations have been made before and asking others to see connections. However, sigh, you got 2 points, I got none -- you win.
Nah. I had few new ideas there, I merely packaged yours in such a way that the average dimwit surfing in from seach.msn.com can figure it out. I guess I'm gonna be the next Bill Gates.
Someone better shoot me now.
Quoted from article:
A true replacement for the car!No. When the vehicle is mine personally, and I can leave my crap kicking around on the front seat, and most importantly that it goes where I point the steering wheel, then I'll call it a car.
Public transit proponents apparently don't understand the visceral pleasure of punching the gas pedal and peeling the rear wheels. Much like I don't understand the pleasure of hugging a tree.
The first is a Maintenance Nightmare, the second proposes the smart highway/smart vehicle system in which a driver can allow the system to drive the vehicle or drive the vehicle manually. Any design which imposes a mandatory track and vehicle configuration such as that depicted in the article is a hole into which one can through one's money.I should think those would be the least of their worries. If the car isn't my own vehicle and I'm given sovereignty over it, there'd better be a rental company paperwork nightmare every time I get into a vehicle by myself.
Otherwise, I would think that going to work in a car where the seats were still full of the back-from-the-pub puke of the previous patron would be the *least* of Cardiff's worries.
How do *you* treat a car that you don't care about? Spilled ice cream? Overloading it by carrying 20 sheets of drywall? Kicking doors open?How are you going to track down who did the damage to a vehicle which appears to function autonomously?
Quoted from BBC's article:
vandal-proofThat sounds like a challenge. But, to paraphrase an old saying, invent a vandal-proof device, and someone invents a better vandal.
This is just another reason for anyone who can afford to leave a place which imposes high taxes and affords no standard of living to do so: if this is forced on the city, they can expect an exodus of doctors, scientists and engineers.
Most disturbingly, those who would normally espouse public transit at all costs are also usually the most staunch advocates of privacy rights. And yet, there appears to be no great outcry from the fact that your access card would, by necessity, have to track your every movement for fare calculations, and your ID for damage control. Don't want the government to know that you go to a gay bar every Tuesday night? Or that you're a closet white supremacist? Or even what supermarkets you shop at? Tough. They'll know.
This is sheer idiocy. I was born in Cardiff. This and Tom Jones are both good reasons not to go back.
Unfortunately, people are not required to have a truck license for SUVs and minivans...
No. But I don't believe the rise of minivans and SUVs is coincidental to the fall of the full-size land yacht American station wagon.
I'm sure this is gonna cost me karma, but I don't care: if the environmental lobby hadn't pushed to improve automotive gas mileage, the SUV would have remained the niche vehicle it was in the late 1970s. *Billions* of barrels of oil would have been saved if the Caprice Estate Wagon was still in production.
Think of how much oil is wasted to the aerodynamic drag of taller SUVs and minivans, to the inefficient tires and heavy 4x4 drivetrain which were used as marketing devices to get Joe Accountant to trade in the family wagon on a Blazer.
And yet, the environmentalists want to impose CAFE on trucks. This will mean the death of the domestic tough-as-nails pickup truck, and will result it pickup trucks based on such lightweight and flimsy platforms as the Honda CR-V, the Toyota RAV-4, and domestic equivalents we haven't seen yet.
Naturally, any farmer who has to move three quarters of a ton of sheep manure to the neighbor's fields isn't going to try to do it with a unibody vehicle powered by a transverse mounted four-cylinder engine. He's gonna fire up his old V8-powered rear-wheel-drive full-frame Chevrolet Cheyenne, and move the sheep shit.
If CAFE causes these vehicles to suddenly become unavailable on the new market, the intent of CAFE will be utterly thwarted as used pickup trucks depreciate even more slowly than they currently do, and those people who need a real truck will work very hard to keep their aging vehicles on the road - despite old technology like carburetors, transmissions without overdrive, rudimentary spark timing systems - not to mention the effects of age and wear on these systems.
CAFE will backfire again. Check back with me in 20 years. I'm quite convinced I'll still have my 1976 Dodge Ram: They don't make 'em like they used to, and that will be even more apparent in the years to come.
and the stuff you dismiss casually as marketing crap appeals to a wider market than audiophile would, which means more dollars for the card manufactuers
It's a slippery slope between "32 Voices" (Who actually uses the synth in their sound card anyway? Tell me about the D/A converters, not crap like that) and today's "200 Watt" computer speakers which display efficiency in defiance of the basic physics law of conservation of energy by being powered off a 9V 300mA wall wart.
Yeah, admittedly, Joe Consumer is a fool, too stupid to be entrusted to spend his dollar intelligently. VHS vs. Beta, Commodore 64 vs. TI-99/4A, IBM PC vs. Amiga. Yeah, it *is* a niche market. But a niche market with money, educated consumers who are conscious of quality. If that no longer existed, Maytags and Macintoshes would be gone.
I'll take a little comfort in knowing that there are at least a couple of companies that pride themselves on innovation without sacrificing quality.
I believe that last year, more trucks/SUVs were sold in the US than cars. Compare that to Australia, where it's about 20:1 cars:trucks.
Here's where I think it comes from.
Americans have always loved a kind of car that exists nowhere else in the world - the full-size, full-frame rear-wheel-drive land yacht. You know, the Ford LTD and the Chevy Caprice Classics.
And, being that I'm 6'3", I don't fit very comfortably into anything smaller, so I can understand the special appeal of these cars.
Unfortunately, instead of letting the free market decide what size Americans want their cars, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) laws were imposed on the automakers, and the land yachts were discontinued.
Interestingly enough, as the land yachts were phased out, sales of SUVs increased. And I don't mean the silly little Japanese tinfoil SUVs like Sidekicks, CR-Vs and Toyota Rectal Assault Vehicles; I mean the real ones - Grand Cherokee, Ford Exploder, and the granddaddy of 'em all, the Suburban - so named because it's as big as a Wal*Mart parking lot.
Since trucks are exempt from CAFE laws, you can give the buying public what they want very easily: stick a station wagon body onto a pickup truck frame, sell it on image, and the Crown Victorias and Caprice Estate wagons of yesteryear really haven't gone anywhere... though they may be a little taller (less aerodynamic) and have more weight and drag from carrying around a transfer case and front differential...
If things had been left alone, the millions of barrels of oil being wasted to the poorer aerodynamics and the greater weight of an SUV would still be awaiting their turn at the refinery. Accountants wouldn't be feeling foolishly invulnerable as they turn on the four wheel drive because of three inches of snow on the ground.
CAFE is now or soon to be applied to trucks. It'll be interesting to see how the free market works its way around this next round of government interference, how it will backfire.
Don't laugh, either. If the tree-hugging energy zealots knew how much energy your Athlon "wasted", they'd be trying to ban that, too.
and looking at the specs, it appears as though it's got every possible audio connector you can possibly think of
No. There's no XLR.
All my stereo equipment uses XLR patch cables because XLR is balanced and therefore induces almost no noise into the signal. It's a professional format, commonly seen on microphones.
I had to build it into my faithful old SB16; nuked the on-board output amplifier and replaced it with a pair of 12AX7 vacuum tubes because their high operating voltages make induced noise less significant than with comparable gain from semiconductors. And having tubes inside your computer is cool. The tubes are driven directly off the D/A converter outputs and drive my balanced line outputs.
The rest of the system puts to shame the plastic crap most people use as computer sound systems. The amplifier is an early semiconductor model, a Sound A-5000 from about 1968. The noisy germanium preamplifier stage was replaced with 12AX7s with DC filament supplies, zener B+ regulation and a few other hacks. These drive the original transistor output stage, which is surprisingly good. The speakers are Acoustic Research AR-4x, which sit on either side of my monitors (dual-headed display). I'm not really much of an Enya fan, but I've made people weep by playing an MP3 of "Only Time" with that system.
I would imagine that there is a burgeoning market for audiophile sound cards; solid engineering and impeccable quality are more important to me than "3D Simulation" or "32 voices" or any of the other crap that the marketing department invents.
US try this twice and was unable to find Ottawa ! Mayby, last time you will learn how to use a map !
Heh. Since the last time, the 416 has been built, it's four lanes of asphalt with large signs directing you right to Parliament Hill.
A map is no longer required.
For better protection, spray paint the crate in really bright, catchy colors. I would use yellow/red/black/green/blue spray paint and paint swirls, spots, lines, outline corners and 12 inch tall letters saying FRAGILE.
That's a great idea.
I used to work for a division of Litton, and often had to ship radar displays as rush deliveries for customers whose ships couldn't leave port until the radar was arrived and installed. (It's a safety thing, you wounldn't drive your car on a long trip if windshield wipers and headlights didn't work, would you?)
Imagine a ship, costing $10,000 an hour in crew, port fees, diesel fuel, shore power and water, late penalties from their own customers, waiting for a radar transceiver before they can sail.... and, as I'm sure you can also imagine, radar equipment, while built tougher than consumer electronics, tends to be delicate.
Yes, $10k/hr sounds huge. And it is. To put it in perspective, we're also talking about operating costs of a vehicle with a four-story tall diesel engine.
In my experience, UPS loses stuff. FedEx gets it there, but it's broken when it arrives. And Purolator does either at random. At $10,000/hr, if you want to win brownie points with your customers, you toss the crates into the back of your pickup truck and drive them there.
Finally, looking at the devastation wrought on the poor guy's little server farm there, how did that RCA jack on his video card get bent? It looks suspiciously like something was plugged into it when it was shipped; I can't imagine any other way to obtain sufficient leverage to bend it that far.
Heh. I should do that, but I think it could become a vicious circle.
The best I can offer right now is that you go to my main page (www.glowingplate.com/welcome.shtml) and look at the uptime at the bottom of the page. The server load is currently running about 1.50; most CPU cycles are still going to SETI@Home or to the script which sniffs out the worm attacks.
I would forward this to the Help Desk people here, but then they'd know I was reading
Just e-mail them this link: www.glowingplate.com/ida.shtml. Tell them that a friend sent it to you.
The link goes to a page offering a real-time view of the new worm attacking my machine.
Violence induces more violence. Retaliation will only lead to more deaths. If you are a citizen of the U.S. of America, please write your representative right now and ask him to join a plea for peace. Historically the U.S. reaction to this kind of attack is to counter strike. It's highly probably that it's already being planned or even carried on. That will solve nothing.
Dude. This is worse than Pearl Harbor.
Get with the real world. You're dealing, most likely, with Arab terrorists. They're born and raised to think martyrdom after destroying civilian targets is the way to Mecca.
The only thing they understand is violence. This is the start of World War III. Make no mistake about it.
It's time to clean up the Middle East. And I'm afraid that will mean a lot of collateral damage to their civilians, but *the fucking World Trade Center* went down.
I don't care about a few Syrian or Afghani or whoever women and children in the face of *at least 50,000 innocent civilians* dying.
This is war. It's not pretty.
Actually, there were 3 planes hitting the towers.
I've been to the World Trade Center dozens of times. I know (knew?) people who worked there. I can't believe they're gone. I'm watching CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS all at once on my antique TV set collection, and it's all so surreal.
I'm a Canadian computer geek with military radar and electronics experience working for a huge American defense contractor. I've held IATA airport security clearance.
I fear World War III is following. I'm willing to help. I'm willing.
Allow me to take a moment to voice my solidarity with the people of the United States, the American government and even President Bush.
This is war.
One word: Prozac.
Explanation: Do you know what a car looks like when it's stored in thousands of little ziplock baggies? Every nut, bolt, screw, and washer labelled as to where it came from?
I bought so many Ziplock baggies from my local warehouse-style super-saver grocery store that they had the cops meet me outside. They thought I was a big-time drug trafficker. When I invited them to my house to show they my car, they couldn't stop laughing and shaking their heads.
That was when I got help.
OTOH, it's very easy to find a water pump pulley bolt as I reassemble the engine.
Where can I get one?
Build one! The worst part is three stepper motors driving an XYZ table under computer control.
I like EDM myself. Here's a little on EDM, including a link on how to build a very simple one.
While I take no responsibility for anyone getting killed by following my suggestion, I've built my own EDM system for taking broken iron bolts out of aluminum automotive castings. It uses a microwave oven transformer and a bank of oil-filled capacitors. It's a profoundly dangerous machine if you build it wrong. But I've also blown 1/2" Grade-8 bolts out of aluminum castings in a matter of hours.
Wanna hire a computer geek who also knows how to do stuff like this? Great for integrating computers into robotic, industrial and automotive manufacturing processes.
The idea that a machine running Apache is "vunerable" to a trojan that depends on a superuser saving and running an email attachment of unkown origin
Indeed. Ironic, isn't it, that this is essentially what the majority of Outlook users do when funky stuff appears in their e-mail boxes.
Interesting how the author of this warning is attributing the same level of intelligence to Apache sysadmins as one attributes to a donut-eating secretary who festoons her machine with screen-mates and horsehead screensavers.
I noticed also that the first pop-up ad which hit me after I opened the article at vnunet.com was for Microsoft's Enterprise Server software. And Vnunet's logo has the same font and feel as the top of a page at microsoft.com.
This feels like a M$ publicity stunt. It's time to shut the bastards down somehow.
i have a copy here (please dont kill my server
Oops. I posted a link to my video of that as a reply to the first post, just to make sure that it was about the first thing you see if you read the comments. (Yeah, I'm a karma whore, and I'm looking for work, so I'm trying to keep myself Slashdotted.)
Anyway, my mirror is here.