Dude, he's right on all counts, unfortunately. I detest the Republicans because while I'm a fiscal conservative, I'm also a social liberal. And a lot of the Democrats environmental platform is just simply dangerous, in that it causes problems like rolling blackouts and erodes one's freedom to drive (or even possess!) the vehicle of his/her choice.
Having said that, they're not completely to blame, Cash for Clunkers and other misguided concepts were pioneered by Republicans as ways for their big oil friends to appear to be doing something for the environment.
BTW, it's "you're", as in a contraction of "you are". "Your" is possessive.
First, you should not confuse the "not in my backyard" folks with the enviromentalists. These are two almost totally unrelated groups who want almost totally diffrent things, i.e. the "not in my backyard" people will be quit happy to see the power plant to go in the ecologically importent swamp in the next county..
Effectively, though, environmentalists *are* all too often the same thing, simply by virtue of their shortsightedness.
For example, Western European environmentalists scored a big win: they managed to basically kill the nuclear power projects in Western Europe. Western Europe's electricity is now mostly made from natural gas.
One of the world's biggest suppliers of natural gas is Russia. So, Russia sells as much of their natural gas as they can to Western Europe. In order to ensure that the natural gas is available for sale, Russia shuts down their gas power plants and fires up a couple of mothballed RBMK reactors to produce their own power.
Now, which would you rather have, the running Western European reactor three miles from your house, or a running Russian RBMK flammable-moderator reactor in the Ukraine?
Chernobyl was an accident with profound world-wide environmental consequences. While operator error was at fault, Russian reactor design contributed hugely to the severity of the accident. In a French reactor, for example, it would have been a note in the operating log and a fired employee, nothing more.
a) I think breader
breEder
reacters
reactOrs
make very clean nukes and no enviromentalists are objecting to these things (they have a small problem that the millitary
miLitary
must monitor them since they produce high grade plutonium).
Breeder reactors are a great idea. Like solar power. Like tidal power. Like wind power. However, these aren't computers. Things change at an incremental pace; nuclear power (and power plants in general, which are primarily about mechanical engineering) is a relatively mature technology. Don't expect quantum leaps.
As it is, breeders are inefficient. Perhaps that's the wrong term since they actually *create* fuel while they consume it, but for the dollar investment and for the quantity of fuel in the core, they really can't be harnessed to produce a hell of a lot of heat. Heat, of course, boils water which spins turbines and therefore generators.
b) Solar is very cost effective if you allow the companies to charge more for it *and* require people to pay for it when the company provides it.
So you want to undermine the free market economy and force people to buy something that is more expensive when there's a cheaper alternative? I thought you'd just said solar was cost effective?
For the record, it's not. It requires vast quantities of land where you *will* kill the ecosystem, large investments in solar cells, storage batteries (solar doesn't produce power off moonlight, you know) and inverters (solar cells put out DC, the electric grid requires AC to function).
You just need to pass a law which requires people to pay the additional costs for solar AND pay the company and extra 1% or 2% profit on top (multiplied by the percentage of the power which is solar).
Sure!
I propose a law that we force everyone who has ever been a member of any environmentalist group to have to buy electricity *exclusively* from power sources that they have pushed into existance.
Don't get used to cold beer, it ain't gonna happen too often in your fridge.
Finally, it was deregulation and not enviromental regulations which prevented plants from being built. The companies felt they could delay building new plants to save money.
Yes, and no. Unfortunately, the environmental regulations make it so expensive that the energy companies didn't feel building new plants was a worthwhile investment.
Admittedly, the fault was on both sides.
Also, who cares that CA is forcing people to replace their cars?
I care.
I love old cars. I want to be able to drive the car of my choice. And I want to be able to get parts for my old car.
How can you ask "who cares"? It's an erosion of personal freedom. Of liberty. Even if you're not interested in cars, even with your apparently mediocre intelligence, you should see this as a first step down a dangerous path.
The bigger the monitor, the more energy it consumes. I propose that we not allow anyone Internet access if their monitor is bigger than 15". Further, I suggest that if we see a 17" monitor on someone's property, even though they can't get on the Internet with it anymore, we confiscate it and destroy it.
Concerned yet? This is exactly what is being done with cars and old car fans.
That is a great idea and very few of the current cars will live for 10 years anyway.
Yeah, maybe the fact that cars aren't built the way they used to be is part of the reason why I like old cars.
If I'm shelling out $20,000+ for *anything*, you'd better bet your ass that I expect it to last.
Hell, all the eco-friendly cars are cheaper to run (those saturn electric cars cost like 1/4th as much as a good gas car),
Until you have to replace the batteries.
Sadly, they also have about 1/4 of the drivability. And 1/4 of the range. And if you think a gas engine is hard to start when it's cold, just you wait until you're wanting to go to work and all your batteries are frozen.
And what about California's power problems? I can't wait to see the rolling blackouts when millions of commuters are plugging in battery-powered cars to recharge them.
Environmentally, too, you have to remember that a battery, by its very definition, is full of nasty, caustic and toxic chemicals. The more efficient the battery, the more nasty its ingredients are. And an electric car will be packed full of them. Every fender-bender on the freeway will result in a Haz-Mat team being called out to clean up the electrolyte before it trickles down storm sewers. Chemical burns will be a routine part of every car accident. And when these cars start to wear out and get scrapped, you're not going to get all the batteries back. Some will end up in lakes, and streams, and hiding in the pile of crap in my neighbor's back yard, etc.
so making everyone buy one will mean that the price must drop.
Okay. I'm the government. Your computer is taking too much energy. So, we're going to force you to spend $6,000 on this energy-efficient 486SLC-33.
Man, I hope you're never allowed to vote anywhere. You're as fascist as Hitler.
Who knows maybe I will be able to buy a cheap eco-friendly car on the east cost in a few years.
Maybe, yes. And I hope you can. But I also think that the free market economy will provide it, not government regulation.
Anyway, no one will sit arround for rolling blackouts. The government will pay for new plants and (hopefully) the power company officials will go to jail.
For being intelligent businessmen and doing the best they could with the situation created by the laws that had been passed?
Wow, the mass exodus of businesses from your little piece of the world would be staggering.
Wanna pay the taxes to build those new plants? That'll be a neat trick once you've used the threat of jail time to drive the economy away.
Who knows maybe they will just export the socialist power from LA to the rest of the state.
Ah, yes. Socialism works *so* well, as has been proven time after time in countries as diverse as Russia, Cuba, Bulgaria, East Germany, China... And *all* those countries, wonderful socialist goverments that they have/had, are *so* well known for their *excellent* treatment of the environment.
Your short-sightness and flagrant disregard for reality - neigh, common sense! - simultanously upsets, distresses, scares and even amuses me.
I wouldn't sit a car battery right on my carpet. At least get one of those plastic battery cases to contain any acit that might leak out (esp while charging the battery).
A fast food tray is enough. I occasionally bring a cold battery in from outside to charge it. Theoretically, acid shouldn't leak out while you're charging - if it does, you're charging it too hard and the escaping hydrogen is pushing the acid out of the cells where it spills to the floor.
Having said that, batteries aren't always perfectly sealed, even with the caps on the cells...
If you hear your battery making noises like a frothy bubbling sound, stop charging: you're overcharging it. Be careful that the switch on the charger is *below* the battery, because the frothy bubbling is lighter-than-air and extremely flammable hydrogen. Do not smoke near the battery.
Make sure that wherever it is that you're charging the battery, you've got it well ventilated. I always wear a pair of safety glasses and keep a box of baking soda around just in case the battery blows up. And it does happen. It looks like the Hindenburg, only smaller, and shooting hot sulphuric acid around.
When you're using the battery, you can worry a little less about ventilation: they only give it off when they're being charged.
Remember that a lead-acid battery, however inelegant and unrefined they may be, packs a hell of a lot of energy in a small space. You don't want to release that energy without being careful how it's controlled. A good car battery can make a 1/4" diameter screwdriver shank glow bright cherry red in under 5 seconds. And I've seen an engineer lose a finger because the iron pinky ring that engineers wear got shorted across a car battery. Red hot iron ring around a finger = amputated finger.
Be careful and respectful of the power of a battery.
I'd recommend wiring one of these to your UPS when expecting long blackouts. Its a 12V, 125Ah marine battery and each one added should provide several hours of entertainment and lighting when the grid's out.
For sure, that's a great idea.
However, you don't need to specify marine batteries: Around here, Wal*Mart sells deep cycle batteries primarily meant for electric trolling (fishing) motors. They're off the shelf, relatively cheap (<$100) and will happily power an appropriate UPS.
If you can't find that, you can use a car battery, if need be. But a car battery doesn't like to be completely discharged; the plates are designed for short-duty high current use (starting the engine).
Deep cycle = best bet. Car battery = in a pinch.
If your UPS's existing battery has 6 cells (12V), this will work. If your UPS battery has 12 cells (24V), you'll need to put two batteries in series. If you want more battery time, put two (or more) batteries in parallel. Any good auto parts store will sell the cables and battery terminal posts. If you're mixing batteries, it's a very good idea to make sure that the batteries you connect together are identical and charged to the same level. Otherwise, you get into situations where one battery charges another.
Generators optional.
Your car is a great way of replenishing the batteries if you've got a long blackout. Just remember that your alternator is not designed for use as a battery charger: if the battery is really dead, it's best to wait until the power is back on and use the real charger. And if you've got a bunch of batteries in parallel and they're all low, charge them one at a time: Alternators can be expensive to replace.
Another suggestion, which I built for my parents who were affected by the Great Ottawa Ice Storm a few years ago. A car battery, a 1970s GM internal regulator alternator, a Briggs and Stratton gas engine and one of those Statpower AC inverters (500 watt rated) - all screwed to a board - were able to provide enough power for them to use lights (sparingly) and be able to watch TV and stuff.
I think that is inherently the problem. It usually happens when I am trying to accelerate, and I try to accelerate very slowly mind you, but a sudden slipperier section of road knocked me out. Letting off the gas doesn't do much for me, I am not sure if I even have the response time.
Make sure you start out in *second* gear, not first, if it's a fishtail off the line. And make sure that *both* your rear tires are equally worn. Otherwise, you're sliding!
My very main beef with RWD systems is that in itself. IMO they just don't handle very well at all when you have sudden and unpredictable changes in road conditions.
Practice.
The other is that they get stuck easier, I have a friend that owns a Mark VIII and one time he didn't bother to stop by our house because we had some snow in his driveway, a concious decision made *bacause* it was RWD. He passed us and went home only to get stuck in his own driveway. The weight and the power are in totally different places and if the snow isn't perfectly manicured one can run into trouble if you have little momentum.
Practice!
And, make sure that you're starting out in second gear. For sure. Reverse is your enemy, because it's a *very* low gear (Often lower than first), so be careful if you're trying to rock a stuck car. Spinning the tires only melts the snow under them. When that happens, your car sinks into the hole, and the water promptly refreezes.
First gear will generally make your wheels spin too easily. You want low speed torque, not high speed rotation. Automatic transmissions are not your friend here, since most of them will always start out at first.
(ie. you put it in "D", and as you accelerate, it goes through first, then second, then into third. Put it into "2", it starts out in first, upshifts to second, and stays there. This is not what you want, you want it to be in second whenever the shifter is pointed at "2". A stickshift is a definite advantage here unless you have some years of Chrysler TorqueFlite or GM TH-350 automatic.)
Putting weight in the back is a poor hack at best, IMO.
Completely. It's a kludge. For sure, in most cars, FWD has the advantage of weight on the driven wheels. But the other advantages of RWD more than make up for it.
And remember, the weight distribution on most cars is in the 60 front, 40 rear range; regardless of FWD or RWD. If you can put the weight behind the rear axle, it won't take much. You can calculate the weight required for the distribution to be 50/50 when you know how far behind the rear axle (fulcrum) the weight is on the lever (distance between fulcrum and ballast).
*Never* put more more than 50% of your vehicle weight on your rear wheels, or you're in CorvairLand and asking for trouble.
At least the truck has 4WD to make up for it.
Not my daily driver!
'76 Dodge Ram D-140 (2WD), 400 CID (6.6L) V8, 727 TorqueFlite automatic, 9.25" diff with 3.93:1 open gear (no Posi). Weight distribution unloaded, about 75% front, 25% rear. Scary.
It's one of the worst vehicles I've ever driven in snow. It really doesn't like it. (And I can't blame it.) When I let off the brakes, the rear wheels are spinning without even touching the gas pedal. And a '76 TorqueFlite isn't one of those ones that starts out in second if you tell it to - so I lose that advantage.
But with a good set of Firestone Radial ATX tires (yes, they're recalled; yes, the treads separate; no, that's not as bad as a blowout; no, if you can't drive through a blowout, you shouldn't be allowed to drive; yes, they were cheap; no, I'm not worried, I live in a cold climate and I keep them well inflated; yes, I like them, they seem to last really well) and an old Volvo motor strapped into the very back of the bed, the truck is perfectly well mannered.
The best part is that people don't tailgate me because the old engine looks like it's precariously balanced on my back bumper.... yet another RWD advantage!
I think the handling issue is _much_ more of a platform issue than simply FWD / RWD / AWD.
Yes and no. There are some FWD cars that will handle better than some RWD cars. But primarily, the effects of FWD torque steer into a set of MacPherson struts is often insurmountable and unrecoverable.
From 1984 to maybe recently Chrysler made at least one FWD car that outcornered every GM car made up until maybe the C5 (current model) Corvette, as I have been tracking the cornering and slalom ratings in car magazines for quite a while.
Yes and no.
The Daytona/Charger/Laser platform is, of course, an Omni/Horizon derivative. Like the Shadow/Sundance, it shares the same steering geometry, same front unibody clip, same drivetrain options (for the most part). Most importantly, while the spring rates and lock-to-lock counts may be different, the same MacPherson struts, top plates and steering rack as a Shadow/Sundance or Omni/Horizon.
Now, that doesn't mean that it handles badly. In fact, Chrysler FWD has far less torque steer than the competition (notably GM's X-cars). But that doesn't mean it handles well, either.
The primary problem with a MacPherson Strut front suspension is that the steering pivot point (axis) is well behind the wheels, in an invisible line directly below the centers of the MacPherson strut to inner fender attachments under your hood. The arc that the wheels cover is big.
Now, a more conventional suspension - specifically a double-A arm - the wheel's steering axis is a vertical line drawn from the upper balljoint to the lower balljoint. Those are attached right to the steering knuckle. On most cars, that's in line with the outside of the rim. In fact, on some double-A-arm front suspensions, for example a Pontiac Fiero with alloy rims, the steering axis is almost centered within the wheels because of the offset of the rims.
(Note that a Fiero is RWD and uses MacPhersons in the back, not on the front wheels.)
This means an incredible reduction of the understeer associated with FWD, more specifically, MacPherson struts. And, because of the width of the engine and transmission transverse-mounted in the engine bay, designers often don't have any choice other than a MacPherson strut setup, which is small. Car companies like them, too, because they're cheap and lightweight.
The one company that I've seen which has addressed this effectively was Honda. Now, I don't like them, but they've done a very good thing: Honda's MacPherson struts are generally shaped so that the wheel is almost directly under the top plate. This is a great enhancement to the handling.
I have scared people with the way it corners, even with tall tires.
That's not tough to do. Most people get frightened when they're in my truck and I swing the back end out to fishtail around a corner. I've seen bus drivers in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec do it to make corners on mountain highways. Some of the people in the bus were scared there, too.
Hell, to scare people with what I drive, all I need to do is start the engine. (400 CID (6.6L) V8 in my 1976 Dodge Ram.) Just sitting at idle, the happy panting burble is subsonic, you feel it more than hear it. It feels distressingly powerful to most people.
I think the current Neon sport package can outhandle most cars even at twice the price.
Twice the price of a Neon = ~$30,000 = still FWD, still MacPherson struts, just with more body weight and sheer bulk. Yup, the Neon wins that contest. But with good tires, a Chevette (with double A-arms and RWD) will outhandle a Neon. No sweat. (Just watch out, Chevettes have really nasty brakes, so upgrade to Fiero rotors and calipers before racing your 'Vette.)
You won't see an improvement to the Neon until you actually get into RWD sports cars and sedans, like Caprice Classics, Crown Victorias, BMWs, Mercedes, not to mention the Vipers, Corvettes and mega-buck exoticars.
I have driven RWD vehicles in unpredictable icy winter conditions with much less luck. Once my rear wheels slipped I had much less directional stability than I would desire,
Okay, if you have poor directional stability in RWD and snow, *let off the gas!*.
That's all there is to it.
With FWD, you need to stay on the gas, but you want to get off it before you turn a corner, then apply power again after you're out of the corner.
In RWD, use the gas pedal as a steering device. Turn the wheels gently, hit the gas pedal just hard enough to lose traction, and you've used the fishtail to your advantage.
Or, you can drive like you are with FWD, but remember to be more gentle with the gas pedal.
I ended up in the ditch far more often than with FWD vehicles (well 2 and 0), even with a decent weight balance on the rear tires.
Like an automatic transmission, FWD tends to be easier to drive.
Like a manual transmission, learning how to drive RWD well is a lot more rewarding.
Even if I lost traction on an FWD vehicle, I still had momentum, a similar situation would put me in a tailspin on a typical RWD system.
Tailspin? Let off the gas. Be gentle. Instead of starting out in first gear, start out in second gear. Accelerate gently and skillfully, and you can make any RWD car accelerate in snow every bit as fast as the "better traction" of FWD will allow.
The gas pedal is a steering device. It's easy once you get the hang of it.
The argument that loosing drive traction means loosing steering power on FWD systems don't mean much to me because of the way most diffs are set up. If the diffs were positraction I think I might have much better luck but they aren't on many vehicles that I have noticed.
When you turn a corner, your wheels rotate at different speeds. The wheels on the outside of the corner spin faster (and cover more ground) than those on the inside of the corner. A posi differential in a front wheel drive car would be a very bad thing. Instead of letting that happen, the posi would try to make both wheels turn the same number of revolutions through the corner. The result is, since most vehicles have some caster, that the car would try to force the wheels straight as you hit the gas pedal. In order to accelerate hard into a corner, you'd have to fight against the little clutch in the differential carrier that has to slip to unlock the wheels from each other.
This is related to torque steer, but it's not quite the same thing. Olds Toronados/Buick Riveras/Caddy Eldorados were some of the early American FWD cars, had *huge* V8s (like the Cadillac 500CID (8.3L)), and often had posi FWD. Very scary to drive sometimes.)
In RWD, since the wheels are hard-mounted in their positions, the little clutch in the differential carrier gives and slips. Since it's not trying to force the front wheels to spin at the same speed, you don't feel it in the steering wheel.
Both the Aspen and Volare could be equipped with the slant-6 (I know, I owned the stationwagon).
Of course. I'm unclear as to where I said otherwise.
The base engine for the Volare/Aspen - and for most of Chryslers cars and trucks at the time - was the Slant-6. The Volare and Aspen were available with either the 318 or the 360 as an option. Chrysler big blocks, like the 400 and the 440, were available in other car lines until 1978. They were never factory installed in the F-body (Volare/Aspen), though it's an easy engine swap.
The 318 and 360 share most of their geometries with the Slant-6, so they're almost as tough, though the 318 is preferable because the heads that were being used on 360s at that time had valve lubrication problems.
The station wagon was my favorite of the lot, too. I'd love to get a 1980 Volare Premier wagon, and bolt on a 1976-1977 hood, grille, front fenders and bumper. That's a reliable and kinda cool (in a 70's retro way) looking car.
Amazing enough...there's a LOT of these cars are STILL on the road. (I still see valiants!) They got okay gas mileage...but they were reliable as hell.
The Slant-6 is widely considered to be the toughest gasoline engine ever made. Consider its heritage: it was designed in the late 1950s as an aluminum 170 CID (2.8L) racing engine. In 1958, in typical Chrysler do-or-die fashion, they had to bring out a new car, the Valiant. They still hadn't found a suitable motor for it. So, they tried the aluminum racing engine: expensive to cast, unreliable if they overheated. With no time to spare, they poured molten iron into the molds (which had been designed for softer aluminum) and the Slant-6 was born. Since the block and head castings were originally designed to be aluminum, it's amazingly tough in the high-nickel iron alloy that Chrysler chose to make them with.
By 1961, people were already starting to talk about how tough these motors were. And with their intake manifold design and the fact that they were tilted to the passenger side, they had a tunnel ram intake and a weight distribution that was set up for good handling. Valiants were quick. Chrysler eventually decided to offer a longer stroke version of the Slant-6. They brought out the 225. As emissions controls like catalytic converters and EGR systems reduced the efficiency of the cars in the 1970s, the 170 CID (and the 198, which I didn't mention) Slant-6 was dropped and the 225 was all that remained.
The only thing I hate about Chrystler/Dodge is that their automatic trannys made manuals pointless (and I like manual transmissions). The 904 & 727 are the best transmissions I've even had.
Yeah, I prefer a stick, too.
I've seen a 1969 New Yorker at a Mopar show. Big 4-door land yacht. Comes with an automatic transmission. This guy factory-ordered the only known New Yorker to have been made with a stickshift - they hand-built some linkages for him and everything. A-833 4-speed manual, in a 440-powered New Yorker. Very nice.:)
<grin> I've got a 904 in my Valiant and a 727 in my 400CID Ram. And there's a beautiful A-833 4-speed manual, full clutch linkage, Slant-6, small-block and big-block bellhousings, languishing in my garage, waiting for one of my TorqueFlites to fail. It's going to have to wait a long time...
Re:Aspen was a *compact*, and RWD is a good thing.
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A RWD car with snow tires will do as well as a FWD car. I had a 1971 Plymouth Valiant. Me and p*ssy were mutually-exclusive during that period, slant-6 or not. It was an ugly car that repelled women but you could drive it 25,000 miles without changing the oil and not hurt the engine. Try doing that to one of those sissified cars today and it will sue your ass.
That's a lovely car!
I've got a '74 Valiant Brougham (scroll down for a description, I've yet to find any pics on the 'net). It's a Valiant with velour and leather seats and shag carpets. And, despite how horrific that must sound, it's actually really tastefully done. And it's incredibly comfortable. Also, it's got the 1973-1976 styling, which combines an aggressive looking front end with lots of chrome trim, a form-fitting vinyl roof (no opera windows, thank god), tailfins (the Valiant was the last car to still have them), and a really neat shape to the back doors.
The damned thing is timeless. Sure, it looks old, but not in the same way that a 1975 Cutlass Supreme or even the Vista Cruiser on That 70's Show looks old.
What can you compare it to today? 2001 Nissan Maxima. It's about the same size, same passenger space, handles and stops about as well. The Slant-6 doesn't keep up with the OHC Nissan 6-cyl, though it puts out a hell of a lot more torque.
It's my baby, and I'm restoring it and rebuilding it as my "touring car" for long trips.
And chicks seem to like it. It's not a silly little Honda with a big stereo and a chainsaw muffler like most other guys they meet are driving. It's a sensible car, and yet it's also got a shag carpet and a few other neat things. And it's one of those rare things that looks more expensive than it really is.
Your '71 was a great about-town daily driver, and it's a lot more interesting now that something boring and expendable like a Honda Accord or some similar crap. I'm sure it would attract a lot of attention around here, especially with an immaculate body and a good coat of paint. (Gotta be something really chintzy. They looked *awful* in the gold metallic that was popular at the time. I suggest a modern replacement would be Volvo Copper paint.)
Of course, mondern all wheel drive is far better than only front or rear wheel drive. Note that I'm *not* talking about four wheel drive that can really suck on things like Jeeps etc.
I'm not sure if it really is. I think AWD/4WD/4x4 just give most motorists a false sense of security and that leads to problems. ie. Usually, you see more SUVs in the ditch during a snowstorm than any other kind of vehicle.
As for which is better, a high tech AWD or a Jeep-inspired low-tech 4x4? Gimme the 4x4 anytime. KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. No electronic controls to break. No CV joints to couple the power, just simple and brawny universal joints. No weird computer controlled differentials that will lock you out entirely if you break a wire while driving over a treestump.
It's not that I don't like computers in cars. I think they're great for some things. But the tendency with the electronically controlled parts in drivetrains is that they either work, or they don't. If I break that wire, I'm stranded until I pull out the diagnostic equipment and figure out which wire is broken. If I crack a PC board in my traction control computer, I'm screwed.
With a low-tech vehicle, if I break something, it's likely that I can pound it together to the point where it runs.
I was out bushwacking once in a friend's old full-size Blazer. I popped the rear universal joint, and it was a 2WD truck, so I couldn't take out the driveshaft and use the front wheels to drag me home. I was stranded.
So, I pulled out my toolbox, where I found that I had a couple of chisels. I drifted out the remains of the U-joint's spider, and pounded the chisels through the yokes.
Then, I cut off a few links of some of the old tire chains kicking around in the truck, put them through the chisels, and then got out a big sledgehammer to mushroom one chisel so that it wouldn't fall out of the differential yoke.
I hooked up the chain links to the chisel on the driveshaft yoke, pounded it through, flattened it off, and there it was: a universal joint made of chain links and chisels. It was loud (clink-clink-clink-clink!) and it was fragile. But it got me home.
Try that with a CV joint in a new car.
All I demand in a 4x4 is a torquey and efficient motor (like my lovely old Chrysler Slant-6!), a good four speed with overdrive manual transmission (my Chrysler A-833 fits the bill here), a New Process selectable transfer case (like the NP-170; 2WD lo, 2WD hi, 4WD hi, and my favorite, 4WD lo.) and a Dana 44 front axle. Oh, man, there's nothing you can't drive over with that - I accidentally backed over a Subaru Outback one morning. And in 2WD mode, with reasonable tires, in my old 1983 Dodge Ram, I was getting 20 MPG. (That old truck is scrapped, but I saved the entire drivetrain out of it, so I'll put it into something else someday.)
Aspen was a *compact*, and RWD is a good thing.
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363 Horsepower? Rear-wheel drive? Sounds like a 70s-era gas guzzler to me (see also Dodge Aspen).
Okay. Where to begin. Hmmm...
First thing, is the Volare and Aspen were made from 1976 to 1980 as replacements for the compact, efficient and highly reliable Plymouth Valiant. They were not gas guzzlers, even when equipped with the optional 360 CID (5.9L) V8.
Now, they weren't as good on gas as today's cars, but technology has progressed. The Valiant, with its base engine, the legendary Chrysler Slant-6, was routinely capable of 20-25MPG; the Volare/Aspent, because of emissions controls, got a little bit less gas mileage than that. For their day, good gas mileage. And for their size, good gas mileage.
The cars that were really bad on gas were things like the big-block powered Cordoba/Mirada personal luxury cars, the New Yorkers, etc. of that era. That's because of the sheer size of the car (which was what people wanted at the time, and apparently again want) and the fact that they had three-speed transmissions with a final output drive ratio of 1:1. At the time, overdrive automatic transmissions were just starting to come out. So, yeah, they were gas pigs.
Rear wheel drive does not itself mean bad gas mileage. However, it does mean marginally more weight. And because the entire drivetrain is not assembled as a single unit like in a front-wheel-drive car, it does mean more time and labor going down the assembly line.
In a front wheel drive car, everything - steering, suspension, engine, transmission, driveaxles, etc. are crammed into a small engine bay. That means that if you have to replace a starter motor, you might have to spend three hours taking out the front axles before you can get at it. It also means that in a collision, everything mechanical is probably screwed, and therefore the car is a write-off.
Finally, rear wheel drive handles better. Why? Well, if you lose traction on one of your front wheels, you lose the ability to steer. (Ever tried to steer with your front wheels locked up?)
With front wheel drive, how your car will handle on a snowy road depends on how much traction you have, where the wheels are pointed, and how hard you have your foot on the gas. Unpredictably, one or the other wheel can lose traction - when that happens, you lose steering in that wheel. And because there are so many variables for the driver to consider, it's tough to manage.
On the other hand, with rear wheel drive, there's less weight on the driving wheels. Put a bag of kitty litter in your trunk to prevent getting stuck. But the best part is that when you lose traction, your RWD car will fishtail predictably. Let off the gas, it straightens out. If you need to make a right turn, point the wheels a little to the right and punch the gas. With some practice, you can use this tendency to your advantage and control it completely.
(Do your practice in a snowy parking lot so that you don't hurt anyone else, until you've got the technique down.)
I grew up in Ottawa, Canada. It snows a lot there. And now that I live in Toronto, I can spot my fellow Snowbelters - they're the ones who *don't* slow down to take corners, they just fishtail sideways into them, and then accurately pull the car straight. I can take a corner faster in snow than I can on dry pavement.
The same thing occurs on wet or dry pavement, and you can use it to your advantage if you know how. It's a lot more useful than silly little front wheel drive parking brake donuts.
The car looks pretty terrible, but hey, embedded Linux!
The car looks pretty terrible, but hey, big V8 without silly things like extra valves per cylinder or front-wheel-drive. And it's a Hemi to boot!
That's the *real* priority. Linux was just a smart business decision.
But the big Hemi-head RWD V8 setup means that the automakers have finally realized that there's a segment of the population that really responds to big, brawny, unrefined American V8s. Myself included.
Sure, it'll be a gas pig, but that's okay. If I can afford to daily drive a 1976 Dodge Ram with a 400 CID (6.6L) big-block V8, I can afford to drive this.
Sadly, it doesn't look anything like one of the concept cars they've had kicking around, the Hemi-powered V8 Charger. I hope this is a signal that the platform is going to happen and that they'll make the Charger, too.
As it is, that's a great market niche for Chrysler. Police departments are screwed, because Ford's dropping the Crown Victoria, GM has already killed the Caprice Classic. And cops love rear wheel drive because it handles so much better than front wheel drive.
You'd have to be a lot more careful hacking on that system, then, say, your Tivo. (Segmentation Fault: Welcome to Idaho)
<grin> As long as you're not hacking the traction control, ABS or airbag computers. It's still not a teleporter, you know.
Definitely sounds like my ex-boss (I left that place for the sake of my sanity). And that girl definitely sounds like the women I was talking about too.
You mean, there's more of them? [sigh] The world is definitely in trouble.
I've never been much of a school person myself either. But I've probably got as much overall knowledge, and way more practical (as in usuable) knowledge than most of the college going bookworm types. Of course, I'm just a regular bookworm type.
Nope. As I see it, if I'd gone to university for Electical Engineering, I'd be getting paid exactly what I am now, I'd have less practical experience, and I'd have a debt. However, I make more money than we pay the engineers (of approximately my age) here. And, to boot, they usually end up asking me questions about how to design such-and-such a circuit. In trade, while I can do resonance and other fairly involved calculations, I usually just pawn it off on them, feigning ignorance.:)
BTW, nice rant. Doesn't it feel good to vent?
Thanks, yeah, it does. I need to do it every now and then. And, let me tell you, it's been a tough week. AutoCAD 14 and Mechanical Desktop on a Pentium 133 notebook. With Windows 2000. And I'm expected to support that. Hell, I can't even pretend to look surprised that you-know-who can't make it work.
It doesn't discuss Beta as a professional format at all...
Nope. It never had a chance as a professional format. The picture quality wasn't quite as good as some of the more portable 3/4" decks that were coming out at the time. Picture quality is especially crucial in ENG, because of dimmer lighting that you're likely to encounter (shows low signal to noise ratio very well...) and the number of generations that ENG source tape was expected to go through in those days of 3/4" frame editors. (Field video dubbed right away to 3/4"; A-B roll edit, which another generation for both source VTRs; backup and archival dubs; etc.)
The other alternative, of course, was film. And back then, that was the portable one. Video = quick. Film = good quality, portable, existing equipment.
Betamax is better than VHS, but still not as good as 3/4" or Betacam. It wasn't until the Betacam format came out in '82 or '83 that the migration finally started.
It was like Sony's more recent attempt to move professional cameramen over to Hi8 systems. Unfortunately, when you snap a Hi8 VTR onto the back of an Ikegami camera, the whole camcorder is *very* light, which makes it unstable. A good camcorder weighs about 35lbs and has a comfortable and molded shoulder pad. It balances well.
The Hi8 has such a tiny mechanism that it's very fragile (ie. a spot of dust on Hi8 tape is a far bigger dropout than on a Betacam or 3/4" tape), and the weight needed for the cameraman to be able to provide good stability just isn't there.
Despite the fact that Sony has actually built professional products in both Betamax and Hi8, they quickly abandoned them and moved the formats into the realm of hi-end consumer gear. So, while I've seen examples of both attempts, they're sure to go down as a footnote in the history of a broadcast engineering giant.
Ok, I don't want to nitpick, but wouldn't their base be 14 (assuming they have two 'hands')?
That's a hell of an assumption. What if they have three hands?
Or, what if, somewhere in their history, a leader had decreed that one hand must remain at all times on their genitalia? Continuing the assumption of two hands at 7 digits each, they'd still only have one hand with which to count. Their number system may have grown up with that and despite their equivalent to the sexual revolution of the '60s, maybe they have a tradition of using only base 7 as a result.
I think the point I was making is that you can *never* make any assumptions about who might be out there - everything that we take for granted has to be sent to/dev/null before any relevent communication, beyond basically a sign of unintelligible intelligence (!), is possible.
Too wacky? I think not.
Look at us.
Our height is commonly measured in units based on, and named after, the length of a dead king's foot. A king that wasn't even *liked* on this continent.
As if that weren't enough, we confuse the issue. Smaller divisions of that unit aren't "half-feet" or "quarter-feet" or even something intelligent like decimal divisions of feet. They're inches. Based on the width of the same dead king's thumb. (Since we're already basing the principal unit of length on his foot, why not designate the smaller unit after the width of his big toe?)
Our calendar is based on the circumcision of a religious figure who allegedly was born 2,000 years ago. (And, because he was Jewish, the calendar recognizes the Jewish tradition... it's not by accident that New Year's is exactly 8 days after the accepted date of celebration of his birthday.)
Now, I'm not making any big statment here. It's easy to look again at things we take for granted. For one thing, a foot is an easy principal measure of length, because you can basically pace out a distance. And a few inches can be measured by pacing out a thumb.
But without a reference, a baseline, an understanding - much of which is impossible to convey without a common language - there's no way that anything but pure mathematics based on immutable elements will ever make sense.
Re:No soldering iron and heat shrink tubing?
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Gave myself a nice zap even through the plasit insulation on the cutting pliers, and thoroughly destroyed the power supply for some reason. The thing started to smoke.
Hmmm... They're switching supplies. Generally, when you overload them, the shut right down with no damage done. I can't say that I've had this problem many times - I spend extra to buy good quality stuff and then I take good care of it - but even on some of the notebook power supplies I've come across at work (and surplus stores; notebook PSUs are very useful), I can't say that I've ever seen one that should misbehave when you short it.
I did break out my $7 Radio Shack soldering iron and got to work soldering the wire back together (REAL men don't use any insulation at all before testing:P) and it just didn't work.
The $7 soldering iron is at least half your problem. If the soldering iron is symbolic of the quality of the notebook, yeah, I can see that the manufacturer might have scrimped and neglected to put in regulators that shut down when overloaded.
Yeah, real men *do* use insulation when testing. The stuff I fix will kill you if you look at it the wrong way. And the stuff that won't, bad things happen anyway.
It never fails that when you have an uninsulated piece of wire hanging across the desk is also exactly when a big truck is going to drive by your house and the vibrations will knock the empty Pepsi can on your desk onto it. Or the cat will come by. Or your roommate's girlfriend's hellion of a 6-year-old son. Or, you'll be checking out the device under test with your good Fluke 77 multimeter, and unseen, one of the test leads will drag the connection you should have insulated onto a screwdriver.
No soldering iron and heat shrink tubing?
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qUOTED (oops, caps lock) from article:
Sparks went flying and the metal supports sliced into the cable. It was sweet, except for the part where I had to wait a week to have electricity for my laptop...
[sigh]
You're not a real geek if you don't own at least two soldering irons.
Yessir, about a 25W Ungar iron-clad tip soldering iron, a little bit of Kester 40 rosin-core solder, a few inches of heat shrink tubing. About five minutes, and you're all set to do battle against Microsoft again.
Dabblers use electrical tape. Real professional geeks use heat shrink tubing.
If this is the sort of thing that "intelligent" life broadcasts into space in an attempt to contact other civilisations, then it's no fucking wonder we've not yet got any evidence that we're not alone in the Universe.
[sigh]
Okay. How is time measured? In days, hours, minutes, seconds - right?
All stuff that's based on the properties of the orbit of our planet. A planet that they've never seen before, and until this message, have no idea where it is.
Their planet may spin slower than ours. What we measure as a second here may well actually take 34 of our seconds on their planet.
What's that mean? It means that when we try to describe basic properties of distance in our units of measurement - like light years, for example - their light years would end up being different from ours. Essentially, then, they'd receive a message that displays intelligence, but demands that they use references that they don't have.
What's the distance between the Earth and Sun? Going to measure that in kilometers and send it to them? How do you describe a kilometer over radio waves? You can't send a reference unit of 1m, you know. You can't tell them it's approximately the length of the recipient's left arm. What if the reader has tentacles?
*Everything* has to be defined clearly in a mathematical sense. Anything that isn't probably won't have a reference that they can understand.
Sending them video of Three's Company or something would tell them a lot about us. An NTSC TV signal is repetitive and therefore could be quite easily dissected and displayed by an alien culture. But what would Three's Company say about us or our world? And how many minutes of Jack whining could you get to fit in under 64k of highly noise-resistant signal?
So, with this new understanding, what do *you* propose is a better way to get in touch with ET? What do *you* suggest will tell him the most about us?
Anyway, a Hebrew or Arabic puzzle would have just been a mirror image I guess. And I am sure this puzzle will get distorted on transit by not being in the ET's network byte order.
It's amazing just how difficult it is to describe things that you and I (and all people) take for granted.
Like describing temperature. You can't give it in degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit - those measurements evolved on Earth. They're referenced to things on Earth.
You can't even give it in degrees Kelvin, because their scientific scale could well be based on something completely different. From absolute zero to the temperature of a sunny day on their planet?
So, you have to define an atom. Then, you have to define a few basic elements. And then the compound H2O, which still has the same atomic composition, though instead of calling it water, they'll recognize it as something they call NNGrlap. They love to ride down NNGrlap slides on days when their planet's star shines brightly on the land. And, on the remotest of possibilities that they've never seen water - under any name - they'll figure out how to make it. If they have the ability to make a radio telescope, they understand enough chemistry to know that hydrogen and oxygen react together. So, even if oxygen is a rarer-than-palladium element to them, at least their scientists will have seen it, documented its properties, and will be able to make water so that they can understand our standard.
It's more likely, though, that ET will simply slither (or whatever) down the hallway, and turn on the faucet in the office kitchen to get a beaker full of NNGrlap.
Once ET is familiar with the basic properties of NNGrlap/Water, you can establish a descriptive and meaningful temperature measurement of things that only we have seen.
The fact that every measurement has to be described and that whatever the recipient's language is, it's going to be far different from *anything* we know on this planet, means all communication must be mathematics.
Like reading graffiti in Aramaic, you don't need to know anything about Aramaic to know that the patterns on the wall aren't by accident. But, unless you've had some expose to the culture, you won't be able to make sense of it on your own. They'll have had no experience to our cultures. Therefore, any human language is not useful.
Not to mention the fact that it could well take 1,000 years for the message to travel to a planet and be read by someone, and another 1,000 years for it to come back. What did English sound like 2,000 years ago? Didn't exist? Who is to say that it will still exist 500 years from now, let alone 2,000? So, if they managed to decipher a human-language message, and reply to it, our decendents will probably have a tough time understanding it. Ever read Beowulf? (Not the cluster, the old English poem). Think Shakespeare was tough? Try Beowulf. And that's only 1,000 years old.
In mathematics, 2+2=4, no matter how you write it. If they've got the technology to receive a signal from space, they've got mathematics. They'll be able to figure out the message.
Consider the ground that was covered in that message. We defined *everything* in 23 pages of low-resolution dots. We described DNA. Maybe in a galaxy far, far away, the project manager of the radio telecope is going to be standing at an NNGrlap cooler, chatting with a fellow employee, when a scientist will come running in, show him the page, and he'll drop his glass of NNGrlap with surprise at how they're based on the same basic DNA structure as we are.
We covered the spectral responses of our senses of sight and hearing. That will be important if they ever follow the directions we gave them and come to visit us. It'd be tough if they communicated in ultrasonics...:)
All this ground was covered. And anyone, regardless of language, with some scientific interest, could figure it out.
Mathematics is the only universal language. Not that it's practical for conversation...
If the alien figures out a stream of 0's and 1's, how does he know that they represent 23 pages of 127*127 pixels?
Have you ever looked at a stack dump? I mean, even without being a programmer, you've seen them. But have you ever really looked at one?
When you start to see a pattern of, let's say, 65,535 random characters with a $ sign, then another 65,535 random characters and another dollar sign, can't you maybe make the assumption that you're dealing in 64k pages of information? If you then start to use the dollar sign as a sign to start a new line, then a pattern might become visible in the contents of the stack dump. (And, no, don't get highly technical on why this stack dump is wrong, it's an example.)
Each line that is being sent is 127 pixels long. At the same places in each string of seemingly random dots, there are pixels that mark the "edges" of the information.
Further, even Hellen Keller could see that there was intelligence at work if she saw this coming into the instruments on her radio telescope. It would be given close scrutiny.
Mathematics are universal. It doesn't matter if you write 2+2=4, or 0010 + 0010 = 0100, or even II + II = IV. The values and fundamentals are universal. If ET has 7 fingers on each hand, his numbering system might be base 7. But if he's got the technology to be building a radio telescope, he's got higher mathematics. And that means he's got the lowest and simplest mathematics there is: binary. And while there can be no standard way of writing the symbol between two lifeforms that have evolved completely different, it remains: There are two characters, On or Off. However you draw them.
Remember: 1001 = *..* = fyyf = etc.
If someone were to write this:
^^#^ + ^^## = ^#^#
And put it on a mathematician's desk, he'd figure it out in seconds.
Since they will know binary, and they'll know that another creature trying to make contact is likely to use it because of its simplicity, my bet is that they'll try to look for patterns on 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64...and *128* in the incoming data stream. Right where our page edge markers are.
Build your own pay TV decoder for fun. You'll see that deciphering what appears to be random information really isn't all that tough. This is a walk in the park compared to some of the math that people get into in daily life. Let alone pure research scientists.
ET wouldn't have to be all that bright to figure it out. He *would* have to be far brighter to build the equipment with which to receive it.
Does her head bounce back and forth as she talks too? Sounds like a couple of women (and I use that term very loosely, insert loose joke here) I know too.
You got it, Pontiac!
She's 27 and has a 6-year-old son. She lives on welfare and drives a 1986 Beretta. Her dream car is a Chevrolet full-size pickup truck, but there ain't no way in hell she's gonna drive a GMC pickup truck.
<sigh> At least she's trying to do something, though. She frustrates me, but at least she's trying to do something with her life.
Not to be harsh, but the people that think they are going to get rich just because they have a "COMPUTER DEGREE" from some community college are precisely the people that aren't going to make any money. There are a lot of those 'degrees' that can be earned without learning anything more about computers than how to market speak computer jargon.
This is at least part of why I've eschewed structured, formal education myself.
I'm into computers because between them and my cars, they're the passions of my life. I'm also very much into professional and high end audio and video electronics, especially antique stuff.
I contrast the fact that every spare moment, I'm doing something that has to do with one of those fields, to the community college type who has no original thoughts or even the instinctive understanding that most Slashdot readers would probably take for granted.
A revelation to me is that I can finally use the old Chevette engine kicking around in the garage - to replace the worn-out Tecumseh on my 1973 Ariens snowblower. All it takes is to weld in a 7" stretch to the chassis between the blower and the drive subassembly, it's really cool, and it's cheaper than to replace the dual-shaft Tecumseh.
A revelation to me is that, in high school, rather than writing a little Pascal program to make a Macintosh play Chopsticks as a mandated "Write a program to make the computer play music" assignment, I could hook three 5.25" full-height Shugart floppy disk drives to my trusty old TI-99/4A, and write an assembly language program to make them play Flight of the Bumblebees. In three part harmony. I got an A+, though the teacher wasn't happy about giving it to me. (And, I admit, I got help: I needed someone to translate the sheet music into frequencies and durations, since I don't know how to read sheet music.)
A revelation is realizing that you *can* mass produce a surface-mount radar buffer board with the small production facilities at work and no real SMT assembly equipment by...well, that's a secret. Non-disclosure agreement.
To Jen, a revelation is that you need to put real-mode CD-ROM drivers onto your startup diskette before you format the hard drive and try to install Windows 95 from CD. (No, neither the Windows 95B edition, nor her motherboard, support a boot off CD-ROM.) Sure, when we've been new to any operating system, we've all done stupid things like this. But the astute *test* the machine's ability to workably boot prior to formatting the drive...
I had a boss that was that way. Head of IT, yet he couldn't figure out the simplest of computer concepts without at least two of the help desk people there to tell him how to do it. But he had a DEGREE in computers, so he had to know what he was doing!
Oh no, and in a position of power. That must have been a frustrating workplace.
Listen, I like my boss. I don't like badmouthing him. But, let's face it, you need to, every now and then. This guy feels qualified to talk about computers. He's *literally* never done a clean install of Windows since he installed Windows 3.1. When Windows 95 came out, he upgraded. When that crashed, he actually spent the time to fix it. Then he bought Partition Magic, and mirrored it across to a bigger drive. Then a few years later, another bigger drive. Now, he's got probably the world's only Windows 2000 Professional system that is running in a 6 gigabyte drive under FAT16. I've never seen so many partitions in my life.
Every time the computer hiccups (which is often, as you can imagine), he storms into my office, looking for some troubleshooting disk. My standard answer, of course, is that he should format the drive, reinstall Windows, and then his apps. Of course, he refuses: it'll take way too long. A whole morning, if he does it slowly. Then, he'll spend 2 days trying to get Windows to run without crashing, and consider himself to have come out ahead.
He actually copied the entire registry out of my box once - even though our machines have nothing remotely similar in hardware or software.
On one hand, the dogged determination is amazing. On the other hand, well... you know.
He demanded root access to the Linux server I set up. I just told him that he had it. Sure enough, go through the history file on his account, and there are commands like "dir c:", "win", "scandisk c:", and my favorite, "why the f**k isnt this computer working". Of course, the computer was fine, but he's obviously never seen any UNIX before.
And yet between the two adresses I get less than 30 pieces of spam a day. Either I have a real high tolerance for annoyances, or the oft-cited sources of spammers getting your email adress is wrong.
Oh, no. 15 pieces of spam per e-mail box per day is not unreasonable. No. That's not a pain in the butt.
Oddly enough, when I set up a spambucket adress at Yahoo!, even with very little use that box gets upwards of 50+ pieces of spam
Yeah, I can't account for that experience, though. I get a few spams here and there through my Yahoo accounts, but it's not bad. Less than one in the average week. Fortunately, Yahoo has a Spam-Guard service as part of their e-mail. As long as you log in from the web access every week to make sure no important e-mails have accidentally been filtered that way, it's great.
Woah! I want a 96GHz AMD ThunderChicken.:) As long as I have 35gigs of ZXRAM@24ghz, and a TNT12 Plasmdrive 4D video card, I'll be happy as a pig in shit.
Well, I figured Intel will have to give up the Pentium name sooner or later, it's getting a little long in the tooth as it approaches a decade...
<grin> That assumes Intel lives another 10 years, of course.
Pentium was a great name. Pentium II was a reasonable sequel, though apparently Santa Clara sequels are similar to those a few miles down the coast in Hollywood: they lose originality.
Pentium III was as much of a stretch as... well, I can't tell you, I boycott sequels, so I can't think of any. Let alone the Pentium IV.
Time for Intel to give it up and at least get a fresh name. Otherwise, Joe Consumer is going to feel that his new computer is powered by something unoriginal, rather than something new, high tech and powerful.
Eventually, I sold it to a friend of mine for $1200, including installation at his house.
A good salesman always refers to his customers as friends. After all, they're my friends because they give me money.
That's not to imply that I'm a good salesman, of course. I'm not especially, despite having read a few books on sales. I hate selling stuff, but I get the job done.
It's the same way that you never ask a customer to sign a contract. A customer is a friend, signing is something your mother told you never to do, and a contract is a scary pile of legalese. You instead get your friend to autograph an agreement, because this conjures up pleasant of happy people making him feel important. (Other bad words in sales include "policy" and, well, "sales".)
More importantly, with the emissions that the projector was still putting out - in other words, the CRTs (which are expensive and a lot of work to replace) were *very* healthy - that projector was an easy $2500 in the classified ads in the local newspaper. (You know, where people still advertise and sell $700 Pentium 75s.)
Real not-ripping-anyone-off value of it was about $2,000.
He did okay. I did okay. It was a mutually beneficial agreement. We're both happy.
You know, the people that just totally turn off their brain when they sit in front of a computer?
You know, like my roommate's girlfriend, who enters your e-mail address into every one of these stupid little websites that sends you a card and sells the collected list of addresses?
"Oh, look! It's a picture of a puppy sleeping on a sofa! And the caption is so funny! Oh, that's so cute! I have to send that to Lawrence, even though he's a cat person, he's like that so much!"
<sigh> She complains about the amount of spam she gets, and yet she merrily enters her real unobfuscated e-mail address into every website, newsgroup, *everything*. She hasn't yet made the connection.
And she's on her last year of some sort of computer diploma from some community college. Of course, it's not because she has any interest or aptitude in computers, it's because she can make "so much money" in computers. Jesus wept.
And, no, I didn't just discover the HTML <i> tag. That's really how she talks.
Either could be. Digital Betacam has been around for years; D-VHS is apparently in the works.
they're fixed format
Physically, yes. Electronically, no. SVHS, for example, will not play in a VHS VCR, though a VHS cassette will play in an SVHS VCR.
Lots of things use VCR mechanisms and tape for things other than TV pictures. I have a JVC SVHS machine right beside me that uses off-the-shelf SVHS cassettes to save PPI radar video. That's not even raster scanned!
Lemme tell you, those cassettes look really funny when you pop them into a regular SVHS VCR.:)
they're crappy CGA grade resolution
D-VHS wouldn't be. And Sony's got an HDTV version of Digital Betacam.
they're not random access, they're tape for yog's sake!
Yup. That's right. The technology is mature, so at least you know that the video collection that you have in the archives at your TV station will probably still play 30 years from now. It'll be interesting to see how well optical discs stand the test of time, with all the comments about CD-R/RW lifespans, not to mention the ?possibly? urban legends about the aluminum coating inside CDs corroding in time through the edges of the disc.
What'll happen? Maybe something bad, maybe something good. I have videotape that is over 30 years old, and I'm not a TV station. It's important.
Tape isn't perfect. It's still a pain in the ass waiting for it to wind to the right place, but at least the media is mature.
The videotape that new parents take of their baby will still probably work 30 years from now. Hell, some 50 year old tape still works, and it was a lot more primitive then than it is now; it's likely that most of today's tape recordings, if stored properly, will still work in 2051. It's still unknown how well that CD/DVD/CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-RAM will survive the years...
Neither is interactive, not even freakin' hyperlinks
Nah. I wouldn't want Jerry Springer to be interactive, would you? If I wanted interactive, I'd sit down at my computer. If I wanted to just veg out after a long day, I'll turn on the TV, maybe pop a movie into the VCR. Or a DVD into the player. Ask me when the last time was that I checked out the Director's Comments or Play Hangman with the Letters in the Names of the Cast or some other crap like that... I know my DVD player supports them, but I've never used them.
(most of the above also go for current TV standards, NTSC/PAL/SECAM)
I agree with you exclusively on the resolution of NTSC/PAL/SECAM. But TV has been such a successful innovation that I question whether any improvements besides faster/cheaper/better can actually take over?
Faster: No waiting though commercials, that's what the fast forward button is for.
Cheaper: Well? I remember when a color TV started at over $500. Now, I see them for under $100.
Interactive alters the formula. Will it ever *really* take off? If it's incorporated into TV sets, will it go the way of the VCR timers where most people can't even figure out how to set the clock?
Having said *all that*, for most consumers, yeah, recordable DVDs are probably the way to go. It would be what I would get for my daily time-shifting and movie rental use. But it's not anywhere near so clear cut as you apparently feel.
Slashdot Mirror
You have no idea what your talking about.
Dude, he's right on all counts, unfortunately. I detest the Republicans because while I'm a fiscal conservative, I'm also a social liberal. And a lot of the Democrats environmental platform is just simply dangerous, in that it causes problems like rolling blackouts and erodes one's freedom to drive (or even possess!) the vehicle of his/her choice.
Having said that, they're not completely to blame, Cash for Clunkers and other misguided concepts were pioneered by Republicans as ways for their big oil friends to appear to be doing something for the environment.
BTW, it's "you're", as in a contraction of "you are". "Your" is possessive.
First, you should not confuse the "not in my backyard" folks with the enviromentalists. These are two almost totally unrelated groups who want almost totally diffrent things, i.e. the "not in my backyard" people will be quit happy to see the power plant to go in the ecologically importent swamp in the next county..Effectively, though, environmentalists *are* all too often the same thing, simply by virtue of their shortsightedness.
For example, Western European environmentalists scored a big win: they managed to basically kill the nuclear power projects in Western Europe. Western Europe's electricity is now mostly made from natural gas.
One of the world's biggest suppliers of natural gas is Russia. So, Russia sells as much of their natural gas as they can to Western Europe. In order to ensure that the natural gas is available for sale, Russia shuts down their gas power plants and fires up a couple of mothballed RBMK reactors to produce their own power.
Now, which would you rather have, the running Western European reactor three miles from your house, or a running Russian RBMK flammable-moderator reactor in the Ukraine?
Chernobyl was an accident with profound world-wide environmental consequences. While operator error was at fault, Russian reactor design contributed hugely to the severity of the accident. In a French reactor, for example, it would have been a note in the operating log and a fired employee, nothing more.
a) I think breaderbreEder
reactersreactOrs
make very clean nukes and no enviromentalists are objecting to these things (they have a small problem that the millitarymiLitary
must monitor them since they produce high grade plutonium).Breeder reactors are a great idea. Like solar power. Like tidal power. Like wind power. However, these aren't computers. Things change at an incremental pace; nuclear power (and power plants in general, which are primarily about mechanical engineering) is a relatively mature technology. Don't expect quantum leaps.
As it is, breeders are inefficient. Perhaps that's the wrong term since they actually *create* fuel while they consume it, but for the dollar investment and for the quantity of fuel in the core, they really can't be harnessed to produce a hell of a lot of heat. Heat, of course, boils water which spins turbines and therefore generators.
b) Solar is very cost effective if you allow the companies to charge more for it *and* require people to pay for it when the company provides it.So you want to undermine the free market economy and force people to buy something that is more expensive when there's a cheaper alternative? I thought you'd just said solar was cost effective?
For the record, it's not. It requires vast quantities of land where you *will* kill the ecosystem, large investments in solar cells, storage batteries (solar doesn't produce power off moonlight, you know) and inverters (solar cells put out DC, the electric grid requires AC to function).
You just need to pass a law which requires people to pay the additional costs for solar AND pay the company and extra 1% or 2% profit on top (multiplied by the percentage of the power which is solar).Sure!
I propose a law that we force everyone who has ever been a member of any environmentalist group to have to buy electricity *exclusively* from power sources that they have pushed into existance.
Don't get used to cold beer, it ain't gonna happen too often in your fridge.
Finally, it was deregulation and not enviromental regulations which prevented plants from being built. The companies felt they could delay building new plants to save money.Yes, and no. Unfortunately, the environmental regulations make it so expensive that the energy companies didn't feel building new plants was a worthwhile investment.
Admittedly, the fault was on both sides.
Also, who cares that CA is forcing people to replace their cars?I care.
I love old cars. I want to be able to drive the car of my choice. And I want to be able to get parts for my old car.
How can you ask "who cares"? It's an erosion of personal freedom. Of liberty. Even if you're not interested in cars, even with your apparently mediocre intelligence, you should see this as a first step down a dangerous path.
The bigger the monitor, the more energy it consumes. I propose that we not allow anyone Internet access if their monitor is bigger than 15". Further, I suggest that if we see a 17" monitor on someone's property, even though they can't get on the Internet with it anymore, we confiscate it and destroy it.
Concerned yet? This is exactly what is being done with cars and old car fans.
That is a great idea and very few of the current cars will live for 10 years anyway.Yeah, maybe the fact that cars aren't built the way they used to be is part of the reason why I like old cars.
If I'm shelling out $20,000+ for *anything*, you'd better bet your ass that I expect it to last.
Hell, all the eco-friendly cars are cheaper to run (those saturn electric cars cost like 1/4th as much as a good gas car),Until you have to replace the batteries.
Sadly, they also have about 1/4 of the drivability. And 1/4 of the range. And if you think a gas engine is hard to start when it's cold, just you wait until you're wanting to go to work and all your batteries are frozen.
And what about California's power problems? I can't wait to see the rolling blackouts when millions of commuters are plugging in battery-powered cars to recharge them.
Environmentally, too, you have to remember that a battery, by its very definition, is full of nasty, caustic and toxic chemicals. The more efficient the battery, the more nasty its ingredients are. And an electric car will be packed full of them. Every fender-bender on the freeway will result in a Haz-Mat team being called out to clean up the electrolyte before it trickles down storm sewers. Chemical burns will be a routine part of every car accident. And when these cars start to wear out and get scrapped, you're not going to get all the batteries back. Some will end up in lakes, and streams, and hiding in the pile of crap in my neighbor's back yard, etc.
so making everyone buy one will mean that the price must drop.Okay. I'm the government. Your computer is taking too much energy. So, we're going to force you to spend $6,000 on this energy-efficient 486SLC-33.
Man, I hope you're never allowed to vote anywhere. You're as fascist as Hitler.
Who knows maybe I will be able to buy a cheap eco-friendly car on the east cost in a few years.Maybe, yes. And I hope you can. But I also think that the free market economy will provide it, not government regulation.
Anyway, no one will sit arround for rolling blackouts. The government will pay for new plants and (hopefully) the power company officials will go to jail.For being intelligent businessmen and doing the best they could with the situation created by the laws that had been passed?
Wow, the mass exodus of businesses from your little piece of the world would be staggering.
Wanna pay the taxes to build those new plants? That'll be a neat trick once you've used the threat of jail time to drive the economy away.
Who knows maybe they will just export the socialist power from LA to the rest of the state.Ah, yes. Socialism works *so* well, as has been proven time after time in countries as diverse as Russia, Cuba, Bulgaria, East Germany, China... And *all* those countries, wonderful socialist goverments that they have/had, are *so* well known for their *excellent* treatment of the environment.
Your short-sightness and flagrant disregard for reality - neigh, common sense! - simultanously upsets, distresses, scares and even amuses me.
You, sir, are an idiot.
I wouldn't sit a car battery right on my carpet. At least get one of those plastic battery cases to contain any acit that might leak out (esp while charging the battery).
A fast food tray is enough. I occasionally bring a cold battery in from outside to charge it. Theoretically, acid shouldn't leak out while you're charging - if it does, you're charging it too hard and the escaping hydrogen is pushing the acid out of the cells where it spills to the floor.
Having said that, batteries aren't always perfectly sealed, even with the caps on the cells...
If you hear your battery making noises like a frothy bubbling sound, stop charging: you're overcharging it. Be careful that the switch on the charger is *below* the battery, because the frothy bubbling is lighter-than-air and extremely flammable hydrogen. Do not smoke near the battery.
Make sure that wherever it is that you're charging the battery, you've got it well ventilated. I always wear a pair of safety glasses and keep a box of baking soda around just in case the battery blows up. And it does happen. It looks like the Hindenburg, only smaller, and shooting hot sulphuric acid around.
When you're using the battery, you can worry a little less about ventilation: they only give it off when they're being charged.
Remember that a lead-acid battery, however inelegant and unrefined they may be, packs a hell of a lot of energy in a small space. You don't want to release that energy without being careful how it's controlled. A good car battery can make a 1/4" diameter screwdriver shank glow bright cherry red in under 5 seconds. And I've seen an engineer lose a finger because the iron pinky ring that engineers wear got shorted across a car battery. Red hot iron ring around a finger = amputated finger.
Be careful and respectful of the power of a battery.
I'd recommend wiring one of these to your UPS when expecting long blackouts. Its a 12V, 125Ah marine battery and each one added should provide several hours of entertainment and lighting when the grid's out.
For sure, that's a great idea.
However, you don't need to specify marine batteries: Around here, Wal*Mart sells deep cycle batteries primarily meant for electric trolling (fishing) motors. They're off the shelf, relatively cheap (<$100) and will happily power an appropriate UPS.
If you can't find that, you can use a car battery, if need be. But a car battery doesn't like to be completely discharged; the plates are designed for short-duty high current use (starting the engine).
Deep cycle = best bet. Car battery = in a pinch.
If your UPS's existing battery has 6 cells (12V), this will work. If your UPS battery has 12 cells (24V), you'll need to put two batteries in series. If you want more battery time, put two (or more) batteries in parallel. Any good auto parts store will sell the cables and battery terminal posts. If you're mixing batteries, it's a very good idea to make sure that the batteries you connect together are identical and charged to the same level. Otherwise, you get into situations where one battery charges another.
Generators optional.Your car is a great way of replenishing the batteries if you've got a long blackout. Just remember that your alternator is not designed for use as a battery charger: if the battery is really dead, it's best to wait until the power is back on and use the real charger. And if you've got a bunch of batteries in parallel and they're all low, charge them one at a time: Alternators can be expensive to replace.
Another suggestion, which I built for my parents who were affected by the Great Ottawa Ice Storm a few years ago. A car battery, a 1970s GM internal regulator alternator, a Briggs and Stratton gas engine and one of those Statpower AC inverters (500 watt rated) - all screwed to a board - were able to provide enough power for them to use lights (sparingly) and be able to watch TV and stuff.
I think that is inherently the problem. It usually happens when I am trying to accelerate, and I try to accelerate very slowly mind you, but a sudden slipperier section of road knocked me out. Letting off the gas doesn't do much for me, I am not sure if I even have the response time.
Make sure you start out in *second* gear, not first, if it's a fishtail off the line. And make sure that *both* your rear tires are equally worn. Otherwise, you're sliding!
My very main beef with RWD systems is that in itself. IMO they just don't handle very well at all when you have sudden and unpredictable changes in road conditions.Practice.
The other is that they get stuck easier, I have a friend that owns a Mark VIII and one time he didn't bother to stop by our house because we had some snow in his driveway, a concious decision made *bacause* it was RWD. He passed us and went home only to get stuck in his own driveway. The weight and the power are in totally different places and if the snow isn't perfectly manicured one can run into trouble if you have little momentum.Practice!
And, make sure that you're starting out in second gear. For sure. Reverse is your enemy, because it's a *very* low gear (Often lower than first), so be careful if you're trying to rock a stuck car. Spinning the tires only melts the snow under them. When that happens, your car sinks into the hole, and the water promptly refreezes.
First gear will generally make your wheels spin too easily. You want low speed torque, not high speed rotation. Automatic transmissions are not your friend here, since most of them will always start out at first.
(ie. you put it in "D", and as you accelerate, it goes through first, then second, then into third. Put it into "2", it starts out in first, upshifts to second, and stays there. This is not what you want, you want it to be in second whenever the shifter is pointed at "2". A stickshift is a definite advantage here unless you have some years of Chrysler TorqueFlite or GM TH-350 automatic.)
Putting weight in the back is a poor hack at best, IMO.Completely. It's a kludge. For sure, in most cars, FWD has the advantage of weight on the driven wheels. But the other advantages of RWD more than make up for it.
And remember, the weight distribution on most cars is in the 60 front, 40 rear range; regardless of FWD or RWD. If you can put the weight behind the rear axle, it won't take much. You can calculate the weight required for the distribution to be 50/50 when you know how far behind the rear axle (fulcrum) the weight is on the lever (distance between fulcrum and ballast).
*Never* put more more than 50% of your vehicle weight on your rear wheels, or you're in CorvairLand and asking for trouble.
At least the truck has 4WD to make up for it.Not my daily driver!
'76 Dodge Ram D-140 (2WD), 400 CID (6.6L) V8, 727 TorqueFlite automatic, 9.25" diff with 3.93:1 open gear (no Posi). Weight distribution unloaded, about 75% front, 25% rear. Scary.
It's one of the worst vehicles I've ever driven in snow. It really doesn't like it. (And I can't blame it.) When I let off the brakes, the rear wheels are spinning without even touching the gas pedal. And a '76 TorqueFlite isn't one of those ones that starts out in second if you tell it to - so I lose that advantage.
But with a good set of Firestone Radial ATX tires (yes, they're recalled; yes, the treads separate; no, that's not as bad as a blowout; no, if you can't drive through a blowout, you shouldn't be allowed to drive; yes, they were cheap; no, I'm not worried, I live in a cold climate and I keep them well inflated; yes, I like them, they seem to last really well) and an old Volvo motor strapped into the very back of the bed, the truck is perfectly well mannered.
The best part is that people don't tailgate me because the old engine looks like it's precariously balanced on my back bumper.... yet another RWD advantage!
I think the handling issue is _much_ more of a platform issue than simply FWD / RWD / AWD.
Yes and no. There are some FWD cars that will handle better than some RWD cars. But primarily, the effects of FWD torque steer into a set of MacPherson struts is often insurmountable and unrecoverable.
From 1984 to maybe recently Chrysler made at least one FWD car that outcornered every GM car made up until maybe the C5 (current model) Corvette, as I have been tracking the cornering and slalom ratings in car magazines for quite a while.Yes and no.
The Daytona/Charger/Laser platform is, of course, an Omni/Horizon derivative. Like the Shadow/Sundance, it shares the same steering geometry, same front unibody clip, same drivetrain options (for the most part). Most importantly, while the spring rates and lock-to-lock counts may be different, the same MacPherson struts, top plates and steering rack as a Shadow/Sundance or Omni/Horizon.
Now, that doesn't mean that it handles badly. In fact, Chrysler FWD has far less torque steer than the competition (notably GM's X-cars). But that doesn't mean it handles well, either.
The primary problem with a MacPherson Strut front suspension is that the steering pivot point (axis) is well behind the wheels, in an invisible line directly below the centers of the MacPherson strut to inner fender attachments under your hood. The arc that the wheels cover is big.
Now, a more conventional suspension - specifically a double-A arm - the wheel's steering axis is a vertical line drawn from the upper balljoint to the lower balljoint. Those are attached right to the steering knuckle. On most cars, that's in line with the outside of the rim. In fact, on some double-A-arm front suspensions, for example a Pontiac Fiero with alloy rims, the steering axis is almost centered within the wheels because of the offset of the rims.
(Note that a Fiero is RWD and uses MacPhersons in the back, not on the front wheels.)
This means an incredible reduction of the understeer associated with FWD, more specifically, MacPherson struts. And, because of the width of the engine and transmission transverse-mounted in the engine bay, designers often don't have any choice other than a MacPherson strut setup, which is small. Car companies like them, too, because they're cheap and lightweight.
The one company that I've seen which has addressed this effectively was Honda. Now, I don't like them, but they've done a very good thing: Honda's MacPherson struts are generally shaped so that the wheel is almost directly under the top plate. This is a great enhancement to the handling.
I have scared people with the way it corners, even with tall tires.That's not tough to do. Most people get frightened when they're in my truck and I swing the back end out to fishtail around a corner. I've seen bus drivers in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec do it to make corners on mountain highways. Some of the people in the bus were scared there, too.
Hell, to scare people with what I drive, all I need to do is start the engine. (400 CID (6.6L) V8 in my 1976 Dodge Ram.) Just sitting at idle, the happy panting burble is subsonic, you feel it more than hear it. It feels distressingly powerful to most people.
I think the current Neon sport package can outhandle most cars even at twice the price.Twice the price of a Neon = ~$30,000 = still FWD, still MacPherson struts, just with more body weight and sheer bulk. Yup, the Neon wins that contest. But with good tires, a Chevette (with double A-arms and RWD) will outhandle a Neon. No sweat. (Just watch out, Chevettes have really nasty brakes, so upgrade to Fiero rotors and calipers before racing your 'Vette.)
You won't see an improvement to the Neon until you actually get into RWD sports cars and sedans, like Caprice Classics, Crown Victorias, BMWs, Mercedes, not to mention the Vipers, Corvettes and mega-buck exoticars.
I have driven RWD vehicles in unpredictable icy winter conditions with much less luck. Once my rear wheels slipped I had much less directional stability than I would desire,Okay, if you have poor directional stability in RWD and snow, *let off the gas!*.
That's all there is to it.
With FWD, you need to stay on the gas, but you want to get off it before you turn a corner, then apply power again after you're out of the corner.
In RWD, use the gas pedal as a steering device. Turn the wheels gently, hit the gas pedal just hard enough to lose traction, and you've used the fishtail to your advantage.
Or, you can drive like you are with FWD, but remember to be more gentle with the gas pedal.
I ended up in the ditch far more often than with FWD vehicles (well 2 and 0), even with a decent weight balance on the rear tires.Like an automatic transmission, FWD tends to be easier to drive.
Like a manual transmission, learning how to drive RWD well is a lot more rewarding.
Even if I lost traction on an FWD vehicle, I still had momentum, a similar situation would put me in a tailspin on a typical RWD system.Tailspin? Let off the gas. Be gentle. Instead of starting out in first gear, start out in second gear. Accelerate gently and skillfully, and you can make any RWD car accelerate in snow every bit as fast as the "better traction" of FWD will allow.
The gas pedal is a steering device. It's easy once you get the hang of it.
The argument that loosing drive traction means loosing steering power on FWD systems don't mean much to me because of the way most diffs are set up. If the diffs were positraction I think I might have much better luck but they aren't on many vehicles that I have noticed.When you turn a corner, your wheels rotate at different speeds. The wheels on the outside of the corner spin faster (and cover more ground) than those on the inside of the corner. A posi differential in a front wheel drive car would be a very bad thing. Instead of letting that happen, the posi would try to make both wheels turn the same number of revolutions through the corner. The result is, since most vehicles have some caster, that the car would try to force the wheels straight as you hit the gas pedal. In order to accelerate hard into a corner, you'd have to fight against the little clutch in the differential carrier that has to slip to unlock the wheels from each other.
This is related to torque steer, but it's not quite the same thing. Olds Toronados/Buick Riveras/Caddy Eldorados were some of the early American FWD cars, had *huge* V8s (like the Cadillac 500CID (8.3L)), and often had posi FWD. Very scary to drive sometimes.)
In RWD, since the wheels are hard-mounted in their positions, the little clutch in the differential carrier gives and slips. Since it's not trying to force the front wheels to spin at the same speed, you don't feel it in the steering wheel.
Both the Aspen and Volare could be equipped with the slant-6 (I know, I owned the stationwagon).
Of course. I'm unclear as to where I said otherwise.
The base engine for the Volare/Aspen - and for most of Chryslers cars and trucks at the time - was the Slant-6. The Volare and Aspen were available with either the 318 or the 360 as an option. Chrysler big blocks, like the 400 and the 440, were available in other car lines until 1978. They were never factory installed in the F-body (Volare/Aspen), though it's an easy engine swap.
The 318 and 360 share most of their geometries with the Slant-6, so they're almost as tough, though the 318 is preferable because the heads that were being used on 360s at that time had valve lubrication problems.
The station wagon was my favorite of the lot, too. I'd love to get a 1980 Volare Premier wagon, and bolt on a 1976-1977 hood, grille, front fenders and bumper. That's a reliable and kinda cool (in a 70's retro way) looking car.
Amazing enough...there's a LOT of these cars are STILL on the road. (I still see valiants!) They got okay gas mileage...but they were reliable as hell.The Slant-6 is widely considered to be the toughest gasoline engine ever made. Consider its heritage: it was designed in the late 1950s as an aluminum 170 CID (2.8L) racing engine. In 1958, in typical Chrysler do-or-die fashion, they had to bring out a new car, the Valiant. They still hadn't found a suitable motor for it. So, they tried the aluminum racing engine: expensive to cast, unreliable if they overheated. With no time to spare, they poured molten iron into the molds (which had been designed for softer aluminum) and the Slant-6 was born. Since the block and head castings were originally designed to be aluminum, it's amazingly tough in the high-nickel iron alloy that Chrysler chose to make them with.
By 1961, people were already starting to talk about how tough these motors were. And with their intake manifold design and the fact that they were tilted to the passenger side, they had a tunnel ram intake and a weight distribution that was set up for good handling. Valiants were quick. Chrysler eventually decided to offer a longer stroke version of the Slant-6. They brought out the 225. As emissions controls like catalytic converters and EGR systems reduced the efficiency of the cars in the 1970s, the 170 CID (and the 198, which I didn't mention) Slant-6 was dropped and the 225 was all that remained.
The only thing I hate about Chrystler/Dodge is that their automatic trannys made manuals pointless (and I like manual transmissions). The 904 & 727 are the best transmissions I've even had.Yeah, I prefer a stick, too.
I've seen a 1969 New Yorker at a Mopar show. Big 4-door land yacht. Comes with an automatic transmission. This guy factory-ordered the only known New Yorker to have been made with a stickshift - they hand-built some linkages for him and everything. A-833 4-speed manual, in a 440-powered New Yorker. Very nice. :)
<grin> I've got a 904 in my Valiant and a 727 in my 400CID Ram. And there's a beautiful A-833 4-speed manual, full clutch linkage, Slant-6, small-block and big-block bellhousings, languishing in my garage, waiting for one of my TorqueFlites to fail. It's going to have to wait a long time...
A RWD car with snow tires will do as well as a FWD car. I had a 1971 Plymouth Valiant. Me and p*ssy were mutually-exclusive during that period, slant-6 or not. It was an ugly car that repelled women but you could drive it 25,000 miles without changing the oil and not hurt the engine. Try doing that to one of those sissified cars today and it will sue your ass.
That's a lovely car!
I've got a '74 Valiant Brougham (scroll down for a description, I've yet to find any pics on the 'net). It's a Valiant with velour and leather seats and shag carpets. And, despite how horrific that must sound, it's actually really tastefully done. And it's incredibly comfortable. Also, it's got the 1973-1976 styling, which combines an aggressive looking front end with lots of chrome trim, a form-fitting vinyl roof (no opera windows, thank god), tailfins (the Valiant was the last car to still have them), and a really neat shape to the back doors.
The damned thing is timeless. Sure, it looks old, but not in the same way that a 1975 Cutlass Supreme or even the Vista Cruiser on That 70's Show looks old.
What can you compare it to today? 2001 Nissan Maxima. It's about the same size, same passenger space, handles and stops about as well. The Slant-6 doesn't keep up with the OHC Nissan 6-cyl, though it puts out a hell of a lot more torque.
It's my baby, and I'm restoring it and rebuilding it as my "touring car" for long trips.
And chicks seem to like it. It's not a silly little Honda with a big stereo and a chainsaw muffler like most other guys they meet are driving. It's a sensible car, and yet it's also got a shag carpet and a few other neat things. And it's one of those rare things that looks more expensive than it really is.
Your '71 was a great about-town daily driver, and it's a lot more interesting now that something boring and expendable like a Honda Accord or some similar crap. I'm sure it would attract a lot of attention around here, especially with an immaculate body and a good coat of paint. (Gotta be something really chintzy. They looked *awful* in the gold metallic that was popular at the time. I suggest a modern replacement would be Volvo Copper paint.)
Besides, is the chick dating you, or the car?
Of course, mondern all wheel drive is far better than only front or rear wheel drive. Note that I'm *not* talking about four wheel drive that can really suck on things like Jeeps etc.
I'm not sure if it really is. I think AWD/4WD/4x4 just give most motorists a false sense of security and that leads to problems. ie. Usually, you see more SUVs in the ditch during a snowstorm than any other kind of vehicle.
As for which is better, a high tech AWD or a Jeep-inspired low-tech 4x4? Gimme the 4x4 anytime. KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. No electronic controls to break. No CV joints to couple the power, just simple and brawny universal joints. No weird computer controlled differentials that will lock you out entirely if you break a wire while driving over a treestump.
It's not that I don't like computers in cars. I think they're great for some things. But the tendency with the electronically controlled parts in drivetrains is that they either work, or they don't. If I break that wire, I'm stranded until I pull out the diagnostic equipment and figure out which wire is broken. If I crack a PC board in my traction control computer, I'm screwed.
With a low-tech vehicle, if I break something, it's likely that I can pound it together to the point where it runs.
I was out bushwacking once in a friend's old full-size Blazer. I popped the rear universal joint, and it was a 2WD truck, so I couldn't take out the driveshaft and use the front wheels to drag me home. I was stranded.
So, I pulled out my toolbox, where I found that I had a couple of chisels. I drifted out the remains of the U-joint's spider, and pounded the chisels through the yokes.
Then, I cut off a few links of some of the old tire chains kicking around in the truck, put them through the chisels, and then got out a big sledgehammer to mushroom one chisel so that it wouldn't fall out of the differential yoke.
I hooked up the chain links to the chisel on the driveshaft yoke, pounded it through, flattened it off, and there it was: a universal joint made of chain links and chisels. It was loud (clink-clink-clink-clink!) and it was fragile. But it got me home.
Try that with a CV joint in a new car.
All I demand in a 4x4 is a torquey and efficient motor (like my lovely old Chrysler Slant-6!), a good four speed with overdrive manual transmission (my Chrysler A-833 fits the bill here), a New Process selectable transfer case (like the NP-170; 2WD lo, 2WD hi, 4WD hi, and my favorite, 4WD lo.) and a Dana 44 front axle. Oh, man, there's nothing you can't drive over with that - I accidentally backed over a Subaru Outback one morning. And in 2WD mode, with reasonable tires, in my old 1983 Dodge Ram, I was getting 20 MPG. (That old truck is scrapped, but I saved the entire drivetrain out of it, so I'll put it into something else someday.)
363 Horsepower? Rear-wheel drive? Sounds like a 70s-era gas guzzler to me (see also Dodge Aspen).
Okay. Where to begin. Hmmm...
First thing, is the Volare and Aspen were made from 1976 to 1980 as replacements for the compact, efficient and highly reliable Plymouth Valiant. They were not gas guzzlers, even when equipped with the optional 360 CID (5.9L) V8.
Now, they weren't as good on gas as today's cars, but technology has progressed. The Valiant, with its base engine, the legendary Chrysler Slant-6, was routinely capable of 20-25MPG; the Volare/Aspent, because of emissions controls, got a little bit less gas mileage than that. For their day, good gas mileage. And for their size, good gas mileage.
The cars that were really bad on gas were things like the big-block powered Cordoba/Mirada personal luxury cars, the New Yorkers, etc. of that era. That's because of the sheer size of the car (which was what people wanted at the time, and apparently again want) and the fact that they had three-speed transmissions with a final output drive ratio of 1:1. At the time, overdrive automatic transmissions were just starting to come out. So, yeah, they were gas pigs.
Rear wheel drive does not itself mean bad gas mileage. However, it does mean marginally more weight. And because the entire drivetrain is not assembled as a single unit like in a front-wheel-drive car, it does mean more time and labor going down the assembly line.
However, for the consumer, rear wheel drive is generally a good thing, though most consumers erroneously believe that the opposite is true.
In a front wheel drive car, everything - steering, suspension, engine, transmission, driveaxles, etc. are crammed into a small engine bay. That means that if you have to replace a starter motor, you might have to spend three hours taking out the front axles before you can get at it. It also means that in a collision, everything mechanical is probably screwed, and therefore the car is a write-off.
Finally, rear wheel drive handles better. Why? Well, if you lose traction on one of your front wheels, you lose the ability to steer. (Ever tried to steer with your front wheels locked up?)
With front wheel drive, how your car will handle on a snowy road depends on how much traction you have, where the wheels are pointed, and how hard you have your foot on the gas. Unpredictably, one or the other wheel can lose traction - when that happens, you lose steering in that wheel. And because there are so many variables for the driver to consider, it's tough to manage.
On the other hand, with rear wheel drive, there's less weight on the driving wheels. Put a bag of kitty litter in your trunk to prevent getting stuck. But the best part is that when you lose traction, your RWD car will fishtail predictably. Let off the gas, it straightens out. If you need to make a right turn, point the wheels a little to the right and punch the gas. With some practice, you can use this tendency to your advantage and control it completely.
(Do your practice in a snowy parking lot so that you don't hurt anyone else, until you've got the technique down.)
I grew up in Ottawa, Canada. It snows a lot there. And now that I live in Toronto, I can spot my fellow Snowbelters - they're the ones who *don't* slow down to take corners, they just fishtail sideways into them, and then accurately pull the car straight. I can take a corner faster in snow than I can on dry pavement.
The same thing occurs on wet or dry pavement, and you can use it to your advantage if you know how. It's a lot more useful than silly little front wheel drive parking brake donuts.
Why do you think it is that most police forces buy rear wheel drive cars?
The car looks pretty terrible, but hey, embedded Linux!
The car looks pretty terrible, but hey, big V8 without silly things like extra valves per cylinder or front-wheel-drive. And it's a Hemi to boot!
That's the *real* priority. Linux was just a smart business decision.
But the big Hemi-head RWD V8 setup means that the automakers have finally realized that there's a segment of the population that really responds to big, brawny, unrefined American V8s. Myself included.
Sure, it'll be a gas pig, but that's okay. If I can afford to daily drive a 1976 Dodge Ram with a 400 CID (6.6L) big-block V8, I can afford to drive this.
Sadly, it doesn't look anything like one of the concept cars they've had kicking around, the Hemi-powered V8 Charger. I hope this is a signal that the platform is going to happen and that they'll make the Charger, too.
As it is, that's a great market niche for Chrysler. Police departments are screwed, because Ford's dropping the Crown Victoria, GM has already killed the Caprice Classic. And cops love rear wheel drive because it handles so much better than front wheel drive.
You'd have to be a lot more careful hacking on that system, then, say, your Tivo. (Segmentation Fault: Welcome to Idaho)<grin> As long as you're not hacking the traction control, ABS or airbag computers. It's still not a teleporter, you know.
Definitely sounds like my ex-boss (I left that place for the sake of my sanity). And that girl definitely sounds like the women I was talking about too.
You mean, there's more of them? [sigh] The world is definitely in trouble.
I've never been much of a school person myself either. But I've probably got as much overall knowledge, and way more practical (as in usuable) knowledge than most of the college going bookworm types. Of course, I'm just a regular bookworm type.Nope. As I see it, if I'd gone to university for Electical Engineering, I'd be getting paid exactly what I am now, I'd have less practical experience, and I'd have a debt. However, I make more money than we pay the engineers (of approximately my age) here. And, to boot, they usually end up asking me questions about how to design such-and-such a circuit. In trade, while I can do resonance and other fairly involved calculations, I usually just pawn it off on them, feigning ignorance. :)
BTW, nice rant. Doesn't it feel good to vent?Thanks, yeah, it does. I need to do it every now and then. And, let me tell you, it's been a tough week. AutoCAD 14 and Mechanical Desktop on a Pentium 133 notebook. With Windows 2000. And I'm expected to support that. Hell, I can't even pretend to look surprised that you-know-who can't make it work.
It's like loading up a Ford Model T with the world's largest fishing sinker collection and then trying to take it out onto the Santa Monica Freeway.
[sigh]
It doesn't discuss Beta as a professional format at all...
Nope. It never had a chance as a professional format. The picture quality wasn't quite as good as some of the more portable 3/4" decks that were coming out at the time. Picture quality is especially crucial in ENG, because of dimmer lighting that you're likely to encounter (shows low signal to noise ratio very well...) and the number of generations that ENG source tape was expected to go through in those days of 3/4" frame editors. (Field video dubbed right away to 3/4"; A-B roll edit, which another generation for both source VTRs; backup and archival dubs; etc.)
The other alternative, of course, was film. And back then, that was the portable one. Video = quick. Film = good quality, portable, existing equipment.
Betamax is better than VHS, but still not as good as 3/4" or Betacam. It wasn't until the Betacam format came out in '82 or '83 that the migration finally started.
It was like Sony's more recent attempt to move professional cameramen over to Hi8 systems. Unfortunately, when you snap a Hi8 VTR onto the back of an Ikegami camera, the whole camcorder is *very* light, which makes it unstable. A good camcorder weighs about 35lbs and has a comfortable and molded shoulder pad. It balances well.
The Hi8 has such a tiny mechanism that it's very fragile (ie. a spot of dust on Hi8 tape is a far bigger dropout than on a Betacam or 3/4" tape), and the weight needed for the cameraman to be able to provide good stability just isn't there.
Despite the fact that Sony has actually built professional products in both Betamax and Hi8, they quickly abandoned them and moved the formats into the realm of hi-end consumer gear. So, while I've seen examples of both attempts, they're sure to go down as a footnote in the history of a broadcast engineering giant.
Ok, I don't want to nitpick, but wouldn't their base be 14 (assuming they have two 'hands')?
That's a hell of an assumption. What if they have three hands?
Or, what if, somewhere in their history, a leader had decreed that one hand must remain at all times on their genitalia? Continuing the assumption of two hands at 7 digits each, they'd still only have one hand with which to count. Their number system may have grown up with that and despite their equivalent to the sexual revolution of the '60s, maybe they have a tradition of using only base 7 as a result.
I think the point I was making is that you can *never* make any assumptions about who might be out there - everything that we take for granted has to be sent to /dev/null before any relevent communication, beyond basically a sign of unintelligible intelligence (!), is possible.
Too wacky? I think not.
Look at us.
Our height is commonly measured in units based on, and named after, the length of a dead king's foot. A king that wasn't even *liked* on this continent.
As if that weren't enough, we confuse the issue. Smaller divisions of that unit aren't "half-feet" or "quarter-feet" or even something intelligent like decimal divisions of feet. They're inches. Based on the width of the same dead king's thumb. (Since we're already basing the principal unit of length on his foot, why not designate the smaller unit after the width of his big toe?)
Our calendar is based on the circumcision of a religious figure who allegedly was born 2,000 years ago. (And, because he was Jewish, the calendar recognizes the Jewish tradition... it's not by accident that New Year's is exactly 8 days after the accepted date of celebration of his birthday.)
Now, I'm not making any big statment here. It's easy to look again at things we take for granted. For one thing, a foot is an easy principal measure of length, because you can basically pace out a distance. And a few inches can be measured by pacing out a thumb.
But without a reference, a baseline, an understanding - much of which is impossible to convey without a common language - there's no way that anything but pure mathematics based on immutable elements will ever make sense.
Gave myself a nice zap even through the plasit insulation on the cutting pliers, and thoroughly destroyed the power supply for some reason. The thing started to smoke.
Hmmm... They're switching supplies. Generally, when you overload them, the shut right down with no damage done. I can't say that I've had this problem many times - I spend extra to buy good quality stuff and then I take good care of it - but even on some of the notebook power supplies I've come across at work (and surplus stores; notebook PSUs are very useful), I can't say that I've ever seen one that should misbehave when you short it.
I did break out my $7 Radio Shack soldering iron and got to work soldering the wire back together (REAL men don't use any insulation at all before testingThe $7 soldering iron is at least half your problem. If the soldering iron is symbolic of the quality of the notebook, yeah, I can see that the manufacturer might have scrimped and neglected to put in regulators that shut down when overloaded.
Yeah, real men *do* use insulation when testing. The stuff I fix will kill you if you look at it the wrong way. And the stuff that won't, bad things happen anyway.
It never fails that when you have an uninsulated piece of wire hanging across the desk is also exactly when a big truck is going to drive by your house and the vibrations will knock the empty Pepsi can on your desk onto it. Or the cat will come by. Or your roommate's girlfriend's hellion of a 6-year-old son. Or, you'll be checking out the device under test with your good Fluke 77 multimeter, and unseen, one of the test leads will drag the connection you should have insulated onto a screwdriver.
qUOTED (oops, caps lock) from article:
Sparks went flying and the metal supports sliced into the cable. It was sweet, except for the part where I had to wait a week to have electricity for my laptop[sigh]
You're not a real geek if you don't own at least two soldering irons.
Yessir, about a 25W Ungar iron-clad tip soldering iron, a little bit of Kester 40 rosin-core solder, a few inches of heat shrink tubing. About five minutes, and you're all set to do battle against Microsoft again.
Dabblers use electrical tape. Real professional geeks use heat shrink tubing.
Besides, notebook computers don't make sparks. Tesla coils make sparks.
If this is the sort of thing that "intelligent" life broadcasts into space in an attempt to contact other civilisations, then it's no fucking wonder we've not yet got any evidence that we're not alone in the Universe.
[sigh]
Okay. How is time measured? In days, hours, minutes, seconds - right?
All stuff that's based on the properties of the orbit of our planet. A planet that they've never seen before, and until this message, have no idea where it is.
Their planet may spin slower than ours. What we measure as a second here may well actually take 34 of our seconds on their planet.
What's that mean? It means that when we try to describe basic properties of distance in our units of measurement - like light years, for example - their light years would end up being different from ours. Essentially, then, they'd receive a message that displays intelligence, but demands that they use references that they don't have.
What's the distance between the Earth and Sun? Going to measure that in kilometers and send it to them? How do you describe a kilometer over radio waves? You can't send a reference unit of 1m, you know. You can't tell them it's approximately the length of the recipient's left arm. What if the reader has tentacles?
*Everything* has to be defined clearly in a mathematical sense. Anything that isn't probably won't have a reference that they can understand.
Sending them video of Three's Company or something would tell them a lot about us. An NTSC TV signal is repetitive and therefore could be quite easily dissected and displayed by an alien culture. But what would Three's Company say about us or our world? And how many minutes of Jack whining could you get to fit in under 64k of highly noise-resistant signal?
So, with this new understanding, what do *you* propose is a better way to get in touch with ET? What do *you* suggest will tell him the most about us?
Anyway, a Hebrew or Arabic puzzle would have just been a mirror image I guess. And I am sure this puzzle will get distorted on transit by not being in the ET's network byte order.
It's amazing just how difficult it is to describe things that you and I (and all people) take for granted.
Like describing temperature. You can't give it in degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit - those measurements evolved on Earth. They're referenced to things on Earth.
You can't even give it in degrees Kelvin, because their scientific scale could well be based on something completely different. From absolute zero to the temperature of a sunny day on their planet?
So, you have to define an atom. Then, you have to define a few basic elements. And then the compound H2O, which still has the same atomic composition, though instead of calling it water, they'll recognize it as something they call NNGrlap. They love to ride down NNGrlap slides on days when their planet's star shines brightly on the land. And, on the remotest of possibilities that they've never seen water - under any name - they'll figure out how to make it. If they have the ability to make a radio telescope, they understand enough chemistry to know that hydrogen and oxygen react together. So, even if oxygen is a rarer-than-palladium element to them, at least their scientists will have seen it, documented its properties, and will be able to make water so that they can understand our standard.
It's more likely, though, that ET will simply slither (or whatever) down the hallway, and turn on the faucet in the office kitchen to get a beaker full of NNGrlap.
Once ET is familiar with the basic properties of NNGrlap/Water, you can establish a descriptive and meaningful temperature measurement of things that only we have seen.
The fact that every measurement has to be described and that whatever the recipient's language is, it's going to be far different from *anything* we know on this planet, means all communication must be mathematics.
Like reading graffiti in Aramaic, you don't need to know anything about Aramaic to know that the patterns on the wall aren't by accident. But, unless you've had some expose to the culture, you won't be able to make sense of it on your own. They'll have had no experience to our cultures. Therefore, any human language is not useful.
Not to mention the fact that it could well take 1,000 years for the message to travel to a planet and be read by someone, and another 1,000 years for it to come back. What did English sound like 2,000 years ago? Didn't exist? Who is to say that it will still exist 500 years from now, let alone 2,000? So, if they managed to decipher a human-language message, and reply to it, our decendents will probably have a tough time understanding it. Ever read Beowulf? (Not the cluster, the old English poem). Think Shakespeare was tough? Try Beowulf. And that's only 1,000 years old.
In mathematics, 2+2=4, no matter how you write it. If they've got the technology to receive a signal from space, they've got mathematics. They'll be able to figure out the message.
Consider the ground that was covered in that message. We defined *everything* in 23 pages of low-resolution dots. We described DNA. Maybe in a galaxy far, far away, the project manager of the radio telecope is going to be standing at an NNGrlap cooler, chatting with a fellow employee, when a scientist will come running in, show him the page, and he'll drop his glass of NNGrlap with surprise at how they're based on the same basic DNA structure as we are.
We covered the spectral responses of our senses of sight and hearing. That will be important if they ever follow the directions we gave them and come to visit us. It'd be tough if they communicated in ultrasonics... :)
All this ground was covered. And anyone, regardless of language, with some scientific interest, could figure it out.
Mathematics is the only universal language. Not that it's practical for conversation...
If the alien figures out a stream of 0's and 1's, how does he know that they represent 23 pages of 127*127 pixels?
Have you ever looked at a stack dump? I mean, even without being a programmer, you've seen them. But have you ever really looked at one?
When you start to see a pattern of, let's say, 65,535 random characters with a $ sign, then another 65,535 random characters and another dollar sign, can't you maybe make the assumption that you're dealing in 64k pages of information? If you then start to use the dollar sign as a sign to start a new line, then a pattern might become visible in the contents of the stack dump. (And, no, don't get highly technical on why this stack dump is wrong, it's an example.)
Each line that is being sent is 127 pixels long. At the same places in each string of seemingly random dots, there are pixels that mark the "edges" of the information.
Further, even Hellen Keller could see that there was intelligence at work if she saw this coming into the instruments on her radio telescope. It would be given close scrutiny.
Mathematics are universal. It doesn't matter if you write 2+2=4, or 0010 + 0010 = 0100, or even II + II = IV. The values and fundamentals are universal. If ET has 7 fingers on each hand, his numbering system might be base 7. But if he's got the technology to be building a radio telescope, he's got higher mathematics. And that means he's got the lowest and simplest mathematics there is: binary. And while there can be no standard way of writing the symbol between two lifeforms that have evolved completely different, it remains: There are two characters, On or Off. However you draw them.
Remember: 1001 = *..* = fyyf = etc.
If someone were to write this:
^^#^ + ^^## = ^#^#
And put it on a mathematician's desk, he'd figure it out in seconds.
Since they will know binary, and they'll know that another creature trying to make contact is likely to use it because of its simplicity, my bet is that they'll try to look for patterns on 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 ...and *128* in the incoming data stream. Right where our page edge markers are.
Build your own pay TV decoder for fun. You'll see that deciphering what appears to be random information really isn't all that tough. This is a walk in the park compared to some of the math that people get into in daily life. Let alone pure research scientists.
ET wouldn't have to be all that bright to figure it out. He *would* have to be far brighter to build the equipment with which to receive it.
Does her head bounce back and forth as she talks too? Sounds like a couple of women (and I use that term very loosely, insert loose joke here) I know too.
You got it, Pontiac!
She's 27 and has a 6-year-old son. She lives on welfare and drives a 1986 Beretta. Her dream car is a Chevrolet full-size pickup truck, but there ain't no way in hell she's gonna drive a GMC pickup truck.
<sigh> At least she's trying to do something, though. She frustrates me, but at least she's trying to do something with her life.
Not to be harsh, but the people that think they are going to get rich just because they have a "COMPUTER DEGREE" from some community college are precisely the people that aren't going to make any money. There are a lot of those 'degrees' that can be earned without learning anything more about computers than how to market speak computer jargon.This is at least part of why I've eschewed structured, formal education myself.
I'm into computers because between them and my cars, they're the passions of my life. I'm also very much into professional and high end audio and video electronics, especially antique stuff.
I contrast the fact that every spare moment, I'm doing something that has to do with one of those fields, to the community college type who has no original thoughts or even the instinctive understanding that most Slashdot readers would probably take for granted.
A revelation to me is that I can finally use the old Chevette engine kicking around in the garage - to replace the worn-out Tecumseh on my 1973 Ariens snowblower. All it takes is to weld in a 7" stretch to the chassis between the blower and the drive subassembly, it's really cool, and it's cheaper than to replace the dual-shaft Tecumseh.
A revelation to me is that, in high school, rather than writing a little Pascal program to make a Macintosh play Chopsticks as a mandated "Write a program to make the computer play music" assignment, I could hook three 5.25" full-height Shugart floppy disk drives to my trusty old TI-99/4A, and write an assembly language program to make them play Flight of the Bumblebees. In three part harmony. I got an A+, though the teacher wasn't happy about giving it to me. (And, I admit, I got help: I needed someone to translate the sheet music into frequencies and durations, since I don't know how to read sheet music.)
A revelation is realizing that you *can* mass produce a surface-mount radar buffer board with the small production facilities at work and no real SMT assembly equipment by ...well, that's a secret. Non-disclosure agreement.
To Jen, a revelation is that you need to put real-mode CD-ROM drivers onto your startup diskette before you format the hard drive and try to install Windows 95 from CD. (No, neither the Windows 95B edition, nor her motherboard, support a boot off CD-ROM.) Sure, when we've been new to any operating system, we've all done stupid things like this. But the astute *test* the machine's ability to workably boot prior to formatting the drive...
I had a boss that was that way. Head of IT, yet he couldn't figure out the simplest of computer concepts without at least two of the help desk people there to tell him how to do it. But he had a DEGREE in computers, so he had to know what he was doing!Oh no, and in a position of power. That must have been a frustrating workplace.
Listen, I like my boss. I don't like badmouthing him. But, let's face it, you need to, every now and then. This guy feels qualified to talk about computers. He's *literally* never done a clean install of Windows since he installed Windows 3.1. When Windows 95 came out, he upgraded. When that crashed, he actually spent the time to fix it. Then he bought Partition Magic, and mirrored it across to a bigger drive. Then a few years later, another bigger drive. Now, he's got probably the world's only Windows 2000 Professional system that is running in a 6 gigabyte drive under FAT16. I've never seen so many partitions in my life.
Every time the computer hiccups (which is often, as you can imagine), he storms into my office, looking for some troubleshooting disk. My standard answer, of course, is that he should format the drive, reinstall Windows, and then his apps. Of course, he refuses: it'll take way too long. A whole morning, if he does it slowly. Then, he'll spend 2 days trying to get Windows to run without crashing, and consider himself to have come out ahead.
He actually copied the entire registry out of my box once - even though our machines have nothing remotely similar in hardware or software.
On one hand, the dogged determination is amazing. On the other hand, well... you know.
He demanded root access to the Linux server I set up. I just told him that he had it. Sure enough, go through the history file on his account, and there are commands like "dir c:", "win", "scandisk c:", and my favorite, "why the f**k isnt this computer working". Of course, the computer was fine, but he's obviously never seen any UNIX before.
And yet between the two adresses I get less than 30 pieces of spam a day. Either I have a real high tolerance for annoyances, or the oft-cited sources of spammers getting your email adress is wrong.
Oh, no. 15 pieces of spam per e-mail box per day is not unreasonable. No. That's not a pain in the butt.
Oddly enough, when I set up a spambucket adress at Yahoo!, even with very little use that box gets upwards of 50+ pieces of spamYeah, I can't account for that experience, though. I get a few spams here and there through my Yahoo accounts, but it's not bad. Less than one in the average week. Fortunately, Yahoo has a Spam-Guard service as part of their e-mail. As long as you log in from the web access every week to make sure no important e-mails have accidentally been filtered that way, it's great.
Woah! I want a 96GHz AMD ThunderChicken.
Well, I figured Intel will have to give up the Pentium name sooner or later, it's getting a little long in the tooth as it approaches a decade...
<grin> That assumes Intel lives another 10 years, of course.
Pentium was a great name. Pentium II was a reasonable sequel, though apparently Santa Clara sequels are similar to those a few miles down the coast in Hollywood: they lose originality.
Pentium III was as much of a stretch as... well, I can't tell you, I boycott sequels, so I can't think of any. Let alone the Pentium IV.
Time for Intel to give it up and at least get a fresh name. Otherwise, Joe Consumer is going to feel that his new computer is powered by something unoriginal, rather than something new, high tech and powerful.
Eventually, I sold it to a friend of mine for $1200, including installation at his house.
A good salesman always refers to his customers as friends. After all, they're my friends because they give me money.
That's not to imply that I'm a good salesman, of course. I'm not especially, despite having read a few books on sales. I hate selling stuff, but I get the job done.
It's the same way that you never ask a customer to sign a contract. A customer is a friend, signing is something your mother told you never to do, and a contract is a scary pile of legalese. You instead get your friend to autograph an agreement, because this conjures up pleasant of happy people making him feel important. (Other bad words in sales include "policy" and, well, "sales".)
More importantly, with the emissions that the projector was still putting out - in other words, the CRTs (which are expensive and a lot of work to replace) were *very* healthy - that projector was an easy $2500 in the classified ads in the local newspaper. (You know, where people still advertise and sell $700 Pentium 75s.)
Real not-ripping-anyone-off value of it was about $2,000.
He did okay. I did okay. It was a mutually beneficial agreement. We're both happy.
You know, the people that just totally turn off their brain when they sit in front of a computer?
You know, like my roommate's girlfriend, who enters your e-mail address into every one of these stupid little websites that sends you a card and sells the collected list of addresses?
"Oh, look! It's a picture of a puppy sleeping on a sofa! And the caption is so funny! Oh, that's so cute! I have to send that to Lawrence, even though he's a cat person, he's like that so much!"
<sigh> She complains about the amount of spam she gets, and yet she merrily enters her real unobfuscated e-mail address into every website, newsgroup, *everything*. She hasn't yet made the connection.
And she's on her last year of some sort of computer diploma from some community college. Of course, it's not because she has any interest or aptitude in computers, it's because she can make "so much money" in computers. Jesus wept.
And, no, I didn't just discover the HTML <i> tag. That's really how she talks.
No, they altered his preferences and have "given" him about 2 weeks to change them back before they go into effect. Underhanded and wrong, sure.
Come on, how can you question this?
After all, Ebay is, like, one of ten Dot-Coms that is financially viable and one of two that actually turns a profit.
How can you question their motives?
If ya want this Internet thing ta work, mebbe that's a part of it all.
Just as long as they don't send *me* a notice like that.
...[Eudora plays a bar from Ren and Stimpy's The Log]...
<sigh> Okay. Let's get them. A boycott is in order.
neither's digital
Either could be. Digital Betacam has been around for years; D-VHS is apparently in the works.
they're fixed formatPhysically, yes. Electronically, no. SVHS, for example, will not play in a VHS VCR, though a VHS cassette will play in an SVHS VCR.
Lots of things use VCR mechanisms and tape for things other than TV pictures. I have a JVC SVHS machine right beside me that uses off-the-shelf SVHS cassettes to save PPI radar video. That's not even raster scanned!
Lemme tell you, those cassettes look really funny when you pop them into a regular SVHS VCR. :)
they're crappy CGA grade resolutionD-VHS wouldn't be. And Sony's got an HDTV version of Digital Betacam.
they're not random access, they're tape for yog's sake!Yup. That's right. The technology is mature, so at least you know that the video collection that you have in the archives at your TV station will probably still play 30 years from now. It'll be interesting to see how well optical discs stand the test of time, with all the comments about CD-R/RW lifespans, not to mention the ?possibly? urban legends about the aluminum coating inside CDs corroding in time through the edges of the disc.
What'll happen? Maybe something bad, maybe something good. I have videotape that is over 30 years old, and I'm not a TV station. It's important.
Tape isn't perfect. It's still a pain in the ass waiting for it to wind to the right place, but at least the media is mature.
The videotape that new parents take of their baby will still probably work 30 years from now. Hell, some 50 year old tape still works, and it was a lot more primitive then than it is now; it's likely that most of today's tape recordings, if stored properly, will still work in 2051. It's still unknown how well that CD/DVD/CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-RAM will survive the years...
Neither is interactive, not even freakin' hyperlinksNah. I wouldn't want Jerry Springer to be interactive, would you? If I wanted interactive, I'd sit down at my computer. If I wanted to just veg out after a long day, I'll turn on the TV, maybe pop a movie into the VCR. Or a DVD into the player. Ask me when the last time was that I checked out the Director's Comments or Play Hangman with the Letters in the Names of the Cast or some other crap like that... I know my DVD player supports them, but I've never used them.
(most of the above also go for current TV standards, NTSC/PAL/SECAM)I agree with you exclusively on the resolution of NTSC/PAL/SECAM. But TV has been such a successful innovation that I question whether any improvements besides faster/cheaper/better can actually take over?
Faster: No waiting though commercials, that's what the fast forward button is for.
Cheaper: Well? I remember when a color TV started at over $500. Now, I see them for under $100.
Better: Color, stereo, HDTV, Closed Captioning, wireless remote control, more channels.
Interactive alters the formula. Will it ever *really* take off? If it's incorporated into TV sets, will it go the way of the VCR timers where most people can't even figure out how to set the clock?
Having said *all that*, for most consumers, yeah, recordable DVDs are probably the way to go. It would be what I would get for my daily time-shifting and movie rental use. But it's not anywhere near so clear cut as you apparently feel.