I wonder if you arranged 800x600 of these things on a grid (assuming the price drops significantly) we could actually see LED projectors in the future! Sounds like a promising alternative to LCD, huh? Then maybe I can watch projected movies on my big loft wall without spending US $10,000.
Uhhh... No. If you made an array of LEDs and wanted to project them, you'd still need a lens.
To do it more reasonably, just make the 800x600 grid direct-viewable in whatever size that you want.
Problem 1: Average current to each LED is, let's say, 15mA. 800x600x0.015A = 7,200 amps. Evidently, this is going to have to be multiplexed somehow. (Oh, yeah, that's 7,200A *per color*, since I didn't multiply that number by three for each of the primary colors. (I assume you want each pixel to be three color.)
Assuming the average forward voltage drop per LED is 2.0V, that's a total consumption of 14.4kW. With the cost of a kWh of electricity where I am hovering around $0.06, watching the X-Files would cost me $8.64 in electricity. Per color! ("Maw, we's is goan' hafta winna lottery before we is can afford ta turn on th' whole TV set... 'ntil then, it's Jerry Springer 'n green only.") And that's just for the LEDs, not the support electronics.
Problem 2: Let's say these are three-color T-1 3/4 LEDs. And let's say that you've somehow figured out a way of wiring them to each other that doesn't occupy any display real estate.
A T-1 3/4 LED is about 1/4" in diameter. If you have 800 of them in a row, that's gonna be 200 inches long. 16.66 feet. 600 LEDs tall: 150 inches; 12.5 feet. A 16.6 x 12.5 foot screen. Or, using Pythagorean Theorum to figure out how they'd advertise it if it were a TV set, 20.78 feet diagonally. 249.36 Viewable Inches! On Sale Now! (Got space for it?)
LEDs vary from lot to lot, factory to factory. Blue on one side of your display with be different from the blue on the other side. At the same time, it'll be difficult to get your driver system to be adjusted flat across the entire color spectrum. You will have color purity issues. Look at a big LED display board in a public place now; few of them even approach the scope and resolution that you're talking about. And they're all spotty. There's a gorgeous example on the Paramount Theater at Toronto's Richmond and John Streets.
Finally, 800x600 is 480,000 LEDs. Each one is gonna cost you at least a buck (three color T-1 3/4), even in quantity. Each one is going to take you at least 30 seconds to solder into place (realistically, doing it by hand). Got 240,000 minutes (that's 4,000 hours; 166 days)? And we haven't even looked at the support electronics.
Just wait another 20 years or so until a stadium somewhere is being demolished, and scoop the JumboTron out of it. They're not LED-based, they don't have the same resolution, but they're pre-built and they look really good.
On the LED subject, I was at a Fossil store the other day and they were selling LED watches -- the ones with red numbers that you had to press a button to see...what was that, 1978 or so? Twenty bucks, and it was even about the same size as the old ones (must have put lead or something in there to simulate the weight:-)
Cool! I've always wanted one of those!
I *hate* analog watches (the whole idea of moving parts on my wrist...), but I want a *tasteful* and *neat* digital watch. (Calculator watches need not apply.) Do they at least have the really nice cases and wristbands that I remember them having in my childhood?
I rigged up a color-programmable fishbowl full of Christmas lights (RGB) through three dimmer switches for the same effect, much cheaper... I have noticed, however that there is a bit of a heat problem. I wonder whether LEDs would be any better in that regard.
Incandescent bulbs (Christmas lights) use a tungsten filament heated to white hot inside a vacuum.
A natural by-product of this is heat.
(Actually, truth be told, a natural by-product of an incandescent bulb is *light*; most of the energy is wasted as heat.)
A Light Emitting Diode is based on the concept that when some semiconductor PN junctions (ie. diodes) are forward-biased, they convert the energy lost to their forward voltage drop into light.
LED light actually comes from the semiconductor junction itself; it's highly efficient (85% or more), highly color-stable (the color emitted depends on the doping of the junction), has none of the thermal inertia issues associated with tungsten filaments (ie., look at a car with tungsten tail lights and an LED third brake light), and is virtually impervious to mechanical shock.
The LED is the way of the future. Your fishbowl would benefit.
I'm not sure about stagelights, though. I used to work in the sound/lighting/professional video field; I don't know how I'll like stagelights that don't feel *warm* when they shine on you!
Although, I'd never have to dig out the asbestos gloves and climb a ladder to change a hot quartz bulb during the 10-minute intermission or fart around swapping gels...
Hey, is there a Linux version of the Color Kinetics software out there? I'm just wondering, when Windows blue-screens, do their cans change to blue in sympathy?
Either way, these guys are set to give Intellibeam, RoboScan, etc. a run for their money. Most of the times I ever used those, it wasn't for the tacky little gobos or the fact that they'd follow a target: it was because they changed color *quickly*, certainly faster than conventional cans with a gel reel setup.
Reasoning by anecdote is so much fun; it lets you prove anything with but a single example. <grin>
Absolutely. Or, the anecdote can be used as an illustrative example.
Let's consider something. The Demon was *blueprinted*. That's an automotive hobbyist's term for building the motor to closer than new tolerances.
Now, why would you do that? For power.
What's the consequence of more power? More efficiency.
What's the consequence of more efficiency? Closer stoichiometry.
And that means....?
Less emissions.
The thing you may not know is that tailpipe tests are done at idle.
Really? Hmmm... I guess that's why they put cars onto dynamometers in most modern emissions testing programs...
You know, all people who make generalizations are idiots. <grin> The Demon passed a 25 MPH dyno test, a 2500 RPM idle test, and a factory idle (750RPM) test.
This also happens to be when the exhaust gases are coolest, and the catalytic converter is working particularly poorly. On top of this, idle has the lowest cylinder pressures. Therefore, you have the worst conversion, offset by the lowest production of NOx.
Actually, a cold cat would generally result in *more* unburnt HC leaving the exhaust, and therefore a failed test. But if the car were inefficient at idle, you'd probably find that the cat got hot.
But it's an especially interesting question, since the 1972 Dodge Demon, even in California emissions trim, didn't come with a catalytic converter.
What we're proving here is that older cars with simpler engines and good care can pass the same standards as a modern car.
It's all about maintenance. Stop demonstrating your ignorance.
It's not too surprising that the Demon would fare well under these conditions.
It's not too surprising that the Demon passed the 25 MPH dyno, either. And if you had ever done more with a car than cry helplessly when you blew a tire by the side of the road, you might know that.
The problem for you is that these aren't representative conditions; people don't do a whole lot of miles at idle.
You've clearly never been on a metropolitan freeway at rush hour.
If you tested the cars under load, they'd tell a very different story. That's when you'd be comparing a hot, working 'cat against the catless, EGR-less Demon - with actual cylinder pressures and temperatures in the operating range.
<sigh> I suspect you're fat. I've got a weight reduction plan for you that simulates EGR wonderfully.
Step one: Take a crap. Step two: replace x percentage of your food with your crap. Step three: enjoy the weight loss, weird infections and onset of scurvy.
Would you work any more efficiently if you ate your own shit? No. Why would you expect a car engine to?
If your ignition timing isn't too far advanced, your NOx production is *very* limited.
You'll note that on many cars, the EGR valve is vacuum-operated. At full-throttle, there is no vacuum with which to hold the EGR valve open. Similarily, speaking as one who has *designed engine management systems for a living*, I'll tell you that most car engines with electronically-controlled EGR valves close them at wide-open throttle.
Now, if you want to simulate a catalytic converter, go to a sex shop and buy a butt-plug. Drill a 1/4" hole through it. Insert it, and now try to dispose of your waste the way you're forcing the engine to.
Ah, yes. We've made the engine so much healthier with all these great ideas!
That's when the 1997 car would be clean as a whistle, and the Demon would be pumping out huge amounts of crap.
Test report forthcoming.
Fortunately for your anecdotes you can't demo this without a chassis dyno, so the examples to disprove your assertions are nowhere as easy to come by as your simple "proofs".
Again, I live in Toronto, Canada. That is in the province of Ontario. Ontario has "DriveClean". Click on this link to go to their site and read about their dynos. You'll note two things. The Demon was *voluntarily* tested (it's more than 20 years old), and you'll also note that the dyno test runs at 40km/h. That's approximately 25 MPH.
I grow weary with your self-righteous ignorance. Are you sure you're not a Baptist, too?
Don't believe me, then you must..
a) be living in a large polluted place (read almost any large US city), you have become use to the pollution and don't know it.
Toronto, Canada, actually. In order of size, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago then Toronto are the largest *metropolitan* cities in North America. Highway 401 across the top of Toronto is the second busiest freeway in the world, after only the Santa Monica in L.A.
Do I qualify?
b) be living in the country or smaller city where the affects of polution are not yet significant.
I grew up outside Ottawa, Canada. While it's Canada's capital, the metro population is under a million. The big freeway ("The Queensway") is a paltry four lanes wide in each direction. 'Tis a small town.
OR the worst but most likely category..
Oh, but you have no concept...
c) you do not care about anything but your own well being (i.e. as long as the environment does not become shit in your lifetime, you will do what ever you like regardless of the long term impacts).
No, I'm simply reasonable. Do you want to save the environment, maybe increasing the average lifespan by two years? Great! And as you shut down the economy to do that, unemployment rates get increased, and you give people an extra two years of welfare misery. Congratulations. The lynch mob is standing outside your house, waiting for you.
You know, I love environmentalists. They're such idiots. One of them, the sister of a friend of mine, came up to me, all proud that she'd just bought a 1970s VW Microbus. And she was telling me that it was what her "hippy forefathers" would have driven. And how it got such great gas mileage and therefore was *so* environmentally friendly.
Over the exhaust pipe, her back bumper had the big black stain of a rich fuel mixture. And when she dropped the clutch and pulled away, the blue cloud of blow-by oil from her worn-out engine would have killed a NYC pigeon. And yet she feels that what she's driving is more environmentally friendly than her brother's absolutely perfectly restored 1972 Dodge Demon with a *blueprinted* 340-4bbl. While it only gets 10MPG, that car passed an emissions test, blowing cleaner than a 1997 model spec, even though it has no emissions control equipment.
I'd bet money that Jen's Microbus is well over 5,000 PPM of unburnt hydrocarbon.
But, do you believe in Darwinism? I don't really care about air pollution. It'll eventually remove asthmatics from the gene pool.
The day is coming very soon when you won't even think of burning fossil fuels to get somewhere. You could get one of VW's
78-MPG cars today, and run it off of spent fryer grease (but you'd be a bit eccentric).
Oh, no doubt, I think they're a great idea. Gas mileage is all important. (As a side note, my daily driver is a 1976 Dodge Ram with a 400CID (6.6L) big block V8. It gets about 7 miles per gallon when I drive it gently. And it'll not only out-accelerate any little "souped-up" Acura I've ever come up against at a stoplight, but it's also a lot of fun to drive.)
Or, wait a bit and you'll be able to get
something like the tzero, which already has acceleration better than anything made by Mopar.
13.2 on the quarter mile? While that's impressive, my *truck* would show you taillights.
Ever hear of the legendary Chrysler (Mopar) Hemi?
Ever hear of the Chrysler 340? Or the 440-6 pak? Chrysler built at least ten cars, in mass production, during the musclecar era that would have blown that thing away. I'll list them for you, as well as totals produced, if you're interested.
Hell, the Dodge Omni GLHS was faster than that 13.2, and it was a little mid-80's hatchback. (With a Shelby turbocharged 2.2L or 2.5L engine...)
The Shelby Dodge Viper runs 12.8 on the 1/4 mile, and it's a lot more practical and streetable than this car that you're talking about. (And, by the way, the Shelby cars are built that way at Chrysler's factories.)
Hell, do you even know who Carrol Shelby is? (Hint: not a chick.)
Finally, while not a Mopar, in the mid-1980s, GM built the Grand National, which was a black Buick Regal with a 3.8L SFI turbo V6. It had a curb weight of close to 4,000 pounds, was luxury everything, and was faster than that electric car.
Get to know your automotive history before you start spouting about automotive future.
That's with current batteries,
too. When you consider the performance potential with new batteries such as the NEC proton polymer battery, you could be
talking 0-60 in 3 seconds. That's more fun than I've ever had.
By their very nature, batteries are full of nasty, caustic chemicals. The more potent the battery, the more potent the chemicals. Gasoline is bad, yes. But I can't wait for the adoption of electric cars en masse. Every car accident will be a haz-mat team call; because of need for range, batteries will be stuffed everywhere in the car and they'll be ruptured in every minor fender-bender. Car accident burns won't be thermal anymore (well, there will still be some of those); the majority will be chemical. And there'll be a lot of them.
And all those exotic battery electrolytes will leak into storm sewers, killing your precious fish in whatever lake they get to.
Sure, I read the article; the new NEC battery is an exception, it uses a conventional sulphuric acid electrolyte to achieve its phenomenal power to volume ratios.
But even if that's the technology of the future, where are you going to charge the batteries? Plug them in? Remember the power shortages and rotating blackouts in California this summer? I can't wait to see what those will be like once the state's commuters are all plugging in at night. Gonna have to build a few new nuclear or coal power plants to supply Sacramento alone (let alone L.A.) Oh, but wait, that's bad for the environment, too. Sorry.
Forcing replacement of the existing fleet is a bigger market opening than
the replacement of R-12.
The replacement of R-12 wasn't much to the car companies. A few retrofit kits for the orifices on older A/C systems, a new cylinder of gas to fill new car A/C with, no big deal. Retooling to get away from a piston engine? Could happen, but there'll be lots of kicking and screaming.
You're also blissfully ignorant of the old car collector like myself. Gasoline will not go away. Old car enthusiasts tend to be educated, affluent, and enjoy *driving* our cars. And we vote.
You say you're affluent and intelligent, why aren't you on this bandwagon already?
Because I'm smart enough to see the folly in it. Like communism, it's a great idea. Like communism, it also forgets a few very basic things about how the world works. That didn't stop it from fucking up a whole lot of lives, though.
If I was made Prime Minister of Canada (yes, that's where I live) my first order of business would be to ban all fossil-fuel burning personal use automobiles!!!
Then I, as an affluent and intelligent young Canadian, being forced to ride on public transportation where I may be forced into personal contact with hotel chambermaids, unwed 18-year-old single mothers, the homeless and other derelicts, will no longer find that Canada is able to provide me with the lifestyle that I expect for the work that I do.
As a result, even faster than the high taxes and lack of opportunity in this socialist hellhole are driving me out, I'll be a brain-drain statistic before you're able to reneg on your first campaign promise.
Idiot. Don't you realize that everything is cause and effect? Banning cars will cause the affluent to leave. That will mean less people starting businesses, and less skilled labor for established businesses. Which means more businesses fail. Which means higher unemployment. While Canada clearly wants to be a third-world nation, this is the best way to exacerbate the problem. (Here's why the economy always goes bad when the NDP gets elected!)
Try learning something about how the world really works.
"The incredibly hardy, long-lived satellite, which long ago surpassed NASA's wildest expectations for its power supplies and other systems, may finally have drifted peacefully into eternal slumber . . .."
<sigh>
We've been through some things together With trunks of memories still to come We found things to do in stormy weather Long may you run.
Long may you run. Long may you run. Although these changes have come With your chrome heart shining in the sun Long may you run.
Wasn't there a really cheap item sold to make a B&W TV look color? It was simply a plastic filter with blue on the top half and green on the lower half that mounted to the TV. (I'm not kidding about this). I guess it was for the days where Westerns were the biggest entertainment on TV. Always a need for blue sky and green grass....
Absolutely, there was. It was kinda like the screen overlays on a Vectrex video game system.
But no, that's not the color TV system I was talking about. The color TV system I was talking about (I think it was from Westinghouse, but I can't remember for sure) actually had the primary colors on a rotating disk.
If you wanted to show the red in a picture, only the red portions of the image would be displayed on the (black and white) TV screen. At this point, the red portion of the disk would be over the screen. When you wanted to show blue or green, same thing - the image displayed on the CRT would switch as the disk came to that point in its rotation. It would have been flickery, but it would have been true color. And the noise and bulk of a rapidly spinning disk over the CRT would have been nasty.
Part of the issue was that when the NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) was choosing the support for a new color TV standard, the FCC had decreed that it had to remain backwards-compatible with the existing black and white TV standard (they pushed for this back in the late '80s, too, with the proposals for the new HDTV standard). This color wheel system, elegantly simple but unwieldy, would have done that.
Fortunately for us, RCA invented the color (three-gun) cathode ray tube at about that time, and had come up with a way of encoding the color information onto a black and white image by syncing an oscillator in the TV set with one at the TV station (the 3.5758MHz "colorburst" signal) which was hidden in the horizontal blanking interval (the black bar that you see geting torn all over the place when your horizontal hold is set wrong). The color information then rode over top of the video brightness information. Old TV sets don't notice the color signal, but your color TV set compares the phase of the signal riding on the luminance (brightness) and demodulates it by phase to each one of the three primary guns. And the more saturated the color has to be, the bigger the color signal riding in the brightness info.
Basically, it's an all-electronic version of the nasty old Westinghouse color system. We should all be grateful to the pioneers like RCA, Nipikow and Zworkin for what we now take for granted. And, of course, to John Logie Baird, whose mechanical TV system is completely irrelevant now, but he got the ball rolling by proving that TV was possible.
Fairly correct. Mazda has actually never stopped producing rotaries. The RX-7 was phased out in America in '96 but was still produced until last year for the asian market, and the Cosmo (sedan available with a triple rotary 20b) is also extant.
Oh, that's cool. But it's sad that they're no longer a part of the biggest automotive market in the world. The engine is innovative, even though it was originally imperfect and has now suffered the scourge of emissions controls.
Mazda has been showing it's latest version of the 13b dual rotary lately. The 'Reinesis' plant has 280 HP naturaly aspirated, gets 30+ MPG (stunning for a rotary of that power), can pass low emission standards, and has much improved apex seals.
The seals haven't been an issue since the early 1980s. But I'm really curious as to how they'd have coped with the inherently limited compression ratio of a rotary, as well as a combustion chamber with way too much surface area and a shape that is completely counter-productive from a flame-front (and therefore a volumetric efficiency) standpoint.
I mean, let's face it, even a 1986 Hyundai Excel has a better (hemispherical) combustion chamber, capable of better flame travel and with less cold quench area to drive up emissions.
Don't misunderstand me; I love the rotary, and I've enjoyed driving them, and while I've never worked on one, I think it would be fascinating. But I'm amazed at your news that they can be made more conformant with today's tough emissions laws.
Mazda is supposedly going to put it in the new RX-7, the new MX-6, and possibly an MX-5 (Miata) variant.
That would be very cool. I'm not a fan of Japanese cars on the whole - I'm more a fan of the traditional American car philosophy of big engine, full-frame, rear-wheel-drive design. There's no question that it makes a car easier to service and last longer. But, again, I applaud and even *like* Mazda for their rotaries. Unlike most Japanese manufacturers (ie. Honda, Toyota), they're actually highly innovative. (And don't get onto me about Honda's CVCC or V-TEC; they're not as innovative as Honda fans like to think they are.)
As for american wankels, there was also an Astrovette (rear-engined prototype corvette from the early 70s) that sported a quad rotary. Serious power in a quad, Mazda has won the 24 hours of LeMans with quad-rotary cars. An additional note about LeMans is that Mazda has the highest finishing percentage of any manufacturer who has entered more than one race, all with wankels.
Yeah, Mazda really did have the kinks worked out of the motor.
Along the lines of the Astrovette, the original Valiant concept car back in the late 1950s was to be rear-engined (like a Corvair, which Chrysler found out about before the Corvair hit the showrooms) and was to use a gas turbine engine, like the later semi-prototype Chrysler Turbine cars used. While that would have been cool, it too would have been impractical.
My mechanic just got one of those rotary trucks which has survived 25 years with it's weird 1.3 litre. You are right that it sucks with big loads, whatever a wankel is it's not a high torque at low revs engine.
No, it's not. <grin> But with suitable gearing, that wouldn't be a problem. The issue with those early rotaries, especially in a truck, is that people tend to tow heavy loads and stuff. A surprising number of people lug the engine (drive in too high a gear for a given speed). In a piston engine, the detonation as a result makes a loud knocking sound, eventually hurting valves, connecting rod bearings and cylinder head gaskets. It takes a *lot* of abuse to put a hole through a piston. However, in the same situation with a rotary, especially an early one, it doesn't take much lugging to lose all your compression by blowing out an (early and fragile) apex or side seal.
"...the RX-7 sports coupe, was an excellent car mechanically." Yup, but don't get me started on their electrical system. Damned cold solders...
<grin> Never been there. Around here, as is typical with any Japanese car, the lightweight and irresponsibly thin body sheetmetal is rotted off by winter driving before anything else really starts to fail.
Hey.. that's a pretty neat idea. I'll call my patent attorney tomorrow and see if I can make their idea my intellectual property.
Too late. Every Sharper Image store has something similar, though I'd prefer to build my own. (Helps to give me an excuse for keeping all those old VCR head drum assemblies kicking around.)
You're a putz, Bob. I like you. I checked out your website, you build really cool stuff. Thanks for putting these neat little projects up on the 'Net!
Uhhh... I design radar equipment for Litton; any chance of getting your microwave oven hack schematics, despite the danger warnings? (I've got *no* idea how you'd have handled the waveguide issues, or even how you built the antenna!)
This reminds me of how John Logie Baird's first television worked. It's actually more sophisticated than that really, in that Baird's TV gated the light output by shining it through apertures in a spinning disk. But you get the picture:o)
Nipikow Disk TV sets. Yeah, they were really cool.
But, man oh man, after watching one of those, I'm grateful for rickety old NTSC. If you think 525 lines isn't enough resolution, try watching Felix the Cat on 50 lines.
I love antique TV sets, they're fascinating. I've got a collection going; I have 4 from the early 1950s (*not* mechanical), and a couple of early 1960s portables.
Here's one for you: the original proposed color TV standard was mechanical: a spinning disk, with the three primary colors on it, was to be placed in front of the picture tube and spun in time with the sync signals from the TV station. Thank God RCA came up with the three-gun picture tube.
Antique TV Museum: MZTV Museum, part of Canada's MuchMusic and Citytv empire.
Jesus, it's guys like you that shouldn't even get close to a notebook. Using 1500 sand paper to mask your incompetence in dealing with a laptop? You've got to be kidding me. If that would have been my notebook I would have kicked your ass all over the friggin store.
<grin> My boss told me to do it. I was working at a shitty little computer store with no tools. I was the only one on staff who knew that you don't carry a bare motherboard across a carpeted repair shop on a dry winter's day. And the boss was screaming at me that I couldn't spend more than an hour to do it. (Hell, the little plastic tangs that hold it together can take at least 1/2 hour on some models, and that's when you can see where the tangs are!)
I did what I could do. And, man, I got it looking good again but even so, you should've seen how happy the owner was just to see the computer boot up again.
On the other hand, I'm also *extremely* glad that I don't work in computer retail anymore. Ugh.
BTW, wet 1500 grit sandpaper is great for smoothing a plastic case back down if you've pursed it at all. I find it hard to believe that you're so competent and co-ordinated that you've never had to resort to that.
Besides an unfortunate name, I never understood why wankel engines didn't catch on. Few moving parts, simple design... beautiful. Ideas?
Completely off-topic, but yeah.
The Wankel is a beautiful engine, I agree. It's a great idea. But, like communism, it's a great idea that cannot possibly work.
In its early adoption with the NSU Rotaries and some of the early Mazdas (and, while I really don't like Japanese cars, I really respect Mazda for pressing on with the rotary engine), they were frought with low compression and sealing problems. Like a piston engine, they need to create compression before firing the fuel/air mixture.
Unlike a piston engine, where the sealing is fairly easy (iron piston rings), Wankels had huge wear problems of the early seals. This reduced compression, and eventually caused many of the same problems as a worn-out conventional engine.
Early owners of Mazda rotaries (especially the ?1969? ?1970? Mazda RX-1 sedan) were having to rebuild their motors at less than 10,000 mile intervals. Mazda's ill-fated line of rotary-powered pickup trucks was even worse; the stress of a highly-loaded pickup truck was more than they could handle. Many of these vehicles in collector hands now have survived only because someone figured out a way of bolting a conventional engine into them.
By the late 1970s, Mazda had pressed on and worked hard, and their sole-surviving rotary, the RX-7 sports coupe, was an excellent car mechanically. This got to survive for a while, but ever-increasing emissions standards (tough to pass with a rotary) eventually killed it in 1993 or thereabouts.
It's sad, because when technology and corner-seals had finally caught up with the overall concept of the engine, it was no longer practical; refinement of the piston engine made it pass emissions laws that a rotary simply can't do.
Rotaries have a hard time getting as much power out of a drop of fuel as a conventional engine does. The reason is that it's pretty easy to increase the compression ratio of a piston engine - interference valves, domed pistons, less piston-to-head clearance. Increasing the compression of a rotary is tougher - dome the rotor outwards a little bit, but too much and it will hit the outer chamber as it revolves. You can't get a compression ratio of more than about 8.5:1 out of them for that reason, without having to resort to complex and expensive turbos and superchargers (which defeat the purpose of the lightweight rotary). Even if the seals work, low compression = low combustion efficiency = nasty crap in the air and poor fuel bills.
Like communism, a good idea, but that never was (and seemingly never will be) practical.
ABC News, of all people, has a really cool story on this, which touches on a few of the points, but has several *wrong* things in it. For one thing, the Pacer was American Motors' (AMC, now part of DaimlerChrysler) car. The AMC Pacer was supposed to have a rotary, according to lore. The GM "Pacer" was an early proposed name for the new 1976 Chevette. Then, it turned out that AMC brought out a car with the name, and the Chevette name was chosen for GM's new "world-car". The Chevette was *never* to have a rotary; instead, it has an excellent German-designed and American-built 4-cylinder conventional engine.
So many great ideas, so many shattered dreams. Automotive engineering is fraught with as many failed design ideas as the road to the information superhighway has been with TRS-80s and TI-99/4As and Amigas. A good idea and good engineering doesn't necessarily mean that something won't screw you over and ruin your great idea. <sigh>
Sounds right to me, underpowered plant in a nice looking shell. Just like a slant-6 Challenger.;) Me, I want the computer equivelent of a 426 Hemi... or even an LA series like the 340.
Woah, dude. The problem was never the Slant-6's performance. The problem was that every car that got a Slant-6 was seen as being an "economy" car, and therefore got a really tall differential gear. As a result, the cars got great gas mileage, but driving them was like trying to start a ten-speed bicycle out in 7th gear.
Out of the box, a Slant-6 with a good rear gear can easily move an E-body (Challenger/'Cuda) down the quarter mile in the 16.5 second range. Not bad at all, especially when you consider that's done with a 3.7L engine that gets 25MPG with the pedal down and is renouned for lasting 300,000 miles without any major attention.
Sure, it's not as fast as a Hemi or even a 340. It has lots of other cool things going for it. But, it's still far from underpowered. Underpowered is a 4-cylinder 1.5L Japanese mushbox like a Honda Civic - buzzy, noisy and whiny, giving the illusion of speed but still scoring no more than about 18-19 seconds on the 1/4 mile.
Actually, being an RX-7 nut, I want the computer equivelent of the Bi-turbo Mazda 20b triple rotary... the RISC chip of internal combustion.
Your RX-7 is a fly caught in my 400's air cleaner.
I dropped my IBM thinkpad from a height of 3 feet onto concrete. It powered up without a problem.
That's really cool!
When I worked for Dominion Business Machines (Toronto, now defunct), I wrote off dozens of notebooks that had had their motherboards cracked with less abuse. (Ever tried to repair a mult-layer PC board? Don't bother.)
I am going to be hardpressed to ever purchase a laptop from anyone else.
Believe it or not, I've found Compaq, Toshiba and Acer (!) notebooks to be very durable, too. Though the Toshiba that the guy checked was a goner. The baggage carrousel at the airport is about the most gentle thing it would have experienced; now I do IT at a big airport, and it's scary what happens to your bags during the sorting.
Given all of my experiences with Sony consumer electronics, I must say I would NEVER buy anything, especially a laptop, from them, regardless of how cool it looked.
Sony's quality control has definately gone downhill. It used to be that their TV sets could be guaranteed to go 20+ years. I used to work in a TV station as a bench tech (fixing stuff). We used to *try* to kill the old (1970s) Sony KV-1710 TV sets all over the station, but we couldn't. But the newer stuff is starting to die already. Granted, a TV station is a pretty extreme place to put a TV set - it's on at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and being beaten around in mobile trucks and stuff. But if it survives there, it should last almost forever in the home.
Okay, maybe it's not quality control. The solder on the boards is still excellent (unlike Taiwanese/Korean crap, Daytek/Daewoo comes to mind first); but the boards aren't secured as well within the chassis and things tend to break free of their solder (flybacks especially). Cheap design; not enough reinforcement. I hate stuff like that. I'd pay $0.50 more for a couple of screws and buttresses to hold the board in place a little better.
Sony's cheap consumer stuff has been just reprehensible lately. But their professional line Betacam and other high-end stuff still seemed to be good, last time I touched a soldering iron to one of them (1996).
b) It's got a handle! You can't carry a computer like that by it's handle. It will get scratched, it is not protected, and if you drop it, it is lost! I do not let anyone of my clients carry a computer more than two feet with out putting it in a case. Believe me, you do not want to see what a laptop looks like after a two foot drop to a floor. Yes, even a carpeted floor! A handle is cute, but without a case, it is asking for trouble!
Heheheh... I used to work for a little computer store, and we once had a guy come in with a notebook computer. You remember the "I checked my notebook!" Toshiba commercials? Well, he did that.
I was the lucky guy who got to replace the display in that thing. Fun, wow. There's no way you can open up a notebook computer without leaving little pry-marks around all the clips that hold it together. Even though I wet-sanded the case with 1500 grit afterwards, it still looked like crap.
The broken display, recently back-lit with some white LEDs, hangs on the wall in my office, looking like a glow-in-the-dark piece of fractal art.
I like things that are built tough, forgiving of owner stupidity and indifference. That Toshiba wasn't it, though it was a rather extreme test.
Remember the AST pen notebook computers? They were really cool, with a magnesium case and a handwriting recognition system. They were about as close to the computer equivalent to the Chrysler Slant-6 as anything I've ever seen. Too bad that they only had 386SX processors.
Hi Lawrence, my name is Jonathan. I started using Linux with Redhat 5.0 about 2 1/2 years ago and my first installation was on a Compaq.
Welcome to our little 12-step program.
This was one of the most difficult things I have ever done with a PC; and one of the most rewarding.
I agree.
I encountered the "Ll" problem and so many others that I cannot recall them all.
LILO problem aside (not Red Hat's fault, but it needed to be addressed earlier than it was), how was a later non-x.0 installation?
After a while I realized that I needed to R T F M. It was an uncomfortable realization - I actually had to learn something before I could *use* this OS.
R T F M, *S*. I did. And yet, I was completely unprepared for the *loads* of problems with RH6.0.
That installation took weeks. WEEKS dammit! But it finally worked. And it has gotten easier all the time.
I agree. One of my boxes still runs RH6, mostly because I haven't been able to accomodate the downtime required to shut it down and reinstall everything. But, I restate: RH 6.0 was an unacceptable product; too many problems. More problems, in fact, than a 1985 Hyundai Stellar I bought for $100 as a winter beater one year. I appreciate that Red Hat works hard for our community, but I also ask that they show that by not releasing stuff that's not yet ready for the big leagues.
I value an OS that is user-installable as Redhat now is, but I learned to love Linux because I first hated so badly how little I knew about it.
A well-equipped neophyte can install DOS 5.0 and up and have it work first shot. It's far from perfect, to be sure, but it works. Any Linux distro, aimed at the new Linux user (as, I would argue, anything sold in shrink-wrap at Fry's, is), should actually work first shot.
Maybe that is a distinction between a Windows user and a Linux user, maybe we are just more stubborn.
Oh, in my case, that's not an issue. That's how it is that my Linux systems, even my RH6.0 system, all work now.
Our common, mostly unstated goal as a community, is to usurp Windows, right? Screw the server market; anyone with any sense is already running Linux/*BSD/UNIX there. But to get the desktop, *most* installations, especially on low to mid machines (most people I know seem to try out new operating systems on the machine collecting dust in the closet), will have to work properly, first shot. Or else users less stubborn than you and me will simply go back to Windows. That which is easy (known) is comfortable, even if it blue-screens twice a day.
Out of the gate, any Linux distribution in shrink-wrap should work out of the box significantly better than Windows or indicate prominantly on the box that it's for advanced Linux users, or we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.
I applaud Red Hat for their installation program. I boo them for the fact that when it's done, the system (RH6.0 and probably RH7.0) still doesn't work.
Re: Beowulf cluster of 486s mounted in toilet tanks.
Upgrade to P3s and eliminate your hot water bills! Not to mention that annoying fan noise.
Great idea!
And when I'm taking a dump and a piece hits the water a little too fast, the water that sprays up from the bowl will give me third-degree burns.
On the other hand, I will agree with you that it does have its merits. Certainly, hot water in the toilet will probably reduce the incidence of stains and things in the bowl.
New method of DDOS attacks: Ex-lax brownies for the whole office!
Actually, the overly-frequent flushing would probably cause all the processors to overheat (running dry too long) and would cause a rather massive hardware failure...
I'd bet that's because a Windows3.1/DOS machine is the virtual equivalent of a 'rock'.
Normal modern systems have weird daemons in the background which eventually contribute to their demise.
If that was the sense in which you're calling Windows 3.1 a rock, I fully agree.
As long as an application doesn't crash it out, I've never found DOS or Window 3.x to ever be unstable. Primitive, yes. Full of frustrating quirks, absolutely (this *is* an M$ product, after all). But not spontaneous crashers.
Something tells me that it's a REALLY REALLY BAD IDEA to allow your current system configuration to go out over the network towards a centralized server every 30 minutes.
Hey, look! This guy's running an old version of BIND, it's black hat time, et al.
<grin> Does the daemon that does this report *itself* to the server this same way? If it does that, at least the new RH Insecurity Daemon also gives itself a chance to be the door to an intruder...
I know a lot of people who use their personal computers as servers in one way or another, and turning the thing on and off just isn't workable because you have to _plan_ your uptime to when you think you might need to get something remotely. This never ever works.
Absolutely. In fact, several of my computers run 24/7. But only those that need to; the rest of them are turned on when I get home, and turned off when I go to bed. By the same token, several of my computers at the office are up all the time, and several more go down when I leave for the night.
After all, the computers are there to be used, not to be protected from any bad thing that can possibly happen to them.
This isn't really an issue for Microsoft operating systems at this point, because remote access to most of them is quite horrid.
I disagree. It was really thoughtful of M$ to automatically bind NetBIOS file and print sharing to your internet-connected network adapters by default. Evidently, someone was planning ahead for remote accessibility.
I've kept various computers on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since I was 14 and ran a Bulletin Board System, and personally I've never had problems besides broken burnt-smelling fans every couple years.
<grin> In my experience, it's usually not the fan that smells burnt when it fails... a brushless DC fan doesn't heat up when it gets stalled by dust or a plastic "ball bearing" melts and seizes the rotor. What heats up and starts to smell is the component(s) that the fan was supposed to be cooling.
The added functionality I get from it is _way_ more than the sacrifice, and since those who run Linux are (for the most part) serious computer users, its not realistic for us to do otherwise.
My Linux servers run 24/7/364.25. But my Windows boxes don't; neither do my general-purpose Linux machines. Discretion.
If you think that Red Hat's is a stinkpile of doo-doo don't use it. Try Debian, try Slackware. That is the whole point here.
In principle, that's great. But when Joe P. Accountant, sick of his Windows box crashing all the time, walks into a computer store and buys a copy of Linux, Red Hat is likely to be what he'll buy. He's heard of Red Hat.
And when he installs Red Hat 7 and it crashes his computer in 50 new and interesting ways, he's going to blame Linux, not Red Hat. New users don't understand the distinctions between distributions.
He doesn't know or care that Red Hat is different from Debian is different from Corel is different from SuSE... As far as he's concerned, Linux is Linux.
So, a bad commercial distro, especially from a recognized name in Linux, is going to drive away lots of new users who try out that distro as their first Linux.
More than any other form of advocacy, Red Hat, Corel and all the other big names have a responsibility to Linux users to ensure that their distributions work at least as well as the competition's operating systems (Windows 2000/Me). And I would argue they must work significantly better than Windows, since Linux has to overcome the Windows inertia.
I like Red Hat. I've tried several other distros, and I love the information that's available to me as I run a popular distro. I like Red Hat's website, and hell, I even like their logo. I don't like it when people bash Red Hat. But let's face it, if RH 7.0 is anywhere near as bad as RH 6.0 was (and I'm led to believe it's a lot worse), then they really dropped the ball.
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I wonder if you arranged 800x600 of these things on a grid (assuming the price drops significantly) we could actually see LED projectors in the future! Sounds like a promising alternative to LCD, huh? Then maybe I can watch projected movies on my big loft wall without spending US $10,000.
Uhhh... No. If you made an array of LEDs and wanted to project them, you'd still need a lens.
To do it more reasonably, just make the 800x600 grid direct-viewable in whatever size that you want.
Problem 1: Average current to each LED is, let's say, 15mA. 800x600x0.015A = 7,200 amps. Evidently, this is going to have to be multiplexed somehow. (Oh, yeah, that's 7,200A *per color*, since I didn't multiply that number by three for each of the primary colors. (I assume you want each pixel to be three color.)
Assuming the average forward voltage drop per LED is 2.0V, that's a total consumption of 14.4kW. With the cost of a kWh of electricity where I am hovering around $0.06, watching the X-Files would cost me $8.64 in electricity. Per color! ("Maw, we's is goan' hafta winna lottery before we is can afford ta turn on th' whole TV set... 'ntil then, it's Jerry Springer 'n green only.") And that's just for the LEDs, not the support electronics.
Problem 2: Let's say these are three-color T-1 3/4 LEDs. And let's say that you've somehow figured out a way of wiring them to each other that doesn't occupy any display real estate.
A T-1 3/4 LED is about 1/4" in diameter. If you have 800 of them in a row, that's gonna be 200 inches long. 16.66 feet. 600 LEDs tall: 150 inches; 12.5 feet. A 16.6 x 12.5 foot screen. Or, using Pythagorean Theorum to figure out how they'd advertise it if it were a TV set, 20.78 feet diagonally. 249.36 Viewable Inches! On Sale Now! (Got space for it?)
LEDs vary from lot to lot, factory to factory. Blue on one side of your display with be different from the blue on the other side. At the same time, it'll be difficult to get your driver system to be adjusted flat across the entire color spectrum. You will have color purity issues. Look at a big LED display board in a public place now; few of them even approach the scope and resolution that you're talking about. And they're all spotty. There's a gorgeous example on the Paramount Theater at Toronto's Richmond and John Streets.
Finally, 800x600 is 480,000 LEDs. Each one is gonna cost you at least a buck (three color T-1 3/4), even in quantity. Each one is going to take you at least 30 seconds to solder into place (realistically, doing it by hand). Got 240,000 minutes (that's 4,000 hours; 166 days)? And we haven't even looked at the support electronics.
Just wait another 20 years or so until a stadium somewhere is being demolished, and scoop the JumboTron out of it. They're not LED-based, they don't have the same resolution, but they're pre-built and they look really good.
On the LED subject, I was at a Fossil store the other day and they were selling LED watches -- the ones with red numbers that you had to press a button to see...what was that, 1978 or so? Twenty bucks, and it was even about the same size as the old ones (must have put lead or something in there to simulate the weight
Cool! I've always wanted one of those!
I *hate* analog watches (the whole idea of moving parts on my wrist...), but I want a *tasteful* and *neat* digital watch. (Calculator watches need not apply.) Do they at least have the really nice cases and wristbands that I remember them having in my childhood?
I rigged up a color-programmable fishbowl full of Christmas lights (RGB) through three dimmer switches for the same effect, much cheaper... I have noticed, however that there is a bit of a heat problem. I wonder whether LEDs would be any better in that regard.
Incandescent bulbs (Christmas lights) use a tungsten filament heated to white hot inside a vacuum.
A natural by-product of this is heat.
(Actually, truth be told, a natural by-product of an incandescent bulb is *light*; most of the energy is wasted as heat.)
A Light Emitting Diode is based on the concept that when some semiconductor PN junctions (ie. diodes) are forward-biased, they convert the energy lost to their forward voltage drop into light.
LED light actually comes from the semiconductor junction itself; it's highly efficient (85% or more), highly color-stable (the color emitted depends on the doping of the junction), has none of the thermal inertia issues associated with tungsten filaments (ie., look at a car with tungsten tail lights and an LED third brake light), and is virtually impervious to mechanical shock.
The LED is the way of the future. Your fishbowl would benefit.
I'm not sure about stagelights, though. I used to work in the sound/lighting/professional video field; I don't know how I'll like stagelights that don't feel *warm* when they shine on you!
Although, I'd never have to dig out the asbestos gloves and climb a ladder to change a hot quartz bulb during the 10-minute intermission or fart around swapping gels...
Hey, is there a Linux version of the Color Kinetics software out there? I'm just wondering, when Windows blue-screens, do their cans change to blue in sympathy?
Either way, these guys are set to give Intellibeam, RoboScan, etc. a run for their money. Most of the times I ever used those, it wasn't for the tacky little gobos or the fact that they'd follow a target: it was because they changed color *quickly*, certainly faster than conventional cans with a gel reel setup.
Reasoning by anecdote is so much fun; it lets you prove anything with but a single example. <grin>
Absolutely. Or, the anecdote can be used as an illustrative example.
Let's consider something. The Demon was *blueprinted*. That's an automotive hobbyist's term for building the motor to closer than new tolerances.
Now, why would you do that? For power.
What's the consequence of more power? More efficiency.
What's the consequence of more efficiency? Closer stoichiometry.
And that means....?
Less emissions.
The thing you may not know is that tailpipe tests are done at idle.Really? Hmmm... I guess that's why they put cars onto dynamometers in most modern emissions testing programs...
You know, all people who make generalizations are idiots. <grin> The Demon passed a 25 MPH dyno test, a 2500 RPM idle test, and a factory idle (750RPM) test.
This also happens to be when the exhaust gases are coolest, and the catalytic converter is working particularly poorly. On top of this, idle has the lowest cylinder pressures. Therefore, you have the worst conversion, offset by the lowest production of NOx.Actually, a cold cat would generally result in *more* unburnt HC leaving the exhaust, and therefore a failed test. But if the car were inefficient at idle, you'd probably find that the cat got hot.
But it's an especially interesting question, since the 1972 Dodge Demon, even in California emissions trim, didn't come with a catalytic converter.
What we're proving here is that older cars with simpler engines and good care can pass the same standards as a modern car.
It's all about maintenance. Stop demonstrating your ignorance.
It's not too surprising that the Demon would fare well under these conditions.It's not too surprising that the Demon passed the 25 MPH dyno, either. And if you had ever done more with a car than cry helplessly when you blew a tire by the side of the road, you might know that.
The problem for you is that these aren't representative conditions; people don't do a whole lot of miles at idle.You've clearly never been on a metropolitan freeway at rush hour.
If you tested the cars under load, they'd tell a very different story. That's when you'd be comparing a hot, working 'cat against the catless, EGR-less Demon - with actual cylinder pressures and temperatures in the operating range.<sigh> I suspect you're fat. I've got a weight reduction plan for you that simulates EGR wonderfully.
Step one: Take a crap. Step two: replace x percentage of your food with your crap. Step three: enjoy the weight loss, weird infections and onset of scurvy.
Would you work any more efficiently if you ate your own shit? No. Why would you expect a car engine to?
If your ignition timing isn't too far advanced, your NOx production is *very* limited.
You'll note that on many cars, the EGR valve is vacuum-operated. At full-throttle, there is no vacuum with which to hold the EGR valve open. Similarily, speaking as one who has *designed engine management systems for a living*, I'll tell you that most car engines with electronically-controlled EGR valves close them at wide-open throttle.
Now, if you want to simulate a catalytic converter, go to a sex shop and buy a butt-plug. Drill a 1/4" hole through it. Insert it, and now try to dispose of your waste the way you're forcing the engine to.
Ah, yes. We've made the engine so much healthier with all these great ideas!
That's when the 1997 car would be clean as a whistle, and the Demon would be pumping out huge amounts of crap.Test report forthcoming.
Fortunately for your anecdotes you can't demo this without a chassis dyno, so the examples to disprove your assertions are nowhere as easy to come by as your simple "proofs".Again, I live in Toronto, Canada. That is in the province of Ontario. Ontario has "DriveClean". Click on this link to go to their site and read about their dynos. You'll note two things. The Demon was *voluntarily* tested (it's more than 20 years old), and you'll also note that the dyno test runs at 40km/h. That's approximately 25 MPH.
I grow weary with your self-righteous ignorance. Are you sure you're not a Baptist, too?
Don't believe me, then you must.. a) be living in a large polluted place (read almost any large US city), you have become use to the pollution and don't know it.
Toronto, Canada, actually. In order of size, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago then Toronto are the largest *metropolitan* cities in North America. Highway 401 across the top of Toronto is the second busiest freeway in the world, after only the Santa Monica in L.A.
Do I qualify?
b) be living in the country or smaller city where the affects of polution are not yet significant.I grew up outside Ottawa, Canada. While it's Canada's capital, the metro population is under a million. The big freeway ("The Queensway") is a paltry four lanes wide in each direction. 'Tis a small town.
OR the worst but most likely category..Oh, but you have no concept...
c) you do not care about anything but your own well being (i.e. as long as the environment does not become shit in your lifetime, you will do what ever you like regardless of the long term impacts).No, I'm simply reasonable. Do you want to save the environment, maybe increasing the average lifespan by two years? Great! And as you shut down the economy to do that, unemployment rates get increased, and you give people an extra two years of welfare misery. Congratulations. The lynch mob is standing outside your house, waiting for you.
You know, I love environmentalists. They're such idiots. One of them, the sister of a friend of mine, came up to me, all proud that she'd just bought a 1970s VW Microbus. And she was telling me that it was what her "hippy forefathers" would have driven. And how it got such great gas mileage and therefore was *so* environmentally friendly.
Over the exhaust pipe, her back bumper had the big black stain of a rich fuel mixture. And when she dropped the clutch and pulled away, the blue cloud of blow-by oil from her worn-out engine would have killed a NYC pigeon. And yet she feels that what she's driving is more environmentally friendly than her brother's absolutely perfectly restored 1972 Dodge Demon with a *blueprinted* 340-4bbl. While it only gets 10MPG, that car passed an emissions test, blowing cleaner than a 1997 model spec, even though it has no emissions control equipment.
I'd bet money that Jen's Microbus is well over 5,000 PPM of unburnt hydrocarbon.
But, do you believe in Darwinism? I don't really care about air pollution. It'll eventually remove asthmatics from the gene pool.
The day is coming very soon when you won't even think of burning fossil fuels to get somewhere. You could get one of VW's 78-MPG cars today, and run it off of spent fryer grease (but you'd be a bit eccentric).
Oh, no doubt, I think they're a great idea. Gas mileage is all important. (As a side note, my daily driver is a 1976 Dodge Ram with a 400CID (6.6L) big block V8. It gets about 7 miles per gallon when I drive it gently. And it'll not only out-accelerate any little "souped-up" Acura I've ever come up against at a stoplight, but it's also a lot of fun to drive.)
Or, wait a bit and you'll be able to get something like the tzero, which already has acceleration better than anything made by Mopar.13.2 on the quarter mile? While that's impressive, my *truck* would show you taillights.
Ever hear of the legendary Chrysler (Mopar) Hemi?
Ever hear of the Chrysler 340? Or the 440-6 pak? Chrysler built at least ten cars, in mass production, during the musclecar era that would have blown that thing away. I'll list them for you, as well as totals produced, if you're interested.
Hell, the Dodge Omni GLHS was faster than that 13.2, and it was a little mid-80's hatchback. (With a Shelby turbocharged 2.2L or 2.5L engine...)
The Shelby Dodge Viper runs 12.8 on the 1/4 mile, and it's a lot more practical and streetable than this car that you're talking about. (And, by the way, the Shelby cars are built that way at Chrysler's factories.)
Hell, do you even know who Carrol Shelby is? (Hint: not a chick.)
Finally, while not a Mopar, in the mid-1980s, GM built the Grand National, which was a black Buick Regal with a 3.8L SFI turbo V6. It had a curb weight of close to 4,000 pounds, was luxury everything, and was faster than that electric car.
Get to know your automotive history before you start spouting about automotive future.
That's with current batteries, too. When you consider the performance potential with new batteries such as the NEC proton polymer battery, you could be talking 0-60 in 3 seconds. That's more fun than I've ever had.By their very nature, batteries are full of nasty, caustic chemicals. The more potent the battery, the more potent the chemicals. Gasoline is bad, yes. But I can't wait for the adoption of electric cars en masse. Every car accident will be a haz-mat team call; because of need for range, batteries will be stuffed everywhere in the car and they'll be ruptured in every minor fender-bender. Car accident burns won't be thermal anymore (well, there will still be some of those); the majority will be chemical. And there'll be a lot of them.
And all those exotic battery electrolytes will leak into storm sewers, killing your precious fish in whatever lake they get to.
Sure, I read the article; the new NEC battery is an exception, it uses a conventional sulphuric acid electrolyte to achieve its phenomenal power to volume ratios.
But even if that's the technology of the future, where are you going to charge the batteries? Plug them in? Remember the power shortages and rotating blackouts in California this summer? I can't wait to see what those will be like once the state's commuters are all plugging in at night. Gonna have to build a few new nuclear or coal power plants to supply Sacramento alone (let alone L.A.) Oh, but wait, that's bad for the environment, too. Sorry.
Forcing replacement of the existing fleet is a bigger market opening than the replacement of R-12.The replacement of R-12 wasn't much to the car companies. A few retrofit kits for the orifices on older A/C systems, a new cylinder of gas to fill new car A/C with, no big deal. Retooling to get away from a piston engine? Could happen, but there'll be lots of kicking and screaming.
You're also blissfully ignorant of the old car collector like myself. Gasoline will not go away. Old car enthusiasts tend to be educated, affluent, and enjoy *driving* our cars. And we vote.
You say you're affluent and intelligent, why aren't you on this bandwagon already?Because I'm smart enough to see the folly in it. Like communism, it's a great idea. Like communism, it also forgets a few very basic things about how the world works. That didn't stop it from fucking up a whole lot of lives, though.
If I was made Prime Minister of Canada (yes, that's where I live) my first order of business would be to ban all fossil-fuel burning personal use automobiles!!!
Then I, as an affluent and intelligent young Canadian, being forced to ride on public transportation where I may be forced into personal contact with hotel chambermaids, unwed 18-year-old single mothers, the homeless and other derelicts, will no longer find that Canada is able to provide me with the lifestyle that I expect for the work that I do.
As a result, even faster than the high taxes and lack of opportunity in this socialist hellhole are driving me out, I'll be a brain-drain statistic before you're able to reneg on your first campaign promise.
Idiot. Don't you realize that everything is cause and effect? Banning cars will cause the affluent to leave. That will mean less people starting businesses, and less skilled labor for established businesses. Which means more businesses fail. Which means higher unemployment. While Canada clearly wants to be a third-world nation, this is the best way to exacerbate the problem. (Here's why the economy always goes bad when the NDP gets elected!)
Try learning something about how the world really works.
"The incredibly hardy, long-lived satellite, which long ago surpassed NASA's wildest expectations for its power supplies and other systems, may finally have drifted peacefully into eternal slumber . . .
<sigh>
We've been through some things together
With trunks of memories still to come
We found things to do in stormy weather
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes have come
With your chrome heart shining in the sun
Long may you run.
- Neil Young, Long May You Run
Wasn't there a really cheap item sold to make a B&W TV look color? It was simply a plastic filter with blue on the top half and green on the lower half that mounted to the TV. (I'm not kidding about this). I guess it was for the days where Westerns were the biggest entertainment on TV. Always a need for blue sky and green grass....
Absolutely, there was. It was kinda like the screen overlays on a Vectrex video game system.
But no, that's not the color TV system I was talking about. The color TV system I was talking about (I think it was from Westinghouse, but I can't remember for sure) actually had the primary colors on a rotating disk.
If you wanted to show the red in a picture, only the red portions of the image would be displayed on the (black and white) TV screen. At this point, the red portion of the disk would be over the screen. When you wanted to show blue or green, same thing - the image displayed on the CRT would switch as the disk came to that point in its rotation. It would have been flickery, but it would have been true color. And the noise and bulk of a rapidly spinning disk over the CRT would have been nasty.
Part of the issue was that when the NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) was choosing the support for a new color TV standard, the FCC had decreed that it had to remain backwards-compatible with the existing black and white TV standard (they pushed for this back in the late '80s, too, with the proposals for the new HDTV standard). This color wheel system, elegantly simple but unwieldy, would have done that.
Fortunately for us, RCA invented the color (three-gun) cathode ray tube at about that time, and had come up with a way of encoding the color information onto a black and white image by syncing an oscillator in the TV set with one at the TV station (the 3.5758MHz "colorburst" signal) which was hidden in the horizontal blanking interval (the black bar that you see geting torn all over the place when your horizontal hold is set wrong). The color information then rode over top of the video brightness information. Old TV sets don't notice the color signal, but your color TV set compares the phase of the signal riding on the luminance (brightness) and demodulates it by phase to each one of the three primary guns. And the more saturated the color has to be, the bigger the color signal riding in the brightness info.
Basically, it's an all-electronic version of the nasty old Westinghouse color system. We should all be grateful to the pioneers like RCA, Nipikow and Zworkin for what we now take for granted. And, of course, to John Logie Baird, whose mechanical TV system is completely irrelevant now, but he got the ball rolling by proving that TV was possible.
Fairly correct. Mazda has actually never stopped producing rotaries. The RX-7 was phased out in America in '96 but was still produced until last year for the asian market, and the Cosmo (sedan available with a triple rotary 20b) is also extant.
Oh, that's cool. But it's sad that they're no longer a part of the biggest automotive market in the world. The engine is innovative, even though it was originally imperfect and has now suffered the scourge of emissions controls.
Mazda has been showing it's latest version of the 13b dual rotary lately. The 'Reinesis' plant has 280 HP naturaly aspirated, gets 30+ MPG (stunning for a rotary of that power), can pass low emission standards, and has much improved apex seals.The seals haven't been an issue since the early 1980s. But I'm really curious as to how they'd have coped with the inherently limited compression ratio of a rotary, as well as a combustion chamber with way too much surface area and a shape that is completely counter-productive from a flame-front (and therefore a volumetric efficiency) standpoint.
I mean, let's face it, even a 1986 Hyundai Excel has a better (hemispherical) combustion chamber, capable of better flame travel and with less cold quench area to drive up emissions.
Don't misunderstand me; I love the rotary, and I've enjoyed driving them, and while I've never worked on one, I think it would be fascinating. But I'm amazed at your news that they can be made more conformant with today's tough emissions laws.
Mazda is supposedly going to put it in the new RX-7, the new MX-6, and possibly an MX-5 (Miata) variant.That would be very cool. I'm not a fan of Japanese cars on the whole - I'm more a fan of the traditional American car philosophy of big engine, full-frame, rear-wheel-drive design. There's no question that it makes a car easier to service and last longer. But, again, I applaud and even *like* Mazda for their rotaries. Unlike most Japanese manufacturers (ie. Honda, Toyota), they're actually highly innovative. (And don't get onto me about Honda's CVCC or V-TEC; they're not as innovative as Honda fans like to think they are.)
As for american wankels, there was also an Astrovette (rear-engined prototype corvette from the early 70s) that sported a quad rotary. Serious power in a quad, Mazda has won the 24 hours of LeMans with quad-rotary cars. An additional note about LeMans is that Mazda has the highest finishing percentage of any manufacturer who has entered more than one race, all with wankels.Yeah, Mazda really did have the kinks worked out of the motor.
Along the lines of the Astrovette, the original Valiant concept car back in the late 1950s was to be rear-engined (like a Corvair, which Chrysler found out about before the Corvair hit the showrooms) and was to use a gas turbine engine, like the later semi-prototype Chrysler Turbine cars used. While that would have been cool, it too would have been impractical.
My mechanic just got one of those rotary trucks which has survived 25 years with it's weird 1.3 litre. You are right that it sucks with big loads, whatever a wankel is it's not a high torque at low revs engine.No, it's not. <grin> But with suitable gearing, that wouldn't be a problem. The issue with those early rotaries, especially in a truck, is that people tend to tow heavy loads and stuff. A surprising number of people lug the engine (drive in too high a gear for a given speed). In a piston engine, the detonation as a result makes a loud knocking sound, eventually hurting valves, connecting rod bearings and cylinder head gaskets. It takes a *lot* of abuse to put a hole through a piston. However, in the same situation with a rotary, especially an early one, it doesn't take much lugging to lose all your compression by blowing out an (early and fragile) apex or side seal.
"...the RX-7 sports coupe, was an excellent car mechanically." Yup, but don't get me started on their electrical system. Damned cold solders...<grin> Never been there. Around here, as is typical with any Japanese car, the lightweight and irresponsibly thin body sheetmetal is rotted off by winter driving before anything else really starts to fail.
Hey.. that's a pretty neat idea. I'll call my patent attorney tomorrow and see if I can make their idea my intellectual property.
Too late. Every Sharper Image store has something similar, though I'd prefer to build my own. (Helps to give me an excuse for keeping all those old VCR head drum assemblies kicking around.)
It allows all timezones to be displayed
You're a putz, Bob. I like you. I checked out your website, you build really cool stuff. Thanks for putting these neat little projects up on the 'Net!
Uhhh... I design radar equipment for Litton; any chance of getting your microwave oven hack schematics, despite the danger warnings? (I've got *no* idea how you'd have handled the waveguide issues, or even how you built the antenna!)
This reminds me of how John Logie Baird's first television worked. It's actually more sophisticated than that really, in that Baird's TV gated the light output by shining it through apertures in a spinning disk. But you get the picture
Nipikow Disk TV sets. Yeah, they were really cool.
But, man oh man, after watching one of those, I'm grateful for rickety old NTSC. If you think 525 lines isn't enough resolution, try watching Felix the Cat on 50 lines.
I love antique TV sets, they're fascinating. I've got a collection going; I have 4 from the early 1950s (*not* mechanical), and a couple of early 1960s portables.
Here's one for you: the original proposed color TV standard was mechanical: a spinning disk, with the three primary colors on it, was to be placed in front of the picture tube and spun in time with the sync signals from the TV station. Thank God RCA came up with the three-gun picture tube.
Antique TV Museum: MZTV Museum, part of Canada's MuchMusic and Citytv empire.
Jesus, it's guys like you that shouldn't even get close to a notebook. Using 1500 sand paper to mask your incompetence in dealing with a laptop? You've got to be kidding me. If that would have been my notebook I would have kicked your ass all over the friggin store.
<grin> My boss told me to do it. I was working at a shitty little computer store with no tools. I was the only one on staff who knew that you don't carry a bare motherboard across a carpeted repair shop on a dry winter's day. And the boss was screaming at me that I couldn't spend more than an hour to do it. (Hell, the little plastic tangs that hold it together can take at least 1/2 hour on some models, and that's when you can see where the tangs are!)
I did what I could do. And, man, I got it looking good again but even so, you should've seen how happy the owner was just to see the computer boot up again.
On the other hand, I'm also *extremely* glad that I don't work in computer retail anymore. Ugh.
BTW, wet 1500 grit sandpaper is great for smoothing a plastic case back down if you've pursed it at all. I find it hard to believe that you're so competent and co-ordinated that you've never had to resort to that.
Besides an unfortunate name, I never understood why wankel engines didn't catch on. Few moving parts, simple design... beautiful. Ideas?
Completely off-topic, but yeah.
The Wankel is a beautiful engine, I agree. It's a great idea. But, like communism, it's a great idea that cannot possibly work.
In its early adoption with the NSU Rotaries and some of the early Mazdas (and, while I really don't like Japanese cars, I really respect Mazda for pressing on with the rotary engine), they were frought with low compression and sealing problems. Like a piston engine, they need to create compression before firing the fuel/air mixture.
Unlike a piston engine, where the sealing is fairly easy (iron piston rings), Wankels had huge wear problems of the early seals. This reduced compression, and eventually caused many of the same problems as a worn-out conventional engine.
Early owners of Mazda rotaries (especially the ?1969? ?1970? Mazda RX-1 sedan) were having to rebuild their motors at less than 10,000 mile intervals. Mazda's ill-fated line of rotary-powered pickup trucks was even worse; the stress of a highly-loaded pickup truck was more than they could handle. Many of these vehicles in collector hands now have survived only because someone figured out a way of bolting a conventional engine into them.
By the late 1970s, Mazda had pressed on and worked hard, and their sole-surviving rotary, the RX-7 sports coupe, was an excellent car mechanically. This got to survive for a while, but ever-increasing emissions standards (tough to pass with a rotary) eventually killed it in 1993 or thereabouts.
It's sad, because when technology and corner-seals had finally caught up with the overall concept of the engine, it was no longer practical; refinement of the piston engine made it pass emissions laws that a rotary simply can't do.
Rotaries have a hard time getting as much power out of a drop of fuel as a conventional engine does. The reason is that it's pretty easy to increase the compression ratio of a piston engine - interference valves, domed pistons, less piston-to-head clearance. Increasing the compression of a rotary is tougher - dome the rotor outwards a little bit, but too much and it will hit the outer chamber as it revolves. You can't get a compression ratio of more than about 8.5:1 out of them for that reason, without having to resort to complex and expensive turbos and superchargers (which defeat the purpose of the lightweight rotary). Even if the seals work, low compression = low combustion efficiency = nasty crap in the air and poor fuel bills.
Like communism, a good idea, but that never was (and seemingly never will be) practical.
ABC News, of all people, has a really cool story on this, which touches on a few of the points, but has several *wrong* things in it. For one thing, the Pacer was American Motors' (AMC, now part of DaimlerChrysler) car. The AMC Pacer was supposed to have a rotary, according to lore. The GM "Pacer" was an early proposed name for the new 1976 Chevette. Then, it turned out that AMC brought out a car with the name, and the Chevette name was chosen for GM's new "world-car". The Chevette was *never* to have a rotary; instead, it has an excellent German-designed and American-built 4-cylinder conventional engine.
So many great ideas, so many shattered dreams. Automotive engineering is fraught with as many failed design ideas as the road to the information superhighway has been with TRS-80s and TI-99/4As and Amigas. A good idea and good engineering doesn't necessarily mean that something won't screw you over and ruin your great idea. <sigh>
Sounds right to me, underpowered plant in a nice looking shell. Just like a slant-6 Challenger.
Woah, dude. The problem was never the Slant-6's performance. The problem was that every car that got a Slant-6 was seen as being an "economy" car, and therefore got a really tall differential gear. As a result, the cars got great gas mileage, but driving them was like trying to start a ten-speed bicycle out in 7th gear.
Out of the box, a Slant-6 with a good rear gear can easily move an E-body (Challenger/'Cuda) down the quarter mile in the 16.5 second range. Not bad at all, especially when you consider that's done with a 3.7L engine that gets 25MPG with the pedal down and is renouned for lasting 300,000 miles without any major attention.
Sure, it's not as fast as a Hemi or even a 340. It has lots of other cool things going for it. But, it's still far from underpowered. Underpowered is a 4-cylinder 1.5L Japanese mushbox like a Honda Civic - buzzy, noisy and whiny, giving the illusion of speed but still scoring no more than about 18-19 seconds on the 1/4 mile.
Actually, being an RX-7 nut, I want the computer equivelent of the Bi-turbo Mazda 20b triple rotary... the RISC chip of internal combustion.Your RX-7 is a fly caught in my 400's air cleaner.
I dropped my IBM thinkpad from a height of 3 feet onto concrete. It powered up without a problem.
That's really cool!
When I worked for Dominion Business Machines (Toronto, now defunct), I wrote off dozens of notebooks that had had their motherboards cracked with less abuse. (Ever tried to repair a mult-layer PC board? Don't bother.)
I am going to be hardpressed to ever purchase a laptop from anyone else.Believe it or not, I've found Compaq, Toshiba and Acer (!) notebooks to be very durable, too. Though the Toshiba that the guy checked was a goner. The baggage carrousel at the airport is about the most gentle thing it would have experienced; now I do IT at a big airport, and it's scary what happens to your bags during the sorting.
Given all of my experiences with Sony consumer electronics, I must say I would NEVER buy anything, especially a laptop, from them, regardless of how cool it looked.Sony's quality control has definately gone downhill. It used to be that their TV sets could be guaranteed to go 20+ years. I used to work in a TV station as a bench tech (fixing stuff). We used to *try* to kill the old (1970s) Sony KV-1710 TV sets all over the station, but we couldn't. But the newer stuff is starting to die already. Granted, a TV station is a pretty extreme place to put a TV set - it's on at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and being beaten around in mobile trucks and stuff. But if it survives there, it should last almost forever in the home.
Okay, maybe it's not quality control. The solder on the boards is still excellent (unlike Taiwanese/Korean crap, Daytek/Daewoo comes to mind first); but the boards aren't secured as well within the chassis and things tend to break free of their solder (flybacks especially). Cheap design; not enough reinforcement. I hate stuff like that. I'd pay $0.50 more for a couple of screws and buttresses to hold the board in place a little better.
Sony's cheap consumer stuff has been just reprehensible lately. But their professional line Betacam and other high-end stuff still seemed to be good, last time I touched a soldering iron to one of them (1996).
b) It's got a handle! You can't carry a computer like that by it's handle. It will get scratched, it is not protected, and if you drop it, it is lost! I do not let anyone of my clients carry a computer more than two feet with out putting it in a case. Believe me, you do not want to see what a laptop looks like after a two foot drop to a floor. Yes, even a carpeted floor! A handle is cute, but without a case, it is asking for trouble!
Heheheh... I used to work for a little computer store, and we once had a guy come in with a notebook computer. You remember the "I checked my notebook!" Toshiba commercials? Well, he did that.
I was the lucky guy who got to replace the display in that thing. Fun, wow. There's no way you can open up a notebook computer without leaving little pry-marks around all the clips that hold it together. Even though I wet-sanded the case with 1500 grit afterwards, it still looked like crap.
The broken display, recently back-lit with some white LEDs, hangs on the wall in my office, looking like a glow-in-the-dark piece of fractal art.
I like things that are built tough, forgiving of owner stupidity and indifference. That Toshiba wasn't it, though it was a rather extreme test.
Remember the AST pen notebook computers? They were really cool, with a magnesium case and a handwriting recognition system. They were about as close to the computer equivalent to the Chrysler Slant-6 as anything I've ever seen. Too bad that they only had 386SX processors.
Hi Lawrence, my name is Jonathan. I started using Linux with Redhat 5.0 about 2 1/2 years ago and my first installation was on a Compaq.
Welcome to our little 12-step program.
This was one of the most difficult things I have ever done with a PC; and one of the most rewarding.I agree.
I encountered the "Ll" problem and so many others that I cannot recall them all.LILO problem aside (not Red Hat's fault, but it needed to be addressed earlier than it was), how was a later non-x.0 installation?
After a while I realized that I needed to R T F M. It was an uncomfortable realization - I actually had to learn something before I could *use* this OS.R T F M, *S*. I did. And yet, I was completely unprepared for the *loads* of problems with RH6.0.
That installation took weeks. WEEKS dammit! But it finally worked. And it has gotten easier all the time.I agree. One of my boxes still runs RH6, mostly because I haven't been able to accomodate the downtime required to shut it down and reinstall everything. But, I restate: RH 6.0 was an unacceptable product; too many problems. More problems, in fact, than a 1985 Hyundai Stellar I bought for $100 as a winter beater one year. I appreciate that Red Hat works hard for our community, but I also ask that they show that by not releasing stuff that's not yet ready for the big leagues.
I value an OS that is user-installable as Redhat now is, but I learned to love Linux because I first hated so badly how little I knew about it.A well-equipped neophyte can install DOS 5.0 and up and have it work first shot. It's far from perfect, to be sure, but it works. Any Linux distro, aimed at the new Linux user (as, I would argue, anything sold in shrink-wrap at Fry's, is), should actually work first shot.
Maybe that is a distinction between a Windows user and a Linux user, maybe we are just more stubborn.Oh, in my case, that's not an issue. That's how it is that my Linux systems, even my RH6.0 system, all work now.
Our common, mostly unstated goal as a community, is to usurp Windows, right? Screw the server market; anyone with any sense is already running Linux/*BSD/UNIX there. But to get the desktop, *most* installations, especially on low to mid machines (most people I know seem to try out new operating systems on the machine collecting dust in the closet), will have to work properly, first shot. Or else users less stubborn than you and me will simply go back to Windows. That which is easy (known) is comfortable, even if it blue-screens twice a day.
Out of the gate, any Linux distribution in shrink-wrap should work out of the box significantly better than Windows or indicate prominantly on the box that it's for advanced Linux users, or we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.
I applaud Red Hat for their installation program. I boo them for the fact that when it's done, the system (RH6.0 and probably RH7.0) still doesn't work.
This is unacceptable.
I AM CANADIAN!
So am I. I feel your pain.
Being a market leader in Canada is like being a market leader in Kansas.
Re: Beowulf cluster of 486s mounted in toilet tanks.
Upgrade to P3s and eliminate your hot water bills! Not to mention that annoying fan noise.Great idea!
And when I'm taking a dump and a piece hits the water a little too fast, the water that sprays up from the bowl will give me third-degree burns.
On the other hand, I will agree with you that it does have its merits. Certainly, hot water in the toilet will probably reduce the incidence of stains and things in the bowl.
Actually, the overly-frequent flushing would probably cause all the processors to overheat (running dry too long) and would cause a rather massive hardware failure...
Urk. Thank you.
I'd bet that's because a Windows3.1/DOS machine is the virtual equivalent of a 'rock'.
Normal modern systems have weird daemons in the background which eventually contribute to their demise.
If that was the sense in which you're calling Windows 3.1 a rock, I fully agree.
As long as an application doesn't crash it out, I've never found DOS or Window 3.x to ever be unstable. Primitive, yes. Full of frustrating quirks, absolutely (this *is* an M$ product, after all). But not spontaneous crashers.
Something tells me that it's a REALLY REALLY BAD IDEA to allow your current system configuration to go out over the network towards a centralized server every 30 minutes.
Hey, look! This guy's running an old version of BIND, it's black hat time, et al.
<grin> Does the daemon that does this report *itself* to the server this same way? If it does that, at least the new RH Insecurity Daemon also gives itself a chance to be the door to an intruder...
I know a lot of people who use their personal computers as servers in one way or another, and turning the thing on and off just isn't workable because you have to _plan_ your uptime to when you think you might need to get something remotely. This never ever works.Absolutely. In fact, several of my computers run 24/7. But only those that need to; the rest of them are turned on when I get home, and turned off when I go to bed. By the same token, several of my computers at the office are up all the time, and several more go down when I leave for the night.
After all, the computers are there to be used, not to be protected from any bad thing that can possibly happen to them.
This isn't really an issue for Microsoft operating systems at this point, because remote access to most of them is quite horrid.I disagree. It was really thoughtful of M$ to automatically bind NetBIOS file and print sharing to your internet-connected network adapters by default. Evidently, someone was planning ahead for remote accessibility.
I've kept various computers on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since I was 14 and ran a Bulletin Board System, and personally I've never had problems besides broken burnt-smelling fans every couple years.<grin> In my experience, it's usually not the fan that smells burnt when it fails... a brushless DC fan doesn't heat up when it gets stalled by dust or a plastic "ball bearing" melts and seizes the rotor. What heats up and starts to smell is the component(s) that the fan was supposed to be cooling.
The added functionality I get from it is _way_ more than the sacrifice, and since those who run Linux are (for the most part) serious computer users, its not realistic for us to do otherwise.My Linux servers run 24/7/364.25. But my Windows boxes don't; neither do my general-purpose Linux machines. Discretion.
If you think that Red Hat's is a stinkpile of doo-doo don't use it. Try Debian, try Slackware. That is the whole point here.
In principle, that's great. But when Joe P. Accountant, sick of his Windows box crashing all the time, walks into a computer store and buys a copy of Linux, Red Hat is likely to be what he'll buy. He's heard of Red Hat.
And when he installs Red Hat 7 and it crashes his computer in 50 new and interesting ways, he's going to blame Linux, not Red Hat. New users don't understand the distinctions between distributions.
He doesn't know or care that Red Hat is different from Debian is different from Corel is different from SuSE... As far as he's concerned, Linux is Linux.
So, a bad commercial distro, especially from a recognized name in Linux, is going to drive away lots of new users who try out that distro as their first Linux.
More than any other form of advocacy, Red Hat, Corel and all the other big names have a responsibility to Linux users to ensure that their distributions work at least as well as the competition's operating systems (Windows 2000/Me). And I would argue they must work significantly better than Windows, since Linux has to overcome the Windows inertia.
I like Red Hat. I've tried several other distros, and I love the information that's available to me as I run a popular distro. I like Red Hat's website, and hell, I even like their logo. I don't like it when people bash Red Hat. But let's face it, if RH 7.0 is anywhere near as bad as RH 6.0 was (and I'm led to believe it's a lot worse), then they really dropped the ball.