I know nothing about how my car works. I am not at all comfortable with upgrading it or maintaining it. The most complicated act I am able to perform is to put gas in it.
Let's put things into perspective for the computer industry. This is going to seem long and drawn out (aren't all my posts?), but it sheds a new light on the computer.
As a car nut, let's do a quick brief:
The first mass-produced car came out just after the turn of the last century. Almost 100 years ago. With the first affordable car came the first "backyard mechanics", people who maintain their own cars.
In those days, cars were unreliable enough that you could expect to have to fix something every thirty miles or so, and most drivers did it themselves.
Continual refinement brought us to self-adjusting hydraulic brakes, engines that self-cranked, automatically adjusted the ignition timing, and had pressurized lubrication systems by the 1930s. (Prior to that, you had to deal with clutch, throttle, cable-operated brakes, shifting, setting the ignition timing as well as steering - it took a lot of experience and theoretical understanding of how the car worked.)
The 1940s found the first "modern" cars: anyone who can drive a stickshift can drive a car from the 1940s or later, even if they are a little more temperamental. One car that I love to drive is a friend's all-original 1948 Chevrolet Business Coupe. But, even so, the thing doesn't have enough power to be able to get up to freeway speeds.
By the late 1950s, the automatic transmission, was initially available in two speeds (the GM "PowerGlide"). Bigger engines came out, allowing the new cars to cruise easily on the new Eisenhower Interstate System. By the early '60s, Chrysler had brought out their legendary TorqueFlite 727 automatic, a nearly bulletproof three-speed automatic transmission with a really neat planetary gearset design which has since been copied into most modern automatic transmissions.
In the 1970s, user features increased, drivetrain and mechanical manufacturing tolerances were increased, tire technology increased. Electronic ignition replaced points and condensors, making yet another part of the car virtually maintenance-free. But reliability still sucked, primarily because of new federally-mandated emissions controls.
The 1980s brought us EFI systems, which greatly improved reliability and driveability over the primitive emissions control systems of the 1970s. The 1974 oil crisis was working its way into automotive designs, and by 1980, the first of the modern and efficient OHC 4-cylinder engines were hitting the showroom floor. Four speed automatics were coming out, negating a big fuel-efficiency issue that kept the sales of stickshifts up. As the earlier cars were gradually retired and replaced with their more reliable equivalents, the service centers at the side of the freeways started to convert their service bays into fast food franchises.
Today, cars are easy to operate, with very few parts that require periodic adjustments. Machining technology means better fit between parts, less oil leaks, etc. And the sophistication of today's engines and engine management systems makes people feel uncomfortable about taking things into their own hands and fixing an oil leak or other small problem. Spark plugs now usually last 60,000 miles or more - and even if the backyard mechanic of today knows how to change them, they're often difficult to get at. Cars today aren't perfect, but they do represent 100 years of continual refinement and design experience.
So, where does that put us, relative to computers?
I'm going to guess that the majority of computers, running Windows 9x/NT/2K, are now at about the point that cars were at in the late 1960s. To use them really effectively and to avoid being stranded by the side of the road, you should understand how they work and keep a few tools in the trunk. But you can still toss the keys to the wife so she can do the grocery shopping.
That's very impressive: it took the car industry almost 70 years to get from the first mass-produced cars to that relative level of sophistication. With the computer industry, it's been approximately 20 years since we were typing "pr#6" on our Apple IIs to read the disk drive.
In a few years, when computer OSs are actually stable, Plug and Play works, software is always easy to install or remove, and everyone has got a system powerful enough to watch DVD movies, I'll suggest that the computer industry will have reached the level of maturity that the automobile industry is currently at.
The future? Flying cars, and computers with working voice recognition.
Especially if you're out in the middle of the woods, on a moonless night, camping with your friends. The campfire has died down, and you've just finished off a six-pack of your favorite beer. You're now heeding nature's call, staggering away from the glowing embers in the firepit...
And then BANG!, the tailgate that you just *knew* you should have closed gets you in the balls. You lie writhing on the ground for a few minutes, then regain some control over yourself as the pain subsides, start to get up and you clock your head on the back bumper, which you didn't realize you were under.
Never turn your back on a static Ram. Or any other pickup truck that you've parked in the woods on a camping trip.
I've got a '76 RAM, and the article didn't mention at all how I'm supposed to use ferrite core memory in a circuit.
:)
Actually, I do have a '76 Dodge Ram, and I do have some (approximately) '76 ferrite core memory. As much as I hate to admit it, the former is significantly more useful than the latter (especially since it gets me to work every day). The core is some of the *very last* ferrite core memory, with incredibly tiny little beads on what looks like a very uniform piece of windowscreen.
It's amazing that the stuff actually worked. I'd love to find out how to use it so that I can hook it up to my computer just for fun. Ya know, my old Pentium 166MMX will really scream when I add that extra 256 bytes of 750nS RAM to it.
DODGE 4EVAH!
Amen, brother. I've destroyed 7 Honda Civics with my old truck, and they're always the ones with the tinted windows, the chainsaw mufflers, the big stereos and the "Powered By Honda" stickers. (Yah, it's a *Civic*, what do you *think* it's powered by? Put that sticker on a Toyota, and I might be impressed.) They keep on cutting me off, and like lemmings jumping off a cliff, they don't understand the fatal implications of their actions. I mean, 4,500lbs of Detroit steel coming at their silly little tinfoil cars. The first one really pissed me off, because he actually bent my bumper. (In all fairness, I did push his taillights into his back seat.) How many are you up to?
Interesting people don't drive Hondas.
[BigBlockMopar submits quickly, before he has a chance to think too much about the karma implications this posting will have.]
has much effort been put into vector displays in the past decade or so? I presume work has been done (probably for CAD shops..), but they are vastly outnumbered by raster displays.. Also, I suppose it would be (theoretically) possible to convert an ordinary raster display into a vector display, but I have only a small understanding of what goes into a CRT display..
Hold on to your hat.
A raster display is very simple. An electron beam, controlled by electromagnets, paints the screen. The electromagnets are driven by oscillators. In a an ordinary NTSC TV set, the oscillators are at 60Hz (for vertical) and 15,750Hz (for horizontal). The beam is turned on and off in the appropriate places by video amplifiers which simply turn on the beam where there is supposed to be light, and turn it off where there isn't. The deflection oscillators are kept in sync with the TV station, VCR, video game, etc. When they lose sync, you get the familiar roll or twist to the picture, simply because the beam is being turned on and off for the image while the deflection oscillators have the beam in the wrong part of the screen.
Vector displays turn the beam on an off relative to the desired brightness at a particular location, just like a raster. But instead of using oscillators for deflection, they use digital-to-analog converters and amplifiers. You'd poke a numeric value to the D/A converter, which would produce a corresponding voltage, which would be amplified to drive the deflection magnets. Do it fast enough in X and Y axis, and turn the beam on and off at will, and you're graphing in the cartesian plane. (Or playing Asteroids...) While a raster repeats the deflection on its own (all you need to do it continue to turn on and off the guns at the right places), vector graphics requires that you keep cycling the X and Y values through the D/A converter, and keep turning on and off the gun at the right places. It's a lot more CPU intensive, although I doubt that's much of an obstacle now.
Color is a relatively simple addition. Without getting too complicated, there are three guns that shoot at three colors of phosphor. There's a mask, called a "shadow mask", just beind the screen, and because of its position relative to the phosphors, it serves as a filter. The angle of incidence of the red beam is such that it can only pass through the shadow mask to hit the red phosphor. This assures "color purity".
Now, while I suppose this could be done with a vectored display, I've never heard of any color vector displays- they all use overlays for color. Deflecting the three beams that make up color video requires a lot more current supplied to the deflection magnets. That means a bigger deflection yoke, and higher powered output stages. To deflect vectored video adds to the confusion: to make the beam abruptly change direction means that not only will the output stages have to be capable of a lot of current, but they'd also have to be capable of lots of high frequency response. It would be a challenge now to do that well using such parts as Harris HEXFETs and things; the only way to do that before about 5 years ago would have been brute force, paralleled MOSFETs - not really cost-practical in the early 1980s. Back in the early 80's, when the small amounts of video RAM required to make up a raster display were very expensive, this may have helped to drive the short-term popularity of vectors.
Finally, consider that to draw a screen, constant motion of the electron beam is required. Failure to do so (ie. CPU hang) will burn the phosphors of the tube and make it look like a worn-out ATM machine display.
The info required to draw any dot in a monochrome vector would be X = 0 to 255, Y = 0 to 255, L (luminance) = 0 to 1 (on or off). As you increase resolution, X = 0 to 1023, Y = 0 to 1023, and for fun, let's add gray scale: L = 0 to 1023. The resolution aside (arbitrary data widths for the D/A converters chosen), adding the gray scale support would require a lot more CPU overhead, as well as cost of another D/A converter and video amplifier stages (rather than just turning on and off the voltage applied to the CRT's cathode).
Color displays? Let's look at this:
X = 0 - 1023
Y = 0 - 1023
R = 0 - 1023
G = 0 - 1023
B = 0 - 1023
That's 5 pieces of information for every last pixel to be drawn on the display. Not much for today, I'm sure, but given the fact this has to be a real-time feature of the display, it's probably pretty CPU intensive for a 6800 that is trying to play a game and manage sound at the same time.
And we still haven't even looked into convergence issues... but let me mention that, since the CRT needs a high voltage "accelerating potential" (the big rubber cup on the back of the CRT in your monitor/TV set), you also need to produce a power supply to provide the 30kV or so that it requires. Rastered displays generally pull this off the horizontal deflection oscillator, which is a convenient source. Doing this on a vectored display would mean that your high voltage would fluctuate, which would cause brightness issues, focus issues, consistency of image issues, etc... The Vectrex home arcade system used a small separate power supply to do this, but it adds to the cost.
The ultimate vectored display system is a radar display. Vectors are drawn from the center outwards, lit up when the signal is bounced off a remote target, and carve either a full 360 or 90 degree sweep usually by moving electromagnets on the necks of their picture tubes. These days, though, most radar systems use rasters, with the vectored image existing only in the controlling computer: Video RAM is cheap, and it gets you away from noisy and unreliable moving magnet systems in the display. And a raster allows you to use color in your displays, which would be difficult in a vectored setting.
Not impossible, just difficult...
[BigBlockMopar contemplates driving X and Y deflection amplifiers off the convenient D/A converters in his sound card to try it out...]
This charge leaks out over time because, of course, there is no perfect insulator. Generally, EPROMs are guaranteed to keep for at least 10 years or more, depending on environment temperature. So yeah, even One Time Programmable devices (EPROMs without the quartz window - much cheaper) can self erase over long periods of time.
Actually, your description sounds overall a lot like what happens to electrolytic capacitors as they age and dry up.
I collect and restore old radios and TV sets, and in the 1930s to 1960s, electrolytic capacitors weren't what they are today.
Generally, the first time you plug in an old radio or TV after it's been sitting for 20 years in someone's attic or something, you short every electrolytic capacitor in the thing. And that gets inconvenient, since the local Radio Shack doesn't stock very many 10uF 450V capacitors anymore. (Of course, the sensible thing is to either apply power slowly using a variac or re-"form" each electrolytic capacitor by applying power it individually with a wall-wart and a resistor in series...)
Once the device has been powered up once after storage and the capacitors are all working, running the radio or TV set for a few minutes every month normally keeps the electrolyic capacitors in top shape.
Not being a semiconductor physicist, will this tactic work with (E/EE)PROMs?
I did see warnings in the area of the LCD about high voltages (assuming its for the display -- who knows), and there was a particularly disheartening connector leading up to the display with a mass of wires. Doesn't look easy.
I wouldn't worry too much about the high voltages involved.
The inverter itself is usually quite tiny and supplies a very efficient backlighting system, whether it's through the little fluorescent tubes or through an electroluminescent sheet.
All of this stuff *has* to be very efficient, because the more power the thing uses, the shorter the life of the battery, and that's not a good selling point.
I've never actually put an ammeter to the inverter or actually tried to current test one, but I'd expect they'll mostly put out in the range of 150-250V, with 1.0-2.0mA short circuit output current. That translates to about 0.5 watts of energy to run the backlighting - easily enough, I'd think.
So, what kind of shock would that give you? It'd hurt, but unless you deliberately tried to apply that power so that it had a clear line through your heart or your brain, you'd be in trouble.
Use the good ole one-hand rule: When working in live equipment, keep the other hand *in your pocket*. (When the unused hand is allowed to escape the pocket, it occasionally has been known to wander towards the chassis or controls of the device that you're working on, and has been responsible for causing shocks...)
Biggest zap I've ever received?
Deliberately, sitting on a tesla coil at work, while tuning the secondary. We use it for testing high voltage insulators for one of our product lines. Somewhere in the 10MeV range. Sparks 15 feet long. No current behind it, feels like a good static electric shock. (But it's really cool watching corona and sparks jump off your fingertips.)
Accidentally, and far more dangerous: the horizontal output stage in a 1954 RCA color TV set. (The very first color TV sold to the general public, I love and collect very old TV sets, and I was helping to restore this one.) About 4kV with easily 50mA of current available. That's more than an electric chair. I brushed the anode cap of the horizontal output tube, and immediately the skin was black and scorched. Fortunately, I was using the one-hand rule, so I have a scar, not a coffin.
Ahh, the forever tiresome, never-ending saga of Quebec. Quebec tramples all over the right to free speech as defined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and yet the federal government puts up with it.
Is it any wonder skilled young Canadians (like myself) are fleeing - in unprecedented numbers - to the greener pastures and real freedom of the United States? I have a very hard time getting excited about being Canadian. Sure, it's better than being Bolivian, but you've gotta admit that it's pretty hard to live right next door to the world's one great superpower without feeling left out.
Not to use/. as my personal employment website, but you've gotta agree that Slashdot does attract a very nice cross section of the computer industry. Knowing that my loads of positive karma will be moderated away within minutes of this posting, I'll post the following anyway:
Highly skilled Windows 9x/NT administration and networking, some Linux under RedHat 6.0 (primarily the implementation of a Samba file sharing and ipchains MASQing firewall for my home LAN's PPPoE-based DSL connection). I was on the Internet before Yahoo, and I have lots of experience as a UNIX user. Also highly versed with airport flight information systems (FIDS), and am familiar with the data streams provided by ARINC, INFAX and a couple of Air Canada proprietary systems. Lots of experience in professional audio and video, broadcasting, analog and digital circuit design.
Currently employed by a major US defense contractor, and have designed marine radar video processing circuits and marine engine monitoring systems that are in use in a number of vessels in the American and Canadian Coast Guard. I'm also the IT Administrator for our office, with 17 clients on our LAN. (And, I administer a home LAN with 6 clients.) I'm also very familiar with the domain registration and hosting process, since I've registered and currently manage three domains.
Highly versatile, internally motivated, and always learning. Hobbies include restoring vintage automobiles (engine rebuilds, automatic transmission modifications, body and unibody rust repairs and welding, electrical work), restoring and collecting early radio and television receivers, playing with and reading about computers, writing non-fiction for periodicals under a variety of "nom-de-plume".
Dangerously literate, bizarre off-the-wall sense of humor, friendly and personable disposition that makes people surprised when they find out that I'm a "computer geek". Tall, attractive and muscular, I've been told that I look like Jerry O'Connell (Mission To Mars / Joe's Apartment). I speak with an accent known in broadcasting as a "New England Bland", which is the same accent as Peter Jennings and Tom Green have. As well as my technical experience in broadcasting, I've also appeared on camera and have done voice-overs for a number of radio and television commercials.
Interested in moving to the US primarily because I identify more with Americans and the American spirit than I do with Canadians. Not to mention the unending high taxes and political effluence bombarding me here. My interest in moving to the United States is not one of working in the United States, but one of moving to the United States and taking on the responsibilities of being an American citizen.
I consider playing around in cramped, cable-rat's-nest-ified, sharp-edged, poorly labeled peecee cases to be a complete waste of my time. It's well worth the extra money to have a machine that always works; and even if it doesn't, it's trivial to fix it. If you've never owned a real workstation, you can't really argue with me. Try it; you'll never go back.
Oh yeah. I fixed an Indy once for a friend (small problem, PSU fan died, very easy to fix), and I couldn't get over how wonderfully easy it was to pull apart the system (once I'd figured out how it was held together) and get at everything.
It was like the difference between an AT-layout x86 and an ATX-layout x86. Only better. Lots better. No more digging through little scraps of ribbon cable connecting on-board serial ports to the connectors on the back of the card cage.
Actually, it was almost as good as working on a Mac G3/G4. (And, even then, Macs hold stature only because of familiarity.)
I am serious. Just found the link here Considering most drivers when they use their cell phone, I think you are being a little mild with the punishment
That's just so wrong. Urk.
I'm leaving my office now.
I'm going to stop by a welding supply store, and then a steel and iron supply company.
I'm going to gusset my truck's frame with triangular braces welded across the frame rails at 18" intervals.
And then I'm going to weld 1/4" thick plate steel to the outside of the body of the truck.
I guarantee you that the guy who hits me because of one of these will be hurt worse than I am.
And then, I'll get out of the truck, and beat his injured body into oblivion. And sue NaviCase for my injuries, my damaged truck, my psychological stress, and the impending criminal record for assault.
The company is claiming something on its advertisement- the box- namely, that their product will function under the GNU/Linux operating system. The product clearly does not do this. The consumer is misled by the advertising. Is this not false advertising?
Sure. But look at these far more blatant examples that we, as computer users and therefore hardware buyers, have tolerated:
It started out small enough. An Intel 486 at 100MHz can be either a 486DX3-100 (33MHz internally multiplied by 3 for 99MHz) or the real (and more common) thing, the 486DX4-100 (25MHz x 4 for 100MHz). And we tolerated it. (In fact, I think you'd probably want the 486-99, since the bus would have to be faster!)
Then came the "Plug and Play" ISA cards, where you still have to set up the card's hardware with a little setup program. That's *not* Plug 'n Play.
Now, we tolerate computer speakers that claim to be rated to 100W + "PMPO" ("Peak Music Power Output", whatever that is), despite the fact they're powered from a little 9V 300mA AC adapter. (P= EI = 9 x 0.3 = 2.7 watts, so how can the output power be greater than the input power?) Speaking as a former professional audio technician (I've done sound for Harry Belafonte, The Three Tenors, Garth Brooks, etc. in full concert settings), generally a 100 watt amplifier weighs about 0.3-0.5 pounds per watt. An el-cheapo pair of "100 watt" computer speakers don't even weigh a pound.
Next comes "PC100" RAM. PC100 certification is supposed to be regulated by Intel, but they obviously don't watch it too carefully. I recently bought some SDRAM that wouldn't work when I kicked the CPU bus up to the rated 100MHz. Now, the chips are rated at 10 nanoseconds. Since time = 1/frequency, 10 nanosecond RAM should work at 100MHz, and therefore it's good 100MHz RAM. But the Intel specification requires the chip latency to be under 8nS for a PC100 sticker. This was *not* PC100 SDRAM. Imagine trying to explain this to the computer store $8.00/hr "technician" dork who considers himself to know everything and doesn't even speak English fluently. (Not that English is a prerequisite to computer knowledge, but, let's face it, it *is* the language of the industry.) The solution was their "PC133" SDRAM, which is really only PC100, because the latency is 8nS, not the ?5?6?nS latency called for by Intel's PC133 specification.
How about all those really crappy little CPU fans that say on the label "ball bearing"? Ever opened one up? I've only ever opened one up where I did find ball bearings, and they were made of plastic, and had fused together (causing the fan to stop). Most of the rest use sintered bronze sleeve bearings, which are actually superior for small cooling fans, but they're "accidentally" mislabeled as "ball bearing".
Now, the far less clear issues of Linux hardware compatibility. Of course, they'll have a field day with this one.
Bottom line, don't trust hardware vendors/manufacturers as far as you can throw them. They're in a fiercely competitive business, trying to move product any way that they can. Lots of really tiny computer companies just import stuff right off the boat from China and Taiwan, where truth in advertising has never been much of a priority, and where the language difference is a plausible excuse they can use if they get caught. I'd like to avoid Chinese/Taiwanese stuff for that reason, but Japanese and American-made hardware are virtually non-existant.
My rule of thumb? If there are spelling errors or outrageous claims on the box or in the manuals, I don't buy the product. Stick with good name brands where possible. And if you want a really good set of computer speakers (not the generic crap), go to your local stereo store. Buy a nice stereo with good speakers (Polk, Acoustic Research, Cerwin Vega, whatever), a nice amplifier (remember the watts to pounds rule of thumb), and tell the guy you need an adapter to allow you to hook up your Sony Discman. That adapter will very nicely connect your stereo to your sound card, and lemme tell you, your MP3 collection never sounded better.
Oh, and, unlike the little computer speakers, a real stereo system is actually UL/CSA approved, meaning that it's that much less likely to cause a fire when it breaks.
I always thought those "designed for Windows 9x" or "designed for Windows NT" stickers looked much better on the side of our department's trashcans.
A friend of mine works in the IT department at a very large local automotive wrecking yard. (And, since we're both car geeks as well as computer geeks, we get a lot of free car parts!)
They have a fairly large LAN with a database of available parts as well as a website with a parts search, all of which he administers.
One day, he peeled off the "Designed for Windows 95" sticker from one of his computers, wiped the oil and grease from the side of the car crusher, and stuck it there.
To Microsoft's credit, they really know how to make a good sticker. Despite the harsh conditions, the sticker was still mostly there the last time I dropped by to pick up some stuff. There's a big red paint scrape across the front of it now from when one of the front-end loader operators grazed it with the 3" tall remains of a Suzuki Samurai. (He also busted up part of the control panel, so the yard's owner made a big stink about it.)
'Course, I'd love to be the guy who gets to put a big pile of M$ products into the crusher and then hit the green "Cycle Start" button...:)
"I'm a Slant-6 fan, primarily. That was the motor you couldn't kill...:)" funny...there's a dead one behind my house sitting in an old blue Dart.
Are you sure it's the engine that's at fault? Or do you not know how to set up a Holley 2245/Carter BBD carburetor?
The Slant-6 was designed in the late 1950s as a race engine to compete with small 6-cylinder cars from Ford and GM. It was a completely aluminum engine, leaned to the passenger side to allow for a tunnel ram intake manifold, lower hood line, and a center of gravity to offset the weight of the driver. In its early incarnations, it was a very short stroke engine, displacing 170 cubic inches, and capable of happlily revving to 8,000 RPM +.
In typical Chrysler do-or-die fashion, in 1960, Ford had the Falcon and GM had the Chevy Corvair. Chyrsler had been playing around with the Valiant, but still didn't have a motor for it. They experimented with their high-tech aluminum block Slant-6, and decided it wasn't durable enough for the masses. On a tight timeline, they poured the Slant-6 with high-nickel iron alloy instead.
It's worth noting that aluminum is much softer than iron. If you're building an engine block out of aluminum, it has to have a huge amount of "webbing" (kinda like flying buttresses to help hold the block together) in order to maintain its rigidity. Since the Slant-6 had been designed for aluminum, it was vast overkill making it in iron.
Produced from 1960 to 1983 (cars), 1987 (trucks), and 1991 (marine), taxi fleets powered by Slant-6 engines have gone literally millions of miles between rebuilds. One of my Slant-6s came to me in a 1974 Plymouth Valiant Brougham. When I got the car, there were 297,000 miles on the odometer. The car had been neglected, and the lifter adjustments - necessary with all older engines with mechanical lifters - hadn't been done. She was running on 4 out of 6 cylinders, but still started and ran well, and would still peel the tires. The engine didn't burn or leak any oil, and aside from a really rough idle and the stench of unburned gasoline leaving through the tailpipe, it still sounded healthy at speed: no bearing knock, *strong* oil pressure, compression of 130PSI on the four good cylinders. I'm still working on restoring that car - the body was pretty cabbaged when I got it, but it's looking a lot better now.
The only Slant-6 with a real achilles heel is the 225 / 3.7L Slant-6, which were the only Slant-6s made after 1972. The 225 Slant-6 has a very long stroke (4.125") which means that they're quite sensitive to being over-revved. They're a massively torquey motor, so if you know how to drive based on torque curves, you won't over-rev it anyway. The failure mode of an over-revved Slant-6 is generally the failure of the number 6 (rear) con rod. I've seen Slant-6s driven thousands of miles with five cylinders running and a broken con rod in the sixth, so it doens't necessarily keep the engine from going. Just be careful if you're downshifting or if you're trying to rock the car out of a snowbank.
That being said, in a Dart, your engine is old enough that it has mechanical valve lifters. You have to adjust your valve clearance regularily - do it just before every oil change. Or, you can replace your cam and lifters with more modern hydraulics. (All post-1980 Slant-6s have hydraulic lifters.) Failure to adjust your valvetrain on any older engine properly is negligence, not a failure on the part of the engine, and it will cost you exhaust valves, especially if you're not running a lead additive. (Slant-6s before 1972, as with most other vintage engines, don't have hardened valve seats because unleaded fuel is a relatively new "innovation".)
If your engine *still* won't run, check your ballast resistor. Blaming your engine for a bad ballast resistor is akin to calling your motherboard a piece of crap because you keep on hooking it up to cheap power supplies. Chrysler has always been known for good drivetrain components, the support systems sometimes leave a little to be desired.
If you don't believe me about the legendary durability of the Slant-6, I invite you to take a look at Yahoo and see what comes up. Check out Tailfins and Allpar, too. If you're *still* not convinced, I'd invite you to e-mail me with the address and details on the car. If you're nearby, I'll happily give you a few bucks for it and haul it off for a good restoration or to be used as a parts car.
I haven't read the article yet - it's been Slashdotted - but does it cover the one big question about script kiddies - and that is, why do they spell so badly?
The nasty combination of punctuation and numeric characters into words surely makes it more difficult for them to communicate properly with each other, let alone us normal computer geeks.
Can anyone offer any insight? I'll look forward to reading the article when the server is responding again.
Thanks, man! Yeah, I'm a car nut. Rather than sit at home and watch anime, I prefer to get out there, spark up the MIG welder, and plop a big engine somewhere where it doesn't belong.
Freedom to Innovate includes multi-talented computer geeks with welders, I guess...:) (There! Now we're on-topic!)
Mopar kicks so much ass. Fuck a Chevy and to hell with Ford. Well... I'm still a die-hard Ford guy but Mopar rules too.
Well, my daily driver is a 400 big-block powered 1976 Dodge Ram. It's a lot more fun than the little Acura Integra that one of my co-workers drives. And, it's faster, though it only gets about 7 MPG and I drive it 20 miles each way to work and back. (Ouch!)
I'm a Slant-6 fan, primarily. That was the motor you couldn't kill...:) Tough as nails. I've got three Slant-6 engines, and a Slant-6 powered Valiant Brougham in my garage. Very nice little luxury highway cruiser.
I've also got a Chevette with a Buick 3.8L V6 stuffed under the hood. To satisfy the driveway's Big-Three quota, the Chevette has a narrowed Ford 8.8" differential from an old Crown Vic in the back; the Chevette's original diff didn't hold up to the Buick V6 for very long. Fast little car. Beating a Mustang with it is a fun challenge; having a Civic with tinted windows pull up beside me is just boring.
Here in New England, Mopar is getting more popular with each show I go to. If you're in MA there is a show every Fri night at Sams next to Higgins. There was a huge show about 5 weeks ago at Quinsig with a bunch of Mopar on display.
I'm in Toronto, Canada, actually. If you're gonna be up this way 'round about August 20th, you should head to New Hamburg, there's an annual Mopar show there that attracts several thousand cars. And then, nearer to you in PA, there's the show in Calisle. You'd have to check out the date for that one this year; I was at last year's, it was incredible.
Drop me a line by e-mail (assuming you check this post again), and I can get you specific Carlisle info and stuff *without* losing all my/. karma.
The days when Usenet was big, everyone was on Prodigy "Classic" and SPAM as we fear it today was still limited to the snail mail variety . . . ah . ..an Internet sin Corporations . . . those were the days . ..
Dontcha love telling someone to hit Usenet, and they look at you blankly?
It was exactly the same look I'd get from people in 1992 when I gave them my e-mail address.
I told them, "One day, you will know what this is." I was generally dismissed as a crackpot.
Ahh, the good old days. I had (and still have, it's plugged into my Linux DSL proxy/firewall) an DEC VT-100 terminal - ya know, the funkadelic 1970s model upon which every terminal program is based. What a work of art that thing is. Every now and then, I'll set the terminal down to 300 baud, fire up Pine & Tin and remember the 'net as it once was. Cryptic, slow, text-based, and free.
WHAT??? You've gotta be from Taylor or something. I've lived in AA for 24 years and that's a load of crap. 20 minutes from Ann Arbor to Metro Airport when traffic's good, and that's not even half way to Detroit.
LOL Actually, no, I'm a frequent visitor from Toronto. I usually do the drive between Detroit and A^2 in the middle of the night; I didn't realize it was that bad in the daytime.
My truck has a Mopar/Chrysler 6.6L (400CID) V8 in it, and I regularily push it to 90 MPH on open highway. 20 minutes, easy.:)
Abcess slaps BigBlockMopar around with a Corvair (or any other Detroit automobile from the 70's)
Try an AMC Pacer or Gremlin.:) I think the Corvair was discontinued before the 1970 model, if not even the 1969 model. And, as usual, AskJeeves provides thoroughly useless and irrelevant answers. [BigBlockMopar slaps Ralph Nadar around with a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere front bumper.]
As far as the auto industry goes, the big 3 seem to borrow quite a bit from the rest of the world as well, took 'em long enough to figure out how to build a car that lasted as long as the Japanese and Europeans cars.
Not true.
The Japanese, during their motorcycle days, did invent vacuum-casting of aluminum, giving their products a definate oil-leakage and power-to-displacement advantage. I'll give you that.
But there's one engine that Mercedes reverse-engineered to find out what made them last so long, and reportedly is the reason why, 40 years later, Daimler decided to merge with that company.
Obviously, the company was Chrysler, and the engine was the Slant-6, first introduced in 1960 Valiants, and used in Dodge trucks all the way up to 1986(US)/1987(Canada), and as marine engines until 1991.
The trick to the Slant-6's legendary durability (easily lasting 300,000 miles between rebuilds, but there are documented original ex-taxicabs with several million miles on them) is the fact that it is hugely overbuilt. The crankshaft, with massive throws and an 85lb weight, looks like something out of a big diesel truck, not a small (for its day) car engine. The block was high nickel cast iron poured into a mold that included webbing sufficient to cast it with aluminum.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is the world's toughest car engine.
Chrysler did one better, too: the bolted it up to a few different transmissions over the years, depending on the car and option package. The most common transmissions were the A-833 four-speed manual (meant to live behind a 426 Hemi V8), the TorqueFlite 727 3-speed automatic (arguably the most durable automatic transmission ever made, these were also built for Hemi cars), and the TorqueFlite 904 (which was the 727's slightly smaller brother).
GM and Ford have also built some incredibly tough engines over the years. The Chevy 350 V8 lasts a long time on average, as does the Ford 300 inline 6.
Reason? These are primarily low-revving engines that build their power through torque. With a taller gearing, the engines produce lots of satisfying acceleration, and still maintain low engine speeds.
Why low engine speeds? The slower the engine spins, the less wear it sees. And the less fuel is wasted reciprocating the pistons up and down. To the Japanese and most Europeans, this is a completely unknown concept, though low-revving long-stroke ("oversquare") engines are very common in more expensive European cars.
Sure, a bigger, oversquare engine is often worse on fuel simply because of the mass of the parts inside it. But who cares? American cars are designed for American roads, and gas is still relatively cheap. They fit perfectly into their market. It was only when government-mandated CAFE laws came about that all that started to change.
Blah, blah, motor capital of the world. What about pollution capital of the world? There are large tracts of detroit and surrounding area that the auto industry has abandoned, leaving someone else (read, the taxpayers) to pay for the clean up.
Sure. What about Love Canal in Niagara Falls NY? Industry has to be held accountable for what it does. But remember, most of Detroit's factories - and probably dumps, too - were built before anyone knew that you couldn't just seal up drums of benzene and toss it into the earth. And, a lot of the companies involved have gone out of business or have been bought up / merged over the years. There were over 150 American car companies in the early 1920s, and the lines of responsibility have been blurred.
We've learned from those mistakes. It's like having too few liferafts on the Titanic: until the Titanic, no one thought a ship (let alone an "unsinkable" one - could sink before help arrived).
Besides, you're not going to tell me that Japan and Europe don't have environmental quagmires like this? Gimme a break. Parts of the Black Forest are dying from coal dust from German steel mills.
Somehow, the mention of 'The Big Three' and 'innovation' in the same sentance makes me think of M$.
Not true, either. GM, Ford and Chrysler have always been fiercely competitive. Chrysler was founded when Walter P. left GM because he disagreed with their valve design principles. He headed up Maxwell and eventually bought it out with his own firm. There's always been bad blood between GM and Chrysler as a result. And Ford? Well, Walter P. Chrysler was Jewish, as were the Dodge Brothers (hence the Star of David on the early Dodge hood ornaments). Henry Ford was one of the world's alltime greatest anti-Semites, and hated Chrysler for that. Ford also hated GM and Chrysler because they also used assembly lines, and legal battles continued into the 1930s over whether or not GM and Chysler infringing on Ford's inventions. (I don't know whether Ford ever patented the assembly line or now, though.)
What obstructions has Microsoft ever had to deal with? I think, as an automotive buff and amateur automotive historian, there might be better parallels than to compare M$ to the Big Three.
The thing that really kills Detroit is the unions. Brake piston machinists who feel that they're worth $19/hr and a union that lets them get it means that the Big Three are forced to cut down human labor as much as possible, more so than the Europeans and the Japanese. It means that the Big Three can't always afford the labor to manufacture a part with a lower yield rate than the tolerances and manufacturing quality would dictate. What happens? Marginal parts have to be put onto cars to maintain a profit, otherwise shareholders aren't happy, start pulling out, and eventually the company goes under. The unions must be broken up.
Anyways, yes Ann Arbor is a pretty good place to live, especially if you're in academia, want to raise kids in a nice place, or hang out with a bunch of yuppies.
Oh yeah. Very nice. I'd look more to Ypsilanti, since it strikes me that rent is quite a bit cheaper there.
All higher education in Michigan is based there.Well, shit, that's not saying much, is it? I mean, it's not as if Michigan were the intellectual capital of the world...
BigBlockMopar slaps around AC with a large stack of Motown records.
No, agreed, it's not perceived as such, is it? But the Midwest is the industrial, automotive and manufacturing heartland, so if you like mechanical and process engineering, it *is* a world-renowned part of the world.
And, less than a 20 minute drive down I-94 from Ann Arbor is Detroit, the world's motor capital. Honda and Toyota get all their ideas from copying the Big Three's innovation.
Ann Arbor, Michigan. You only have to go there once to fall in love with it.
All higher education in Michigan is based there. The populace is intelligent and friendly. The coffee shop to population and computer shop to population ratios are higher than anywhere I've ever been to. There are two beautiful Art Deco movie theaters downtown. There's a store that specializes in stuff like little chrome fish - like one of the emblems for some Christian sect - but these fish have little feet and the word "Darwin" in the center. And broadband is readily available.
This isn't a city-affiliated site, but it's got a lot of cool links, so check it out.
And to that I say," bullshit ". Teflon was "invented" accidentally in 1938 by a DuPont chemist doing research work on refrigerants. While NASA makes heavy use of Teflon, they had nothing to do with its invention.
Wow! That's news to me! That's a little factoid I got from somewhere like CNN, but it's obviously quite wrong.
That is because you are an idiot! Why would you do this? Go to hell!
It's no different from collecting antique computers.
If you're a good Slashdot geek, I'm sure you, like me, wouldn't pass up someone offering you a nice TRS-80 model 1.
Of course it's not useful for anything, except you can admire the engineering and how far we've come.
By the same token, you could go to Wal-Mart, spend $40, and get a nice little black-and-white, plastic-cased made-in-Taiwan TV set that would produce a far better picture than any one of my antiques would. Their hand-made mahogany cabinets with their brass trim and gold-leaf grill cloths over the speakers don't improve the picture quality to that of the disposeable plastic commodity. But it's not the same.
Or, you could trade in your 1948 Chevrolet Business Coupe for a brand new Honda Accord. The Honda will be better on gas, able to accelerate faster, will handle better, and parts will be easier to find. But it's also boring.
Moses Znaimer scares me. He has too much power, dealt to him by the CRTC. The CRTC also scares me. Moreso than MZ.
Nah, Moses is a cool guy. I've met him several times, both because of the fact that I used to work in the TV business, but also because of our shared interest in antique TV sets. A few years ago, he dropped in to borrow a TV set from my collection for an exhibit at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. We sat back, cracked open a beer and had a great time together.
Moses is a hardass, like you'd expect someone who turned an ailing TV station (Citytv in 1971) into a world-renouned media empire. And while he is out there for ratings and profit, he's also very conscious of history, of culture, of people.
But, like most people who know Moses personally say, "I just wish he'd come out of the closet". At the very least, he'd finally get a good hairdo.
The really scary thing is the taxpayer funded mediocrity and waste of the CBC.
How closed minded you are for being a fellow slashdotter. Eventually we won't have to drive our cars; they'll be vessels that take us where we want to go and we can do what we wish whilst on them. When that happens we will be computing thanks to forward thinking from people like the megacar crew.
Nah, I think people enjoy driving too much for it ever to go away.
Further, these "vessels" better at least segregate me from all the dregs of society. Speaking as one who once got scabies from a family of dirty people on a Toronto subway, I make enough money to afford a car. If the price of cars and fuel or highway congestion are inflated too much by idiotic tree-hugger ideals, rather than take transit, I'll just move to somewhere where I don't have to share a confined space with the city's effluence. And, as I move, I'll take my skills and my disposeable income with me.
I tend to think that you're an older person who can't do more than one thing at a time.
Nope. I'm 26 years old; I've been on the Internet since 1988. (Remember ARPANET? This was long before Spry Mosaic came out, and a full 5 years before Yahoo registered their domain name.) And if you can judge how much I can do at once based on how many applications are currently open on my desktop, there are 10 currently going on my machine.
I have been car computing safely for years now. Here's the link that demonstrates this: My Jetta with GPS, DVD, MP3, and Heads up Display
Wow! That's really cool. Yeah, you can watch a DVD while you drive. I hope you've at least had enough sense to set it up so that only the passengers get to watch the movies.
MP3s in the car are great; keep the volume low enough that you can hear the siren of the fire truck coming at you. And don't get distracted by choosing the tunes as you drive.
Ya know, for all your apparent engineering and hacking skills, I would have thought you'd have had enough taste to do this in a real car.
I think you need to be a little more open minded about things. I'm not saying everyone can drivecompute, but some of us certainly can and have with no problems.
Sure. Right.
You probably spend a lot of time driving, and I do too. I'm in a familiar place, surrounded by familiar objects. I know where all the controls are, I know the dimensions of my vehicle, and I have the seat adjusted comfortably. I am at piece. I am in a comfortable space.
Familiarity breeds contempt. By being too comfortable, you start to forget that you're in a machine, that you're hurtling down the road at speeds sure to be deadly to your frail body. You are in mortal danger.
Now, having said that, I'm not advocating that everyone drive really slowly in the fast lane. That's sure to cause even more accidents as people try to swerve around you.
What people have to realize is that driving is a complex task, and it should take all your concentration. How complex is it? Well, let's keep in mind that the US Army, among other organizations, have been trying to build a vehicle that can drive on its own. And they've met with only very limited success.
My driving record is flawless. Zero accidents, zero speeding tickets, zero other moving violations. (Parking tickets are another matter.) I've got an air brake license, which allows me to drive up to 15 tons with air brakes. I used to have to go out on the road, driving large loads of professional audio, video and TV production equipment across the country, setting it up, working the show, then driving back. I've logged over 360,000 miles in diverse cities and massively different driving conditions. And I have yet to get a speeding ticket.
As the astute will note, my very nickname is evidence of one of my passions: "BigBlockMopar" refers to any member of the family of Chrysler-built "big-block" V8 engines. Chysler big-block engines were available from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, in displacements from 361 to 440 cubic inches. (For sake of reference, 440 cubic inches = 7.2L. Compare that to a Honda Civic's 1.5L engine.)
I own several cars, including a CASCAR Enduro class racecar. It's not streetable; I enjoy towing it out to Mosport and doing laps at 95+ MPH. In full race conditions.
83% of all drivers think they're better than average (source: California DMV). Both my insurance company and I agree that I am truly a skilled driver. And the reason? I concentrate on the road.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration agrees with me: cellphones are dangerous when you're driving. Further, check out this link. Talking on the cellphone while you drive increases your chances of having an accident 400 times. That's worse than being drunk to twice the legal limit (0.16% B.A.C.). I can't imagine what the risks of driving and computing must be - I'll wait until I get home, rather than try it behind the wheel... My daily driver is a 4,500lb 1976 Dodge Ram with a 400CID (6.6L) big-block V8. I only hope that when you hit me, my truck kills you.
Technologies that can be found in most automobiles, in modern airplanes and jet fighters. Not only that, but it's scientific advance. Science has improved our quality of life, told us how the universe works and how to harness its energies.
Here, here!
The by-products of space exploration include faster adoption of transistors to replace tubes, which has terrific consequences for the computer sitting on your desktop.
Space exploration and the many engineering disciplines involved have helped to bring us quieter, more fuel-efficient civilian aircraft - through increasing our knowledge of aerodynamics - and have helped us to develop hushkits for noisy jet engines. (But I still feel that anyone who buys a house near an airport and then complains about the noise is about as smart as a bag of hammers.)
Building machines to the incredible limits of durability and machining tolerance that space travel requires has proliferated the use of computer-aided design and manufacturing systems, as well as increasing the precision of overall manufacturing. You can take a look inside a hard disk drive, flip open your VCR or pull the cylinder head off your car engine to see the benefits of this.
And finally, space exploration caused NASA to start calling up chemical companies, looking for a durable, slippery, lightweight and high-temperature plastic. Dupont stepped up to the challenge and invented Teflon.
Apart from making it easier to clean the matted hair and bits of scalp out of the frying pan after you've smacked someone with it, Teflon enriches out lives in countless ways every day, from safer wiring inside high-temperature devices like stoves all the way to engine assembly lubricants that are used for protection before a new engine is started up for the first time.
Space exploration is a boon to mankind, and anyone opposed is invited to give up their computer and all the other wonderful fruits of the research it has helped spawn.
Having said that, I don't like India's motivation here. I don't believe it to be a philanthropic and scientific exploration the way NASA does it; I believe it to be an extension to the current arms race with Pakistan. Now, that was the impetuous behind the space race between USA/USSR during the Cold War, but at least 95% of the population of either country wasn't living in abject poverty at the time. India should examine its motivations and get its affairs in order before it starts spending the huge sums of money on this.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's put things into perspective for the computer industry. This is going to seem long and drawn out (aren't all my posts?), but it sheds a new light on the computer.
As a car nut, let's do a quick brief:
The first mass-produced car came out just after the turn of the last century. Almost 100 years ago. With the first affordable car came the first "backyard mechanics", people who maintain their own cars.
In those days, cars were unreliable enough that you could expect to have to fix something every thirty miles or so, and most drivers did it themselves.
Continual refinement brought us to self-adjusting hydraulic brakes, engines that self-cranked, automatically adjusted the ignition timing, and had pressurized lubrication systems by the 1930s. (Prior to that, you had to deal with clutch, throttle, cable-operated brakes, shifting, setting the ignition timing as well as steering - it took a lot of experience and theoretical understanding of how the car worked.)
The 1940s found the first "modern" cars: anyone who can drive a stickshift can drive a car from the 1940s or later, even if they are a little more temperamental. One car that I love to drive is a friend's all-original 1948 Chevrolet Business Coupe. But, even so, the thing doesn't have enough power to be able to get up to freeway speeds.
By the late 1950s, the automatic transmission, was initially available in two speeds (the GM "PowerGlide"). Bigger engines came out, allowing the new cars to cruise easily on the new Eisenhower Interstate System. By the early '60s, Chrysler had brought out their legendary TorqueFlite 727 automatic, a nearly bulletproof three-speed automatic transmission with a really neat planetary gearset design which has since been copied into most modern automatic transmissions.
In the 1970s, user features increased, drivetrain and mechanical manufacturing tolerances were increased, tire technology increased. Electronic ignition replaced points and condensors, making yet another part of the car virtually maintenance-free. But reliability still sucked, primarily because of new federally-mandated emissions controls.
The 1980s brought us EFI systems, which greatly improved reliability and driveability over the primitive emissions control systems of the 1970s. The 1974 oil crisis was working its way into automotive designs, and by 1980, the first of the modern and efficient OHC 4-cylinder engines were hitting the showroom floor. Four speed automatics were coming out, negating a big fuel-efficiency issue that kept the sales of stickshifts up. As the earlier cars were gradually retired and replaced with their more reliable equivalents, the service centers at the side of the freeways started to convert their service bays into fast food franchises.
Today, cars are easy to operate, with very few parts that require periodic adjustments. Machining technology means better fit between parts, less oil leaks, etc. And the sophistication of today's engines and engine management systems makes people feel uncomfortable about taking things into their own hands and fixing an oil leak or other small problem. Spark plugs now usually last 60,000 miles or more - and even if the backyard mechanic of today knows how to change them, they're often difficult to get at. Cars today aren't perfect, but they do represent 100 years of continual refinement and design experience.
So, where does that put us, relative to computers?
I'm going to guess that the majority of computers, running Windows 9x/NT/2K, are now at about the point that cars were at in the late 1960s. To use them really effectively and to avoid being stranded by the side of the road, you should understand how they work and keep a few tools in the trunk. But you can still toss the keys to the wife so she can do the grocery shopping.
That's very impressive: it took the car industry almost 70 years to get from the first mass-produced cars to that relative level of sophistication. With the computer industry, it's been approximately 20 years since we were typing "pr#6" on our Apple IIs to read the disk drive.
In a few years, when computer OSs are actually stable, Plug and Play works, software is always easy to install or remove, and everyone has got a system powerful enough to watch DVD movies, I'll suggest that the computer industry will have reached the level of maturity that the automobile industry is currently at.
The future? Flying cars, and computers with working voice recognition.
Yes. Static RAM can be highly dangerous.
Especially if you're out in the middle of the woods, on a moonless night, camping with your friends. The campfire has died down, and you've just finished off a six-pack of your favorite beer. You're now heeding nature's call, staggering away from the glowing embers in the firepit...
And then BANG!, the tailgate that you just *knew* you should have closed gets you in the balls. You lie writhing on the ground for a few minutes, then regain some control over yourself as the pain subsides, start to get up and you clock your head on the back bumper, which you didn't realize you were under.
Never turn your back on a static Ram. Or any other pickup truck that you've parked in the woods on a camping trip.
I've got a '76 RAM, and the article didn't mention at all how I'm supposed to use ferrite core memory in a circuit.
:)
Actually, I do have a '76 Dodge Ram, and I do have some (approximately) '76 ferrite core memory. As much as I hate to admit it, the former is significantly more useful than the latter (especially since it gets me to work every day). The core is some of the *very last* ferrite core memory, with incredibly tiny little beads on what looks like a very uniform piece of windowscreen.
It's amazing that the stuff actually worked. I'd love to find out how to use it so that I can hook it up to my computer just for fun. Ya know, my old Pentium 166MMX will really scream when I add that extra 256 bytes of 750nS RAM to it.
DODGE 4EVAH!Amen, brother. I've destroyed 7 Honda Civics with my old truck, and they're always the ones with the tinted windows, the chainsaw mufflers, the big stereos and the "Powered By Honda" stickers. (Yah, it's a *Civic*, what do you *think* it's powered by? Put that sticker on a Toyota, and I might be impressed.) They keep on cutting me off, and like lemmings jumping off a cliff, they don't understand the fatal implications of their actions. I mean, 4,500lbs of Detroit steel coming at their silly little tinfoil cars. The first one really pissed me off, because he actually bent my bumper. (In all fairness, I did push his taillights into his back seat.) How many are you up to?
Interesting people don't drive Hondas.
[BigBlockMopar submits quickly, before he has a chance to think too much about the karma implications this posting will have.]
Hold on to your hat.
A raster display is very simple. An electron beam, controlled by electromagnets, paints the screen. The electromagnets are driven by oscillators. In a an ordinary NTSC TV set, the oscillators are at 60Hz (for vertical) and 15,750Hz (for horizontal). The beam is turned on and off in the appropriate places by video amplifiers which simply turn on the beam where there is supposed to be light, and turn it off where there isn't. The deflection oscillators are kept in sync with the TV station, VCR, video game, etc. When they lose sync, you get the familiar roll or twist to the picture, simply because the beam is being turned on and off for the image while the deflection oscillators have the beam in the wrong part of the screen.
Vector displays turn the beam on an off relative to the desired brightness at a particular location, just like a raster. But instead of using oscillators for deflection, they use digital-to-analog converters and amplifiers. You'd poke a numeric value to the D/A converter, which would produce a corresponding voltage, which would be amplified to drive the deflection magnets. Do it fast enough in X and Y axis, and turn the beam on and off at will, and you're graphing in the cartesian plane. (Or playing Asteroids...) While a raster repeats the deflection on its own (all you need to do it continue to turn on and off the guns at the right places), vector graphics requires that you keep cycling the X and Y values through the D/A converter, and keep turning on and off the gun at the right places. It's a lot more CPU intensive, although I doubt that's much of an obstacle now.
Color is a relatively simple addition. Without getting too complicated, there are three guns that shoot at three colors of phosphor. There's a mask, called a "shadow mask", just beind the screen, and because of its position relative to the phosphors, it serves as a filter. The angle of incidence of the red beam is such that it can only pass through the shadow mask to hit the red phosphor. This assures "color purity".
Now, while I suppose this could be done with a vectored display, I've never heard of any color vector displays- they all use overlays for color. Deflecting the three beams that make up color video requires a lot more current supplied to the deflection magnets. That means a bigger deflection yoke, and higher powered output stages. To deflect vectored video adds to the confusion: to make the beam abruptly change direction means that not only will the output stages have to be capable of a lot of current, but they'd also have to be capable of lots of high frequency response. It would be a challenge now to do that well using such parts as Harris HEXFETs and things; the only way to do that before about 5 years ago would have been brute force, paralleled MOSFETs - not really cost-practical in the early 1980s. Back in the early 80's, when the small amounts of video RAM required to make up a raster display were very expensive, this may have helped to drive the short-term popularity of vectors.
Finally, consider that to draw a screen, constant motion of the electron beam is required. Failure to do so (ie. CPU hang) will burn the phosphors of the tube and make it look like a worn-out ATM machine display.
The info required to draw any dot in a monochrome vector would be X = 0 to 255, Y = 0 to 255, L (luminance) = 0 to 1 (on or off). As you increase resolution, X = 0 to 1023, Y = 0 to 1023, and for fun, let's add gray scale: L = 0 to 1023. The resolution aside (arbitrary data widths for the D/A converters chosen), adding the gray scale support would require a lot more CPU overhead, as well as cost of another D/A converter and video amplifier stages (rather than just turning on and off the voltage applied to the CRT's cathode).
Color displays? Let's look at this:
X = 0 - 1023
Y = 0 - 1023
R = 0 - 1023
G = 0 - 1023
B = 0 - 1023
That's 5 pieces of information for every last pixel to be drawn on the display. Not much for today, I'm sure, but given the fact this has to be a real-time feature of the display, it's probably pretty CPU intensive for a 6800 that is trying to play a game and manage sound at the same time.
And we still haven't even looked into convergence issues... but let me mention that, since the CRT needs a high voltage "accelerating potential" (the big rubber cup on the back of the CRT in your monitor/TV set), you also need to produce a power supply to provide the 30kV or so that it requires. Rastered displays generally pull this off the horizontal deflection oscillator, which is a convenient source. Doing this on a vectored display would mean that your high voltage would fluctuate, which would cause brightness issues, focus issues, consistency of image issues, etc... The Vectrex home arcade system used a small separate power supply to do this, but it adds to the cost.
The ultimate vectored display system is a radar display. Vectors are drawn from the center outwards, lit up when the signal is bounced off a remote target, and carve either a full 360 or 90 degree sweep usually by moving electromagnets on the necks of their picture tubes. These days, though, most radar systems use rasters, with the vectored image existing only in the controlling computer: Video RAM is cheap, and it gets you away from noisy and unreliable moving magnet systems in the display. And a raster allows you to use color in your displays, which would be difficult in a vectored setting.
Not impossible, just difficult...
[BigBlockMopar contemplates driving X and Y deflection amplifiers off the convenient D/A converters in his sound card to try it out...]
Actually, your description sounds overall a lot like what happens to electrolytic capacitors as they age and dry up.
I collect and restore old radios and TV sets, and in the 1930s to 1960s, electrolytic capacitors weren't what they are today.
Generally, the first time you plug in an old radio or TV after it's been sitting for 20 years in someone's attic or something, you short every electrolytic capacitor in the thing. And that gets inconvenient, since the local Radio Shack doesn't stock very many 10uF 450V capacitors anymore. (Of course, the sensible thing is to either apply power slowly using a variac or re-"form" each electrolytic capacitor by applying power it individually with a wall-wart and a resistor in series...)
Once the device has been powered up once after storage and the capacitors are all working, running the radio or TV set for a few minutes every month normally keeps the electrolyic capacitors in top shape.
Not being a semiconductor physicist, will this tactic work with (E/EE)PROMs?
I wouldn't worry too much about the high voltages involved.
The inverter itself is usually quite tiny and supplies a very efficient backlighting system, whether it's through the little fluorescent tubes or through an electroluminescent sheet.
All of this stuff *has* to be very efficient, because the more power the thing uses, the shorter the life of the battery, and that's not a good selling point.
I've never actually put an ammeter to the inverter or actually tried to current test one, but I'd expect they'll mostly put out in the range of 150-250V, with 1.0-2.0mA short circuit output current. That translates to about 0.5 watts of energy to run the backlighting - easily enough, I'd think.
So, what kind of shock would that give you? It'd hurt, but unless you deliberately tried to apply that power so that it had a clear line through your heart or your brain, you'd be in trouble.
Use the good ole one-hand rule: When working in live equipment, keep the other hand *in your pocket*. (When the unused hand is allowed to escape the pocket, it occasionally has been known to wander towards the chassis or controls of the device that you're working on, and has been responsible for causing shocks...)
Biggest zap I've ever received?
Deliberately, sitting on a tesla coil at work, while tuning the secondary. We use it for testing high voltage insulators for one of our product lines. Somewhere in the 10MeV range. Sparks 15 feet long. No current behind it, feels like a good static electric shock. (But it's really cool watching corona and sparks jump off your fingertips.)
Accidentally, and far more dangerous: the horizontal output stage in a 1954 RCA color TV set. (The very first color TV sold to the general public, I love and collect very old TV sets, and I was helping to restore this one.) About 4kV with easily 50mA of current available. That's more than an electric chair. I brushed the anode cap of the horizontal output tube, and immediately the skin was black and scorched. Fortunately, I was using the one-hand rule, so I have a scar, not a coffin.
Ahh, the forever tiresome, never-ending saga of Quebec. Quebec tramples all over the right to free speech as defined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and yet the federal government puts up with it.
Is it any wonder skilled young Canadians (like myself) are fleeing - in unprecedented numbers - to the greener pastures and real freedom of the United States? I have a very hard time getting excited about being Canadian. Sure, it's better than being Bolivian, but you've gotta admit that it's pretty hard to live right next door to the world's one great superpower without feeling left out.
Not to use /. as my personal employment website, but you've gotta agree that Slashdot does attract a very nice cross section of the computer industry. Knowing that my loads of positive karma will be moderated away within minutes of this posting, I'll post the following anyway:
Highly skilled Windows 9x/NT administration and networking, some Linux under RedHat 6.0 (primarily the implementation of a Samba file sharing and ipchains MASQing firewall for my home LAN's PPPoE-based DSL connection). I was on the Internet before Yahoo, and I have lots of experience as a UNIX user. Also highly versed with airport flight information systems (FIDS), and am familiar with the data streams provided by ARINC, INFAX and a couple of Air Canada proprietary systems. Lots of experience in professional audio and video, broadcasting, analog and digital circuit design.
Currently employed by a major US defense contractor, and have designed marine radar video processing circuits and marine engine monitoring systems that are in use in a number of vessels in the American and Canadian Coast Guard. I'm also the IT Administrator for our office, with 17 clients on our LAN. (And, I administer a home LAN with 6 clients.) I'm also very familiar with the domain registration and hosting process, since I've registered and currently manage three domains.
Highly versatile, internally motivated, and always learning. Hobbies include restoring vintage automobiles (engine rebuilds, automatic transmission modifications, body and unibody rust repairs and welding, electrical work), restoring and collecting early radio and television receivers, playing with and reading about computers, writing non-fiction for periodicals under a variety of "nom-de-plume".
Dangerously literate, bizarre off-the-wall sense of humor, friendly and personable disposition that makes people surprised when they find out that I'm a "computer geek". Tall, attractive and muscular, I've been told that I look like Jerry O'Connell (Mission To Mars / Joe's Apartment). I speak with an accent known in broadcasting as a "New England Bland", which is the same accent as Peter Jennings and Tom Green have. As well as my technical experience in broadcasting, I've also appeared on camera and have done voice-overs for a number of radio and television commercials.
Interested in moving to the US primarily because I identify more with Americans and the American spirit than I do with Canadians. Not to mention the unending high taxes and political effluence bombarding me here. My interest in moving to the United States is not one of working in the United States, but one of moving to the United States and taking on the responsibilities of being an American citizen.
Resume and references available upon request.
E-mail me.
Oh yeah. I fixed an Indy once for a friend (small problem, PSU fan died, very easy to fix), and I couldn't get over how wonderfully easy it was to pull apart the system (once I'd figured out how it was held together) and get at everything.
It was like the difference between an AT-layout x86 and an ATX-layout x86. Only better. Lots better. No more digging through little scraps of ribbon cable connecting on-board serial ports to the connectors on the back of the card cage.
Actually, it was almost as good as working on a Mac G3/G4. (And, even then, Macs hold stature only because of familiarity.)
Considering most drivers when they use their cell phone, I think you are being a little mild with the punishment
That's just so wrong. Urk.
I'm leaving my office now.
I'm going to stop by a welding supply store, and then a steel and iron supply company.
I'm going to gusset my truck's frame with triangular braces welded across the frame rails at 18" intervals.
And then I'm going to weld 1/4" thick plate steel to the outside of the body of the truck.
I guarantee you that the guy who hits me because of one of these will be hurt worse than I am.
And then, I'll get out of the truck, and beat his injured body into oblivion. And sue NaviCase for my injuries, my damaged truck, my psychological stress, and the impending criminal record for assault.
(Would grin, if it were funny.)
Sure. But look at these far more blatant examples that we, as computer users and therefore hardware buyers, have tolerated:
It started out small enough. An Intel 486 at 100MHz can be either a 486DX3-100 (33MHz internally multiplied by 3 for 99MHz) or the real (and more common) thing, the 486DX4-100 (25MHz x 4 for 100MHz). And we tolerated it. (In fact, I think you'd probably want the 486-99, since the bus would have to be faster!)
Then came the "Plug and Play" ISA cards, where you still have to set up the card's hardware with a little setup program. That's *not* Plug 'n Play.
Now, we tolerate computer speakers that claim to be rated to 100W + "PMPO" ("Peak Music Power Output", whatever that is), despite the fact they're powered from a little 9V 300mA AC adapter. (P= EI = 9 x 0.3 = 2.7 watts, so how can the output power be greater than the input power?) Speaking as a former professional audio technician (I've done sound for Harry Belafonte, The Three Tenors, Garth Brooks, etc. in full concert settings), generally a 100 watt amplifier weighs about 0.3-0.5 pounds per watt. An el-cheapo pair of "100 watt" computer speakers don't even weigh a pound.
Next comes "PC100" RAM. PC100 certification is supposed to be regulated by Intel, but they obviously don't watch it too carefully. I recently bought some SDRAM that wouldn't work when I kicked the CPU bus up to the rated 100MHz. Now, the chips are rated at 10 nanoseconds. Since time = 1/frequency, 10 nanosecond RAM should work at 100MHz, and therefore it's good 100MHz RAM. But the Intel specification requires the chip latency to be under 8nS for a PC100 sticker. This was *not* PC100 SDRAM. Imagine trying to explain this to the computer store $8.00/hr "technician" dork who considers himself to know everything and doesn't even speak English fluently. (Not that English is a prerequisite to computer knowledge, but, let's face it, it *is* the language of the industry.) The solution was their "PC133" SDRAM, which is really only PC100, because the latency is 8nS, not the ?5?6?nS latency called for by Intel's PC133 specification.
How about all those really crappy little CPU fans that say on the label "ball bearing"? Ever opened one up? I've only ever opened one up where I did find ball bearings, and they were made of plastic, and had fused together (causing the fan to stop). Most of the rest use sintered bronze sleeve bearings, which are actually superior for small cooling fans, but they're "accidentally" mislabeled as "ball bearing".
Now, the far less clear issues of Linux hardware compatibility. Of course, they'll have a field day with this one.
Bottom line, don't trust hardware vendors/manufacturers as far as you can throw them. They're in a fiercely competitive business, trying to move product any way that they can. Lots of really tiny computer companies just import stuff right off the boat from China and Taiwan, where truth in advertising has never been much of a priority, and where the language difference is a plausible excuse they can use if they get caught. I'd like to avoid Chinese/Taiwanese stuff for that reason, but Japanese and American-made hardware are virtually non-existant.
My rule of thumb? If there are spelling errors or outrageous claims on the box or in the manuals, I don't buy the product. Stick with good name brands where possible. And if you want a really good set of computer speakers (not the generic crap), go to your local stereo store. Buy a nice stereo with good speakers (Polk, Acoustic Research, Cerwin Vega, whatever), a nice amplifier (remember the watts to pounds rule of thumb), and tell the guy you need an adapter to allow you to hook up your Sony Discman. That adapter will very nicely connect your stereo to your sound card, and lemme tell you, your MP3 collection never sounded better.
Oh, and, unlike the little computer speakers, a real stereo system is actually UL/CSA approved, meaning that it's that much less likely to cause a fire when it breaks.
No, but I bet the can gets punched and kicked a lot more now.
A friend of mine works in the IT department at a very large local automotive wrecking yard. (And, since we're both car geeks as well as computer geeks, we get a lot of free car parts!)
They have a fairly large LAN with a database of available parts as well as a website with a parts search, all of which he administers.
One day, he peeled off the "Designed for Windows 95" sticker from one of his computers, wiped the oil and grease from the side of the car crusher, and stuck it there.
To Microsoft's credit, they really know how to make a good sticker. Despite the harsh conditions, the sticker was still mostly there the last time I dropped by to pick up some stuff. There's a big red paint scrape across the front of it now from when one of the front-end loader operators grazed it with the 3" tall remains of a Suzuki Samurai. (He also busted up part of the control panel, so the yard's owner made a big stink about it.)
'Course, I'd love to be the guy who gets to put a big pile of M$ products into the crusher and then hit the green "Cycle Start" button... :)
funny...there's a dead one behind my house sitting in an old blue Dart.
Are you sure it's the engine that's at fault? Or do you not know how to set up a Holley 2245/Carter BBD carburetor?
The Slant-6 was designed in the late 1950s as a race engine to compete with small 6-cylinder cars from Ford and GM. It was a completely aluminum engine, leaned to the passenger side to allow for a tunnel ram intake manifold, lower hood line, and a center of gravity to offset the weight of the driver. In its early incarnations, it was a very short stroke engine, displacing 170 cubic inches, and capable of happlily revving to 8,000 RPM +.
In typical Chrysler do-or-die fashion, in 1960, Ford had the Falcon and GM had the Chevy Corvair. Chyrsler had been playing around with the Valiant, but still didn't have a motor for it. They experimented with their high-tech aluminum block Slant-6, and decided it wasn't durable enough for the masses. On a tight timeline, they poured the Slant-6 with high-nickel iron alloy instead.
It's worth noting that aluminum is much softer than iron. If you're building an engine block out of aluminum, it has to have a huge amount of "webbing" (kinda like flying buttresses to help hold the block together) in order to maintain its rigidity. Since the Slant-6 had been designed for aluminum, it was vast overkill making it in iron.
Produced from 1960 to 1983 (cars), 1987 (trucks), and 1991 (marine), taxi fleets powered by Slant-6 engines have gone literally millions of miles between rebuilds. One of my Slant-6s came to me in a 1974 Plymouth Valiant Brougham. When I got the car, there were 297,000 miles on the odometer. The car had been neglected, and the lifter adjustments - necessary with all older engines with mechanical lifters - hadn't been done. She was running on 4 out of 6 cylinders, but still started and ran well, and would still peel the tires. The engine didn't burn or leak any oil, and aside from a really rough idle and the stench of unburned gasoline leaving through the tailpipe, it still sounded healthy at speed: no bearing knock, *strong* oil pressure, compression of 130PSI on the four good cylinders. I'm still working on restoring that car - the body was pretty cabbaged when I got it, but it's looking a lot better now.
The only Slant-6 with a real achilles heel is the 225 / 3.7L Slant-6, which were the only Slant-6s made after 1972. The 225 Slant-6 has a very long stroke (4.125") which means that they're quite sensitive to being over-revved. They're a massively torquey motor, so if you know how to drive based on torque curves, you won't over-rev it anyway. The failure mode of an over-revved Slant-6 is generally the failure of the number 6 (rear) con rod. I've seen Slant-6s driven thousands of miles with five cylinders running and a broken con rod in the sixth, so it doens't necessarily keep the engine from going. Just be careful if you're downshifting or if you're trying to rock the car out of a snowbank.
That being said, in a Dart, your engine is old enough that it has mechanical valve lifters. You have to adjust your valve clearance regularily - do it just before every oil change. Or, you can replace your cam and lifters with more modern hydraulics. (All post-1980 Slant-6s have hydraulic lifters.) Failure to adjust your valvetrain on any older engine properly is negligence, not a failure on the part of the engine, and it will cost you exhaust valves, especially if you're not running a lead additive. (Slant-6s before 1972, as with most other vintage engines, don't have hardened valve seats because unleaded fuel is a relatively new "innovation".)
If your engine *still* won't run, check your ballast resistor. Blaming your engine for a bad ballast resistor is akin to calling your motherboard a piece of crap because you keep on hooking it up to cheap power supplies. Chrysler has always been known for good drivetrain components, the support systems sometimes leave a little to be desired.
If you don't believe me about the legendary durability of the Slant-6, I invite you to take a look at Yahoo and see what comes up. Check out Tailfins and Allpar, too. If you're *still* not convinced, I'd invite you to e-mail me with the address and details on the car. If you're nearby, I'll happily give you a few bucks for it and haul it off for a good restoration or to be used as a parts car.
I haven't read the article yet - it's been Slashdotted - but does it cover the one big question about script kiddies - and that is, why do they spell so badly?
The nasty combination of punctuation and numeric characters into words surely makes it more difficult for them to communicate properly with each other, let alone us normal computer geeks.
Can anyone offer any insight? I'll look forward to reading the article when the server is responding again.
Thanks, man! Yeah, I'm a car nut. Rather than sit at home and watch anime, I prefer to get out there, spark up the MIG welder, and plop a big engine somewhere where it doesn't belong.
Freedom to Innovate includes multi-talented computer geeks with welders, I guess... :) (There! Now we're on-topic!)
Mopar kicks so much ass. Fuck a Chevy and to hell with Ford. Well... I'm still a die-hard Ford guy but Mopar rules too.Well, my daily driver is a 400 big-block powered 1976 Dodge Ram. It's a lot more fun than the little Acura Integra that one of my co-workers drives. And, it's faster, though it only gets about 7 MPG and I drive it 20 miles each way to work and back. (Ouch!)
I'm a Slant-6 fan, primarily. That was the motor you couldn't kill... :) Tough as nails. I've got three Slant-6 engines, and a Slant-6 powered Valiant Brougham in my garage. Very nice little luxury highway cruiser.
I've also got a Chevette with a Buick 3.8L V6 stuffed under the hood. To satisfy the driveway's Big-Three quota, the Chevette has a narrowed Ford 8.8" differential from an old Crown Vic in the back; the Chevette's original diff didn't hold up to the Buick V6 for very long. Fast little car. Beating a Mustang with it is a fun challenge; having a Civic with tinted windows pull up beside me is just boring.
Here in New England, Mopar is getting more popular with each show I go to. If you're in MA there is a show every Fri night at Sams next to Higgins. There was a huge show about 5 weeks ago at Quinsig with a bunch of Mopar on display.I'm in Toronto, Canada, actually. If you're gonna be up this way 'round about August 20th, you should head to New Hamburg, there's an annual Mopar show there that attracts several thousand cars. And then, nearer to you in PA, there's the show in Calisle. You'd have to check out the date for that one this year; I was at last year's, it was incredible.
Drop me a line by e-mail (assuming you check this post again), and I can get you specific Carlisle info and stuff *without* losing all my /. karma.
E-mail address is at the top!
Dontcha love telling someone to hit Usenet, and they look at you blankly?
It was exactly the same look I'd get from people in 1992 when I gave them my e-mail address.
I told them, "One day, you will know what this is." I was generally dismissed as a crackpot.
Ahh, the good old days. I had (and still have, it's plugged into my Linux DSL proxy/firewall) an DEC VT-100 terminal - ya know, the funkadelic 1970s model upon which every terminal program is based. What a work of art that thing is. Every now and then, I'll set the terminal down to 300 baud, fire up Pine & Tin and remember the 'net as it once was. Cryptic, slow, text-based, and free.
LOL Actually, no, I'm a frequent visitor from Toronto. I usually do the drive between Detroit and A^2 in the middle of the night; I didn't realize it was that bad in the daytime.
My truck has a Mopar/Chrysler 6.6L (400CID) V8 in it, and I regularily push it to 90 MPH on open highway. 20 minutes, easy. :)
Abcess slaps BigBlockMopar around with a Corvair (or any other Detroit automobile from the 70's)Try an AMC Pacer or Gremlin. :) I think the Corvair was discontinued before the 1970 model, if not even the 1969 model. And, as usual, AskJeeves provides thoroughly useless and irrelevant answers. [BigBlockMopar slaps Ralph Nadar around with a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere front bumper.]
As far as the auto industry goes, the big 3 seem to borrow quite a bit from the rest of the world as well, took 'em long enough to figure out how to build a car that lasted as long as the Japanese and Europeans cars.Not true.
The Japanese, during their motorcycle days, did invent vacuum-casting of aluminum, giving their products a definate oil-leakage and power-to-displacement advantage. I'll give you that.
But there's one engine that Mercedes reverse-engineered to find out what made them last so long, and reportedly is the reason why, 40 years later, Daimler decided to merge with that company.
Obviously, the company was Chrysler, and the engine was the Slant-6, first introduced in 1960 Valiants, and used in Dodge trucks all the way up to 1986(US)/1987(Canada), and as marine engines until 1991.
The trick to the Slant-6's legendary durability (easily lasting 300,000 miles between rebuilds, but there are documented original ex-taxicabs with several million miles on them) is the fact that it is hugely overbuilt. The crankshaft, with massive throws and an 85lb weight, looks like something out of a big diesel truck, not a small (for its day) car engine. The block was high nickel cast iron poured into a mold that included webbing sufficient to cast it with aluminum.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is the world's toughest car engine.
Chrysler did one better, too: the bolted it up to a few different transmissions over the years, depending on the car and option package. The most common transmissions were the A-833 four-speed manual (meant to live behind a 426 Hemi V8), the TorqueFlite 727 3-speed automatic (arguably the most durable automatic transmission ever made, these were also built for Hemi cars), and the TorqueFlite 904 (which was the 727's slightly smaller brother).
GM and Ford have also built some incredibly tough engines over the years. The Chevy 350 V8 lasts a long time on average, as does the Ford 300 inline 6.
Reason? These are primarily low-revving engines that build their power through torque. With a taller gearing, the engines produce lots of satisfying acceleration, and still maintain low engine speeds.
Why low engine speeds? The slower the engine spins, the less wear it sees. And the less fuel is wasted reciprocating the pistons up and down. To the Japanese and most Europeans, this is a completely unknown concept, though low-revving long-stroke ("oversquare") engines are very common in more expensive European cars.
Sure, a bigger, oversquare engine is often worse on fuel simply because of the mass of the parts inside it. But who cares? American cars are designed for American roads, and gas is still relatively cheap. They fit perfectly into their market. It was only when government-mandated CAFE laws came about that all that started to change.
Blah, blah, motor capital of the world. What about pollution capital of the world? There are large tracts of detroit and surrounding area that the auto industry has abandoned, leaving someone else (read, the taxpayers) to pay for the clean up.Sure. What about Love Canal in Niagara Falls NY? Industry has to be held accountable for what it does. But remember, most of Detroit's factories - and probably dumps, too - were built before anyone knew that you couldn't just seal up drums of benzene and toss it into the earth. And, a lot of the companies involved have gone out of business or have been bought up / merged over the years. There were over 150 American car companies in the early 1920s, and the lines of responsibility have been blurred.
We've learned from those mistakes. It's like having too few liferafts on the Titanic: until the Titanic, no one thought a ship (let alone an "unsinkable" one - could sink before help arrived).
Besides, you're not going to tell me that Japan and Europe don't have environmental quagmires like this? Gimme a break. Parts of the Black Forest are dying from coal dust from German steel mills.
Somehow, the mention of 'The Big Three' and 'innovation' in the same sentance makes me think of M$.Not true, either. GM, Ford and Chrysler have always been fiercely competitive. Chrysler was founded when Walter P. left GM because he disagreed with their valve design principles. He headed up Maxwell and eventually bought it out with his own firm. There's always been bad blood between GM and Chrysler as a result. And Ford? Well, Walter P. Chrysler was Jewish, as were the Dodge Brothers (hence the Star of David on the early Dodge hood ornaments). Henry Ford was one of the world's alltime greatest anti-Semites, and hated Chrysler for that. Ford also hated GM and Chrysler because they also used assembly lines, and legal battles continued into the 1930s over whether or not GM and Chysler infringing on Ford's inventions. (I don't know whether Ford ever patented the assembly line or now, though.)
What obstructions has Microsoft ever had to deal with? I think, as an automotive buff and amateur automotive historian, there might be better parallels than to compare M$ to the Big Three.
The thing that really kills Detroit is the unions. Brake piston machinists who feel that they're worth $19/hr and a union that lets them get it means that the Big Three are forced to cut down human labor as much as possible, more so than the Europeans and the Japanese. It means that the Big Three can't always afford the labor to manufacture a part with a lower yield rate than the tolerances and manufacturing quality would dictate. What happens? Marginal parts have to be put onto cars to maintain a profit, otherwise shareholders aren't happy, start pulling out, and eventually the company goes under. The unions must be broken up.
Anyways, yes Ann Arbor is a pretty good place to live, especially if you're in academia, want to raise kids in a nice place, or hang out with a bunch of yuppies.Oh yeah. Very nice. I'd look more to Ypsilanti, since it strikes me that rent is quite a bit cheaper there.
BigBlockMopar slaps around AC with a large stack of Motown records.
No, agreed, it's not perceived as such, is it? But the Midwest is the industrial, automotive and manufacturing heartland, so if you like mechanical and process engineering, it *is* a world-renowned part of the world.
And, less than a 20 minute drive down I-94 from Ann Arbor is Detroit, the world's motor capital. Honda and Toyota get all their ideas from copying the Big Three's innovation.
Ann Arbor, Michigan. You only have to go there once to fall in love with it.
All higher education in Michigan is based there. The populace is intelligent and friendly. The coffee shop to population and computer shop to population ratios are higher than anywhere I've ever been to. There are two beautiful Art Deco movie theaters downtown. There's a store that specializes in stuff like little chrome fish - like one of the emblems for some Christian sect - but these fish have little feet and the word "Darwin" in the center. And broadband is readily available.
This isn't a city-affiliated site, but it's got a lot of cool links, so check it out.
[longing sigh] Ann Arbor.
Wow! That's news to me! That's a little factoid I got from somewhere like CNN, but it's obviously quite wrong.
Ack... I had a wonderful reply written out. And then I clicked the wrong key, and it was gone.
Anyone know if a CGI form is cached anywhere (except RAM) when you type it, but before you send it?
I'm using IE 4.01 under Windoze 95B OSR2.
It's no different from collecting antique computers.
If you're a good Slashdot geek, I'm sure you, like me, wouldn't pass up someone offering you a nice TRS-80 model 1.
Of course it's not useful for anything, except you can admire the engineering and how far we've come.
By the same token, you could go to Wal-Mart, spend $40, and get a nice little black-and-white, plastic-cased made-in-Taiwan TV set that would produce a far better picture than any one of my antiques would. Their hand-made mahogany cabinets with their brass trim and gold-leaf grill cloths over the speakers don't improve the picture quality to that of the disposeable plastic commodity. But it's not the same.
Or, you could trade in your 1948 Chevrolet Business Coupe for a brand new Honda Accord. The Honda will be better on gas, able to accelerate faster, will handle better, and parts will be easier to find. But it's also boring.
It's a hobby. It's not meant to be practical.
Nah, Moses is a cool guy. I've met him several times, both because of the fact that I used to work in the TV business, but also because of our shared interest in antique TV sets. A few years ago, he dropped in to borrow a TV set from my collection for an exhibit at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. We sat back, cracked open a beer and had a great time together.
Moses is a hardass, like you'd expect someone who turned an ailing TV station (Citytv in 1971) into a world-renouned media empire. And while he is out there for ratings and profit, he's also very conscious of history, of culture, of people.
But, like most people who know Moses personally say, "I just wish he'd come out of the closet". At the very least, he'd finally get a good hairdo.
The really scary thing is the taxpayer funded mediocrity and waste of the CBC.
Nah, I think people enjoy driving too much for it ever to go away.
Further, these "vessels" better at least segregate me from all the dregs of society. Speaking as one who once got scabies from a family of dirty people on a Toronto subway, I make enough money to afford a car. If the price of cars and fuel or highway congestion are inflated too much by idiotic tree-hugger ideals, rather than take transit, I'll just move to somewhere where I don't have to share a confined space with the city's effluence. And, as I move, I'll take my skills and my disposeable income with me.
I tend to think that you're an older person who can't do more than one thing at a time.Nope. I'm 26 years old; I've been on the Internet since 1988. (Remember ARPANET? This was long before Spry Mosaic came out, and a full 5 years before Yahoo registered their domain name.) And if you can judge how much I can do at once based on how many applications are currently open on my desktop, there are 10 currently going on my machine.
I have been car computing safely for years now. Here's the link that demonstrates this: My Jetta with GPS, DVD, MP3, and Heads up DisplayWow! That's really cool. Yeah, you can watch a DVD while you drive. I hope you've at least had enough sense to set it up so that only the passengers get to watch the movies.
MP3s in the car are great; keep the volume low enough that you can hear the siren of the fire truck coming at you. And don't get distracted by choosing the tunes as you drive.
Ya know, for all your apparent engineering and hacking skills, I would have thought you'd have had enough taste to do this in a real car.
I think you need to be a little more open minded about things. I'm not saying everyone can drivecompute, but some of us certainly can and have with no problems.Sure. Right.
You probably spend a lot of time driving, and I do too. I'm in a familiar place, surrounded by familiar objects. I know where all the controls are, I know the dimensions of my vehicle, and I have the seat adjusted comfortably. I am at piece. I am in a comfortable space.
Familiarity breeds contempt. By being too comfortable, you start to forget that you're in a machine, that you're hurtling down the road at speeds sure to be deadly to your frail body. You are in mortal danger.
Now, having said that, I'm not advocating that everyone drive really slowly in the fast lane. That's sure to cause even more accidents as people try to swerve around you.
What people have to realize is that driving is a complex task, and it should take all your concentration. How complex is it? Well, let's keep in mind that the US Army, among other organizations, have been trying to build a vehicle that can drive on its own. And they've met with only very limited success.
My driving record is flawless. Zero accidents, zero speeding tickets, zero other moving violations. (Parking tickets are another matter.) I've got an air brake license, which allows me to drive up to 15 tons with air brakes. I used to have to go out on the road, driving large loads of professional audio, video and TV production equipment across the country, setting it up, working the show, then driving back. I've logged over 360,000 miles in diverse cities and massively different driving conditions. And I have yet to get a speeding ticket.
As the astute will note, my very nickname is evidence of one of my passions: "BigBlockMopar" refers to any member of the family of Chrysler-built "big-block" V8 engines. Chysler big-block engines were available from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, in displacements from 361 to 440 cubic inches. (For sake of reference, 440 cubic inches = 7.2L. Compare that to a Honda Civic's 1.5L engine.)
I own several cars, including a CASCAR Enduro class racecar. It's not streetable; I enjoy towing it out to Mosport and doing laps at 95+ MPH. In full race conditions.
83% of all drivers think they're better than average (source: California DMV). Both my insurance company and I agree that I am truly a skilled driver. And the reason? I concentrate on the road.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration agrees with me: cellphones are dangerous when you're driving. Further, check out this link. Talking on the cellphone while you drive increases your chances of having an accident 400 times. That's worse than being drunk to twice the legal limit (0.16% B.A.C.). I can't imagine what the risks of driving and computing must be - I'll wait until I get home, rather than try it behind the wheel... My daily driver is a 4,500lb 1976 Dodge Ram with a 400CID (6.6L) big-block V8. I only hope that when you hit me, my truck kills you.
Here, here!
The by-products of space exploration include faster adoption of transistors to replace tubes, which has terrific consequences for the computer sitting on your desktop.
Space exploration and the many engineering disciplines involved have helped to bring us quieter, more fuel-efficient civilian aircraft - through increasing our knowledge of aerodynamics - and have helped us to develop hushkits for noisy jet engines. (But I still feel that anyone who buys a house near an airport and then complains about the noise is about as smart as a bag of hammers.)
Building machines to the incredible limits of durability and machining tolerance that space travel requires has proliferated the use of computer-aided design and manufacturing systems, as well as increasing the precision of overall manufacturing. You can take a look inside a hard disk drive, flip open your VCR or pull the cylinder head off your car engine to see the benefits of this.
And finally, space exploration caused NASA to start calling up chemical companies, looking for a durable, slippery, lightweight and high-temperature plastic. Dupont stepped up to the challenge and invented Teflon.
Apart from making it easier to clean the matted hair and bits of scalp out of the frying pan after you've smacked someone with it, Teflon enriches out lives in countless ways every day, from safer wiring inside high-temperature devices like stoves all the way to engine assembly lubricants that are used for protection before a new engine is started up for the first time.
Space exploration is a boon to mankind, and anyone opposed is invited to give up their computer and all the other wonderful fruits of the research it has helped spawn.
Having said that, I don't like India's motivation here. I don't believe it to be a philanthropic and scientific exploration the way NASA does it; I believe it to be an extension to the current arms race with Pakistan. Now, that was the impetuous behind the space race between USA/USSR during the Cold War, but at least 95% of the population of either country wasn't living in abject poverty at the time. India should examine its motivations and get its affairs in order before it starts spending the huge sums of money on this.