I find it interesting that VW are throwing their software engineers under the bus over this.
This just isn't something that a couple of developers could independently do, unless VW's oversight and change control is absurdly sloppy. It's going to require at least someone involved in the testing telling the software engineers "we have a problem, can you do something to make the car pass in the test cell" - software engineers don't just generally add code like this for fun. One would imagine there would also be code reviews and audit given that engine management system software is now a safety of life issue (think drive-by-wire throttle, which this code would likely touch).
While it's probably true that Cxx level management weren't aware of what was going on, I find it extremely hard to believe that at least some layers of management were not actively involved with this, and people auditing the software were not actively involved in this. If they weren't, and really just a couple of software guys can put code into the engine management system with anyone being the wiser then this is probably worse (and then the Cxx level people definitely carry some of the culpability for allowing such a sloppy regime in safety critical systems).
Well, no. Where I live an electric car is powered by natural gas (the only generation we have here). In the UK, depending on where you lived, your electric car may be nuclear powered, gas powered, wind powered or coal powered. Coal is on the wane, being replaced by natural gas and wind. If you live in France, your electric car is nuclear powered pretty much all the time (France generates more than 100% of its power needs with nuclear, exporting the balance to neighbouring countries).
You also have to include the cost to maintain the fossil fuel plants that back up the fossil fuel plants, in the fossil fuel analysis.
The UK National Grid maintains a "spinning reserve". This has to be big enough to cope with a couple of large fossil fuel or nuclear plants going offline suddenly, which does happen from time to time (and there have been blackouts when there was not enough spinning reserve when two power stations went offline - for unrelated reasons - within minutes of each other). From the point of the UK National Grid, nuclear, coal and gas are seen as "intermittent power sources". Sizewell B, one of the largest generators in the country, could go from full capacity to zero in an instant, without any warning, if a problem occurs - and suddenly you're without a terawatt of generating capacity. Wind power on the other hand doesn't suffer this problem, wind generators are small and numerous and the loss of one of them doesn't have that kind of impact since at most they are only about 2MW each. Over the period of the next hour or two, wind is also extremely predictable. The wind doesn't just unexpectedly stop blowing. Also in the UK, it tends to be windiest when power demand is highest, those dull winter days when it's doing horizontal rain and everyone's got the lights on.
Of course you still need an alternative for when the whole country is under a high pressure system and there's not much wind at all. But any power generation system alone isn't a silver bullet, that's why we don't just have solely nuclear, or solely gas, or solely coal, or solely oil - we have a mix of different fuelled generation.
But generally when there's a big high pressure system sitting over a large area, it's very sunny, so solar is going full power at that stage even if the wind is not.
But London has had minicabs too for years (these are cabs you can't just hail in the street, you have to phone them to get one) and these are regulated under less onerous regulations than the black cabs. What makes Uber different to any other minicab service that's currently up and running in London? Nothing really, other than you press buttons on your mobile phone's touch screen to order one, instead of talking into your mobile phone's microphone.
What is a "real name" in Facebook's definition, anyway? I know many people who are not known by the name printed in their passport. There's two people at the place I work who are not known by the first name their parents gave them and that is printed in their passport. I'd argue the name we know them by is still their "real name" (more so in fact) than the name printed in their passport.
In any case I'd just photoshop mine if they asked.
Oculus Rift DK2 is already 1080p vertical resolution, but it's nowhere near enough. The next versions will be about 1200 vertical which will help. Really the displays in the headsets need to be approaching 4K for a full-on-HD experience.
In other words, virtual reality. The problem with the current VR headsets like the DK2, is you have effectively a 1080p display that fills most of your field of vision, in other words, yes - you can see the pixels and they are pretty big. The screen door effect is also pretty bad. Text is very difficult to read using the Rift DK2 unless the text is very large.
Developing very high PPI displays will be a real benefit for VR headsets. Tne next crop (the Vive/SteamVR and Oculus CV1) have better resolution (IIRC it's something like 1200 pixels vertical) and probably will have much less of a screen door effect, but the resolution really needs doubling at least for a VR headset to truly feel HD.
The charging cables would have to be enormous, though, to fill (say) to a 400 mile range in less than 3 minutes. The currents and voltages required would be absurdly high. Let's say we have a 180kWh battery/capacitor we want to fill in 3 minutes (0.05 hours). The power coupling would be running to the car at 3.6 megawatts during the charge cycle. With a 11kV coupling you'd need a current of almost 330 amps, so big, thick and heavy conductors. Even if the charger was 99% efficient, you'd need to dissipate 36kW of heat energy during charging (about equivalent to the power output of a small car at wide open throttle).
Having quick charging capacitors/batteries isn't even half the challenge of making an electric car charge rapidly.
It's not that simple. A 12 volt lead acid battery won't give you a shock, for instance, even though it's capable of delivering hundreds of amps and stores a lot of energy. Your skin resistance is highly non linear. At low voltages (for example, the voltage your multimeter puts out when measuring a resistance), the resistance from one hand to the other holding the probes with dry skin is a few megohms. But as the voltage rises, there is a point where the resistance dramatically falls and much higher currents can flow. You need enough voltage to be present to result in a lethal electric shock.
The real WTF is that Slashdot has been running IPv6 articles for years...and *still* doesn't support IPv6.
Facebook on the other hand - not a tech site, but a site for angsty teenagers, baby pics, cat memes and partisan squabbling - has supported IPv6 fully for years.
It's embarrassing that a tech site can't do what a non-tech site has been doing for years.
This is actually a good study in human nature. A resource exhaustion (with a solution already in place) we could see from a mile off, but will do nothing about until it becomes absurdly painful to continue. Already we see monstrosities like carrier grade NAT which breaks many applications, rather than moving to IPv6 which nearly every device supports.
We'll see this same procrastinating with AGW, fossil fuels, everything else - we won't do anything about it until the economic damage is already being done and the pain level becomes extreme.
I have to wonder why they want all this power. Quite frequently, I'm held up by slowcoaches driving high priced sports cars. Where I live we have the most amazing roads for motorcycling and driving sports cars: no speed limit outside of the towns, and fun, twisty roads with little traffic. But the overwhelming majority of sports cars are doing about 45 mph, being a rolling roadblock.
I can't understand why these people - if they want a flash car - why don't they buy a luxury car instead? It'll be a hell of a lot more comfortable and nicer for that style of driving. But instead they are trickling along at low speed with rock hard suspension. They could do that with a car with just 20hp - I just don't get what the 450hp or so is supposed to be getting them other than high fuel bills.
I still occasionally make a PCB if I need one quickly. Most low cost board houses will take 4-6 weeks to turn around your board, if I need one for something I'm doing this weekend, I'll hand make it. I started out making 2 layer boards they are nowhere near as hard to make as he says (at least using a toner transfer process - I've never made PCBs using UV/photo processes). I've handmade PCBs using toner transfer for 0.4mm QFP devices.
The real issue for me is I usually want to make 4 layer+ boards with a proper ground and power plane, not only does it make routing vastly easier, but for what I'm doing I end up with a circuit that performs a lot better, too. For those there really isn't a good alternative to going to a factory. Fortunately there are quite a few low cost choices for 4 layer boards now.
Microsoft didn't set a high bar for them to clear, either. At the time our business was using a bunch of WinCE devices (with WiFi and cellular) and they were shockingly bad. The software was appalling. Simple things like switching from WiFi to cellular failed half the time. Dreadful things.
I remember seeing that Steve Ballmer interview where he laughed about the iPhone probably the day after it was made. Having had to suffer his awful WinCE devices, it wasn't hard to predict that Apple would wipe that grin right off his face in record time with the iPhone leaving him looking like a fool. Everyone could see it apart from Ballmer.
It's a shame that Windows PDAs with dialing capability were absolutely terrible, especially when it comes to the cellular support (and even worse when trying to simultaneously support cellular and WiFi). We still have to suffer them (some devices running a proprietary app for our particular line of business).
I seriously doubt they had to reverse engineer the CPU instruction set, it's likely that the car uses a PowerPC or ARM core or other standard CPU core.
I recommend you watch "Threads" (made in 1983 when many of us thought nuclear war was imminent, but didn't really understand what it meant). However I wouldn't class it as entertainment, and it was not made by Hollywood (it was made by the BBC). Or "The War Game" (made for the BBC in the 1960s) or QED's "A Guide To Armageddon" (also made by the BBC in the 1980s). "A Guide to Armageddon" is available on YouTube.
However, unlike regular chemical explosive weapons, nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to the whole of civilisation. Even a relatively small nuclear war (let's imagine India and Pakistan exchanging 50 weapons in the range of several tens of kilotons at each other) would cause climate change that would even impact countries thousands of kilometers from the conflict for many years afterwards.
* Power transmission is not anywhere near as inefficient as you suggest. The UK National Grid for instance suffers losses of only 7% power station to consumer. * Electric motors are not anywhere near as inefficient as you suggest. A decent brushless motor will do better than 90% * Batteries are not anywhere near as inefficient as you suggest. A good Li-Ion type battery has an efficiency of over 90%
So, a petrol engine is not demonstrably more efficient. Overall, electric vehicles significantly beat petrol (gasoline) engines for thermodynamic efficiency even including power generation losses (a large generator tends to be more thermodynamically efficient than millions of tiny ones). Then add to that an electric car can effectively be nuclear powered or wind powered or solar powered or combinations of those if they are the local generating plants.
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What profit? I don't think Twitter has ever made one.
I find it interesting that VW are throwing their software engineers under the bus over this.
This just isn't something that a couple of developers could independently do, unless VW's oversight and change control is absurdly sloppy. It's going to require at least someone involved in the testing telling the software engineers "we have a problem, can you do something to make the car pass in the test cell" - software engineers don't just generally add code like this for fun. One would imagine there would also be code reviews and audit given that engine management system software is now a safety of life issue (think drive-by-wire throttle, which this code would likely touch).
While it's probably true that Cxx level management weren't aware of what was going on, I find it extremely hard to believe that at least some layers of management were not actively involved with this, and people auditing the software were not actively involved in this. If they weren't, and really just a couple of software guys can put code into the engine management system with anyone being the wiser then this is probably worse (and then the Cxx level people definitely carry some of the culpability for allowing such a sloppy regime in safety critical systems).
What did it leak? Oil? Water? (from the radiator or rainwater through the bodywork?) Fuel?
Well, no. Where I live an electric car is powered by natural gas (the only generation we have here). In the UK, depending on where you lived, your electric car may be nuclear powered, gas powered, wind powered or coal powered. Coal is on the wane, being replaced by natural gas and wind. If you live in France, your electric car is nuclear powered pretty much all the time (France generates more than 100% of its power needs with nuclear, exporting the balance to neighbouring countries).
You also have to include the cost to maintain the fossil fuel plants that back up the fossil fuel plants, in the fossil fuel analysis.
The UK National Grid maintains a "spinning reserve". This has to be big enough to cope with a couple of large fossil fuel or nuclear plants going offline suddenly, which does happen from time to time (and there have been blackouts when there was not enough spinning reserve when two power stations went offline - for unrelated reasons - within minutes of each other). From the point of the UK National Grid, nuclear, coal and gas are seen as "intermittent power sources". Sizewell B, one of the largest generators in the country, could go from full capacity to zero in an instant, without any warning, if a problem occurs - and suddenly you're without a terawatt of generating capacity. Wind power on the other hand doesn't suffer this problem, wind generators are small and numerous and the loss of one of them doesn't have that kind of impact since at most they are only about 2MW each. Over the period of the next hour or two, wind is also extremely predictable. The wind doesn't just unexpectedly stop blowing. Also in the UK, it tends to be windiest when power demand is highest, those dull winter days when it's doing horizontal rain and everyone's got the lights on.
Of course you still need an alternative for when the whole country is under a high pressure system and there's not much wind at all. But any power generation system alone isn't a silver bullet, that's why we don't just have solely nuclear, or solely gas, or solely coal, or solely oil - we have a mix of different fuelled generation.
But generally when there's a big high pressure system sitting over a large area, it's very sunny, so solar is going full power at that stage even if the wind is not.
But London has had minicabs too for years (these are cabs you can't just hail in the street, you have to phone them to get one) and these are regulated under less onerous regulations than the black cabs. What makes Uber different to any other minicab service that's currently up and running in London? Nothing really, other than you press buttons on your mobile phone's touch screen to order one, instead of talking into your mobile phone's microphone.
What is a "real name" in Facebook's definition, anyway? I know many people who are not known by the name printed in their passport. There's two people at the place I work who are not known by the first name their parents gave them and that is printed in their passport. I'd argue the name we know them by is still their "real name" (more so in fact) than the name printed in their passport.
In any case I'd just photoshop mine if they asked.
Oculus Rift DK2 is already 1080p vertical resolution, but it's nowhere near enough. The next versions will be about 1200 vertical which will help. Really the displays in the headsets need to be approaching 4K for a full-on-HD experience.
In other words, virtual reality. The problem with the current VR headsets like the DK2, is you have effectively a 1080p display that fills most of your field of vision, in other words, yes - you can see the pixels and they are pretty big. The screen door effect is also pretty bad. Text is very difficult to read using the Rift DK2 unless the text is very large.
Developing very high PPI displays will be a real benefit for VR headsets. Tne next crop (the Vive/SteamVR and Oculus CV1) have better resolution (IIRC it's something like 1200 pixels vertical) and probably will have much less of a screen door effect, but the resolution really needs doubling at least for a VR headset to truly feel HD.
The charging cables would have to be enormous, though, to fill (say) to a 400 mile range in less than 3 minutes. The currents and voltages required would be absurdly high. Let's say we have a 180kWh battery/capacitor we want to fill in 3 minutes (0.05 hours). The power coupling would be running to the car at 3.6 megawatts during the charge cycle. With a 11kV coupling you'd need a current of almost 330 amps, so big, thick and heavy conductors. Even if the charger was 99% efficient, you'd need to dissipate 36kW of heat energy during charging (about equivalent to the power output of a small car at wide open throttle).
Having quick charging capacitors/batteries isn't even half the challenge of making an electric car charge rapidly.
It's not that simple. A 12 volt lead acid battery won't give you a shock, for instance, even though it's capable of delivering hundreds of amps and stores a lot of energy. Your skin resistance is highly non linear. At low voltages (for example, the voltage your multimeter puts out when measuring a resistance), the resistance from one hand to the other holding the probes with dry skin is a few megohms. But as the voltage rises, there is a point where the resistance dramatically falls and much higher currents can flow. You need enough voltage to be present to result in a lethal electric shock.
The real WTF is that Slashdot has been running IPv6 articles for years...and *still* doesn't support IPv6.
Facebook on the other hand - not a tech site, but a site for angsty teenagers, baby pics, cat memes and partisan squabbling - has supported IPv6 fully for years.
It's embarrassing that a tech site can't do what a non-tech site has been doing for years.
This is actually a good study in human nature. A resource exhaustion (with a solution already in place) we could see from a mile off, but will do nothing about until it becomes absurdly painful to continue. Already we see monstrosities like carrier grade NAT which breaks many applications, rather than moving to IPv6 which nearly every device supports.
We'll see this same procrastinating with AGW, fossil fuels, everything else - we won't do anything about it until the economic damage is already being done and the pain level becomes extreme.
I have to wonder why they want all this power. Quite frequently, I'm held up by slowcoaches driving high priced sports cars. Where I live we have the most amazing roads for motorcycling and driving sports cars: no speed limit outside of the towns, and fun, twisty roads with little traffic. But the overwhelming majority of sports cars are doing about 45 mph, being a rolling roadblock.
I can't understand why these people - if they want a flash car - why don't they buy a luxury car instead? It'll be a hell of a lot more comfortable and nicer for that style of driving. But instead they are trickling along at low speed with rock hard suspension. They could do that with a car with just 20hp - I just don't get what the 450hp or so is supposed to be getting them other than high fuel bills.
He's right, sort of.
I still occasionally make a PCB if I need one quickly. Most low cost board houses will take 4-6 weeks to turn around your board, if I need one for something I'm doing this weekend, I'll hand make it. I started out making 2 layer boards they are nowhere near as hard to make as he says (at least using a toner transfer process - I've never made PCBs using UV/photo processes). I've handmade PCBs using toner transfer for 0.4mm QFP devices.
The real issue for me is I usually want to make 4 layer+ boards with a proper ground and power plane, not only does it make routing vastly easier, but for what I'm doing I end up with a circuit that performs a lot better, too. For those there really isn't a good alternative to going to a factory. Fortunately there are quite a few low cost choices for 4 layer boards now.
The Mondeo is the Ford Contour in the US (if it's still available).
Microsoft didn't set a high bar for them to clear, either. At the time our business was using a bunch of WinCE devices (with WiFi and cellular) and they were shockingly bad. The software was appalling. Simple things like switching from WiFi to cellular failed half the time. Dreadful things.
I remember seeing that Steve Ballmer interview where he laughed about the iPhone probably the day after it was made. Having had to suffer his awful WinCE devices, it wasn't hard to predict that Apple would wipe that grin right off his face in record time with the iPhone leaving him looking like a fool. Everyone could see it apart from Ballmer.
It's a shame that Windows PDAs with dialing capability were absolutely terrible, especially when it comes to the cellular support (and even worse when trying to simultaneously support cellular and WiFi). We still have to suffer them (some devices running a proprietary app for our particular line of business).
The Model S wasn't cloned from Maserati, it was designed by an ex-Mazda designer.
I seriously doubt they had to reverse engineer the CPU instruction set, it's likely that the car uses a PowerPC or ARM core or other standard CPU core.
Neither. €€€. Germany hasn't used the DM for 15 years or thereabouts.
I recommend you watch "Threads" (made in 1983 when many of us thought nuclear war was imminent, but didn't really understand what it meant). However I wouldn't class it as entertainment, and it was not made by Hollywood (it was made by the BBC). Or "The War Game" (made for the BBC in the 1960s) or QED's "A Guide To Armageddon" (also made by the BBC in the 1980s). "A Guide to Armageddon" is available on YouTube.
However, unlike regular chemical explosive weapons, nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to the whole of civilisation. Even a relatively small nuclear war (let's imagine India and Pakistan exchanging 50 weapons in the range of several tens of kilotons at each other) would cause climate change that would even impact countries thousands of kilometers from the conflict for many years afterwards.
* Power transmission is not anywhere near as inefficient as you suggest. The UK National Grid for instance suffers losses of only 7% power station to consumer.
* Electric motors are not anywhere near as inefficient as you suggest. A decent brushless motor will do better than 90%
* Batteries are not anywhere near as inefficient as you suggest. A good Li-Ion type battery has an efficiency of over 90%
So, a petrol engine is not demonstrably more efficient. Overall, electric vehicles significantly beat petrol (gasoline) engines for thermodynamic efficiency even including power generation losses (a large generator tends to be more thermodynamically efficient than millions of tiny ones). Then add to that an electric car can effectively be nuclear powered or wind powered or solar powered or combinations of those if they are the local generating plants.