I don't think they're trying to model our Solar System, but even if they were, the orbits described by the "planets" would be governed by the mass of the bodies, not their sizes.
You wouldn't be able to scale the model to the diameters of the bodies involved unless the densities were the same.
To make the angular velocity the same, the models would have to have a 1:1 ratio, which would take up somewhat more space than they're planning to use.
You can make a model using a different scale than the original.
The article says the system may precess by 1/3600 degrees in a year, while still orbiting 3000x/year.
For an oval orbit, to precess means that the oval of the orbit will also be rotating, and that rotation can be measured. That's precession. The planets in our solar system do this too. Precession is what makes this the Age of Aquarius.
Yeah -- I've been watching this guy for a couple years, and have come to the conclusion that he's a complete con-artist.
If you read the website carefully, you'll note that the specifications he displays here http://www.theaircar.com/models.html for the various models (range, top speed, refuel rates, etc) are all based on theoretical measurements made by guessing how much improvement he can get from changing a number of things in his current design. The current design has been tested for a total of 7.2 km. He gets his 200-300km range by extrapolating based on his guesses. See http://www.theaircar.com/tests.html (scroll down to "Mileage comparison between the taxi in development and the final car") for the true specifications, and note that after the top row, they're all extrapolations. He's basically saying he should get x% increase from this change, and y% from that change, and that means the "improved" engine will get (x+y)% better performance.
His site hasn't changed in at least a year -- meaning those figures haven't been updates with actual test results, and I don't think they ever will be. It's real easy to guess how much improvement various changes may make. It's not so easy to get that improvement out of them.
Next, note that he's selling "licenses" to build factories to produce the car. This is his real goal: Grab some $$ from investors before they find out he has no real product. He's a lot like the guys selling free energy based on concepts that violate the laws of thermodynamics, but will have a working model "real soon now".
Go ahead and watch this guy -- it's entertainment at least, -- but don't give him any of your money until he can back up his specifications with real world tests.
Yeah -- I remember your machine. We were all pretty happy that someone local managed to do well. I was working on other projects (Rube Goldberg competition at Purdue and SAE Supermileage) so I didn't get involved in any of the IGVC teams, but I do remember watching some of them working on the vehicles.
I worked security for the 3rd contest, and was still pretty surprised by how many entries were failing due to simple problems.
As you stated -- there were a lot of very basic problems with most entries back then. I'd expect a lot less of that now, as most teams would have a previous year's entry to work from.
If you are plannning on entering -- keep it simple, unless you've already got a working vehicle to start from. You'd be surprised how well you can do in the standings if you have a machine which doesn't break.
We followed the "simple, but working" rule for first-time entries into the SAE SuperMileage competition back then, and lately, the FIRST team I've been helping out. In both cases, we were able to perform better than teams that had much higher budgets, better support systems, and many years of competition history to look back upon. I guess it's easy to get complacent if you're working on a historically successful team.
Has anyone else noticed that the latest MCI commercials on TV have a closed caption script that's completely different than the voice & video portions of the commercial?
The cc portion is pushing a VOIP company (can't recall the name) which is probably owned by MCI, while the voice & video portions are pushing MCI's latest calling plan. I find it interesting that one commercial appears to be pushing two completely different services.
I've seen two different versions of it too, so it appears not to be an error.
I wasn't saying we shouldn't go. I was saying we shouldn't be expecting commercial traffic to pay for the development of the technology to get us there.
If there's no there there, why would anyone pay to go there?
I would think that the difference is primarily the result of thousands of people being excited by the prospect of air travel
The comparison of the current technology level of space travel to the beginnings of air travel does have points, but so far we're missing a very important one:
Where are we going to go?
There are no orbiting space stations (no, the currently 2 person ISS doesn't count), no lunar base, no asteroid mining, no space colonies
When avation was beginning, there was an entire world it could open up to new travel opportunities. What is space travel going to give us?
When I was younger, the rule I followed was to always upgrade to the next generation of calculator after I'd understood all of the functions of the previous one.
I have a friend who says she's already spent $3000 on disposable diapers for her four year old son, who is in pre-school, but still not toilet trained.
That makes the $350 I spent on good quality cloth diapers seem a lot less expensive!
No -- the velcro ones stick to each other in the wash and cause damage. I prefer the ones with plastic snaps. We've been using FuzziBunz on our daughter for 2 months now (she's 10 weeks old), and absolutely love them.
We took her camping a while back and used disposable diapers while we were away from home. I hated the smell of the disposables; they didn't fit nearly as well (and consequently leaked); and they absorbed so much liquid that we couldn't tell when she was wet, so she didn't get changed as often, and consequently spent more time with wastes on her skin and got diaper rash.
Next time we go camping we're taking our disposables with us, and making a trip to the laundrymat.
Sharp has teamed up with PC Connection to offer our developers a special discount price on the Zaurus and accessories. The SL-5600 is available for $424.99 and the SL-5500 is $229. This special price is only valid for approved developers of the Zaurus Developer Program. To access the Developer store, please login to the Zaurus DevNet at http://www.zaurus.com/dev/ and from the menu click Developer Program->Store. If you haven't enrolled into the Developer Program, you must do this prior to purchasing.
It's out. Unfortunately, it's out in Japan, and it's more difficult to get here in the US. Here's another site that's selling them.
Good luck getting one.
I would love to get one IF it will offer a good cellular service option
You are aware that these don't have a wireless option built in, and you'll need to get a compact flash or secure digital card to have wireless connectivity?
I don't know about cellular services, but 802.11 and bluetooth cards are both available.
Yeah - I've had to tell a number of people not to buy one for that very reason.
Everyone's impressed when I pull out my 5500 and tell them it's running Linux, (especially since I got a pocketop keyboard), but then I have to tell them that the synchronization bites, and that they're better off with a Palm if they want to keep track of addresses/meetings.
I'm really hoping someone will come up with a better synchronization option soon.
I've been using Opie Reader on the 5500, and I've been very happy with it. It doesn't read all the formats, but I haven't found anything yet that I can't read either in its original format or by using a conversion utility.
Opie Reader supports: (from the above web site)
"Doc" format - also known as the original Aportis or AportisDoc format.
Weasel or ztxt format.
Plucker format.
gzipped text.
ppms text.
Plain text with special handling of PML or HTML marked-up text.
It doesn't support:
iSilo
TealDoc (afaik)
PalmReader/Peanut - although the early versions of these files were based on "Doc" format and Opie-Reader can manage some of the free files.
EZReader.
The newest version even has a nifty new scroll function where it "paints" over text instead of scrolling it. It's a lot more like reading a book, in that the text doesn't actually move -- the text you've already read is gradually replaced by the next page, while you finish reading the previous page. Very nifty.
Yeah -- my wife & I started watching Buffy together in the 2nd season. I can't remember why we started watching it, but once we saw a couple episodes, we were hooked. We also used to watch X-files while we were dating, but after the movie came out she got disgusted by the series and never watched another episode.
We don't watch a lot of TV -- we've never seen any of the "reality" TV shows, don't watch "The West Wing", or "The Sopranos", but we never miss an episode of Buffy if we can help it.
Of course, since UPN picked it up, it's consistently being preempted by local sporting events. SCREW YOU UPN!/rant
Sorry about that -- I'd just generally rather watch an episode of an intelligent, well done comedy/drama than watch our pathetic local sports teams lose again.
That said, I think that BTVS is past it's prime, and is heading downhill towards mediocrity. I personally think that the second and third seasons were the best of Buffy. My wife & I thought that Mayor Wilkins was one of the best villians ever portrayed. His combination of big E Evil and ordinary small town charm was sidesplitting at times. I especially recall the scene where he gave Faith (evil Slayer) a glass of milk, as he was giving instructions for an assassination, and said "There's nothing uncool about healthy teeth and bones."
I say, Joss, kill the entire cast and keep them dead, just to show you have the balls to do it.
While I wouldn't necessarily like such an ending, it would make a fitting end to this show. Joss has consistently tried to bend the rules, and shake up the viewers by betraying most of the Hollywood rules (good wins, evil loses, main characters don' die, etc)... If it wasn't for Angel, and other possible spinoffs, I wouldn't put it past Joss to let the evil win just one time, and kill off the entire town of Sunnydale.
Of course, then that would open the door to a new, Anti-Slayer spinoff series. Does anyone else remember evil-Willow from Doppelgängerland (Season 3)? Rowr!
That's entirely true. My point was that any tuning you do may be damaging the vehicle in some way that you're not aware of.
There's no doubt that you can get better than stock performance by changing some of the parameters. The doubt is what you're compromising by doing so. It may be that what you're doing affects emissions only (a very important and costly (in legal terms) consideration for manufacturers, but one which users are much less likely to care about).
On the other hand, you may be exceeding torque limits in the transmission, or temperature limits in the turbocharger, etc. which can drastically reduce the longevity of these parts.
Bottom line -- if you play with it, and break it, don't expect the manufacturer to replace it under warranty!
Interesting timing for this article. I just got an assignment to reverse-engineer some of the "superchip" style performance enhancers for the vehicle line I program. (Yeah - I'm one of the quys who writes the software that the people in this article are hacking)
The manufacturer I work for wants to know what the aftermarket shops are doing to change the performance of the engine. -- And before you ask, no it isn't so the manufacturer can copy their techniques. Believe it or not, we know what we're doing when we design these things! We want to know how the modifications will affect the drivability and warranty rates on these vehicles.
Fair warning -- watch for manufacturers to increase pressure on dealerships to detect people using aftermarket computer chips, so that they can start denying warranty claims for people who do foolish things like burning up their turbochargers by requesting too much boost.
Some of the technologies we've already implemented will be able to supply information to dealerships about whether any of the data on the computer has been changed, and when the computer was last re-programmed. That will allow the dealerships to catch the people who re-program their PCM (Powertrain Control Module), and then return it to the original program before bringing it back to the dealership for any repairs.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think they're trying to model our Solar System, but even if they were, the orbits described by the "planets" would be governed by the mass of the bodies, not their sizes.
You wouldn't be able to scale the model to the diameters of the bodies involved unless the densities were the same.
To make the angular velocity the same, the models would have to have a 1:1 ratio, which would take up somewhat more space than they're planning to use.
You can make a model using a different scale than the original.
That's what makes it a "model".
The article says the system may precess by 1/3600 degrees in a year, while still orbiting 3000x/year.
For an oval orbit, to precess means that the oval of the orbit will also be rotating, and that rotation can be measured. That's precession. The planets in our solar system do this too. Precession is what makes this the Age of Aquarius.
Let the Sun shine in.
David
Yeah -- I've been watching this guy for a couple years, and have come to the conclusion that he's a complete con-artist.
If you read the website carefully, you'll note that the specifications he displays here http://www.theaircar.com/models.html for the various models (range, top speed, refuel rates, etc) are all based on theoretical measurements made by guessing how much improvement he can get from changing a number of things in his current design. The current design has been tested for a total of 7.2 km. He gets his 200-300km range by extrapolating based on his guesses. See http://www.theaircar.com/tests.html (scroll down to "Mileage comparison between the taxi in development and the final car") for the true specifications, and note that after the top row, they're all extrapolations. He's basically saying he should get x% increase from this change, and y% from that change, and that means the "improved" engine will get (x+y)% better performance.
His site hasn't changed in at least a year -- meaning those figures haven't been updates with actual test results, and I don't think they ever will be. It's real easy to guess how much improvement various changes may make. It's not so easy to get that improvement out of them.
Next, note that he's selling "licenses" to build factories to produce the car. This is his real goal: Grab some $$ from investors before they find out he has no real product. He's a lot like the guys selling free energy based on concepts that violate the laws of thermodynamics, but will have a working model "real soon now".
Go ahead and watch this guy -- it's entertainment at least, -- but don't give him any of your money until he can back up his specifications with real world tests.
Yeah -- I remember your machine. We were all pretty happy that someone local managed to do well. I was working on other projects (Rube Goldberg competition at Purdue and SAE Supermileage) so I didn't get involved in any of the IGVC teams, but I do remember watching some of them working on the vehicles.
I worked security for the 3rd contest, and was still pretty surprised by how many entries were failing due to simple problems.
As you stated -- there were a lot of very basic problems with most entries back then. I'd expect a lot less of that now, as most teams would have a previous year's entry to work from.
If you are plannning on entering -- keep it simple, unless you've already got a working vehicle to start from. You'd be surprised how well you can do in the standings if you have a machine which doesn't break.
We followed the "simple, but working" rule for first-time entries into the SAE SuperMileage competition back then, and lately, the FIRST team I've been helping out. In both cases, we were able to perform better than teams that had much higher budgets, better support systems, and many years of competition history to look back upon. I guess it's easy to get complacent if you're working on a historically successful team.
Has anyone else noticed that the latest MCI commercials on TV have a closed caption script that's completely different than the voice & video portions of the commercial?
The cc portion is pushing a VOIP company (can't recall the name) which is probably owned by MCI, while the voice & video portions are pushing MCI's latest calling plan. I find it interesting that one commercial appears to be pushing two completely different services.
I've seen two different versions of it too, so it appears not to be an error.
If there's no there there, why would anyone pay to go there?
The comparison of the current technology level of space travel to the beginnings of air travel does have points, but so far we're missing a very important one:
Where are we going to go?
There are no orbiting space stations (no, the currently 2 person ISS doesn't count), no lunar base, no asteroid mining, no space colonies
When avation was beginning, there was an entire world it could open up to new travel opportunities. What is space travel going to give us?
Of course, it's IR port was output only, and strictly for printing.
Is it time to go to this one yet?
No... I'm still doing fine with my old 28S
I have a friend who says she's already spent $3000 on disposable diapers for her four year old son, who is in pre-school, but still not toilet trained.
That makes the $350 I spent on good quality cloth diapers seem a lot less expensive!
We took her camping a while back and used disposable diapers while we were away from home. I hated the smell of the disposables; they didn't fit nearly as well (and consequently leaked); and they absorbed so much liquid that we couldn't tell when she was wet, so she didn't get changed as often, and consequently spent more time with wastes on her skin and got diaper rash.
Next time we go camping we're taking our disposables with us, and making a trip to the laundrymat.
Sharp has teamed up with PC Connection to offer our developers a special discount price on the Zaurus and accessories. The SL-5600 is available for $424.99 and the SL-5500 is $229. This special price is only valid for approved developers of the Zaurus Developer Program. To access the Developer store, please login to the Zaurus DevNet at http://www.zaurus.com/dev/ and from the menu click Developer Program->Store. If you haven't enrolled into the Developer Program, you must do this prior to purchasing.
Details here
Good luck getting one.
I would love to get one IF it will offer a good cellular service option
You are aware that these don't have a wireless option built in, and you'll need to get a compact flash or secure digital card to have wireless connectivity?
I don't know about cellular services, but 802.11 and bluetooth cards are both available.
If you watch for deals, the prices aren't even that bad. I paid $60 for the wireless card and $108 for the 512MB CF card.
Everyone's impressed when I pull out my 5500 and tell them it's running Linux, (especially since I got a pocketop keyboard), but then I have to tell them that the synchronization bites, and that they're better off with a Palm if they want to keep track of addresses/meetings.
I'm really hoping someone will come up with a better synchronization option soon.
The OZ folks do have an experimental driver that uses the onboard piezo clicker to reproduce sounds other than beeps, but I haven't tried it yet.
Opie Reader supports: (from the above web site)
It doesn't support:
The newest version even has a nifty new scroll function where it "paints" over text instead of scrolling it. It's a lot more like reading a book, in that the text doesn't actually move -- the text you've already read is gradually replaced by the next page, while you finish reading the previous page. Very nifty.
The 5600 is native Linux -- it uses an embedix distro w/ Qtopia for the front end. There's also an Open Source distribution, which frankly, I prefer.
640x480 65k screen w/ clamshell keyboard. Plus all the goodies (Linux, OpenZaurus, etc.) from the 5500/5600 series.
Aw, what the heck. Here's the link again.
Shoot -- I'm not an early adopter and I've had mine for over a year. This is not news.
On the other hand, the C700, 750, and 760's are hot, and I want one!
We don't watch a lot of TV -- we've never seen any of the "reality" TV shows, don't watch "The West Wing", or "The Sopranos", but we never miss an episode of Buffy if we can help it.
Of course, since UPN picked it up, it's consistently being preempted by local sporting events. SCREW YOU UPN! /rant
Sorry about that -- I'd just generally rather watch an episode of an intelligent, well done comedy/drama than watch our pathetic local sports teams lose again.
That said, I think that BTVS is past it's prime, and is heading downhill towards mediocrity. I personally think that the second and third seasons were the best of Buffy. My wife & I thought that Mayor Wilkins was one of the best villians ever portrayed. His combination of big E Evil and ordinary small town charm was sidesplitting at times. I especially recall the scene where he gave Faith (evil Slayer) a glass of milk, as he was giving instructions for an assassination, and said "There's nothing uncool about healthy teeth and bones."
I say, Joss, kill the entire cast and keep them dead, just to show you have the balls to do it.
While I wouldn't necessarily like such an ending, it would make a fitting end to this show. Joss has consistently tried to bend the rules, and shake up the viewers by betraying most of the Hollywood rules (good wins, evil loses, main characters don' die, etc)... If it wasn't for Angel, and other possible spinoffs, I wouldn't put it past Joss to let the evil win just one time, and kill off the entire town of Sunnydale.
Of course, then that would open the door to a new, Anti-Slayer spinoff series. Does anyone else remember evil-Willow from Doppelgängerland (Season 3)? Rowr!
There's no doubt that you can get better than stock performance by changing some of the parameters. The doubt is what you're compromising by doing so. It may be that what you're doing affects emissions only (a very important and costly (in legal terms) consideration for manufacturers, but one which users are much less likely to care about).
On the other hand, you may be exceeding torque limits in the transmission, or temperature limits in the turbocharger, etc. which can drastically reduce the longevity of these parts.
Bottom line -- if you play with it, and break it, don't expect the manufacturer to replace it under warranty!
The manufacturer I work for wants to know what the aftermarket shops are doing to change the performance of the engine. -- And before you ask, no it isn't so the manufacturer can copy their techniques. Believe it or not, we know what we're doing when we design these things! We want to know how the modifications will affect the drivability and warranty rates on these vehicles.
Fair warning -- watch for manufacturers to increase pressure on dealerships to detect people using aftermarket computer chips, so that they can start denying warranty claims for people who do foolish things like burning up their turbochargers by requesting too much boost.
Some of the technologies we've already implemented will be able to supply information to dealerships about whether any of the data on the computer has been changed, and when the computer was last re-programmed. That will allow the dealerships to catch the people who re-program their PCM (Powertrain Control Module), and then return it to the original program before bringing it back to the dealership for any repairs.