Well, here (in France) people routinely use their CB/Visa cards (it's mostly direct or monthly debit, though credit cards proper are also widely available. People call both kinds "cartes de crédit" anyway). It's simple, safe, "secure" (well, there is an encryption chip which more or less works; I need to rely on magstrip+signature+insurance scheme only abroad), and just everyone uses it. It costs ~30 a year, and then there is zero transaction cost, Euroland-wide (some banks only recently and very cautiously started to charge 1/withdrawal done outside of their ATM network if this happens more than a half dozen times a month, but that's pretty much all you have to pay besides foreign exchange rates).
In Belgium (and the Netherlands IIRC), they have Proton cards (in addition to Visa || EC), which claim to be equivalent to pocket change cash (if they don't do like the French supposedly equivalent scheme, Moneo, this is both electronic and privacy preserving. Moneo is expensive and 1984ish as hell). It seems to be very hot there.
Don't assume that just because some elderly people in the Bayern area of Germany are still using cash even for large (10K+ reportedly) transactions that the whole of Europe is arrierated(sp).
Yup, ClearChannel, this one. I mashed their names with a brand of chewing gum recently introduced:-) <p>
If we hadn't strict anti-trust radio laws here (much stricter than vanilla anti-trust [*]), I guess we'd assist in a massive merge. Oh, and I forgot the fourth major music player, <a href="http://www.skyrock.fr">Skyrock</a>, for a different but, ahem, not uninteresting style (if you can stand the thick liquid syrup they serve under the name of RnB) <p>
<p>[*] one Joseph G. from Germany once made a demonstration of what nice things you can do to a continent with a couple properly used tools, including radio. Unfortunately, the radio anti-trust laws don't apply (or are not applied) to TV, and we have now a mess with basically three players, one of which being the State, another being the subsidiary of a major construction group which was one of the major sources of dirty money for the precursor to the current ruling party, and the third one being no church kid either (a partial-subsidiary of Vivendi-Universal, whose influence on corruption is also proverbial), and a fourth one quickly fading out into oblivion since it became a complete sub of Vivendi-Universal, save for its digital sat business. And one day we got April 21st, 2002; learning that through the brown-camo colourded goggles of CNN, MSNBC (and fortunately CBC, a real chance for me they reach Metro Detroit) was no happy day for me.
We'll, we're currently been flooded in "remixes", "updates" and the like shite (and the success of shows like Star Academy in certain locales, which lives off past "musical" successes, is doing nothing to help).
Just drop a (suitably protected) ear to a couple radios (for instance, stuff I can tune in through FM here Fun, NRJ or Europe 2. FR-1 has slightly better (or less overused to my ears) stuff, but I wouldn't call it very higher quality -- and the habit of German music radios to all start talking at the same time is just plain annoying. I'm longing for the day OuïFM broadcasts nationwide in DAB (it's sadly Paris/IDF only for the foreseeable future), but even that one went downhill since R. Branson got his hands on it. Warning on the links above: all these will demand all sorts of pointless whizbangs and doodads to even start displaying correctly, lest alone letting you hear anything.
Aaah, at least we have a mediocrity oligopoly; I guess it's at least marginally better than a de facto monopoly (is that company called ClearWaves?)
... just have a look at any typical 20-40ish year old concrete autobahn (a very good example is the Ha-Fra-Ba), or a busy asphalt motorway like any of the major ones around Paris (A1, A4, A6, A10, A86, A104/N104) 10kms away from the périph' [the closer sections have almost all been rebuilt very recently]. I bet you you can notice which lane is the lorry lane.
Yeah, sure. And poltergeists will ensure the high-pressure nozzles still get the 2000 bar-loaded fuel AND open at the right time once the timing calculator received the order to stop.
Modern European (VW, PSA, even Fiat) diesel has nothing in common with whatever VW could have imported in the US during the late seventies. In fact, you'd be amazed what the (shipping in massive quantities today) 1.4L HDi PSA/Ford block can do.
Yep. The typical strain curve of metals is a linear domain [Elastic domain], followed by a bell curve-ish part [Plastic domain], then destruction.
If you tension to bring the metal into the curve-ish part, before it breaks, and then you release it, then it will release with an elastic behaviour straight away (and the unloaded length will be longer). When you subsequently load the metal, until the previous strain load, it will exhibit an elastic behaviour (thus beyond the initial elastic limit). You cannot seriously move the plastic limit using this way.
Please note that the fatigue effects which have been mentioned previously can happen even when remaining in the linear/elastic domain. This has been modeled in particular by Wöhler (eg http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~chas/node22.html)
That will, I'm pretty sure, find a solution, if that is indeed a problem. Like, determining which factors influence the speed of light, and adding subclauses fixing the "standard conditions" under which the speed of light shall be measured (or the other way around) (if the condition in question "Age of the Universe", I don't have an easy way to fix that...).
No, it's the other way around. Nowadays, the speed of light is the gauge, and the metre is the artifact. It's just that every sane person roughly knows how much a metre is (1 yd is a reasonible approximation with the level of "roughly" I use hee), so telling that speed travels 299792458 metres in a second generares an immediate "wow, that's fast" reaction to people.
The current definition has been made so that it could still be possible to know what a metre is, even if the original platinum bar was destroyed; it exploits the fact that the specific behaviour of Cesium-133 and the speed of light in vacuum are universal constants, independent of whether the Pavillon de Bagatelle receives a 10 Mt nuke on it or not.
(I don't have hard facts on that, but I would not be surprised to hear that there is research right now on replacing the definition of the kg by some reference to cleverly chosen universal constants. This must be a non-trivial subject...)
No, the metre is a unit of length equal to the length of the travel of light in vacuum during 1/299792458th of second.
(the second being the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the fundamental state of the atom of Cesium-133. Phew)
1 litre is 1 dm^3, not cm^3;
1 kg is the mass of the iridated platinum prototype, stored in the International Bureau for Weights and Measures, located a couple kilometres out of Paris, France.
(indeed, liquid water has a density of approximately 1 kg/litre in the standard conditions. )
This has been beaten to death and is pretty well documented in the wikipedia or any other reference work, isn't it ?
Well, in France, you can fire people too, especially since "most"(s/most/all/) contracts specify that the employee must abide by the employer's or the manager's commands and rules (and not complying with "write software in Lisp" or "there is no code ownership, you must accept that Fred modifies this or that module to make it work" is indeed a way to get shown the door. It may take receiving this kind of orders in writing, but once you got them in writing you know you're fired if you stray from them. And you get zero severance pay in that case)
FWIW, there are several "AMD64" conditional #defines in the Windows XP DDK.
It's been pointed out for ages in the NT Insider Newsletter.
My guess is: Microsoft doesn't work in a fishbowl like the Mozilla team does; but it must not cost them much to keep an IA-64->x86-64 port of XP64 ready, just in case (especially since I guesstimate the HAL should merely be a hybrid of x86 and IA-64, the compiler an extension of the x86 logic (much less difficult than VLIW and much well understood), and the code above HAL, once 64-bit clean, is (reportedly) written in compiled, not assembled, languages).
...Yeah, careless farmers selling their production to Danone Group food factories overusing of pesticides.
(large) Food factories not very environmentally friendly either.
Result, local water isn't that good (and anyway, Vivendi has an obvious incentive to let it as good as mandated, but not better).
Bottom line: local water is not really dangerous (except perhaps in the areas where careless farmers (especially pig breeders) and Vivendi are very well entrenched, and the state is too corrupt to actually react, where the nitrates rate can be twice or thrice the fed^EU standard [yes, I'm talking about Brittany]), but it stinks. Finally, people buy Evian water (or from a few other "competitive" springs)... which is owned by Danone Group.
Conclusion: Vivendi has an incentive to do as little as possible to purify local water (cost of processing "new" water and re-processing used water vs. shareholder value), and Danone has an actual incentive to have its suppliers and own factories (or contractor factories) be mildly environmentally careless.
I don't see MS "poisoning" OpenSource software. If OSS isn't yet for Aunt Tillie, it's not MS' fault.
Please note that while I've already seen ice melt when left at 1atm and 25C, I'm "not exactly" sure that 25C is really the temperature of melting ice at 1013 mbar in an atmosphere composed at 80% of diazote and 20% dioxygen (ignoring the rare stuff).
There is definitely a discrepancy here. The 1793 definition didn't mention the STP, it didn't even mention pressure. The 1898 definition (now in force) compares to a single piece of matter which could easily be destroyed (while I wouldn't be very happy to see an ICBM land 10km from my birthplace, this is alas a possibility), with no backup "intrinsic physical" definition like the metre or the second.
Yeeeeah, right. What about the atmospheric conditions ?
Anyway, whatever the definition could have been in 1793 is irrelevant. Since 1898, the definition is "the same mass as this $ARTIFACT", not "the mass of that artifact you can reproduce by doing $FOO, in conditions $BAR". This is very different, isn't it ?
It's not after the word "kilogram" I'm after, nor about the choice which has been made to move from the MGS to the MKS systems.
What I was wondering about, is the fact that at the beginning, all units were defined as being this or that physical property of given artifacts (g, kg, grave) or Earth (m, s), with the accuracy available at the time of the definition or revision.
Since the mid-XXth century, there has been a trend towards removing the dependency on specific objects (like the metre yardstick) and using absolute physical constants instead (see the modern definitions for the second or the metre). What puzzles me is that we still have the 1898 definition for the kg, and a kilogram is still defined as a comparison towards a specific artifact stored in a specific vault (which, despite all its vaultiness, is still a nukable place).
Is there a physical reason why this is still so, or is it just that no one has come up with a practical enough definition based on measurable constant properties of readily available entities ?
It looks very curious (to me) that the kilogram is the last unit which is still defined by a prototype; wouldn't it make sense to define it based on an intrinsic matter constant ? (like, 6.022e23 times the mass of a hydrogen atom in this and that state blah blah ?)
>>As well, in the US and Imperial systems, 1 lb of mass exerts 1 lb of force - just to be confusing.
<<
Actually, in metric land (precisely, in the land of the metre), the kilogram-force (kgf) has been in widespread use, about a century ago. It was more or less equal to the gravity force exerced by earth on a piece of matter with a mass of 1 kg. It took several decades to get rid of that unit (you can still sometimes see indications like "max 2000 kgf" on cranes in old workshops).
Nowadays, low-level mechanics are taught to use the decanewton (daN) as their primary unit of force (be it weight or any other force)... no wonder why !
Read the damn INSTALL file of gcc. You'll have a perhaps very fast bootstrap compiler, but later phases will be compiled with gcc itself, so you'll end up with the exact same binary as before.
Re:Ahh ... those were the days.
on
RLX Gets Denser
·
· Score: 1
Oh, it's nothing. I remember running 3.0 on an original IBM PC-XT (only special thing, it had 512 kb, maybe 640kb of RAM). And 2.11 off 3"1/2 floppies on Olivetti XT-clones (you had to swap disks twice just to run Solitaire)
The coolest thing of all remains Yggdrasil (albeit on an SX16 with a Mitsumi 1X CD drive)
>>Lastly, Microsoft, last I read, didn't indicate any interest in doing a version of XP for the Hammer. <<
While they have officially announced nothing (after all, they're sort of a partner of Intel especially regarding the Itanium, aren't they ?), and AMD officials insisted on saying nothing on behalf of MS (but according to The Vulture's journalists, that wasn't without a little smile),
they did sprinkle the DDK sources with Hammer-related conditional symbols.
Yes -- water injection is not new. And the results you've achieved on your car are quite interesting.
The more pressure you inject water with, the smaller droplets you have. And the smaller the droplets are, the more you have exchange surface with the combusting medium. This allows for a quicker phase change and expansion (actually pressure buildup).
Besides, electronic control with high-precision, high-pressure valves (of the same kind as those controlling the high-pressure diesel ramp in a HDi) can push the water at the moment it's going to do the most good.
Split-cycle engines can achieve almost a 75% water consumption rate for the same power output (and close volumic input)...
(not that split-cycle engines are going to power our cars anytime soon. Too many legal and long-term reliability problems).
There are usually two indicators nowadays:
* one is connected to the oil pressostat. If it goes off, stop the engine NOW and call for assistance
* one is connected to the clock and the odometer. When $KM or $MONTHS have elapsed since the last oil change, you get a friendly warning (but $KM and $MONTHS are computed by the manufacturer with ample margin anyways. My car for instance is rated for 15000 km on an oil change, but the margin is rougly 3000-5000km before any long-term ill effect is caused)
BMW may do the third solution, however, but I frankly doubt it (except on six figures cars maybe):
* have a sensor which look for some physical properties of oil (Impedance ? Magnetoresistivity ? Opacity ?) and somehow "knows" when it needs a change.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh :-) fair enough
Things change fast even in a very few years, I guess.
Which HAS been solved (like in the FAP device on cars such as the Peugeot 607)
Well, here (in France) people routinely use their CB/Visa cards (it's mostly direct or monthly debit, though credit cards proper are also widely available. People call both kinds "cartes de crédit" anyway). It's simple, safe, "secure" (well, there is an encryption chip which more or less works; I need to rely on magstrip+signature+insurance scheme only abroad), and just everyone uses it. It costs ~30 a year, and then there is zero transaction cost, Euroland-wide (some banks only recently and very cautiously started to charge 1/withdrawal done outside of their ATM network if this happens more than a half dozen times a month, but that's pretty much all you have to pay besides foreign exchange rates).
In Belgium (and the Netherlands IIRC), they have Proton cards (in addition to Visa || EC), which claim to be equivalent to pocket change cash (if they don't do like the French supposedly equivalent scheme, Moneo, this is both electronic and privacy preserving. Moneo is expensive and 1984ish as hell). It seems to be very hot there.
Don't assume that just because some elderly people in the Bayern area of Germany are still using cash even for large (10K+ reportedly) transactions that the whole of Europe is arrierated(sp).
Yup, ClearChannel, this one. I mashed their names with a brand of chewing gum recently introduced :-)
<p>
If we hadn't strict anti-trust radio laws here (much stricter than vanilla anti-trust [*]), I guess we'd assist in a massive merge. Oh, and I forgot the fourth major music player, <a href="http://www.skyrock.fr">Skyrock</a>, for a different but, ahem, not uninteresting style (if you can stand the thick liquid syrup they serve under the name of RnB)
<p>
<p>[*] one Joseph G. from Germany once made a demonstration of what nice things you can do to a continent with a couple properly used tools, including radio. Unfortunately, the radio anti-trust laws don't apply (or are not applied) to TV, and we have now a mess with basically three players, one of which being the State, another being the subsidiary of a major construction group which was one of the major sources of dirty money for the precursor to the current ruling party, and the third one being no church kid either (a partial-subsidiary of Vivendi-Universal, whose influence on corruption is also proverbial), and a fourth one quickly fading out into oblivion since it became a complete sub of Vivendi-Universal, save for its digital sat business. And one day we got April 21st, 2002; learning that through the brown-camo colourded goggles of CNN, MSNBC (and fortunately CBC, a real chance for me they reach Metro Detroit) was no happy day for me.
We'll, we're currently been flooded in "remixes", "updates" and the like shite (and the success of shows like Star Academy in certain locales, which lives off past "musical" successes, is doing nothing to help). Just drop a (suitably protected) ear to a couple radios (for instance, stuff I can tune in through FM here Fun, NRJ or Europe 2. FR-1 has slightly better (or less overused to my ears) stuff, but I wouldn't call it very higher quality -- and the habit of German music radios to all start talking at the same time is just plain annoying. I'm longing for the day OuïFM broadcasts nationwide in DAB (it's sadly Paris/IDF only for the foreseeable future), but even that one went downhill since R. Branson got his hands on it. Warning on the links above: all these will demand all sorts of pointless whizbangs and doodads to even start displaying correctly, lest alone letting you hear anything. Aaah, at least we have a mediocrity oligopoly; I guess it's at least marginally better than a de facto monopoly (is that company called ClearWaves?)
... just have a look at any typical 20-40ish year old concrete autobahn (a very good example is the Ha-Fra-Ba), or a busy asphalt motorway like any of the major ones around Paris (A1, A4, A6, A10, A86, A104/N104) 10kms away from the périph' [the closer sections have almost all been rebuilt very recently]. I bet you you can notice which lane is the lorry lane.
Yeah, sure. And poltergeists will ensure the high-pressure nozzles still get the 2000 bar-loaded fuel AND open at the right time once the timing calculator received the order to stop.
Modern European (VW, PSA, even Fiat) diesel has nothing in common with whatever VW could have imported in the US during the late seventies.
In fact, you'd be amazed what the (shipping in massive quantities today) 1.4L HDi PSA/Ford block can do.
Yep. The typical strain curve of metals is a linear domain [Elastic domain], followed by a bell curve-ish part [Plastic domain], then destruction.
If you tension to bring the metal into the curve-ish part, before it breaks, and then you release it, then it will release with an elastic behaviour straight away (and the unloaded length will be longer). When you subsequently load the metal, until the previous strain load, it will exhibit an elastic behaviour (thus beyond the initial elastic limit). You cannot seriously move the plastic limit using this way.
Please note that the fatigue effects which have been mentioned previously can happen even when remaining in the linear/elastic domain. This has been modeled in particular by Wöhler (eg
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~chas/node22.html)
... interesting ...
That will, I'm pretty sure, find a solution, if that is indeed a problem. Like, determining which factors influence the speed of light, and adding subclauses fixing the "standard conditions" under which the speed of light shall be measured (or the other way around) (if the condition in question "Age of the Universe", I don't have an easy way to fix that...).
No, it's the other way around. Nowadays, the speed of light is the gauge, and the metre is the artifact. It's just that every sane person roughly knows how much a metre is (1 yd is a reasonible approximation with the level of "roughly" I use hee), so telling that speed travels 299792458 metres in a second generares an immediate "wow, that's fast" reaction to people.
The current definition has been made so that it could still be possible to know what a metre is, even if the original platinum bar was destroyed; it exploits the fact that the specific behaviour of Cesium-133 and the speed of light in vacuum are universal constants, independent of whether the Pavillon de Bagatelle receives a 10 Mt nuke on it or not.
(I don't have hard facts on that, but I would not be surprised to hear that there is research right now on replacing the definition of the kg by some reference to cleverly chosen universal constants. This must be a non-trivial subject...)
No, the metre is a unit of length equal to the length of the travel of light in vacuum during 1/299792458th of second.
(the second being the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the fundamental state of the atom of Cesium-133. Phew)
1 litre is 1 dm^3, not cm^3;
1 kg is the mass of the iridated platinum prototype, stored in the International Bureau for Weights and Measures, located a couple kilometres out of Paris, France.
(indeed, liquid water has a density of approximately 1 kg/litre in the standard conditions. )
This has been beaten to death and is pretty well documented in the wikipedia or any other reference work, isn't it ?
Well, in France, you can fire people too, especially since "most"(s/most/all/) contracts specify that the employee must abide by the employer's or the manager's commands and rules (and not complying with "write software in Lisp" or "there is no code ownership, you must accept that Fred modifies this or that module to make it work" is indeed a way to get shown the door. It may take receiving this kind of orders in writing, but once you got them in writing you know you're fired if you stray from them. And you get zero severance pay in that case)
FWIW, there are several "AMD64" conditional #defines in the Windows XP DDK.
It's been pointed out for ages in the NT Insider Newsletter.
My guess is: Microsoft doesn't work in a fishbowl like the Mozilla team does; but it must not cost them much to keep an IA-64->x86-64 port of XP64 ready, just in case (especially since I guesstimate the HAL should merely be a hybrid of x86 and IA-64, the compiler an extension of the x86 logic (much less difficult than VLIW and much well understood), and the code above HAL, once 64-bit clean, is (reportedly) written in compiled, not assembled, languages).
...Yeah, careless farmers selling their production to Danone Group food factories overusing of pesticides.
(large) Food factories not very environmentally friendly either.
Result, local water isn't that good (and anyway, Vivendi has an obvious incentive to let it as good as mandated, but not better).
Bottom line: local water is not really dangerous (except perhaps in the areas where careless farmers (especially pig breeders) and Vivendi are very well entrenched, and the state is too corrupt to actually react, where the nitrates rate can be twice or thrice the fed^EU standard [yes, I'm talking about Brittany]), but it stinks. Finally, people buy Evian water (or from a few other "competitive" springs)... which is owned by Danone Group.
Conclusion: Vivendi has an incentive to do as little as possible to purify local water (cost of processing "new" water and re-processing used water vs. shareholder value), and Danone has an actual incentive to have its suppliers and own factories (or contractor factories) be mildly environmentally careless.
I don't see MS "poisoning" OpenSource software. If OSS isn't yet for Aunt Tillie, it's not MS' fault.
Please note that while I've already seen ice melt when left at 1atm and 25C, I'm "not exactly" sure that 25C is really the temperature of melting ice at 1013 mbar in an atmosphere composed at 80% of diazote and 20% dioxygen (ignoring the rare stuff).
There is definitely a discrepancy here. The 1793 definition didn't mention the STP, it didn't even mention pressure. The 1898 definition (now in force) compares to a single piece of matter which could easily be destroyed (while I wouldn't be very happy to see an ICBM land 10km from my birthplace, this is alas a possibility), with no backup "intrinsic physical" definition like the metre or the second.
Yeeeeah, right. What about the atmospheric conditions ?
Anyway, whatever the definition could have been in 1793 is irrelevant. Since 1898, the definition is "the same mass as this $ARTIFACT", not "the mass of that artifact you can reproduce by doing $FOO, in conditions $BAR". This is very different, isn't it ?
It's not after the word "kilogram" I'm after, nor about the choice which has been made to move from the MGS to the MKS systems.
What I was wondering about, is the fact that at the beginning, all units were defined as being this or that physical property of given artifacts (g, kg, grave) or Earth (m, s), with the accuracy available at the time of the definition or revision.
Since the mid-XXth century, there has been a trend towards removing the dependency on specific objects (like the metre yardstick) and using absolute physical constants instead (see the modern definitions for the second or the metre). What puzzles me is that we still have the 1898 definition for the kg, and a kilogram is still defined as a comparison towards a specific artifact stored in a specific vault (which, despite all its vaultiness, is still a nukable place).
Is there a physical reason why this is still so, or is it just that no one has come up with a practical enough definition based on measurable constant properties of readily available entities ?
http://www.bipm.fr/enus/3_SI/base_units.html
It looks very curious (to me) that the kilogram is the last unit which is still defined by a prototype; wouldn't it make sense to define it based on an intrinsic matter constant ? (like, 6.022e23 times the mass of a hydrogen atom in this and that state blah blah ?)
>>As well, in the US and Imperial systems, 1 lb of mass exerts 1 lb of force - just to be confusing.
<<
Actually, in metric land (precisely, in the land of the metre), the kilogram-force (kgf) has been in widespread use, about a century ago. It was more or less equal to the gravity force exerced by earth on a piece of matter with a mass of 1 kg. It took several decades to get rid of that unit (you can still sometimes see indications like "max 2000 kgf" on cranes in old workshops).
Nowadays, low-level mechanics are taught to use the decanewton (daN) as their primary unit of force (be it weight or any other force)... no wonder why !
1) oh, I didn't see that. Huh.
2) oh, huh. <blushing/> should have read better.
3) yes (but I'm more a lazyness than speed freak; besides I don't really use that many P4's)
All in all, I owe you an apology for not having read correctly your post. Please accept it !
Read the damn INSTALL file of gcc. You'll have a perhaps very fast bootstrap compiler, but later phases will be compiled with gcc itself, so you'll end up with the exact same binary as before.
Oh, it's nothing. I remember running 3.0 on an original IBM PC-XT (only special thing, it had 512 kb, maybe 640kb of RAM). And 2.11 off 3"1/2 floppies on Olivetti XT-clones (you had to swap disks twice just to run Solitaire)
The coolest thing of all remains Yggdrasil (albeit on an SX16 with a Mitsumi 1X CD drive)
>>Lastly, Microsoft, last I read, didn't indicate any interest in doing a version of XP for the Hammer. <<
While they have officially announced nothing (after all, they're sort of a partner of Intel especially regarding the Itanium, aren't they ?), and AMD officials insisted on saying nothing on behalf of MS (but according to The Vulture's journalists, that wasn't without a little smile),
they did sprinkle the DDK sources with Hammer-related conditional symbols.
Yes -- water injection is not new. And the results you've achieved on your car are quite interesting.
The more pressure you inject water with, the smaller droplets you have. And the smaller the droplets are, the more you have exchange surface with the combusting medium. This allows for a quicker phase change and expansion (actually pressure buildup).
Besides, electronic control with high-precision, high-pressure valves (of the same kind as those controlling the high-pressure diesel ramp in a HDi) can push the water at the moment it's going to do the most good.
Split-cycle engines can achieve almost a 75% water consumption rate for the same power output (and close volumic input)...
(not that split-cycle engines are going to power our cars anytime soon. Too many legal and long-term reliability problems).
There are usually two indicators nowadays:
* one is connected to the oil pressostat. If it goes off, stop the engine NOW and call for assistance
* one is connected to the clock and the odometer. When $KM or $MONTHS have elapsed since the last oil change, you get a friendly warning (but $KM and $MONTHS are computed by the manufacturer with ample margin anyways. My car for instance is rated for 15000 km on an oil change, but the margin is rougly 3000-5000km before any long-term ill effect is caused)
BMW may do the third solution, however, but I frankly doubt it (except on six figures cars maybe):
* have a sensor which look for some physical properties of oil (Impedance ? Magnetoresistivity ? Opacity ?) and somehow "knows" when it needs a change.