That's interesting then.... the cool thing about a gas engine + electric motor is that, at 0 rpm, the gas engine has 0 torque, and the motor has full torque... as the RPMs go up, the gas engine gains torque and the electrice loses (up to a point, of course). The two assist each other,
That would make it harder to do a diesel + electric motor combo in the same fashion (both motors driving the same axle) because it would get sucky high-end torque.
Just an interesting story: Steam locomotives were popular because they could generate great torque at low rpms - no combustion was needed, so the pistons just filled with steam slowly. Gas engines couldn't replace the steam versions because you'd burn out the clutch in no time. It wasn't until the diesel+electric came out that steam faded away - unlike modern electric cars, the diesel drives a generator that drives a motor. No rotational energy from the diesel is coupled to the wheels. Thus, the diesel generates a lot of current at a speed it feels comfortable at, and the electric motor provides the massive torque @ 0 rpm. The generator-motor system acts as a clutch/gearbox.
That system would be as good as the pure electric cars we have, except, of course, that they'd have better range. I wonder if the electric alone works well enough (to the general population), or if the gas engine is really needed to pass at highway speeds...
0-40 in 4 seconds? good luck doing that in the snow!!
Seriously, that's pretty neat -- good torque at a really low RPM. Nice to see such a cool engine with such great mpg do well in acceleration, too. But, you may want to check out this 0-40 mph comparison:
2003 Subaru Impreza WRX Sti Sedan (US spec) 2.5s hard launch/7.0s soft launch 2001 BMW M3 2.8s hard launch/3.4s soft launch
Also, I don't quite get your math... 0-40 in ~4 seconds, and then another 6 seconds to get to 60? Does it feel like the engine cuts out, or is there a different technique involved, or what is it that I'm missing? Actually, IIRC, the WRX is 0-60 in something like 6 seconds -- that scales similarily, so I guess its normal...
Yikes! Links make it a lot easier for people to figure out what's going on!
"A year ago, there seemed to be two promising Linux HA [high availability] frameworks--along with lots and lots of experimental things: SGI's FailSafe, and Kimberlite from Mission Critical Linux. The FailSafe software website now seems very out of date, although the mailing list remains active, and there seems to be forward momentum. On the other hand, Redhat seems to have forked the development of Kimberlite, calling the fork Redhat Cluster Manager. They don't seem to be making development source available, at least to the public. Are these two projects still relevant? What's the current status of Open Source HA?"
> This makes a lot of sense to me--except why have copy protection at all? No one's going to try to get the gigabyte sized lossless high resolution songfile from P2P networks
Yeah, like no one would bother copying those 600 MB CD's -- why, that would take about 400 floppy disks, or forever over a 2400 baud modem (if you can afford one!). Even if someone invented some sort of super-duper compression scheme (maybe even 3:1 compression!!), who could afford the 60 MHz 32-bit super computer that would be needed to run the algorithm? And forget copying these things to your hard drive - since the largest is 20 MB, it would take 30 hard drives just to record one CD!! The sheer amount of data is copy protection enough.
-circa 1987.
Re:Basically what I've got for my emergency radio
on
Do-it-yourself UPS
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'll second the diode - it's essential!!
Some power supplies (even some fancy lab power supplies - I've seen people kill them this way) don't have a diode on their outputs, so if you turn off the supply (or, say, the power goes out), then the battery will attempt to put energy into the power supply. If the power supply isn't made for this, it could smoke and/or catch fire. A diode ensures that power only goes *into* the battery. Put the cathode end (with the band, "negative") towards the + side of the battery, with the anode (the other end of the diode) towards the + side of the power supply. Make sure that the diode can handle the current (most diodes drop ~0.7v, so dissappated power=I*E=Charging current * 0.7v)
Second, I'd be really cautious about putting power supplies in parallel to achieve more current. While this will usually work, the same problem exists that exists: power supplies don't always behave well when connected to another supply. With one diode isolating each power supply and current-limiting supplies, this should work safely, but the voltage regulation may be poor and the supplies may not share equaly - things not of great importance here. The general problem in paralleling output transistors is that, depending on the circuit, increased temperature can lower the resistance of the transistor, which causes more current to flow through it (relative to the other transistors in parallel), which causes more heat, etc... until it blows (or the current limiting of the supply kicks in).
For another project, I wonder about UPS modding. I've got a UPS that puts out the right amount of power, but the battery is kindof small. It seems that I could replace it with a higher capacity car or motorcycle battery of the same voltage.
U of Texas has done this chemically using glycerol to dry out tissues. Most impressive are the pictures. The story is a bit dated, but at the time, they had only done this with hamsters. previous slashdot story
There are 6 pins on the back of the unit These are longer, single-sided pads, probably for use with some sort of card edge connector, not to be soldered to the xbox. Six pins matches the standard Xilinx programming cable: VCC/GND/TDO/TDI/TCK/TMS for JTAG, or VCC/GND/DP/DIN/CLK/PROG for their non-JTAG FPGAs.
If you notice the pads on the back of the enigmah board (6 on the top right) -- these are to program the part (probably an FPGA or an PLD). These wires don't go anywhere else, so I doubt the part would be able to be programed from software loaded onto the xbox... so the enigmah is also upgradable, but it would require extra cabling/equipment (maybe as simple as a parallel port cable)
But it is ingenius. You can sell more games that way!
The other drawback is that you can't have funny shaped media, but since microsoft isn't focused on the portable market (yet), this isn't much of a problem. Does that mean that the gamecube, with its small DVD media, have plans for a portable player sometime?
but you'll find a lot more meat on a Peruvian Hairless. A friend had one - he was always putting sunscreen on it!! I wonder if the chickens would need that, too.
I tottally lost respect for that movie when I noticed that the locker room is in the middle of the atrium of the building. Yeah, the main office building has kick-ass architecture and I'd love to visit it (or actually, I liked his house, too.). But, if you notice the locker room, there are people seen in the background (on higher floors) walking by. With no windows or anything in between.
The movie had a certain neat style, but I didn't get brought it because it was too much about that style and not about anything else. Glad you enjoyed it, though, just not my taste as a movie.
Olympic Speedskating will be judged, not on speed, but on fashion, sweating the least, and the contestant who books the best airfare to the event.
North Korea became the second country to land a person on the moon and return them safely to earth. Although technically the rocket blew up on the launch pad, it was still considered a sucessful mission given the impoverished country's lack of funds, the technical embargoes placed on the country by space-faring nations, and the total lack of a Korean space program.
Life insurance companies will now pay benefits for near-death experiences, close calls, and "getting really scared".
sorry... I just prefer the normal metrics of FLOPS, MIPS, bandwidth and topology for my supercomputers...
> Feng also proposed that a new technique is needed for measuring the performance of supercomputers. Instead of looking primarily at how many calculations a system can run in a given amount of time, researchers should also consider factors such as downtime, size, price and maintenance requirements, he said.
Following Feng's lead, the whole supercomputing industry has reacted to this new paradigm shift. Industry leader Cray has ceased development of its upcoming SV2 and has designed a system based on the reliable commodore 64. Explained lead scientist Joel Grey, "We managed to get a C64 computer out of the dump, and bought 1,000 surplus 'Barney' solar calculators off of ebay for $30".
The new system, dubbed the SV64, is not quite as fast as the SV2, but exceeds at new metrics: Converted to run on solar power, and having spent the last 15 years in an uncooled closet continously generating the "experiencing technical dificulties" logo for a local community access TV station, the new computer shatters existing power and reliability records. "With an expected retail price of less than $1M USD, we expect this computer to eclipse [Japanese rival] NEC's lead and become the platform that will be used to perform most of the world's weather, biological, and nuclear simulations well into the next decade", said Grey.
Wall Street analysts pointed out the the system has never needed maintence, nor suffered downtime, nor needed the services of an UNIX system administrater, and as a result, the total cost of ownership should remain low. Shares of component manufacturer Commodore rose 10 points to 10 1/64 in heavy trading today.
Also, the iDrive demo kiosk runs a windows variant (it was crashed one day, surprise!). I don't know if it shares any of the code with the real product, but it looked pretty functional, so either it does, someone spent a lot of work, or they had a UI-design tool that could spit out both WinCE and Flash.
The Xbox has a PIC 16LC63A microcontroller... people are still figuring out what it does.
AFAIK, the satellite boxen don't necessarily use a PIC for authentication -- they would probably use a more cryprographically secure/hacker-proof device. It's been the cloners that use PIC chips because they are versatile and cheap enough to get the job done.
Yes, you can go into CompUSA and this Arm-powered windows PC. OK, it's a pocket PC, but it's in direct competition with Risc OS. It comes preinstalled/bundled with "Pocket Word", so, no you can't purchase a word processor for it (damn monopoly!).
Here are all the varieties of ARM processors supported under Windows CE and.NET
We ship $250k high speed tape recorders. The tapes are rather big, and a little sticker on the insertion slot show a yellow triangle, an hand reaching into the slot, and a line through it. Meaning: don't stick your hand in the slot. Well, that wasn't specific enough, I guess, or maybe there should be an additional sticker on the shipping crate: someone drove a forklift precisely into the slot.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, that explains it -- thanks!
That's interesting then.... the cool thing about a gas engine + electric motor is that, at 0 rpm, the gas engine has 0 torque, and the motor has full torque... as the RPMs go up, the gas engine gains torque and the electrice loses (up to a point, of course). The two assist each other,
That would make it harder to do a diesel + electric motor combo in the same fashion (both motors driving the same axle) because it would get sucky high-end torque.
Just an interesting story:
Steam locomotives were popular because they could generate great torque at low rpms - no combustion was needed, so the pistons just filled with steam slowly. Gas engines couldn't replace the steam versions because you'd burn out the clutch in no time. It wasn't until the diesel+electric came out that steam faded away - unlike modern electric cars, the diesel drives a generator that drives a motor. No rotational energy from the diesel is coupled to the wheels. Thus, the diesel generates a lot of current at a speed it feels comfortable at, and the electric motor provides the massive torque @ 0 rpm. The generator-motor system acts as a clutch/gearbox.
That system would be as good as the pure electric cars we have, except, of course, that they'd have better range. I wonder if the electric alone works well enough (to the general population), or if the gas engine is really needed to pass at highway speeds...
yes, very shiny carbon...
[make sure to read the 3rd to the last paragraph about costco!!]
0-40 in 4 seconds? good luck doing that in the snow!!
/7.0s soft launch /3.4s soft launch
Seriously, that's pretty neat -- good torque at a really low RPM. Nice to see such a cool engine with such great mpg do well in acceleration, too. But, you may want to check out this 0-40 mph comparison:
2003 Subaru Impreza WRX Sti Sedan (US spec) 2.5s hard launch
2001 BMW M3 2.8s hard launch
Also, I don't quite get your math... 0-40 in ~4 seconds, and then another 6 seconds to get to 60? Does it feel like the engine cuts out, or is there a different technique involved, or what is it that I'm missing? Actually, IIRC, the WRX is 0-60 in something like 6 seconds -- that scales similarily, so I guess its normal...
and don't miss this neat WRX picture!!
Yikes! Links make it a lot easier for people to figure out what's going on!
"A year ago, there seemed to be two promising Linux HA [high availability] frameworks--along with lots and lots of experimental things: SGI's FailSafe, and Kimberlite from Mission Critical Linux. The FailSafe software website now seems very out of date, although the mailing list remains active, and there seems to be forward momentum. On the other hand, Redhat seems to have forked the development of Kimberlite, calling the fork Redhat Cluster Manager. They don't seem to be making development source available, at least to the public. Are these two projects still relevant? What's the current status of Open Source HA?"
Try also linux-ha.org and open cluster
> This makes a lot of sense to me--except why have copy protection at all? No one's going to try to get the gigabyte sized lossless high resolution songfile from P2P networks
Yeah, like no one would bother copying those 600 MB CD's -- why, that would take about 400 floppy disks, or forever over a 2400 baud modem (if you can afford one!). Even if someone invented some sort of super-duper compression scheme (maybe even 3:1 compression!!), who could afford the 60 MHz 32-bit super computer that would be needed to run the algorithm? And forget copying these things to your hard drive - since the largest is 20 MB, it would take 30 hard drives just to record one CD!! The sheer amount of data is copy protection enough.
-circa 1987.
I'll second the diode - it's essential!!
Some power supplies (even some fancy lab power supplies - I've seen people kill them this way) don't have a diode on their outputs, so if you turn off the supply (or, say, the power goes out), then the battery will attempt to put energy into the power supply. If the power supply isn't made for this, it could smoke and/or catch fire. A diode ensures that power only goes *into* the battery. Put the cathode end (with the band, "negative") towards the + side of the battery, with the anode (the other end of the diode) towards the + side of the power supply. Make sure that the diode can handle the current (most diodes drop ~0.7v, so dissappated power=I*E=Charging current * 0.7v)
Second, I'd be really cautious about putting power supplies in parallel to achieve more current. While this will usually work, the same problem exists that exists: power supplies don't always behave well when connected to another supply. With one diode isolating each power supply and current-limiting supplies, this should work safely, but the voltage regulation may be poor and the supplies may not share equaly - things not of great importance here. The general problem in paralleling output transistors is that, depending on the circuit, increased temperature can lower the resistance of the transistor, which causes more current to flow through it (relative to the other transistors in parallel), which causes more heat, etc... until it blows (or the current limiting of the supply kicks in).
For another project, I wonder about UPS modding. I've got a UPS that puts out the right amount of power, but the battery is kindof small. It seems that I could replace it with a higher capacity car or motorcycle battery of the same voltage.
U of Texas has done this chemically using glycerol to dry out tissues. Most impressive are the pictures. The story is a bit dated, but at the time, they had only done this with hamsters. previous slashdot story
it would cost $199 or $99
There are 6 pins on the back of the unit These are longer, single-sided pads, probably for use with some sort of card edge connector, not to be soldered to the xbox. Six pins matches the standard Xilinx programming cable: VCC/GND/TDO/TDI/TCK/TMS for JTAG, or VCC/GND/DP/DIN/CLK/PROG for their non-JTAG FPGAs.
I second that - there enough pins on the back of the device to be a jtag programming port.
If you notice the pads on the back of the enigmah board (6 on the top right) -- these are to program the part (probably an FPGA or an PLD). These wires don't go anywhere else, so I doubt the part would be able to be programed from software loaded onto the xbox... so the enigmah is also upgradable, but it would require extra cabling/equipment (maybe as simple as a parallel port cable)
I wonder if the Enigmah makes use of the extra images of firmware that bunnie found in the xbox's on-board flash?
But it is ingenius. You can sell more games that way!
The other drawback is that you can't have funny shaped media, but since microsoft isn't focused on the portable market (yet), this isn't much of a problem. Does that mean that the gamecube, with its small DVD media, have plans for a portable player sometime?
> Iridium also provides secure encryption for the military and qualified governmnet users. A nice touch for those that need it.
Yeah, I'm sure the association with the government will assure your privacy.
If you live in the right urban neighborhood with a lot of traffic, your kind neighbors may provide the watermark you need.
but you'll find a lot more meat on a Peruvian Hairless. A friend had one - he was always putting sunscreen on it!! I wonder if the chickens would need that, too.
I tottally lost respect for that movie when I noticed that the locker room is in the middle of the atrium of the building. Yeah, the main office building has kick-ass architecture and I'd love to visit it (or actually, I liked his house, too.). But, if you notice the locker room, there are people seen in the background (on higher floors) walking by. With no windows or anything in between.
The movie had a certain neat style, but I didn't get brought it because it was too much about that style and not about anything else. Glad you enjoyed it, though, just not my taste as a movie.
In other news...
Olympic Speedskating will be judged, not on speed, but on fashion, sweating the least, and the contestant who books the best airfare to the event.
North Korea became the second country to land a person on the moon and return them safely to earth. Although technically the rocket blew up on the launch pad, it was still considered a sucessful mission given the impoverished country's lack of funds, the technical embargoes placed on the country by space-faring nations, and the total lack of a Korean space program.
Life insurance companies will now pay benefits for near-death experiences, close calls, and "getting really scared".
sorry... I just prefer the normal metrics of FLOPS, MIPS, bandwidth and topology for my supercomputers...
> Feng also proposed that a new technique is needed for measuring the performance of supercomputers. Instead of looking primarily at how many calculations a system can run in a given amount of time, researchers should also consider factors such as downtime, size, price and maintenance requirements, he said.
Following Feng's lead, the whole supercomputing industry has reacted to this new paradigm shift. Industry leader Cray has ceased development of its upcoming SV2 and has designed a system based on the reliable commodore 64. Explained lead scientist Joel Grey, "We managed to get a C64 computer out of the dump, and bought 1,000 surplus 'Barney' solar calculators off of ebay for $30".
The new system, dubbed the SV64, is not quite as fast as the SV2, but exceeds at new metrics: Converted to run on solar power, and having spent the last 15 years in an uncooled closet continously generating the "experiencing technical dificulties" logo for a local community access TV station, the new computer shatters existing power and reliability records. "With an expected retail price of less than $1M USD, we expect this computer to eclipse [Japanese rival] NEC's lead and become the platform that will be used to perform most of the world's weather, biological, and nuclear simulations well into the next decade", said Grey.
Wall Street analysts pointed out the the system has never needed maintence, nor suffered downtime, nor needed the services of an UNIX system administrater, and as a result, the total cost of ownership should remain low. Shares of component manufacturer Commodore rose 10 points to 10 1/64 in heavy trading today.
Somebody open these people a tipjar or a donation link!!
That's the kind of argument DOJ was trying to make and the MPAA ate up: "DeCSS is a digital crowbar."
In that case, I propose that we apply the exact same restrictions to DeCSS that we apply to crowbars.
>Someone also told me that the software inside the iDrive is actually WinCE, can anyone verify this? If so, it would be truly a MS car after all
Yes, it runs Windows CE for Automotive V3.5. (see also) The system was done by Siemens VDO Automotive AG.
Also, the iDrive demo kiosk runs a windows variant (it was crashed one day, surprise!). I don't know if it shares any of the code with the real product, but it looked pretty functional, so either it does, someone spent a lot of work, or they had a UI-design tool that could spit out both WinCE and Flash.
The Xbox has a PIC 16LC63A microcontroller... people are still figuring out what it does.
AFAIK, the satellite boxen don't necessarily use a PIC for authentication -- they would probably use a more cryprographically secure/hacker-proof device. It's been the cloners that use PIC chips because they are versatile and cheap enough to get the job done.
Yes, you can go into CompUSA and this Arm-powered windows PC. OK, it's a pocket PC, but it's in direct competition with Risc OS. It comes preinstalled/bundled with "Pocket Word", so, no you can't purchase a word processor for it (damn monopoly!).
.NET
Here are all the varieties of ARM processors supported under Windows CE and
We ship $250k high speed tape recorders. The tapes are rather big, and a little sticker on the insertion slot show a yellow triangle, an hand reaching into the slot, and a line through it. Meaning: don't stick your hand in the slot. Well, that wasn't specific enough, I guess, or maybe there should be an additional sticker on the shipping crate: someone drove a forklift precisely into the slot.
Check out...
G4 PowerPC processor
MIPS R3000 Mongoose
Pentium III/4
RAD6000 variant of IBM's RS/6000