If the new owners of Slashdot really want to improve this site (and I have seen no evidence that they do), a good first step would be stop linking to stories that are paywalled, or that prohibit adblockers. There are always plenty of alternatives.
Not if the new/. owners are being paid to steer us to paywalls and advertising. It's all about the clicks and eyeballs, not the quality of your experience. Money wins.
It seems that every week we some "green power" technology that produces 0.3 yoctowatts of power, involves the slight jostling of 3 electrons, and claims industrial level of application.
I call bullshit. Stop stealing ideas from the local school science fair and develop something that will power something useful, and demonstrate it.
It's also intended to force more money out into the economy for growth, growth, growth! Without cash people need to buy stuff to "store" their earnings.
Yeah, let's ban all cash, drive interest rates negative (except for top tier savings accounts with balances greater than $100k or so), force everyone to either invest in the stock market or continually buy stuff in order to try to maintain the value of their earnings. Real estate prices will skyrocket because that will be one of the places people will want to stash their earnings.
The top 1% will become the top 0.1%, the bottom 99.9% will be reduced to a half-assed barter economy, no personal savings, and mortgage and loan debt beyond belief.
But what if this means that people who drink heavily who suddenly replace their breakfast fifth of whiskey with a pot of coffee allow their livers to actually have two alcohol-free minutes to function and repair? And people who also replace their liquid lunch with another pot of coffee are affording even more time for the liver to repair?
I don't think this paper has validated coffee as a magical elixir that repairs your liver, boosts your Strength attribute to 5 and Vitality to 4, and gives you Alcohol Immunity. Some mechanisms are posited but it's a meta-analysis of correlated data, no validation of mechanism. It may just be that someone who can manage to drink anything other than alcohol for part of the day improves liver function vs. when they were boozing all the time.
They don't need the phone to convict Marguez, going by the press reports he already told the FBI everything they need to convict him. He did what most people did, he talked to the cops and they talked him into confessing, though he didn't realize he was confessing (probably thought he was apologizing).
But if he gets it in his head to recant, then they will need evidence.
The FBI arrested the guy that supplied the guns used in the shooting. He is currently charged with providing material support to terrorists, which means they need to find evidence that he provided the weapons with the intent to support this particular attack. Otherwise they probably only can push weapons-related charges.
As he was buddies with the owner of the iPhone, odds are all they evidence they want against this guy is on that phone.
I'm sure that they are going to take the $3.6 million that they didn't have to pay during this episode and devote that to upgrading and securing their systems to prevent the possibility of future attacks like this. That would be the smart thing to do.
The gain is in efficiency. Or, in more output. You decide which. Want to change combustion cycles, whether from otto to miller or even all the way to two stroke? You can do that.
Yes, assuming that you can actually still get the engine to run reliably with the much more complicated system with a much larger number of potential failure modes. A couple more percentage points of fuel efficiency or another horsepower is awesome, but not if your car keeps blinking out due to a lose connection, chafed wire, bad sensor, etc.. These things need to handle the abuse and neglect of owners and maintenance shops and still function most of the time. Cam shafts work, and work well. Any gains would be incremental to the added complexity.
The digital solution introduces at least two and possibly more points of failure per piston Loose or frayed wire? *BOOM* - destroyed engine. Mechanical failure of a single lifter? *BOOM* - destroyed engine.
Not likely. Why? Most likely scenario is that the valve is opened via electronics and closed via a spring. Failure == closed valve. No permanent damage.
OK, maybe you can build around interference issues. You still have many more points of failure that can leave someone on the side of the road with a dead engine, and a more complicated system to diagnose and repair (read $$$). Where is the gain?
As it is, crank angle sensors, O2 sensors, ignition timing sensors, are all items that can and do fail which will effectively brick your vehicle or require costly repair to pass emissions inspection. Emissions laws effectively mandate these technologies, and admittedly they are getting more robust and reliable. But if there was a killer advantage to replacing a camshaft with something more complex, it would have been done by now.
The folks in automotive design aren't Luddites; they are engineers, and a big part of engineers' jobs is to fully examine the merits of new technologies for potential improvements. Many new technologies introduce more flaws than benefits.
Is it too much to ask that the posts actually, I don't know, have a thesis? What is the topic of discussion here?
Why don't we just go to the bus station downtown and transcribe the ravings and mumblings of the first street person we meet? That might actually be more informative that these posts.
Just because it is possible doesn't make it a good idea.
Many engines are interference engines, where the valves sweep through the same space of the pistons during different parts of the cycle. This is largely due to the need to have high compression ratios (IC engine efficiency is strongly driven by compression ratio). Timing is crucial - if the timing is off, valves crash into the pistons and your engine tears itself to pieces. Timing belts, chains, or even gears are used to prevent this. It is particularly important to get timing belts serviced regularly, because they are a cheap part that can cause destruction of the engine if they fail. However, it is only a single point of failure.
The digital solution introduces at least two and possibly more points of failure per piston Loose or frayed wire? *BOOM* - destroyed engine. Mechanical failure of a single lifter? *BOOM* - destroyed engine.
Isn't health care practically the highest critical tier of the "Internet of Things"? We can't even motivate ourselves to properly secure medical data, literally life and death stuff, even after they get pwned like this. The folks on the IoT bandwagon actually want to hitch more of our daily technology to the Internet, things with even lower security motivation?
Sorry, IoT is dumb beyond belief. We really need to be working on air-gapping and unplugging a lot of stuff from the Internet. Some things should never, ever get plugged into the Internet, convenience be damned. For other things, maybe they can be plugged in, if a rock solid security apparatus is in place and you still maintain the ability to recover from a breach, acknowledging that it can still happen.
This makes some sense, but yes, the physical property is so buried as to be meaningless and impossible to judge the value of the material.
The link to the school page has the same text, so I expect that this was written by campus public relations who completely mangled the technical details. I suppose the researchers slapped their foreheads repeatedly while reading this.
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle. Look at any IT company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
The women who first worked with computers were treated like underling eye-candy, and told their daughters to avoid that shit like the plague? And their granddaughters now see it as a field where wages are going down, where they still get treated like second rate coders (even when they are not), and they are still avoiding that shit like the plague?
Shit, I'm not sure why any male wants to get into IT these days, never mind the ladies.
Where can I get this "plastic bag" you speak of? It sounds amazing!!!
You can get them at my supermarket whether you want them or not. I'm usually fighting the bagger not to put one single item in its own bag. The bags can easily hold 10+ lbs of stuff each, but they're so afraid of lawyers that they'll put a bag of marshmallows in one bag, just to be safe. Canned goods makes the bagger break out in a cold sweat and get double bagged automatically. I usually re-bag into one and hand them back the extras. I'm waiting for them to demand that I sign a waiver to do this.
$2000 for two years of cell phone service in the US, $500 for the phone and $1500 for the service. Right.
No fucking way does it cost $500 to make a middle-of-the-pack phone. And no way does it cost $1500 to deliver that service to you.
It costs $2000 in the U.S. because it is what the market will bear here, and nobody knows any better about the true costs. It's just high enough that people start to bitch about it, but not so much that they can't afford to shell out for it.
Zuckerberg tried to float this in a market that absolutely can't bear $2000 for this sort of service, a market that already knows it can be done for much less, a market that isn't already in a walled garden and doesn't want to be put in one. Good luck trying to squeeze profit from that market. The Indians are more informed consumers than most people in the U.S.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't fucking touch it, don't let it get anywhere near any of your machines. If you do, it will pretty much tell you what it wants you to do.
If the new owners of Slashdot really want to improve this site (and I have seen no evidence that they do), a good first step would be stop linking to stories that are paywalled, or that prohibit adblockers. There are always plenty of alternatives.
Not if the new /. owners are being paid to steer us to paywalls and advertising. It's all about the clicks and eyeballs, not the quality of your experience. Money wins.
The top 1% will become the top 0.1%
Let me guess - not a math major?
No, you don't appear to be.
Wake me when you can run a toaster with it.
It seems that every week we some "green power" technology that produces 0.3 yoctowatts of power, involves the slight jostling of 3 electrons, and claims industrial level of application.
I call bullshit. Stop stealing ideas from the local school science fair and develop something that will power something useful, and demonstrate it.
It's also intended to force more money out into the economy for growth, growth, growth! Without cash people need to buy stuff to "store" their earnings.
Clippy: Hey! It looks like you are trying to violate U.S. citizen's Constitutionally-protected rights! Would you like help?
Yeah, let's ban all cash, drive interest rates negative (except for top tier savings accounts with balances greater than $100k or so), force everyone to either invest in the stock market or continually buy stuff in order to try to maintain the value of their earnings. Real estate prices will skyrocket because that will be one of the places people will want to stash their earnings.
The top 1% will become the top 0.1%, the bottom 99.9% will be reduced to a half-assed barter economy, no personal savings, and mortgage and loan debt beyond belief.
But what if this means that people who drink heavily who suddenly replace their breakfast fifth of whiskey with a pot of coffee allow their livers to actually have two alcohol-free minutes to function and repair? And people who also replace their liquid lunch with another pot of coffee are affording even more time for the liver to repair?
I don't think this paper has validated coffee as a magical elixir that repairs your liver, boosts your Strength attribute to 5 and Vitality to 4, and gives you Alcohol Immunity. Some mechanisms are posited but it's a meta-analysis of correlated data, no validation of mechanism. It may just be that someone who can manage to drink anything other than alcohol for part of the day improves liver function vs. when they were boozing all the time.
Talia Jane was actually fired 4 years ago, but they forgot to stop her paychecks and email. They just "fixed the glitch".
Her red Swingline was also confiscated.
They don't need the phone to convict Marguez, going by the press reports he already told the FBI everything they need to convict him. He did what most people did, he talked to the cops and they talked him into confessing, though he didn't realize he was confessing (probably thought he was apologizing).
But if he gets it in his head to recant, then they will need evidence.
...but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.
They are watching Apple to see if they get hammered by the DOJ or win business due to not selling out their customer's privacy.
The FBI arrested the guy that supplied the guns used in the shooting. He is currently charged with providing material support to terrorists, which means they need to find evidence that he provided the weapons with the intent to support this particular attack. Otherwise they probably only can push weapons-related charges.
As he was buddies with the owner of the iPhone, odds are all they evidence they want against this guy is on that phone.
I'm sure that they are going to take the $3.6 million that they didn't have to pay during this episode and devote that to upgrading and securing their systems to prevent the possibility of future attacks like this. That would be the smart thing to do.
Right?
Where is the gain?
The gain is in efficiency. Or, in more output. You decide which. Want to change combustion cycles, whether from otto to miller or even all the way to two stroke? You can do that.
Yes, assuming that you can actually still get the engine to run reliably with the much more complicated system with a much larger number of potential failure modes. A couple more percentage points of fuel efficiency or another horsepower is awesome, but not if your car keeps blinking out due to a lose connection, chafed wire, bad sensor, etc.. These things need to handle the abuse and neglect of owners and maintenance shops and still function most of the time. Cam shafts work, and work well. Any gains would be incremental to the added complexity.
Not likely. Why? Most likely scenario is that the valve is opened via electronics and closed via a spring. Failure == closed valve. No permanent damage.
OK, maybe you can build around interference issues. You still have many more points of failure that can leave someone on the side of the road with a dead engine, and a more complicated system to diagnose and repair (read $$$). Where is the gain?
As it is, crank angle sensors, O2 sensors, ignition timing sensors, are all items that can and do fail which will effectively brick your vehicle or require costly repair to pass emissions inspection. Emissions laws effectively mandate these technologies, and admittedly they are getting more robust and reliable. But if there was a killer advantage to replacing a camshaft with something more complex, it would have been done by now.
The folks in automotive design aren't Luddites; they are engineers, and a big part of engineers' jobs is to fully examine the merits of new technologies for potential improvements. Many new technologies introduce more flaws than benefits.
Is it too much to ask that the posts actually, I don't know, have a thesis? What is the topic of discussion here?
Why don't we just go to the bus station downtown and transcribe the ravings and mumblings of the first street person we meet? That might actually be more informative that these posts.
Just because it is possible doesn't make it a good idea.
Many engines are interference engines, where the valves sweep through the same space of the pistons during different parts of the cycle. This is largely due to the need to have high compression ratios (IC engine efficiency is strongly driven by compression ratio). Timing is crucial - if the timing is off, valves crash into the pistons and your engine tears itself to pieces. Timing belts, chains, or even gears are used to prevent this. It is particularly important to get timing belts serviced regularly, because they are a cheap part that can cause destruction of the engine if they fail. However, it is only a single point of failure.
The digital solution introduces at least two and possibly more points of failure per piston Loose or frayed wire? *BOOM* - destroyed engine. Mechanical failure of a single lifter? *BOOM* - destroyed engine.
Isn't health care practically the highest critical tier of the "Internet of Things"? We can't even motivate ourselves to properly secure medical data, literally life and death stuff, even after they get pwned like this. The folks on the IoT bandwagon actually want to hitch more of our daily technology to the Internet, things with even lower security motivation? Sorry, IoT is dumb beyond belief. We really need to be working on air-gapping and unplugging a lot of stuff from the Internet. Some things should never, ever get plugged into the Internet, convenience be damned. For other things, maybe they can be plugged in, if a rock solid security apparatus is in place and you still maintain the ability to recover from a breach, acknowledging that it can still happen.
This makes some sense, but yes, the physical property is so buried as to be meaningless and impossible to judge the value of the material.
The link to the school page has the same text, so I expect that this was written by campus public relations who completely mangled the technical details. I suppose the researchers slapped their foreheads repeatedly while reading this.
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle. Look at any IT company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
The women who first worked with computers were treated like underling eye-candy, and told their daughters to avoid that shit like the plague? And their granddaughters now see it as a field where wages are going down, where they still get treated like second rate coders (even when they are not), and they are still avoiding that shit like the plague?
Shit, I'm not sure why any male wants to get into IT these days, never mind the ladies.
EISA/ISA/PCI/PCIE/MCA/LPC/NuBus/PATA/SATA/PB/GSC/HSC/VLB/VME/QBus?
I know there's a LOT I've missed out, but you get the point. I've been building my own PCs since 1988. All using modular components.
Yeah, but did you patent the process? No?
MS will be cracking down on this sort of socialist hooliganism, get ready and assume the position!
The grocery store manager must greatly appreciate your expertise in these matters.
Where can I get this "plastic bag" you speak of? It sounds amazing!!!
You can get them at my supermarket whether you want them or not. I'm usually fighting the bagger not to put one single item in its own bag. The bags can easily hold 10+ lbs of stuff each, but they're so afraid of lawyers that they'll put a bag of marshmallows in one bag, just to be safe. Canned goods makes the bagger break out in a cold sweat and get double bagged automatically. I usually re-bag into one and hand them back the extras. I'm waiting for them to demand that I sign a waiver to do this.
What the fuck does that mean?
1 sq. inch (sectional area) of cheap steel can support 36,000 lbs in tension without yielding.
A 1 inch cube of steel weighs 0.29 lbs and can support 36,000 lbs, so that's 124,000 times!
This raises a red flag that whoever wrote this doesn't really get mechanics.
$2000 for two years of cell phone service in the US, $500 for the phone and $1500 for the service. Right.
No fucking way does it cost $500 to make a middle-of-the-pack phone. And no way does it cost $1500 to deliver that service to you.
It costs $2000 in the U.S. because it is what the market will bear here, and nobody knows any better about the true costs. It's just high enough that people start to bitch about it, but not so much that they can't afford to shell out for it.
Zuckerberg tried to float this in a market that absolutely can't bear $2000 for this sort of service, a market that already knows it can be done for much less, a market that isn't already in a walled garden and doesn't want to be put in one. Good luck trying to squeeze profit from that market. The Indians are more informed consumers than most people in the U.S.