Others have debunked most of your post, but I'll go for some more
Dude, I'm not pulling this stuff out of my butt. GRUB takes some time and effort to get it installed and then figure out how it works, but its really sweet when it all comes together. GRUB can even have a nice graphics boot screen with a arrow key menu boot screen. Its essentially the ultimate bootloader, and it can save you a lot of potential problems once you install it and learn how it works.
And I still contend that an average Linux guy can, with some trial and error, produce their own kernel by compiling it from source. While Debian, for instance, does provide some pretty good performing kernels which have basically every option compiled in and available as a module, you can also roll your own and cut out a lot of the fluff if you know what is inside your computer.
Linux is a monolithic kernel with modular support, but adding the capability to say install a SCSI module will make your kernel substantially larger. Since the kernel remains resident in memory at all times, the size of the kernel is a very important factor to achieving increased performance.
Ideally, you should make your monolithic kernel with all necessary features compiled directly into the kernel, and then build only those modules which you might possibly want to use but aren't really critical, or stuff like ALSA sound which doesn't work right unless its made in a modular fashion.
By doing this you get a nice small fast kernel which supports your hardware and not much else. Granted, its usually not really necessary in most cases, but it is interesting to do this, and you will possibly get a small performance increase if you do it correctly. Its worthwhile just to learn how to do it so in case you buy some new gadget that requires a very recent kernel for driver support then you are not intimidated by the process.
It really isn't all that difficult to make a kernel, and its kind of fun to do it. Expect to have to recompile a couple times and look at your bootup messages and use the dmesg command to check for bootup device driver errors. If you get errors go back into the kernel config menus and fix it and try again.
Finally, most of the kernel config options have a help option which explains what it does and something like "if unsure, say Y", only the really new options lack this, and if there is no help, and you don't know what it is, then just don't check it unless you get a boot error message of some kind which will probably lead you back to that option.
Making your own kernel is something that is kind of unique to Linux and I personally think that everybody should try it when they feel ready if for no other reason than "because you can."
Actually I'm currently running Gentoo but I only emerge -uD world maybe every six months or so. It takes me maybe a weekend to do this, so I generally wait until there have been massive changes before I put on my hard hat and rebuild everything.
I'm a really really old Linux user though. I was running Debian back in 1992. I still use Debian for all my peripheral machines which I don't want to spend a lot of time pissing around with for upgrades, but for my personal ricer box I find that Gentoo is a lot of fun to have.
There's no need to emerge world just for a new kernel, although I do typically use the gentoo-dev-sources for my kernels because they include those spiffy bootsplash patches with the framebuffer graphics consoles which I'm a sucker for (lol). I can personally attest that a GeforceFX 5900 can run vesafb graphics consoles and OpenGL accelerated X with no problems.
Linux graphics have never been better in my opinion. Now all we need is a decent GPL 3D drafting package, and I'll be in GNU Heaven.
Well, unless it has recently been changed, with LILO, you have to run the program to install a new boot block after you toy around with the config file. If LILO encounters an error or something it usually installs a corrupt boot sector and you need a boot disk to get back in. I've been stung by this a couple times when I didn't realize that when LILO gave an error message that the system was at that point unbootable.
With GRUB it just boots up, reads the file from the drive, and then gives you a list of options depending on what was in the file. Also you can open the GRUB shell and edit the boot command lines in case they aren't exactly right. Once its boot sector is installed, all you have to do is modify the text file and thats it.
... I'll probably make most of that space/usr and a decent chunk for/home.
Thats how I have my system set up. Something like 20G for / and around 35 for/usr/local where most of my games live. I also have a small 350M partition for FreeDOS mounted on/freedos and thats where GRUB lives in C:\boot\grub. That way if I hose my root partition for some reason I can still boot up GRUB and attempt a recovery.
I need to repartition sometime. I'd like to fool around with the new Minix3 or one of the BSD's but I'm all out of primary partitons at the moment. Probably I should just slap an old 10G drive in the next time I crack open my case to blow out the dust bunnies.
I've actually been using IBM's JFS file system on my box, and I'm pretty happy with it. It seems to be extremely stable for one thing.
JFS wasn't the fastest in I/O throughput, but it wasn't all that much slower either. However, it had the lowest CPU utilization during I/O which to me seems to make my system run very smoothly. Even if the disk is thrashing like crazy while cron is doing daily maintenance, the overall responsiveness seems largely unaffected.
I played with Reiser3 for a while, and while it was fast, I ran into some problems when a crash and hard reboot corrupted my root partition. I'd like to give Reiser4 a shot sometime, but I'm not disappointed with JFS either.
Kernels are not intended for the consumer. It is assumed that you have a certain level of understanding to install and configure the Linux Kernel.
True, but building your own kernel isn't particularly challenging either. Basically if you have installed your GCC compiler and a couple of extra packages then as long as you can follow a recipe you can probably build a reasonably good kernel tailored for your system.
Running LILO is probably the most dangerous part, because if your config file isn't right you can leave your system unbootable. A much better option is taking the time to learn GRUB and get it installed because once it is installed all you have to do is add a couple lines to a text file to add another kernel to the list. That way you just leave your existing kernel hanging around until you get your home-made one perfected. It usually takes me a couple of attempts to get a new kernel compiled to my satisfaction.
I don't upgrade my kernel very often either. Once I get a stable system that runs well and has all my drivers supported I usually keep that kernel for a year or so, unless I'm feeling bored and just want to play around with the latest and greatest for fun.
That poor fellow is probably done in the field of biology now. So we now have a:
Probably brilliant biologist with
a PhD from Harvard, who is now
Discredited among his peers and unemployed, and who
Apparently doesn't have much of a grasp of ethics.
I can see it now...
Those bastards, we'll see who has the last laugh now... Soon my army of Super Mutants will TAKE OVER THE WORLD! Muahahah!
It sounds like the origins of some kind of cheap comic book super vilain. Except, its not really that funny. This guy might be developing biological weapons for terrorists in the near future. If all he cares about is money and isn't too concerned about right and wrong, he's going to go work for somebody who might overlook his past mistakes as long as he can deliver what they want.
I feel really sorry for this guy and I think that a good part of the blame should be passed on to the universities which granted this guy his academic credentials yet failed to beat enough ethics into his head in the process to prevent him from making this tragic career mistake.
Hopefully he can take this in stride, and find some "good guys" who are willing to give him another chance. You can't get that far along without knowing something about biology, and it would be a shame to loose a valuable scientist of that caliber. This is going to be a painful lesson in professional ethics for Dr. Varijs which he will wish he had learned a lot earlier on.
QNX definately rocks. Its what the Hurd wishes it could be. Basically some dudes with money completed the Hurd commercially and thats what QNX is. There's no doubt that it is a really nice OS.
I've tried to keep an eye on QNX over the years, and its certainly a great product. I'm not sure what else I can say about it.
I'm always interested in mucking around with different operating systems, and Minix3 is no exception.
From what I can tell, Minix requires a primary partition just like BSD's do, and I don't have any available at the moment.
I think it would be fun to try and compile the GNU Hurd for the Minix microkernel. As long as the Minix uKernel boots on modern hardware, and has IDE, cdrom, and memory management, there's no reason why it couldn't be done in theory at least.
The L4/Hurd crew is currently pretty cutting edge, and they are making some significant advances of late. There has been a huge surge of activity as some of the Eros developers have been making some contributions to the L4/Hurd effort.
Be that as it may, I think it would be cool to get the Hurd running on the Minix microkernel just for fun. Of course I have no idea how to do this, but getting it installed would probably be a good first step.
I already have GRUB installed. Does anybody know if I manage to unpack a Minix tarball onto an extended partition if it will be able to function? I'd likewise like to get NetBSD running on an extended partition. If its possible to accomplish this how about somebody replying with some good info. Don't bother to reply if you don't think it can be done. I'll assume silence equals NO.
Why would I want my pharm co. to give away billions of potential profits to a bunch of third world losers? We here in the #1 have free corp supplied meds and I don't give a shit about those that can't bang the rocks together. If they had propper lineage they wouldn't be holding their dirty fingers out for a filthy copper.
Fuck then all, Corp america rules, take over the world Bush, rummy, rove PNAC, we will kill you all and take your shit...
Gotta check my stocks...
Your highly educated engineers with proper lineage are among those holding out their fingers for filthy coppers because dipshits like you have outsourced jobs like mine for a couple percentage points on your online stock market statement when you're already filthy rich.
If you think the US likes blue-blood rich boys you better think again because we outnumber you about 10k to 1. Shit is getting bad and it's looking like the USSR about ten years ago dude. I don't like having to work at fscking Wally-Mart when I have college credits equivalent to a PhD.
Without question, nearly every company I have ever worked for in the US has been either run by dipshits or criminals. Believe it or not, I'd rather work for the criminals than dipshits like you, because criminals at least have a sense of loyalty but dipshits like you are just loose cannons.
Considering how overly protective the US Government has become of its citizens' lives lately, one would think that they would have done this long ago.
There are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of rather freedom-infringing laws on the books now which are essentially there ostensibly to protect US citizens from dangerous or harmfull things. For instance, its illegal to drive without a seat belt.
Yet the US Government continues to let its citizens die from lack of medical care for those who can't afford it. I guarantee you that lots of people are probably right now avoiding going to see a doctor because they don't have medical insurance and are terrified of incurring debts which will effectively ruin what remains of their lives. These people might have a condition which will eventually kill them but if they were to receive treatment now it would be trivial to cure.
I'm an engineer, a veteran, and my parents were not poor, but I've spent most of my adult life without medical coverage. The prices charged by the US medical industry are frankly appalling. For the price of one typical pill, I could feed my entire family, in style, for a week. A surgical procedure costs near that of a new car, and heaven forbid you are ever hospitilized for any period of time.
For a country so concerned about preventing cancer in its citizens, it seems that the government itself is severely infected with a cancerous growth called the health care industry which is sucking the life out of the country. Somebody needs to call the surgeon.
I wish Taiwan the best of luck. Its sad when the industry which is supposed to be saving lives is failing to perform due to corporate avarice and greed. How much is a human life worth? I've always been taught that it is priceless, and if petty negotiations over flu vaccine prices have been unsuccessful, then Taiwan should make the vaccine themselves if they have the technology to do so.
The Open Source evangelists tediously blather on about how Open Source gives users so many choices, but, had you gone with MP3 or WMA, you would have had far more choices for an in-dash MP3 player.
Agreed. Maybe someday OGG will be widely supported for autos, but MP3 is the way to go at present. You're not distributing the music anyways so whether or not you're breaking patents, nobody is gonna know or care.
At home I like to use OGG files mainly because it seems easier to get a good sounding encoding by using the default settings. Or if you were making music for a game that you were going to put on the net, then it would make sense to use OGG files. For listening to music in a car, MP3 is good enough.
Get a stereo with audio in and plug in the portable ogg player of your choice.
Yep. Thats definately a good plan.
Last summer my Volvo's cassette player died, so I decided to upgrade to one of the auto MP3 players. After some shopping around I picked a high-end Jensen unit which was still cheaper than the lowest Sony. I've been lucky with it so far, and being able to store eleven odd hours of music on one cd is definately pretty cool.
Most of these things will have aux input RCA jacks in the back. All you have to do is install a 1/8" stereo plug somewhere like in the glovebox or the center console and possibly run in a second 12v power supply and you can just jack in your Zaurus PDA or such and play OGG files from the flash card.
Personally, I just re-ripped and encoded as MP3 since I own all the music cdroms anyways. It was kind of a minor hassle but such is life. Auto cd-mp3 players are definately cool, especially if the radio stations suck where you live.
I was going under the assumption that the atmospheres unit just had to be a typo or error, but further investigation has yielded references to new composite material tanks capable of safely storing hydrogen at 350 bar. Honda is filling the tank with a metal hydride storage medium also to increase capacity beyond what would normally be possible by dissolving the gas into the crystal matrix.
Well, presumably this home unit has some kind of ultra high pressure compressor then. It would stand to reason that any source of sufficiently pure hydrogen would work for refilling the tanks, but I'm not sure if recharging via solar cells would be feasable at that kind of pressure. I think it would be possible with hydraulics, but I'm not sure what kind of energy input would be required.
It really doesn't make much sense. If they aren't allowed to operate inside the country, then who or what are they hiding from? Wouldn't it be better to set up a big barbed wire fence with armed guards, a big sign saying CIA - KEEP OUT, and just carry on like the FBI or military does?
I guess the deal is they don't want foreign spys operating inside the US to identify their agents so that when they are deployed overseas they aren't recognizable (and shot).
The generator doo-hickey sounds pretty cool though. Just the thing to set up a nice computer center somewhere in the middle of BFE. Too bad one of them will probably be hugely expensive. I'd guess it would cost on the order of $100k but being as its government equipment its anybody's guess what the CIA will actually pay for these things.
Man, you guys are even bigger nerds than I thought. All that ricer junk is to attract hot chicks, not so you can go faster. Who cares how fast your car is when all you're gonna do is go parking somewhere anyways, lol.
At a mere 350psi to charge up the tanks, this vehicle could get its hydrogen from a lot of different sources.
It would certainly be within the realm of possibility to mount a 1KW solar panel on the roof to run a small water electrolysis cell and a very low volume high pressure pump to allow the vehicle to partially refuel itself during the day as it sets in the parking lot.
There are many ways of making hydrogen, but usually getting it compressed to 3000 or so psi is a major hurdle not to mention using a lot of needless extra energy. A 350 psi compressor is much more consumer-friendly.
Electrolysis is a costly process in terms of energy required; however, it is well suited to electricity produced by solar cells. Low voltage DC power with high amperage is precisely what you need to crack water, and thats what you get from solar cells. Basically, re-wire your panel so that every cell is in parallel and connect the output to your electrolysis cell.
I've been meaning to make a cell myself just for experimental purposes. The concentric iron pipe design is probably best suited for amateur fabrication. Years ago I purchased several 1A solar cells, I think they are 0.5v each, and was toying around with cracking water. It did work, but I never actually had anything other than some wires stuck in water. I'll have to blow the dust off of that project and make myself a honest to goodness electrolysis cell, especially now that I have learned a decent design for one.
Meandering back on-topic. This car would obviously well suited to convert into a plug-in also, since a fuel-cell car is just running on electricity anyways. Presumably it would use a bank of batteries to act as a ballast for the fuel cells. Just add more batteries, and make a charger unit. A plug-in self-refueling hydrogen car. Nifty.
When they release OS X for x86, you can expect a huge jump in marketshare from the current ~2%, simply because people will be torrenting this thing like crazy. (as if they aren't already)
Its probably true. I've even considered downloading it just to see if I could get it to work myself. Its not like I really need another OS though.
Some years ago I actually dumped my ROMs from my Ebay Mac IIcx before I scrapped the thing. I cut off the ROM chips with a dremel tool and have them in my desk drawer even now. I have fooled around with the Basilisk ][ macintosh emulator using my ROM dump and I must say its pretty nifty. I actually used it to read a Mac CDROM in my PC and copy a datafile over to the hard drive.
I'd gladly install OSX on my PC if I could purchase it at a reasonable price. I've always admired Apple software, its simply a matter of economics in my case.
I always just installed a "Print to File" Apple Laserwriter driver and called it "Postscript File". When you pick that printer, it asks for a filename, you type something like "c:\myfile.ps"
Then install Ghostscript and just run ps2pdf on the output file from the fake printer. True, you have to open a command shell and actually type a command in, so this would be beyond 90% of the people who use Office, but it always worked well for me.
I've been trying to find a new job for over a year now, and its bad. I'll probably be putting stickers on cans at Wal-Mart soon, with 10 years of engineering school under my belt and hundreds of high tech credits.
The last big place I worked, my engineering boss was a pinhead who must have cheated his way through school because he could barely run a calculator, yet he had a Penn State ME degree. He assumed I was just like him apparently, and when I wouldn't back up his bullshit thats when the trouble started. When things got tight I got cut and he's the one driving the gass-hog SUV while I'm on food stamps now.
It really doesn't pay to learn math and science, study cheating and stealing and sycophantic psychology instead because nobody in this country apparently earns an honest buck anymore. Sorry if I'm a bit cynical, but I earned my lousy B average and I still remember all that stuff, and I'm the one without the job.
Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis. Probably the best science fiction movie in history.
That is an incredibly cool movie. I was lucky enough to see it a sci-fi film festival with a live piano player there performing the score. Definately a steam-tech wonder.
Thus the effect is temporary. The heat originally pumped out of the building/contents will eventually be reabsorbed by it.
Actually, I think all AC's blow out substantially more heat than they remove. The electricity you are putting into the unit is converted to heat and blown out the back along with whatever heat you manage to remove from the interior. That electricity isn't just disappearing, its being emitted as heat.
I'm wondering if using more electricity makes it harder to turn the alternator
Yeah, it definately does. To get 1W of electricity you might have to put in 1.5W of mechanical power, the variance is a curve and there's typically a sweet spot where the efficiency is maximized for any particular alternator.
One horsepower is about 750W, so for a reduction of 1hp from your engine output you might get 500W of electricity which would be about 40 amps in a car.
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Dude, I'm not pulling this stuff out of my butt. GRUB takes some time and effort to get it installed and then figure out how it works, but its really sweet when it all comes together. GRUB can even have a nice graphics boot screen with a arrow key menu boot screen. Its essentially the ultimate bootloader, and it can save you a lot of potential problems once you install it and learn how it works.
And I still contend that an average Linux guy can, with some trial and error, produce their own kernel by compiling it from source. While Debian, for instance, does provide some pretty good performing kernels which have basically every option compiled in and available as a module, you can also roll your own and cut out a lot of the fluff if you know what is inside your computer.
Linux is a monolithic kernel with modular support, but adding the capability to say install a SCSI module will make your kernel substantially larger. Since the kernel remains resident in memory at all times, the size of the kernel is a very important factor to achieving increased performance.
Ideally, you should make your monolithic kernel with all necessary features compiled directly into the kernel, and then build only those modules which you might possibly want to use but aren't really critical, or stuff like ALSA sound which doesn't work right unless its made in a modular fashion.
By doing this you get a nice small fast kernel which supports your hardware and not much else. Granted, its usually not really necessary in most cases, but it is interesting to do this, and you will possibly get a small performance increase if you do it correctly. Its worthwhile just to learn how to do it so in case you buy some new gadget that requires a very recent kernel for driver support then you are not intimidated by the process.
It really isn't all that difficult to make a kernel, and its kind of fun to do it. Expect to have to recompile a couple times and look at your bootup messages and use the dmesg command to check for bootup device driver errors. If you get errors go back into the kernel config menus and fix it and try again.
Finally, most of the kernel config options have a help option which explains what it does and something like "if unsure, say Y", only the really new options lack this, and if there is no help, and you don't know what it is, then just don't check it unless you get a boot error message of some kind which will probably lead you back to that option.
Making your own kernel is something that is kind of unique to Linux and I personally think that everybody should try it when they feel ready if for no other reason than "because you can."
I'm a really really old Linux user though. I was running Debian back in 1992. I still use Debian for all my peripheral machines which I don't want to spend a lot of time pissing around with for upgrades, but for my personal ricer box I find that Gentoo is a lot of fun to have.
There's no need to emerge world just for a new kernel, although I do typically use the gentoo-dev-sources for my kernels because they include those spiffy bootsplash patches with the framebuffer graphics consoles which I'm a sucker for (lol). I can personally attest that a GeforceFX 5900 can run vesafb graphics consoles and OpenGL accelerated X with no problems.
Linux graphics have never been better in my opinion. Now all we need is a decent GPL 3D drafting package, and I'll be in GNU Heaven.
With GRUB it just boots up, reads the file from the drive, and then gives you a list of options depending on what was in the file. Also you can open the GRUB shell and edit the boot command lines in case they aren't exactly right. Once its boot sector is installed, all you have to do is modify the text file and thats it.
Thats how I have my system set up. Something like 20G for / and around 35 for /usr/local where most of my games live. I also have a small 350M partition for FreeDOS mounted on /freedos and thats where GRUB lives in C:\boot\grub. That way if I hose my root partition for some reason I can still boot up GRUB and attempt a recovery.
I need to repartition sometime. I'd like to fool around with the new Minix3 or one of the BSD's but I'm all out of primary partitons at the moment. Probably I should just slap an old 10G drive in the next time I crack open my case to blow out the dust bunnies.
JFS wasn't the fastest in I/O throughput, but it wasn't all that much slower either. However, it had the lowest CPU utilization during I/O which to me seems to make my system run very smoothly. Even if the disk is thrashing like crazy while cron is doing daily maintenance, the overall responsiveness seems largely unaffected.
I played with Reiser3 for a while, and while it was fast, I ran into some problems when a crash and hard reboot corrupted my root partition. I'd like to give Reiser4 a shot sometime, but I'm not disappointed with JFS either.
True, but building your own kernel isn't particularly challenging either. Basically if you have installed your GCC compiler and a couple of extra packages then as long as you can follow a recipe you can probably build a reasonably good kernel tailored for your system.
Running LILO is probably the most dangerous part, because if your config file isn't right you can leave your system unbootable. A much better option is taking the time to learn GRUB and get it installed because once it is installed all you have to do is add a couple lines to a text file to add another kernel to the list. That way you just leave your existing kernel hanging around until you get your home-made one perfected. It usually takes me a couple of attempts to get a new kernel compiled to my satisfaction.
I don't upgrade my kernel very often either. Once I get a stable system that runs well and has all my drivers supported I usually keep that kernel for a year or so, unless I'm feeling bored and just want to play around with the latest and greatest for fun.
- Probably brilliant biologist with
- a PhD from Harvard, who is now
- Discredited among his peers and unemployed, and who
- Apparently doesn't have much of a grasp of ethics.
I can see it now...Those bastards, we'll see who has the last laugh now... Soon my army of Super Mutants will TAKE OVER THE WORLD! Muahahah!
It sounds like the origins of some kind of cheap comic book super vilain. Except, its not really that funny. This guy might be developing biological weapons for terrorists in the near future. If all he cares about is money and isn't too concerned about right and wrong, he's going to go work for somebody who might overlook his past mistakes as long as he can deliver what they want.
I feel really sorry for this guy and I think that a good part of the blame should be passed on to the universities which granted this guy his academic credentials yet failed to beat enough ethics into his head in the process to prevent him from making this tragic career mistake.
Hopefully he can take this in stride, and find some "good guys" who are willing to give him another chance. You can't get that far along without knowing something about biology, and it would be a shame to loose a valuable scientist of that caliber. This is going to be a painful lesson in professional ethics for Dr. Varijs which he will wish he had learned a lot earlier on.
I've tried to keep an eye on QNX over the years, and its certainly a great product. I'm not sure what else I can say about it.
From what I can tell, Minix requires a primary partition just like BSD's do, and I don't have any available at the moment.
I think it would be fun to try and compile the GNU Hurd for the Minix microkernel. As long as the Minix uKernel boots on modern hardware, and has IDE, cdrom, and memory management, there's no reason why it couldn't be done in theory at least.
The L4/Hurd crew is currently pretty cutting edge, and they are making some significant advances of late. There has been a huge surge of activity as some of the Eros developers have been making some contributions to the L4/Hurd effort.
Be that as it may, I think it would be cool to get the Hurd running on the Minix microkernel just for fun. Of course I have no idea how to do this, but getting it installed would probably be a good first step.
I already have GRUB installed. Does anybody know if I manage to unpack a Minix tarball onto an extended partition if it will be able to function? I'd likewise like to get NetBSD running on an extended partition. If its possible to accomplish this how about somebody replying with some good info. Don't bother to reply if you don't think it can be done. I'll assume silence equals NO.
If you think the US likes blue-blood rich boys you better think again because we outnumber you about 10k to 1. Shit is getting bad and it's looking like the USSR about ten years ago dude. I don't like having to work at fscking Wally-Mart when I have college credits equivalent to a PhD.
Without question, nearly every company I have ever worked for in the US has been either run by dipshits or criminals. Believe it or not, I'd rather work for the criminals than dipshits like you, because criminals at least have a sense of loyalty but dipshits like you are just loose cannons.
There are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of rather freedom-infringing laws on the books now which are essentially there ostensibly to protect US citizens from dangerous or harmfull things. For instance, its illegal to drive without a seat belt.
Yet the US Government continues to let its citizens die from lack of medical care for those who can't afford it. I guarantee you that lots of people are probably right now avoiding going to see a doctor because they don't have medical insurance and are terrified of incurring debts which will effectively ruin what remains of their lives. These people might have a condition which will eventually kill them but if they were to receive treatment now it would be trivial to cure.
I'm an engineer, a veteran, and my parents were not poor, but I've spent most of my adult life without medical coverage. The prices charged by the US medical industry are frankly appalling. For the price of one typical pill, I could feed my entire family, in style, for a week. A surgical procedure costs near that of a new car, and heaven forbid you are ever hospitilized for any period of time.
For a country so concerned about preventing cancer in its citizens, it seems that the government itself is severely infected with a cancerous growth called the health care industry which is sucking the life out of the country. Somebody needs to call the surgeon.
I wish Taiwan the best of luck. Its sad when the industry which is supposed to be saving lives is failing to perform due to corporate avarice and greed. How much is a human life worth? I've always been taught that it is priceless, and if petty negotiations over flu vaccine prices have been unsuccessful, then Taiwan should make the vaccine themselves if they have the technology to do so.
At home I like to use OGG files mainly because it seems easier to get a good sounding encoding by using the default settings. Or if you were making music for a game that you were going to put on the net, then it would make sense to use OGG files. For listening to music in a car, MP3 is good enough.
Last summer my Volvo's cassette player died, so I decided to upgrade to one of the auto MP3 players. After some shopping around I picked a high-end Jensen unit which was still cheaper than the lowest Sony. I've been lucky with it so far, and being able to store eleven odd hours of music on one cd is definately pretty cool.
Most of these things will have aux input RCA jacks in the back. All you have to do is install a 1/8" stereo plug somewhere like in the glovebox or the center console and possibly run in a second 12v power supply and you can just jack in your Zaurus PDA or such and play OGG files from the flash card.
Personally, I just re-ripped and encoded as MP3 since I own all the music cdroms anyways. It was kind of a minor hassle but such is life. Auto cd-mp3 players are definately cool, especially if the radio stations suck where you live.
OMG that is hilarious. This needs to be +5 funny!
Well, presumably this home unit has some kind of ultra high pressure compressor then. It would stand to reason that any source of sufficiently pure hydrogen would work for refilling the tanks, but I'm not sure if recharging via solar cells would be feasable at that kind of pressure. I think it would be possible with hydraulics, but I'm not sure what kind of energy input would be required.
I guess the deal is they don't want foreign spys operating inside the US to identify their agents so that when they are deployed overseas they aren't recognizable (and shot).
The generator doo-hickey sounds pretty cool though. Just the thing to set up a nice computer center somewhere in the middle of BFE. Too bad one of them will probably be hugely expensive. I'd guess it would cost on the order of $100k but being as its government equipment its anybody's guess what the CIA will actually pay for these things.
Man, you guys are even bigger nerds than I thought. All that ricer junk is to attract hot chicks, not so you can go faster. Who cares how fast your car is when all you're gonna do is go parking somewhere anyways, lol.
It would certainly be within the realm of possibility to mount a 1KW solar panel on the roof to run a small water electrolysis cell and a very low volume high pressure pump to allow the vehicle to partially refuel itself during the day as it sets in the parking lot.
There are many ways of making hydrogen, but usually getting it compressed to 3000 or so psi is a major hurdle not to mention using a lot of needless extra energy. A 350 psi compressor is much more consumer-friendly.
Electrolysis is a costly process in terms of energy required; however, it is well suited to electricity produced by solar cells. Low voltage DC power with high amperage is precisely what you need to crack water, and thats what you get from solar cells. Basically, re-wire your panel so that every cell is in parallel and connect the output to your electrolysis cell.
I've been meaning to make a cell myself just for experimental purposes. The concentric iron pipe design is probably best suited for amateur fabrication. Years ago I purchased several 1A solar cells, I think they are 0.5v each, and was toying around with cracking water. It did work, but I never actually had anything other than some wires stuck in water. I'll have to blow the dust off of that project and make myself a honest to goodness electrolysis cell, especially now that I have learned a decent design for one.
Meandering back on-topic. This car would obviously well suited to convert into a plug-in also, since a fuel-cell car is just running on electricity anyways. Presumably it would use a bank of batteries to act as a ballast for the fuel cells. Just add more batteries, and make a charger unit. A plug-in self-refueling hydrogen car. Nifty.
Some years ago I actually dumped my ROMs from my Ebay Mac IIcx before I scrapped the thing. I cut off the ROM chips with a dremel tool and have them in my desk drawer even now. I have fooled around with the Basilisk ][ macintosh emulator using my ROM dump and I must say its pretty nifty. I actually used it to read a Mac CDROM in my PC and copy a datafile over to the hard drive.
I'd gladly install OSX on my PC if I could purchase it at a reasonable price. I've always admired Apple software, its simply a matter of economics in my case.
Then install Ghostscript and just run ps2pdf on the output file from the fake printer. True, you have to open a command shell and actually type a command in, so this would be beyond 90% of the people who use Office, but it always worked well for me.
I've been trying to find a new job for over a year now, and its bad. I'll probably be putting stickers on cans at Wal-Mart soon, with 10 years of engineering school under my belt and hundreds of high tech credits.
The last big place I worked, my engineering boss was a pinhead who must have cheated his way through school because he could barely run a calculator, yet he had a Penn State ME degree. He assumed I was just like him apparently, and when I wouldn't back up his bullshit thats when the trouble started. When things got tight I got cut and he's the one driving the gass-hog SUV while I'm on food stamps now.
It really doesn't pay to learn math and science, study cheating and stealing and sycophantic psychology instead because nobody in this country apparently earns an honest buck anymore. Sorry if I'm a bit cynical, but I earned my lousy B average and I still remember all that stuff, and I'm the one without the job.
Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis. Probably the best science fiction movie in history. That is an incredibly cool movie. I was lucky enough to see it a sci-fi film festival with a live piano player there performing the score. Definately a steam-tech wonder.
Jagged Alliance 3 and 3D are supposedly in the works.
Actually, I think all AC's blow out substantially more heat than they remove. The electricity you are putting into the unit is converted to heat and blown out the back along with whatever heat you manage to remove from the interior. That electricity isn't just disappearing, its being emitted as heat.
Yeah, it definately does. To get 1W of electricity you might have to put in 1.5W of mechanical power, the variance is a curve and there's typically a sweet spot where the efficiency is maximized for any particular alternator.
One horsepower is about 750W, so for a reduction of 1hp from your engine output you might get 500W of electricity which would be about 40 amps in a car.