The Tesla Model S does not have a CVT. It has a 1-speed transmission, basically only a gear reduction box (9.73:1) with no clutch. And yes, it performs quite well and the way I have it configured (and most owners do) there is strong regeneration when lifting off the gas pedal which behaves like low gear engine braking. In this mode my brake pedal gets very little use (only to slow from around 3-5MPH to a complete stop). No clutch is needed since the induction motor has very low drag when it is not energized unlike an internal combustion engine.
My Prius, on the other hand, does have a CVT. With a CVT there is no 1:1 relation between vehicle speed and engine speed. The Prius CVT also does not have a clutch per-say. The CVT is controlled by the ratio between two motors with one acting as a generator to shunt power to the other one and/or the battery.
Quick upgrade method from 12.2
on
OpenSUSE 12.3 Is Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Take a look at all repos you have zypper lr and remove all third party/OBS repos you no longer needs zypper rr Change all remaining repo URLs to the new version of the distribution (needs to be run as root) sed -i 's/12.2/12.3/g'/etc/zypp/repos.d/* If you are upgrading from 12.1 or older, add non-oss-update repo zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/update/12.3-non-oss/ repo-update-non-oss Refresh new repositories (you might be asked to accept new gpg key) zypper ref If you haven't removed third party/OBS repositories you may encounter some errors as these repositories may not exist yet or they may have different unguessable URL. It is always recommended to remove them and add their newer version after upgrade. Now execute the full distribution upgrade. It is strongly recommended that you run this inside GNU screen or tmux to protect the upgrade process in case anything should go wrong with the X session during the upgrade. Packages for both screen and tmux are available in the main openSUSE repositories. tmux is probably a safer bet, because for example if upgrading from 12.1 to 12.2, you would go from a version of GNU screen which uses FIFO pipes to a version which uses UNIX sockets, and GNU screen has a bug which breaks compatibility between these two approaches, which means that you cannot resume a screen session created in 12.1 using the version of screen from 12.2. zypper dup With the above command zypper will download all required packages and install them in heaps. To download all packages in advance, use: zypper dup --download "in-advance"
OpenSUSE 12.2 has been rock solid for me and I can't wait to move to 12.3. Of all the distributions I've tried OpenSUSE seems to have the best KDE support.
That's news to me. Tesla can't make them fast enough for the demand. In their last quarterly report they said that if no new orders came in that there are enough on the books now for the rest of the year, and that's without any advertizing other than their show rooms.
As a new owner of a Tesla model S all I can say is that it is an amazing car. The problem has been that most of the EVs in the past had very limited range or were otherwise serious compromises. Many were converting a conventional ICE body to an electric drive train. Tesla built the car from the ground up around an EV drive train and were able to leverage the advantages of it. I have a 416HP motor with 495 ft-lbs of torque the size of a large water melon hidden underneath my large rear trunk, a large interior and another trunk in the front. The fact that the battery is entirely underneath the car makes for a very low center of gravity so the car handles beautifully.
Right now their problem is supply. They're running at near full-capacity making 450 cars per week. They can't make them fast enough. Once they sell enough cars to improve their finances they'll be able to invest in increasing their production.
I recently got a Tesla model S. The added insurance cost to keep my old Prius is $100/year. I'm holding on to it for now for hauling my dog around, camping and other trips where my Tesla would be inconvenient. It remains to be seen if I will keep my Prius since I've only had the Tesla for a couple of weeks. Maintenance should be low on my Prius as long as I drive it once in a while, though I may need to look into a gas preservative. I already invested in a battery minder for it since the Prius will run down its 12v battery fairly quickly if it is not driven regularly.\
For most of my driving needs the Tesla works just fine though I definitely want to see some more Super Charger stations. I can drive down to LA without any issues, but there's no convenient way to drive north or to some other areas.
One thing is that I can charge at just about any RV park as well since the car came with adapters for NEMA 14-50 outlets and I also have adapters for 14-30, 6-50 and 10-30 adapters or if worse comes to worse a standard 120v outlet.
The thing is that if the reporter had waited a few more minutes at the supercharger there would not have been any problems. After he ran into range issues after the first time not charging long enough at a super charger you would think he would have learned, but he didn't. He intentionally undercharged again. If I'm in an unfamiliar vehicle, especially an electric vehicle, I make damned sure I have enough gas or charge before heading out.
The funny thing is that the weekend after that incident a bunch of Tesla owners recreated his trip, even stopping over night and nobody had any problem. Of course they also made sure that they got a full charge at the super charger stations.
While I haven't experenced any really cold temperatures I have noticed that my model S seems to hold the cabin temperature surprisingly well, much better than my Prius. That surprised me a lot considering that I also have a glass panoramic roof. The seat heaters also help so it's not that uncomfortable to lower the cabin temperature a bit to increase range.
BTW, Broder is the NYT token conservative columnest who has said a number of not so complimentary things about EV cars in the past, plus he used to report on the oil industry and doesn't have much experience with cars.
You need to read up on how heat pumps and air conditioners work. A plain heating element is 100% efficient in that all of the electrical energy used goes into generating heat. A heat pump is more efficient since most of the energy is used to pump heat from one location to another. A heat pump is basically an air conditioner run in reverse.
As a new Tesla owner I am happy to hear this. A couple weeks ago I got to see first hand how that money was spent when I toured the factory. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUgDcA1pZAM for a National Geographic program on the Tesla factory. The factory is highly automated and has one of the largest stamping machines in North America.
Tesla has the equivalent of a multi-billion dollar factory that they bought and built out for pennies on the dollar. They bought a lot of state-of-the-art equipment from other car manufacturers who were shuttering factories and bought the Fremont NUMI plant for a song from Toyota. While touring the factory they pointed out a large crane mounted to the ceiling of the factory. They said they normally sell for $100K each and they got ten of them for $67K. The one I saw was moving massive stamping templates around.
The loan money was well spent and they have executed their plan quite well. They are on track to deliver 20,000 cars this year, even if they do not get a single new order, and that's without any serious marketing campaign other than their show rooms. They have plenty of demand and seem to have worked out most of their manufacturing issues, many of which were supply chain related. Many of their suppliers did not believe the quantities Tesla had requested and were unable to meet the demand once manufacturing began in earnest. We finally have an innovative car company in the US who chooses to lead rather than follow the Japanese car manufacturers and can compete with the likes of BMW, Audi and Mercedes. They are also working towards building lower cost vehicles as battery prices continue to drop.
They are the polar opposite of Solyndra which was just down the road from them. Solyndra made sense when the cost of silicon was quite high but all the competition from China drove the cost of solar through the floor where there was no way they could compete. They spent a fortune building their factory in Fremont. I watched them build it day and night. There was even construction going on after midnight! (The Seagate sign just went on the former Solyndra buildings).
The cars move around the factory on autonomous robotic devices that follow magnetic lines in the floor so they can quickly reconfigure the factory or move things around. People move around the factory on bicycles, though I saw some electric and non-electric scooters as well.
Many things in the Tesla model S are revolutionary. The drive train and battery technology are quite different than what everyone else is doing. Most manufacturers are using synchronous motors and automotive grade batteries. The automotive grade batteries are very robust but much lower energy density. Tesla has managed to get the reliability using batteries that are much closer to laptop batteries. They can also replace the battery pack in under 10 minutes.
Tesla showed what can really be done by designing an electric car from the ground up. The battery is located entirely underneath the floor of the car and the drive train is quite small. The 416HP electric motor in my car is the size of a watermelon located underneath the large trunk. The inverter is also located there. The chargers are under the rear seats. There's also a sizable trunk in front of the car.
The interior is very roomy, able to easily seat 5 people. They don't need to make allowances for things like exhaust, a gas tank, a transmission and all the other things involved in a traditional car. The interface was also well thought out with the 17" touch screen (which runs Linux and I believe it is using the QT toolkit). The touch screen is simple with large buttons and is quite intuitive.
Just about everything is controlled by software. So far the software has worked very well though I have hit a few minor bugs. Since the car is 3G enabled Tesla can push out software updates any time without requiring a trip to the dealer (and you choose if and when to install them). They have been adding more
That reminds me of when I was working with an early revision of a new PCIe board. I double checked the auxiliary power connectors and found that they had used the wrong 8-pin connector. Instead of a PCIe power connector they used the motherboard power connector. The 8-pin PCIe power connector and 8-pin motherboard connectors are almost identical except the power and ground is swapped between the two and they're keyed slightly differently.It seems rather stupid to me. As far as I'm concerned they should have designed it such that the connectors and pinouts were the same.
This reminds me of when I was having a new furnace installed. The installer wiring up the thermostat was having a hell of a time because he was color blind (I helped him out there).
Looking at the pictures here though even a color blind person should be able to easily tell positive from negative on the battery terminals.
I have played with several touch screen interfaces on cars. I am most experienced with the one in my 2006 Prius. I have also played with them in the Fisker Karma and the Tesla Model S.
It depends on how the touch screen is implemented. The touch screen in my Prius is actually fairly well designed, with most of the important buttons on the edge of the screen. The distraction caused by it is fairly minimal. When playing with the Tesla model S I noticed that they did something similar. The buttons are also fairly large and generally around the outside edge and many of the controls can easily be assigned to the steering wheel.
I have seen other cars where the touch screen is unusable (i.e. the Fisker Karma). The touch screen on the Fisker Karma is horrible and creates a lot of distraction since the buttons are tiny, inconsistent and the screen is very hard to impossible to see during the day. In order to use it one must spend a lot more time looking at it and the buttons are hard to impossible to hit while driving since they are small and have to be hit exactly. It's an accident waiting to happen.
At least with my Prius and the Tesla there is also voice input as well, though it is somewhat limited in my Prius and Tesla's is still under development from what I understand. My Prius also has good steering wheel support for most common functions so I rarely need to access the touch screen for things like the radio and climate control.
Even the touch interface on the Navigation system on my Prius is generally well thought out. My biggest problem with the touch screen on my Prius is that there is sometimes noticeable lag. When I played with the Tesla there was no lag.
On the Tesla one can easily assign different tasks to the steering wheel with no more distraction than looking at the speedometer since the menus are placed to the sides of it. On the Tesla the navigation map is also displayed just to the left of the speedometer as well so one doesn't have to look at the main display.
As far as cloud support, users have already figured out the interface to use Tesla's cloud services in order to access the car, including downloading real-time data. Users have also started creating web based applications for the Tesla. It also looks like Tesla is using the QT toolkit for their touch screen if the web browser identifier string is any indication.
I have been using an Android app called Locale which was designed with just that in mind. It allows me to change my phone's configuration based on location, time of day and a bunch of other criteria. For example, it can change my wallpaper and ringtone when I'm at work, mute notifications at night, etc. I have been using this app for years.
It was a combination of both. I'm glad I don't work there anymore... they've had a lot of layoffs since then. What pissed me off the most is that they were not up front about that. All of the other companies I've worked for had sane policies.
I ran into this too when I went to work for a large networking company in Silicon Valley (competitor to Cisco). Anyway, after I joined I learned that they combined their sick leave and vacation pay and as it was the vacation was not all that generous. Of course the first thing that happens is I get the cold from hell. Next I find out that they have mandatory vacation days which were at odds with some trips I had planned and paid for long before I started working there (and told them about up front). Needless to say, I was happy to leave there over that and numerous other bonehead policies. They mandated that everyone take the week off of the 4th of July (3 days of vacation wasted) as well as the week of Labor Day (4 more days of vacation wasted).
Many other large companies also do not offer sick leave, even food chains like Red Lobster and Olive Garden.
I agree. I had the misfortune of having to work with a Sun computer as my desktop PC. I helped port KDE to Solaris in order to have something useable (I wrote the Solaris ARTS support). A bunch of my coworkers also switched from CDE to KDE on Solaris. Window management on CDE was unusable, especially if a lot of console sessions were opened.
I have been using my BD-RW drive, a LG HL-DT-ST drive without any problems for ripping my CDs to FLAC. I have also used it to successfully write BDs.
-Aaron
cdparanoia -A cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)
Using cdda library version: 10.2 Using paranoia library version: 10.2 Checking/dev/cdrom for cdrom...
Testing/dev/cdrom for SCSI/MMC interface
SG_IO device:/dev/sr0
CDROM model sensed sensed: HL-DT-ST BD-RE BH08LS20 1.00
Checking for SCSI emulation...
Drive is ATAPI (using SG_IO host adaptor emulation)
Checking for MMC style command set...
Drive is MMC style
DMA scatter/gather table entries: 1
table entry size: 524288 bytes
maximum theoretical transfer: 222 sectors
Setting default read size to 27 sectors (63504 bytes).
Verifying CDDA command set...
Expected command set reads OK.
Attempting to set cdrom to full speed...
drive returned OK.
I see a lot of positions open for people with years of experience in various technologies and a 20 year old isn't going to have that. I'm in my 40s and am contacted almost weekly about open positions both at startups and established companies. Experience is everything, that, and networking among former colleagues. At my company we have a number of positions open. We don't care much about age, we care about experience and skill. A programmer who has been around the block a few times will tend to write better more maintainable code. We've been looking for another experienced toolchain engineer (GCC, etc.) for some time now, for example, but they're hard to come by.
I'm sure that they can easily measure at the IP layer. In the BRAS I designed I used the length of the IP packet since it was the most convenient value for me to use though for downstream traffic I provided multiple counters based on what information I had available (entire packet with LLC/SNAP and IP packet size). I'm sure it varies by vendor though. When I designed the firmware I always tried to make it work best for the users, for example when managing buffers I decreased the probability of dropping small packets (i.e. TCP ACK) rather than large packets so that downloaded traffic wouldn't be affected so much by uploaded traffic. Sadly I had to remove that functionality later when we had to switch to a different buffer management scheme that incorporated single and dual rate three color marking based on policing results. There's some nice things that can be done with traffic management if only the equipment were more intelligent that would make life a lot nicer for the users.
While they may be counting ATM cell usage I doubt it. DSL can use several different encapsulations over ATM. The most common one is a LLC/SNAP header in front of the Ethernet header which adds about 10 bytes per packet. If they're counting cells then the overhead might be higher since the last cell contains an 8-byte trailer containing the packet length and a CRC. Data is broken down into 48 byte cells and if there's less than 8 bytes left in the last cell then another cell is added. It could be even worse if they're using PPPoE which add an additional 8 bytes to each packet, but from my understanding PPPoE is thankfully dying if not dead.
I wrote the data forwarding engine of a BRAS (broadband remote access server) a number of years ago that could terminate tens of thousands of DSL connections. They could be counting cell usage, AAL5 payload usage (ATM frame including LLC/SNAP headers), Ethernet frame usage or IP payload usage.
California did something right about this for a change. Thanks to Proposition 14, the top two vote getters in the primary election end up in the main election and the electorate can vote for any candidate, regardless of party affiliation. This proposition was unpopular with both the democrat and republican parties but it passed.
On top of that, thanks to propositions 11 and 20, the districts were created by a citizen commission of 14 non-political people to eliminate the gerrymandering that had taken place before. The commission was made up of 5 republicans, 5 democrats and 4 independent voters. 8 members were chosen at random from 31,000 applicants and the rest were chosen by those 8. A district had to be agreed to by 3 democrats, 3 republicans and 2 independent voters. From everything I have heard, the commission worked hard to do things right, taking many data points into account so that the various groups were fairly represented. Neither party was happy with the commission, since many formerly "safe" districts were no longer safe.
The results of this in this election were huge. Republicans lost, big time. In fact, it is likely that after a special election in March that California may have enough democrats to override the 2/3 majority. What these propositions did is force elected officials to cater to the center.
In my case I had my choice of two democratic candidates since the republican candidate was eliminated in the primary. We had an extremely liberal member who was just replaced by a more moderate democrat. As much as I liked the old member, it was time to replace him (he'd been in the house about 40 years). I liked him since he got copyright and voted against the new copyright laws that they tried to push. He answered my letters to him about copyright and clearly got it, but in other areas he was having more and more senior moments (he's about 80 years old). He couldn't tell the difference between Tesla and Solyndra, for example, and he was frequently absent from voting. He was also a bit too liberal in some ways.
Except Tesla doesn't have dealerships that sell cars. To buy a Tesla you order it at their web site where you order exactly what features you want then they custom build it for you. They have the show rooms, but the show rooms don't do sales.
As a consumer I really like it. When I bought my Prius I could not get the one I wanted (I got my 3rd choice in color) because I was limited to what the dealer received. 90% of the cars they got were white and I didn't want white. I ended up having to wait 5 months until they got even my 3rd choice, and that was after going through multiple dealerships.
Same here. I helped get KDE 1.2 running on Solaris in order to replace their horrible CDE desktop (I added Solaris support to ARTS and fixed numerous issues). I stayed with KDE 3.x for quite a while until KDE 4.x was mature though.
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The Tesla Model S does not have a CVT. It has a 1-speed transmission, basically only a gear reduction box (9.73:1) with no clutch. And yes, it performs quite well and the way I have it configured (and most owners do) there is strong regeneration when lifting off the gas pedal which behaves like low gear engine braking. In this mode my brake pedal gets very little use (only to slow from around 3-5MPH to a complete stop). No clutch is needed since the induction motor has very low drag when it is not energized unlike an internal combustion engine.
My Prius, on the other hand, does have a CVT. With a CVT there is no 1:1 relation between vehicle speed and engine speed. The Prius CVT also does not have a clutch per-say. The CVT is controlled by the ratio between two motors with one acting as a generator to shunt power to the other one and/or the battery.
From https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade :
Take a look at all repos you have /etc/zypp/repos.d/*
zypper lr
and remove all third party/OBS repos you no longer needs
zypper rr
Change all remaining repo URLs to the new version of the distribution (needs to be run as root)
sed -i 's/12.2/12.3/g'
If you are upgrading from 12.1 or older, add non-oss-update repo
zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/update/12.3-non-oss/ repo-update-non-oss
Refresh new repositories (you might be asked to accept new gpg key)
zypper ref
If you haven't removed third party/OBS repositories you may encounter some errors as these repositories may not exist yet or they may have different unguessable URL. It is always recommended to remove them and add their newer version after upgrade.
Now execute the full distribution upgrade. It is strongly recommended that you run this inside GNU screen or tmux to protect the upgrade process in case anything should go wrong with the X session during the upgrade. Packages for both screen and tmux are available in the main openSUSE repositories. tmux is probably a safer bet, because for example if upgrading from 12.1 to 12.2, you would go from a version of GNU screen which uses FIFO pipes to a version which uses UNIX sockets, and GNU screen has a bug which breaks compatibility between these two approaches, which means that you cannot resume a screen session created in 12.1 using the version of screen from 12.2.
zypper dup
With the above command zypper will download all required packages and install them in heaps. To download all packages in advance, use:
zypper dup --download "in-advance"
OpenSUSE 12.2 has been rock solid for me and I can't wait to move to 12.3. Of all the distributions I've tried OpenSUSE seems to have the best KDE support.
It's rather difficult to do that when many of your warheads are in submarines hiding at the bottom of the ocean.
That's news to me. Tesla can't make them fast enough for the demand. In their last quarterly report they said that if no new orders came in that there are enough on the books now for the rest of the year, and that's without any advertizing other than their show rooms.
As a new owner of a Tesla model S all I can say is that it is an amazing car. The problem has been that most of the EVs in the past had very limited range or were otherwise serious compromises. Many were converting a conventional ICE body to an electric drive train. Tesla built the car from the ground up around an EV drive train and were able to leverage the advantages of it. I have a 416HP motor with 495 ft-lbs of torque the size of a large water melon hidden underneath my large rear trunk, a large interior and another trunk in the front. The fact that the battery is entirely underneath the car makes for a very low center of gravity so the car handles beautifully.
Right now their problem is supply. They're running at near full-capacity making 450 cars per week. They can't make them fast enough. Once they sell enough cars to improve their finances they'll be able to invest in increasing their production.
I recently got a Tesla model S. The added insurance cost to keep my old Prius is $100/year. I'm holding on to it for now for hauling my dog around, camping and other trips where my Tesla would be inconvenient. It remains to be seen if I will keep my Prius since I've only had the Tesla for a couple of weeks. Maintenance should be low on my Prius as long as I drive it once in a while, though I may need to look into a gas preservative. I already invested in a battery minder for it since the Prius will run down its 12v battery fairly quickly if it is not driven regularly.\
For most of my driving needs the Tesla works just fine though I definitely want to see some more Super Charger stations. I can drive down to LA without any issues, but there's no convenient way to drive north or to some other areas.
One thing is that I can charge at just about any RV park as well since the car came with adapters for NEMA 14-50 outlets and I also have adapters for 14-30, 6-50 and 10-30 adapters or if worse comes to worse a standard 120v outlet.
The thing is that if the reporter had waited a few more minutes at the supercharger there would not have been any problems. After he ran into range issues after the first time not charging long enough at a super charger you would think he would have learned, but he didn't. He intentionally undercharged again. If I'm in an unfamiliar vehicle, especially an electric vehicle, I make damned sure I have enough gas or charge before heading out.
The funny thing is that the weekend after that incident a bunch of Tesla owners recreated his trip, even stopping over night and nobody had any problem. Of course they also made sure that they got a full charge at the super charger stations.
While I haven't experenced any really cold temperatures I have noticed that my model S seems to hold the cabin temperature surprisingly well, much better than my Prius. That surprised me a lot considering that I also have a glass panoramic roof. The seat heaters also help so it's not that uncomfortable to lower the cabin temperature a bit to increase range.
BTW, Broder is the NYT token conservative columnest who has said a number of not so complimentary things about EV cars in the past, plus he used to report on the oil industry and doesn't have much experience with cars.
-Aaron
You need to read up on how heat pumps and air conditioners work. A plain heating element is 100% efficient in that all of the electrical energy used goes into generating heat. A heat pump is more efficient since most of the energy is used to pump heat from one location to another. A heat pump is basically an air conditioner run in reverse.
As a new Tesla owner I am happy to hear this. A couple weeks ago I got to see first hand how that money was spent when I toured the factory. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUgDcA1pZAM for a National Geographic program on the Tesla factory. The factory is highly automated and has one of the largest stamping machines in North America.
Tesla has the equivalent of a multi-billion dollar factory that they bought and built out for pennies on the dollar. They bought a lot of state-of-the-art equipment from other car manufacturers who were shuttering factories and bought the Fremont NUMI plant for a song from Toyota. While touring the factory they pointed out a large crane mounted to the ceiling of the factory. They said they normally sell for $100K each and they got ten of them for $67K. The one I saw was moving massive stamping templates around.
The loan money was well spent and they have executed their plan quite well. They are on track to deliver 20,000 cars this year, even if they do not get a single new order, and that's without any serious marketing campaign other than their show rooms. They have plenty of demand and seem to have worked out most of their manufacturing issues, many of which were supply chain related. Many of their suppliers did not believe the quantities Tesla had requested and were unable to meet the demand once manufacturing began in earnest. We finally have an innovative car company in the US who chooses to lead rather than follow the Japanese car manufacturers and can compete with the likes of BMW, Audi and Mercedes. They are also working towards building lower cost vehicles as battery prices continue to drop.
They are the polar opposite of Solyndra which was just down the road from them. Solyndra made sense when the cost of silicon was quite high but all the competition from China drove the cost of solar through the floor where there was no way they could compete. They spent a fortune building their factory in Fremont. I watched them build it day and night. There was even construction going on after midnight! (The Seagate sign just went on the former Solyndra buildings).
The cars move around the factory on autonomous robotic devices that follow magnetic lines in the floor so they can quickly reconfigure the factory or move things around. People move around the factory on bicycles, though I saw some electric and non-electric scooters as well.
Many things in the Tesla model S are revolutionary. The drive train and battery technology are quite different than what everyone else is doing. Most manufacturers are using synchronous motors and automotive grade batteries. The automotive grade batteries are very robust but much lower energy density. Tesla has managed to get the reliability using batteries that are much closer to laptop batteries. They can also replace the battery pack in under 10 minutes.
Tesla showed what can really be done by designing an electric car from the ground up. The battery is located entirely underneath the floor of the car and the drive train is quite small. The 416HP electric motor in my car is the size of a watermelon located underneath the large trunk. The inverter is also located there. The chargers are under the rear seats. There's also a sizable trunk in front of the car.
The interior is very roomy, able to easily seat 5 people. They don't need to make allowances for things like exhaust, a gas tank, a transmission and all the other things involved in a traditional car. The interface was also well thought out with the 17" touch screen (which runs Linux and I believe it is using the QT toolkit). The touch screen is simple with large buttons and is quite intuitive.
Just about everything is controlled by software. So far the software has worked very well though I have hit a few minor bugs. Since the car is 3G enabled Tesla can push out software updates any time without requiring a trip to the dealer (and you choose if and when to install them). They have been adding more
That reminds me of when I was working with an early revision of a new PCIe board. I double checked the auxiliary power connectors and found that they had used the wrong 8-pin connector. Instead of a PCIe power connector they used the motherboard power connector. The 8-pin PCIe power connector and 8-pin motherboard connectors are almost identical except the power and ground is swapped between the two and they're keyed slightly differently.It seems rather stupid to me. As far as I'm concerned they should have designed it such that the connectors and pinouts were the same.
This reminds me of when I was having a new furnace installed. The installer wiring up the thermostat was having a hell of a time because he was color blind (I helped him out there).
Looking at the pictures here though even a color blind person should be able to easily tell positive from negative on the battery terminals.
I have played with several touch screen interfaces on cars. I am most experienced with the one in my 2006 Prius. I have also played with them in the Fisker Karma and the Tesla Model S.
It depends on how the touch screen is implemented. The touch screen in my Prius is actually fairly well designed, with most of the important buttons on the edge of the screen. The distraction caused by it is fairly minimal. When playing with the Tesla model S I noticed that they did something similar. The buttons are also fairly large and generally around the outside edge and many of the controls can easily be assigned to the steering wheel.
I have seen other cars where the touch screen is unusable (i.e. the Fisker Karma). The touch screen on the Fisker Karma is horrible and creates a lot of distraction since the buttons are tiny, inconsistent and the screen is very hard to impossible to see during the day. In order to use it one must spend a lot more time looking at it and the buttons are hard to impossible to hit while driving since they are small and have to be hit exactly. It's an accident waiting to happen.
At least with my Prius and the Tesla there is also voice input as well, though it is somewhat limited in my Prius and Tesla's is still under development from what I understand. My Prius also has good steering wheel support for most common functions so I rarely need to access the touch screen for things like the radio and climate control.
Even the touch interface on the Navigation system on my Prius is generally well thought out. My biggest problem with the touch screen on my Prius is that there is sometimes noticeable lag. When I played with the Tesla there was no lag.
On the Tesla one can easily assign different tasks to the steering wheel with no more distraction than looking at the speedometer since the menus are placed to the sides of it. On the Tesla the navigation map is also displayed just to the left of the speedometer as well so one doesn't have to look at the main display.
As far as cloud support, users have already figured out the interface to use Tesla's cloud services in order to access the car, including downloading real-time data. Users have also started creating web based applications for the Tesla. It also looks like Tesla is using the QT toolkit for their touch screen if the web browser identifier string is any indication.
I agree with you in this case, especially since the company that makes the batteries is Japanese. It's all about saving face.
I have been using an Android app called Locale which was designed with just that in mind. It allows me to change my phone's configuration based on location, time of day and a bunch of other criteria. For example, it can change my wallpaper and ringtone when I'm at work, mute notifications at night, etc. I have been using this app for years.
It was a combination of both. I'm glad I don't work there anymore... they've had a lot of layoffs since then. What pissed me off the most is that they were not up front about that. All of the other companies I've worked for had sane policies.
I ran into this too when I went to work for a large networking company in Silicon Valley (competitor to Cisco). Anyway, after I joined I learned that they combined their sick leave and vacation pay and as it was the vacation was not all that generous. Of course the first thing that happens is I get the cold from hell. Next I find out that they have mandatory vacation days which were at odds with some trips I had planned and paid for long before I started working there (and told them about up front). Needless to say, I was happy to leave there over that and numerous other bonehead policies. They mandated that everyone take the week off of the 4th of July (3 days of vacation wasted) as well as the week of Labor Day (4 more days of vacation wasted).
Many other large companies also do not offer sick leave, even food chains like Red Lobster and Olive Garden.
I agree. I had the misfortune of having to work with a Sun computer as my desktop PC. I helped port KDE to Solaris in order to have something useable (I wrote the Solaris ARTS support). A bunch of my coworkers also switched from CDE to KDE on Solaris. Window management on CDE was unusable, especially if a lot of console sessions were opened.
As you said, France is also notorious for this sort of thing which surprises a lot of people.
I have been using my BD-RW drive, a LG HL-DT-ST drive without any problems for ripping my CDs to FLAC. I have also used it to successfully write BDs.
-Aaron
cdparanoia -A
cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)
Using cdda library version: 10.2 /dev/cdrom for cdrom... /dev/cdrom for SCSI/MMC interface /dev/sr0
Using paranoia library version: 10.2
Checking
Testing
SG_IO device:
CDROM model sensed sensed: HL-DT-ST BD-RE BH08LS20 1.00
Checking for SCSI emulation...
Drive is ATAPI (using SG_IO host adaptor emulation)
Checking for MMC style command set...
Drive is MMC style
DMA scatter/gather table entries: 1
table entry size: 524288 bytes
maximum theoretical transfer: 222 sectors
Setting default read size to 27 sectors (63504 bytes).
Verifying CDDA command set...
Expected command set reads OK.
Attempting to set cdrom to full speed...
drive returned OK.
=================== Checking drive cache/timing behavior ===================
Seek/read timing:
[29:45.68]: 75ms seek, 1.92ms/sec read [7.0x]
[20:00.00]: 87ms seek, 2.17ms/sec read [6.1x]
[10:00.00]: 86ms seek, 2.59ms/sec read [5.1x]
[00:00.00]: 126ms seek, 3.36ms/sec read [4.0x]
Analyzing cache behavior...
Approximate random access cache size: 32 sector(s)
Drive cache tests as contiguous
Drive readahead past read cursor: 218 sector(s)
Cache tail cursor tied to read cursor
Cache tail granularity: 1 sector(s)
Cache read speed: 0.09ms/sector [154x]
Access speed after backseek: 3.57ms/sector [3x]
Backseek flushes the cache as expected
Drive tests OK with Paranoia.
I see a lot of positions open for people with years of experience in various technologies and a 20 year old isn't going to have that. I'm in my 40s and am contacted almost weekly about open positions both at startups and established companies. Experience is everything, that, and networking among former colleagues. At my company we have a number of positions open. We don't care much about age, we care about experience and skill. A programmer who has been around the block a few times will tend to write better more maintainable code. We've been looking for another experienced toolchain engineer (GCC, etc.) for some time now, for example, but they're hard to come by.
I'm sure that they can easily measure at the IP layer. In the BRAS I designed I used the length of the IP packet since it was the most convenient value for me to use though for downstream traffic I provided multiple counters based on what information I had available (entire packet with LLC/SNAP and IP packet size). I'm sure it varies by vendor though. When I designed the firmware I always tried to make it work best for the users, for example when managing buffers I decreased the probability of dropping small packets (i.e. TCP ACK) rather than large packets so that downloaded traffic wouldn't be affected so much by uploaded traffic. Sadly I had to remove that functionality later when we had to switch to a different buffer management scheme that incorporated single and dual rate three color marking based on policing results. There's some nice things that can be done with traffic management if only the equipment were more intelligent that would make life a lot nicer for the users.
While they may be counting ATM cell usage I doubt it. DSL can use several different encapsulations over ATM. The most common one is a LLC/SNAP header in front of the Ethernet header which adds about 10 bytes per packet. If they're counting cells then the overhead might be higher since the last cell contains an 8-byte trailer containing the packet length and a CRC. Data is broken down into 48 byte cells and if there's less than 8 bytes left in the last cell then another cell is added. It could be even worse if they're using PPPoE which add an additional 8 bytes to each packet, but from my understanding PPPoE is thankfully dying if not dead.
I wrote the data forwarding engine of a BRAS (broadband remote access server) a number of years ago that could terminate tens of thousands of DSL connections. They could be counting cell usage, AAL5 payload usage (ATM frame including LLC/SNAP headers), Ethernet frame usage or IP payload usage.
California did something right about this for a change. Thanks to Proposition 14, the top two vote getters in the primary election end up in the main election and the electorate can vote for any candidate, regardless of party affiliation. This proposition was unpopular with both the democrat and republican parties but it passed.
On top of that, thanks to propositions 11 and 20, the districts were created by a citizen commission of 14 non-political people to eliminate the gerrymandering that had taken place before. The commission was made up of 5 republicans, 5 democrats and 4 independent voters. 8 members were chosen at random from 31,000 applicants and the rest were chosen by those 8. A district had to be agreed to by 3 democrats, 3 republicans and 2 independent voters. From everything I have heard, the commission worked hard to do things right, taking many data points into account so that the various groups were fairly represented. Neither party was happy with the commission, since many formerly "safe" districts were no longer safe.
The results of this in this election were huge. Republicans lost, big time. In fact, it is likely that after a special election in March that California may have enough democrats to override the 2/3 majority. What these propositions did is force elected officials to cater to the center.
In my case I had my choice of two democratic candidates since the republican candidate was eliminated in the primary. We had an extremely liberal member who was just replaced by a more moderate democrat. As much as I liked the old member, it was time to replace him (he'd been in the house about 40 years). I liked him since he got copyright and voted against the new copyright laws that they tried to push. He answered my letters to him about copyright and clearly got it, but in other areas he was having more and more senior moments (he's about 80 years old). He couldn't tell the difference between Tesla and Solyndra, for example, and he was frequently absent from voting. He was also a bit too liberal in some ways.
Except Tesla doesn't have dealerships that sell cars. To buy a Tesla you order it at their web site where you order exactly what features you want then they custom build it for you. They have the show rooms, but the show rooms don't do sales.
As a consumer I really like it. When I bought my Prius I could not get the one I wanted (I got my 3rd choice in color) because I was limited to what the dealer received. 90% of the cars they got were white and I didn't want white. I ended up having to wait 5 months until they got even my 3rd choice, and that was after going through multiple dealerships.
Same here. I helped get KDE 1.2 running on Solaris in order to replace their horrible CDE desktop (I added Solaris support to ARTS and fixed numerous issues). I stayed with KDE 3.x for quite a while until KDE 4.x was mature though.