Concept cars are much more than "plastic shells filled with gadgets." Besides the notable ones that have made it straight to the market with little or no change (eg., the original Dodge Viper, the New Beetle, the Honda S2000, the BMW Z3 and Z8, the Plymouth/Chrystler Prowler, the P.T. Cruiser, and likely the upcoming VW Microbus, just to name a few), concept cars are meant to be a test bed for manufacturers various technologies.
Fuel injection, aluminum engine blocks, ABS, power steering, mobile versions of FM radio, computerized engine controls, etc etc etc - all of these and so many more things that are common place in every new car we would ever drive today had their debuts in show cars - many which never saw the light of day as presented at the shows.
Of course, there doesn't seem to be any of these great advances in this little Japanese concoction. So, I'll throw another viewpoint at it - it is a JAPANESE concoction. Toyota - a Japanese car company. Sony - a Japanese electronics company. They do things differently there. Do you have any idea how many models of cars Toyota produces that are sold in Japan but they wouldn't even dream of bringing to the U.S.? Many of them are this small and, *ahem*, "quircky" looking. Also, remember that the "emotion" technology of this car is based on the Sony robotic dog which, albeit available in the U.S., actually sells quite well in Japan. ANOTHER thing to remember is that if any youths of the world are more into gadgets than Americans, it'd be Japanese. I wouldn't be surprised if an iteration of this car actually made it to their market within 3 or 4 years.
Of course we'll never see this box here... but with Sony's blessing and after testmarketing in Japan, Toyota could just as easily slap this stuff on the next generation American Corolla (muched more youth oriented) or the Echo for us Americans.
As for these features not being of practical value, that's a moot point - anything that's marketable will go to market, practical or not.
Once again, the Slashdot mentality of American-centric views rears it's non-attractive head.
Then in your world, you're a cold person not being even remotely attached to a mere machine that saved your life. Also, with the robot in the trash down the airlock, your dear little girl would've been sucked into space right behind him as he wouldn't have still been on the ship to save her.
Granted, comparing this remedial car to an everything-but-complete-free-will-artificial-consc iousness such as Bishop is completely off base. This car (probably) won't save anyone's life by turning on soothing music and blowing cold air.
Whilst I agree with the sentiment, I don't think that's quite pheasible yet.
In my opinion, give the ISS a few more years - let's at least finish the damn thing first! - and after that, I think we really should establish a permanent moonbase (of the international variety). It would be much less expensive than Mars, less of a risk for those involved, and would much more readily open the paths for space tourism. Look at it as a Mars dry-run to work out (or at least discover) the bugs we can't possibly dream of.
Actually, they seem to be attacking Taliban militia targets - not suspected terrorist cells. How are the other Islamic nations going to respond to an apparent attack on an Islamic government? This is a dangerous tactic.
There is only one nation left in the entire world that even recognizes the Taliban as the "government" of Afganistan - Pakistan. Who has already pledged all support possible short of letting us launch ground troops from their border with Afganistan. So if any other Islamic nation got mad at us for attacking an Islamic "government", they would be highly hypocritical.
Alot of stuff has been said already comparing this to the other series, where it should fit in between TOS and TNG. I don't think anyone's brought this one up yet, something I noticed was funny. Transporters are very new technology and they dealt with that very well (the look on Archer's face after having been beamed up was pretty good), however, the transporter beam seemed to me to be way ahead of TOS in look and speed, much more in line with TNG+. It's good and well to make the transporter look "neat", but in the other series, at least they can make each species transporter look distinctly different - why not make this one look more "primitive"?
That, and, we've all seen transporter accidents before (a few fatalities, and plenty of close calls) - This one seemed to go off without a hitch! Strong sensor lock, no anomolies, etc.
Nitpicking, yes. Dissappointed, kinda. Tired and rambling? yeah
I guess I will continue to type the old fashioned way. Hell, I still prefer standard transmissions...
Standard tranmissions aren't old fashioned... they're fun, and give you a level of control you can't find in any traditional automatic. The newer BMW/Ferrari style SMG gearboxes may change that opinion in me, but I can't afford one yet so I'll stick with my clutch and 5-speed.
I've been thinking about this one all day... My thoughts upon waking up were "How tough a job will it be to fix the towers? 30 minutes later, I was thinking "Wow... I hope they put it an incredibly powerful, well crafted monument at the Tower 2 site...
Shortly after that, I was thinking there are 3 possibilities -
A - In a triumphent display, we rebuild both towers
B - The land, being incredibly valuable as it is, is developed in some other venture
C - My personal choice, something I think that would be even more important than the Oklahoma City Memorial, turning the entire Plaza into a memorial to this tragedy.
The WTC towers were built on what was then (late 60's-1970) a new type of steel construction that provided most of the support of the building via a "tube" of steel on the outside of the building (basically, most of the vertical supports are the perimeter girders)
Whilst the towers did have central columns for stability, they did not provide much vertical strength. The planes pierced this external "tube" of support on both sides of the building in Tower 1, and on THREE sides of the building in Tower 2 as the plane enter on one side and pierced a corner of the opposing side.
The buildings were designed in such a way that when the support on 2 or 3 sides was compromised, the weight of the upper sections of the building was being disproportionally supported on only 1 or 2 sides of the "tube" and the stress caused failure in the lower portions of the building, not the upper portions of the building which were actually still quite together.
Immediately after the collisions, the buildings were still stable, a true tribute to the design. It's the fires that wore away at more of the supports, putting more stress on the lower sections of the building causing them to fail.
Since tower 2 had 3 sides compromised, that's why it collapsed first even though it had been hit second.
Having firearms on a plane even for the crew's use would be absolutely insane. Suddenly, crafty hijackers wouldn't need to smuggle their own arms on board as they're already there. Also, no matter who fires the gun, a stray bullet on an airplane can be fatal for all on board.
While really, really good chess programs obviously do exist, I haven't heard of a single one that can play at a Grandmaster level in SPEED chess...
The advantage computers have in chess is pure computational power and the reason they do so well in real tournaments is because they have minutes to process for each move. Speed chess games, that take a maximum of 6 minutes (3 minutes for each player) are not the strong point of any respectible computer chess program.
Re:Think of the savings in $$$!
on
E-Paper Moves Closer
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
That wasn't his point. His point was the amount of disposable paper used at schools, offices, and other places of business where the paper is used temporarily with non-copyright material and then thrown away.
Imagine. 3rd grade classrooms that have 20 kids and do a "60 math problem in 60 seconds" worksheet once a week. Instead of throwing away 20 sheets a week, 20 "sheets" could be reused for an entire school year or beyond. Multiply those savings by every 3rd grade classroom and you're talking very little e-paper compared to lots and lots of tree-paper. And that's only one incredibly small application in only one grade...
The point was also on environmental benefits. True, books won't cost any less, but books aren't disposable and usually aren't just thrown away. The landfill/rain forest savings would, in deed be grand.
"Failure of high tech journalism", talking about various reasons and ways in which news sites just don't get it. Followed up by pictures of stuff exploding, deforming, and shattering. Way to show 'um their wrong, guys.:)
I know it's off topic from the underwater diesel, but superchargers are on many more cars than just new Mercedes motors. Turbochargers are out there, as well. One will never replace the other, no matter what the price difference gets to be. As you pointed out, some prefer superchargers because they don't have the lag characteristics of turbos, but there's also a preferences for turbos since superchargers are belt driven and therefore parasitic on the motor, whereas turbos merely use waste exhaust anyway. Also, there have been a number of successes in turbocharging systems that cut the lag to virtually zero, namely twin-turbo systems. The best such success that comes to mind being the twin-turbo Toyota Supra of the mid-90's, these systems utilize a small turbo that spins up faster with almost no lag, and a larger turbo which takes longer to spin up, but provides more power than the small turbo once it does.
I agree with your comment of surprise about the lack of gearheads (or at least wannabe gearheads) amongst slashdotters.;) Just to letcha all know who didn't already, engines are growing so dependant on computers that a common upgrade is to swap out the engine management chip with one that gives more aggressive valve timing and fuel mapping (at the expensive of fuel economy, of course) that can bump the output by 10 or 20% or more. On the note of turbochargers, turbocharged engines usually respond to these chip upgrades AMAZINGLY well since the computer can also control the boost characteristics of the turbo.
After all, whats the point of having an overclocked, Linux powered mp3 player in your ride if it's a stock Dodge Neon or Toyota Corolla that has so much potential under the hood that can be "overclocked" itself?:)
Mostly correct. Turbochargers do not recycle the exhaust gases like this diesel, but they do re-use it. Exhaust leaving the cylinders is redirected through a small turbine, which spins FAST (20-30k plus rpm ) that compresses fresh air into the intake valves. After spinning through the turbine, the exhaust gases leave as normal - polluting just as much as they would have otherwise.
This creates more power because the one thing engines need to create power effectively other than gasoline is air. Instead of air coming in through an unassisted intake, compressed air that is forced into the engine is much denser and helps the fuel-air mixture ignite with much more "oomph". Some engines that can't handle the extra oomph don't take to turbocharging well as the explosions in the cylinders are more powerful than they were designed to safely take. But SOME motors take to it incredibly well...
It doesn't neccesarily consume more fuel. In fact, the act of turbocharging in itself does not make the engine automatically consume more fuel - it makes it CAPABLE of consuming more fuel because now it will be able to ignite mixtures containing more fuel that it couldn't ignite before. This is only if you have a lead foot, however.:)
On the note of both turbocharging engines and non-pulluting diesel engines, many (if not most) newer diesel engines on the road are turbocharged to help make up for the power deficiencies diesels have as the engine gets above ~2500-3000rpm (depending on the motor, of course). I wonder if this diesel is also turbocharged, meaning the exhaust would spin through the turbo, THEN go get recycled into oxygen. Interesting thought...
My 2 cents is this - everyone up to know has been talking about Swing, which albeit much more complete and useful than AWT, has the problem of speed due to being written entirely in Java.
An AWT UI uses native peer components - it's basically Java wrappers around native GUI objects. Personally, I'm an advocated of using pure AWT in my applications and I've developed quite a library of my own AWT components which fill in some of the functionality that's missing.
A complex PURE AWT gui is no slower than a native gui, minus startup overhead.
Oh yeah, a comment on that, too. Restart your machine. Start up a Java app. It takes a few seconds. Quit it and restart it. It's almost as fast as native equivalent the second time around as the VM and related stuffs are already cached. If you do alot of Java devel and run alot of Java apps, the startup overhead is negligable at best.
I think he meant this, which is something I've thought about off and on since starting Java programming a year ago - What if a processor, and entire hardware platform, were developed whose "native code" was Java byte code.
That is, instead of JIT compiling, microcode translations, or other tricks, the CPU operated directly on Java byte code with no translation of any kind.
Disclaimer - what I'm about to say is in no way supporting DIVX or praising it or claiming it was a good idea, just for information's sake
The original DIVX, as you pointed out, required a Circuit City DIVX dvd player (which also played normal DVDs, of course). The idea was rent the disc, have a certain amount of time to watch it, then you don't have to return it because it will just stop working.
The player required access to a phone line. When you first put in the disc, it would check in with the DIVX headquarters, wherever that was, and mark the beginning of your rental period. Any subsequent viewings would require a check in with the hq again to make sure it was okay to watch. It was not a one use media, however, as after your original rental period was over you could pay for more rental time, or purchase the disc outright in which case the DIVX player would get "permanent clearence" from the HQ, I guess.
So the idea was actually pretty identical to this book idea except there was physical media involved.
Slashdot Mirror
** Disclamer: I am a disgruntled Dreamcast owner.
:)
Then why do you seem to have bitter feelings towards Sony? I'd be mad at Sega, myself.
There are other examples, but I can't name them right now.
A more complete list from my last post, I recalled a few more.
-Dodge Viper
-VW New Beetle
-Plymouth (Chrysler) Prowler
-Chrysler P.T. Cruiser
-Ford Thunderbird (old, AND new)
-Honda S2000
-Acura (Honda) NSX
-BMW Z3
-BMW Z8
-Pontiac Aztek (they're not all GOOD examples)
-New Mini Cooper
And I'm sure I've left a few modern ones off, and TONS of classics off.
Concept cars are much more than "plastic shells filled with gadgets." Besides the notable ones that have made it straight to the market with little or no change (eg., the original Dodge Viper, the New Beetle, the Honda S2000, the BMW Z3 and Z8, the Plymouth/Chrystler Prowler, the P.T. Cruiser, and likely the upcoming VW Microbus, just to name a few), concept cars are meant to be a test bed for manufacturers various technologies.
Fuel injection, aluminum engine blocks, ABS, power steering, mobile versions of FM radio, computerized engine controls, etc etc etc - all of these and so many more things that are common place in every new car we would ever drive today had their debuts in show cars - many which never saw the light of day as presented at the shows.
Of course, there doesn't seem to be any of these great advances in this little Japanese concoction. So, I'll throw another viewpoint at it - it is a JAPANESE concoction. Toyota - a Japanese car company. Sony - a Japanese electronics company. They do things differently there. Do you have any idea how many models of cars Toyota produces that are sold in Japan but they wouldn't even dream of bringing to the U.S.? Many of them are this small and, *ahem*, "quircky" looking. Also, remember that the "emotion" technology of this car is based on the Sony robotic dog which, albeit available in the U.S., actually sells quite well in Japan. ANOTHER thing to remember is that if any youths of the world are more into gadgets than Americans, it'd be Japanese. I wouldn't be surprised if an iteration of this car actually made it to their market within 3 or 4 years.
Of course we'll never see this box here... but with Sony's blessing and after testmarketing in Japan, Toyota could just as easily slap this stuff on the next generation American Corolla (muched more youth oriented) or the Echo for us Americans.
As for these features not being of practical value, that's a moot point - anything that's marketable will go to market, practical or not.
Once again, the Slashdot mentality of American-centric views rears it's non-attractive head.
Then in your world, you're a cold person not being even remotely attached to a mere machine that saved your life. Also, with the robot in the trash down the airlock, your dear little girl would've been sucked into space right behind him as he wouldn't have still been on the ship to save her.
c iousness such as Bishop is completely off base. This car (probably) won't save anyone's life by turning on soothing music and blowing cold air.
Granted, comparing this remedial car to an everything-but-complete-free-will-artificial-cons
Whilst I agree with the sentiment, I don't think that's quite pheasible yet.
In my opinion, give the ISS a few more years - let's at least finish the damn thing first! - and after that, I think we really should establish a permanent moonbase (of the international variety). It would be much less expensive than Mars, less of a risk for those involved, and would much more readily open the paths for space tourism. Look at it as a Mars dry-run to work out (or at least discover) the bugs we can't possibly dream of.
Moon first, Mars soon after.
Actually, they seem to be attacking Taliban militia targets - not suspected terrorist cells. How are the other Islamic nations going to respond to an apparent attack on an Islamic government? This is a dangerous tactic.
There is only one nation left in the entire world that even recognizes the Taliban as the "government" of Afganistan - Pakistan. Who has already pledged all support possible short of letting us launch ground troops from their border with Afganistan.
So if any other Islamic nation got mad at us for attacking an Islamic "government", they would be highly hypocritical.
kiddies, all of ya.
We all know that BARREN REALMS ELITE was the best BBS door ever written.
Period.
Negative - Solar Realms Elite was superior, by far.
:)
Alot of stuff has been said already comparing this to the other series, where it should fit in between TOS and TNG. I don't think anyone's brought this one up yet, something I noticed was funny.
Transporters are very new technology and they dealt with that very well (the look on Archer's face after having been beamed up was pretty good), however, the transporter beam seemed to me to be way ahead of TOS in look and speed, much more in line with TNG+. It's good and well to make the transporter look "neat", but in the other series, at least they can make each species transporter look distinctly different - why not make this one look more "primitive"?
That, and, we've all seen transporter accidents before (a few fatalities, and plenty of close calls) - This one seemed to go off without a hitch! Strong sensor lock, no anomolies, etc.
Nitpicking, yes. Dissappointed, kinda. Tired and rambling? yeah
I guess I will continue to type the old fashioned way. Hell, I still prefer standard transmissions...
...regular phones...
:)
Standard tranmissions aren't old fashioned... they're fun, and give you a level of control you can't find in any traditional automatic. The newer BMW/Ferrari style SMG gearboxes may change that opinion in me, but I can't afford one yet so I'll stick with my clutch and 5-speed.
Come on man, THAT'S old fashioned.
He meant rebooting to start running the new kernel.
Or that today is U.N. "International Day of Peace"?
I've been thinking about this one all day...
My thoughts upon waking up were "How tough a job will it be to fix the towers?
30 minutes later, I was thinking "Wow... I hope they put it an incredibly powerful, well crafted monument at the Tower 2 site...
Shortly after that, I was thinking there are 3 possibilities -
A - In a triumphent display, we rebuild both towers
B - The land, being incredibly valuable as it is, is developed in some other venture
C - My personal choice, something I think that would be even more important than the Oklahoma City Memorial, turning the entire Plaza into a memorial to this tragedy.
We will see...
>>Oh on one last note, remember the trailers for the Spiderman movie?
>>Will the scene with a bad-guy helicopter caught by a web between the WTC towers be kept for final theatrical release?
Yes, that's it, lets think about how this affects Hollywood...
The WTC towers were built on what was then (late 60's-1970) a new type of steel construction that provided most of the support of the building via a "tube" of steel on the outside of the building (basically, most of the vertical supports are the perimeter girders)
Whilst the towers did have central columns for stability, they did not provide much vertical strength. The planes pierced this external "tube" of support on both sides of the building in Tower 1, and on THREE sides of the building in Tower 2 as the plane enter on one side and pierced a corner of the opposing side.
The buildings were designed in such a way that when the support on 2 or 3 sides was compromised, the weight of the upper sections of the building was being disproportionally supported on only 1 or 2 sides of the "tube" and the stress caused failure in the lower portions of the building, not the upper portions of the building which were actually still quite together.
Immediately after the collisions, the buildings were still stable, a true tribute to the design. It's the fires that wore away at more of the supports, putting more stress on the lower sections of the building causing them to fail.
Since tower 2 had 3 sides compromised, that's why it collapsed first even though it had been hit second.
"Son of Timothy" = "Followers of Timothy McVeigh"
Having firearms on a plane even for the crew's use would be absolutely insane. Suddenly, crafty hijackers wouldn't need to smuggle their own arms on board as they're already there. Also, no matter who fires the gun, a stray bullet on an airplane can be fatal for all on board.
While really, really good chess programs obviously do exist, I haven't heard of a single one that can play at a Grandmaster level in SPEED chess...
The advantage computers have in chess is pure computational power and the reason they do so well in real tournaments is because they have minutes to process for each move. Speed chess games, that take a maximum of 6 minutes (3 minutes for each player) are not the strong point of any respectible computer chess program.
That wasn't his point. His point was the amount of disposable paper used at schools, offices, and other places of business where the paper is used temporarily with non-copyright material and then thrown away.
Imagine. 3rd grade classrooms that have 20 kids and do a "60 math problem in 60 seconds" worksheet once a week. Instead of throwing away 20 sheets a week, 20 "sheets" could be reused for an entire school year or beyond. Multiply those savings by every 3rd grade classroom and you're talking very little e-paper compared to lots and lots of tree-paper. And that's only one incredibly small application in only one grade...
The point was also on environmental benefits. True, books won't cost any less, but books aren't disposable and usually aren't just thrown away. The landfill/rain forest savings would, in deed be grand.
"Failure of high tech journalism", talking about various reasons and ways in which news sites just don't get it. Followed up by pictures of stuff exploding, deforming, and shattering. Way to show 'um their wrong, guys. :)
I know it's off topic from the underwater diesel, but superchargers are on many more cars than just new Mercedes motors. Turbochargers are out there, as well. One will never replace the other, no matter what the price difference gets to be. As you pointed out, some prefer superchargers because they don't have the lag characteristics of turbos, but there's also a preferences for turbos since superchargers are belt driven and therefore parasitic on the motor, whereas turbos merely use waste exhaust anyway.
;) Just to letcha all know who didn't already, engines are growing so dependant on computers that a common upgrade is to swap out the engine management chip with one that gives more aggressive valve timing and fuel mapping (at the expensive of fuel economy, of course) that can bump the output by 10 or 20% or more. On the note of turbochargers, turbocharged engines usually respond to these chip upgrades AMAZINGLY well since the computer can also control the boost characteristics of the turbo.
:)
Also, there have been a number of successes in turbocharging systems that cut the lag to virtually zero, namely twin-turbo systems. The best such success that comes to mind being the twin-turbo Toyota Supra of the mid-90's, these systems utilize a small turbo that spins up faster with almost no lag, and a larger turbo which takes longer to spin up, but provides more power than the small turbo once it does.
I agree with your comment of surprise about the lack of gearheads (or at least wannabe gearheads) amongst slashdotters.
After all, whats the point of having an overclocked, Linux powered mp3 player in your ride if it's a stock Dodge Neon or Toyota Corolla that has so much potential under the hood that can be "overclocked" itself?
Mostly correct. Turbochargers do not recycle the exhaust gases like this diesel, but they do re-use it. Exhaust leaving the cylinders is redirected through a small turbine, which spins FAST (20-30k plus rpm ) that compresses fresh air into the intake valves. After spinning through the turbine, the exhaust gases leave as normal - polluting just as much as they would have otherwise.
:)
This creates more power because the one thing engines need to create power effectively other than gasoline is air. Instead of air coming in through an unassisted intake, compressed air that is forced into the engine is much denser and helps the fuel-air mixture ignite with much more "oomph". Some engines that can't handle the extra oomph don't take to turbocharging well as the explosions in the cylinders are more powerful than they were designed to safely take. But SOME motors take to it incredibly well...
It doesn't neccesarily consume more fuel. In fact, the act of turbocharging in itself does not make the engine automatically consume more fuel - it makes it CAPABLE of consuming more fuel because now it will be able to ignite mixtures containing more fuel that it couldn't ignite before. This is only if you have a lead foot, however.
On the note of both turbocharging engines and non-pulluting diesel engines, many (if not most) newer diesel engines on the road are turbocharged to help make up for the power deficiencies diesels have as the engine gets above ~2500-3000rpm (depending on the motor, of course). I wonder if this diesel is also turbocharged, meaning the exhaust would spin through the turbo, THEN go get recycled into oxygen. Interesting thought...
Ummm... errr..... Opera on Win2k, no problems here
My 2 cents is this - everyone up to know has been talking about Swing, which albeit much more complete and useful than AWT, has the problem of speed due to being written entirely in Java.
An AWT UI uses native peer components - it's basically Java wrappers around native GUI objects. Personally, I'm an advocated of using pure AWT in my applications and I've developed quite a library of my own AWT components which fill in some of the functionality that's missing.
A complex PURE AWT gui is no slower than a native gui, minus startup overhead.
Oh yeah, a comment on that, too. Restart your machine. Start up a Java app. It takes a few seconds. Quit it and restart it. It's almost as fast as native equivalent the second time around as the VM and related stuffs are already cached. If you do alot of Java devel and run alot of Java apps, the startup overhead is negligable at best.
I think he meant this, which is something I've thought about off and on since starting Java programming a year ago - What if a processor, and entire hardware platform, were developed whose "native code" was Java byte code.
That is, instead of JIT compiling, microcode translations, or other tricks, the CPU operated directly on Java byte code with no translation of any kind.
Disclaimer - what I'm about to say is in no way supporting DIVX or praising it or claiming it was a good idea, just for information's sake
The original DIVX, as you pointed out, required a Circuit City DIVX dvd player (which also played normal DVDs, of course). The idea was rent the disc, have a certain amount of time to watch it, then you don't have to return it because it will just stop working.
The player required access to a phone line. When you first put in the disc, it would check in with the DIVX headquarters, wherever that was, and mark the beginning of your rental period. Any subsequent viewings would require a check in with the hq again to make sure it was okay to watch. It was not a one use media, however, as after your original rental period was over you could pay for more rental time, or purchase the disc outright in which case the DIVX player would get "permanent clearence" from the HQ, I guess.
So the idea was actually pretty identical to this book idea except there was physical media involved.