There was an amusing scene in Mythbusters about this, where Jamie goes to replace the battery in a Dodge Stratus they purchased and has to take one of the wheels off in order to access it. Needless to say he was unimpressed; I think his quote was "You see, what happened here is some idiot designed this in a computer and didn't think."
What happened there was a special effects guy with no experience in designing products that had to last longer than film production shot his mouth off.
Putting the battery where it was had four benefits. First was that it lowered the car's center of gravity slightly by not putting the additional weight up high. Second was that it added some counter to the weight of the transmission, most of which was on the opposite side of the car and at about the same level. Third, it allowed for a much lower hoodline. Fourth, and most important, was that it got the battery out of the engine compartment, where there's no shortage of a battery's biggest enemy: heat.
That arrangement does actually work well. I bought a car on the LH platform (the Stratus was the smaller JA) in 1999 with the same arrangement and drove it daily through 12 years of hot summers and cold winters, all with the same battery that rolled off the assembly line with the rest of the car. It still started the car just fine, but while doing some other work before giving it to a relative, I threw in a new battery so the new owner wouldn't have to.
I'm not convinced that the high dollar helmets are any safer than the cheaper ones.
If you want more convincing, the UK government has a database of helmet ratings that's very enlightening. There are one- and two-star helmets in the same price ranges as the four- and five-star models. http://sharp.direct.gov.uk/
I mean you're looking at less than $100 in raw parts for GPS + Arduino + HD Camera + display controller/OSD. Not sure about the HUD part but I believe it's just a projection on a small piece of glass, probably also less than $100 in parts by itself not to mention alternative hardware implementations that might be cheaper. Add $300 for a decent helmet, wire it up and you're done.
Yep, and what you'll have when you finish is a kludged-up helmet that does nothing unless you manage to source the hard-to-obtain Arduino Motorcycle Helmet Edition that does all of the navigation, phone interface, etc. You're also assuming you'll get it completely right the first time. which you won't, because nobody does. Price in a few helmets and at least two sets of hardware and you're already into the same price as a finished AR1. Don't forget the value of your time to do all of the hardware integration and write all of that nifty software.
More fun: Your modifications will invalidate any safety certifications the helmet you started with, making it not legal for road use almost everywhere. As a free bonus, you'll get to ride around with a niggling question in the back of your head about whether or not the helmet will do its job properly during a crash.
Personally I think I would find the HUD hardware incredibly distracting. Not the HUD itself mind you, but the stalk that sticks up in front of your eye.
If the photos I've seen reflect what will be produced, it doesn't stick up any further than the breath guard, is in a location where vision is not all that important and isn't any larger than Legal Speeding's H.A.R.D., which is often installed in the same spot.
I think his point was more that if it breaks, there needs to be a way to disconect the rear wheel from the motor so the bike can be pushed around. I'd think that from a practical standpoint, you'd have to have that for everyday use anyway unless you can run it in reverse.
The range problem has vanished if your benchmark is bikes with tanks so small they have a range of about 150 km. I ride further than that before my first stop most days. The benchmarks for range are touring and sport-touring bikes with large tanks that are capable of 350-450 km between stops.
When an electric finishes the Iron Butt Rally, I'll say the range and charge time problems are licked.
More likely, you live in a place where there are surfaces behind the riders for the noise to reflect and bounce back in your direction.
Go to a wide open area sometime and have anything with an audible exhaust drive by you. You'll hear a lot more if it as heads away than when it's coming toward you.
...an electric bike that is faster and better performing than any gas bike could ever be...
I'm as excited about electrics as the next guy, but there's a fistful of gassers that will run rings around the current crop of electrics on performance measures alone and an armload if you factor range into it. That will change, but I'm not holding my breath for something that fits my needs (fast, comfortable and capable of 500-mile days without gaps in the middle) in the next 5-7 years.
The Livewire has marginally better torque- and power-to-weight ratios than HD's Sportster 883, which isn't a stellar performer by any measure. What it does have is full torque available from zero, and that makes it a good (but not fantastic) stoplight racer.
That's a red herring. Why would patients all of a sudden have to understand the ICDs? Will doctors start telling them they have severe cases of 681.02 instead of hangnails?
The insurance industry makes medical billing complex because there's a financial benefit in doing it. The ICDs are just a classification shorthand developed by the World Health Organization for statistical purposes. The insurance industry uses them for its own benefit, which is just fine; if there's a standard, it should be used.
What I tell people about hobby projects is that I tend to do them only if I'm not getting my software ya-yas out at work. Keep me busy with interesting work and almost 100% of my development energy will be yours.
That said, I do write a bit of software outside of work even when work is good. Those cases are the little things that pop up when I have a need I can't easily find something to satisfy.
Hee hee. I worked for Jack in the early 1980s when he had a teeny little company called Softaid. He had a very down-to-earth take on things, and I suppose that extended to today, he'd advocate picking the tools that make sense. The zealots seem to be the ones that adopt things blindly and hope they'll work, all while declaring those who don't adhere to the "one, true way" as apostates.
Google can comply, but if I put a copy of it up on my web server in the U.S. and refuse to remove it, how are the courts in Ireland going to force me to take them down if I have no interests there?
When you sign up for a Facebook account, you enter into a legally-binding contract that says you'll abide by the terms of service. The terms of service say you won't allow others access. Washington would, essentially, be making it legal for employers to ask employees to breach a contract with a third party, putting themselves at risk of being sued.
But you figure that the uptime is going to be identical between an internet based system and an internal system?...
Me? I don't figure anything. I do a cost-benefit analysis for the situation at hand. Then I use the results to make a decision about which way would be better for my business. There's a term for a CBA that doesn't take the potential for outages and the time to resolve them into account: "incomplete."
I can think of a half-dozen situations where it might be a better thing to put your business systems out in "the cloud" and another half-dozen where it would be better to keep them in-house. Being able to argue both sides of the argument is usually a good qualifier for participating in a debate.
...room full of 7 figure people twiddling their thumbs because the computers "aren't working", they want to know exactly WHY!
If you think for a minute the same situation doesn't crop up when your systems are in-house and your IT staff is trying like mad to figure out the problem, please think again. Your seven-figure people will still be twiddling their thumbs. If you've outsourced to someone else and you didn't write the contract so it gives you the uptime you need and people to yell at when you don't get it, you failed.
You need to stay in your jobs...
Thanks, but people who use exclamation points in the middle of sentences and make a lot of generalizations probably need to keep their career advice to themselves. I've already put in scads of time doing critical systems in shops where downtime can be measured in dollars or lives, so I already have a good appreciation for what it costs when things don't work and how to avoid those situations.
These are all problems that can be solved. 30 years ago, nobody ever figured the Internet would be able to sustain things like phone calls and streaming video, but it happened.
Point is, don't dismiss it because it's not practical right now. Somebody has to think about these things.
And like anything else, it all depends on how a cost-benefit analysis falls out. People making these decisions without doing their homework first are... well... stoopid.
The last statement is absolutely true. In-house systems have outages, too. Sometimes the cost of outages is more than made up for by not having to run a room with a raised floor.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an amusing scene in Mythbusters about this, where Jamie goes to replace the battery in a Dodge Stratus they purchased and has to take one of the wheels off in order to access it. Needless to say he was unimpressed; I think his quote was "You see, what happened here is some idiot designed this in a computer and didn't think."
What happened there was a special effects guy with no experience in designing products that had to last longer than film production shot his mouth off.
Putting the battery where it was had four benefits. First was that it lowered the car's center of gravity slightly by not putting the additional weight up high. Second was that it added some counter to the weight of the transmission, most of which was on the opposite side of the car and at about the same level. Third, it allowed for a much lower hoodline. Fourth, and most important, was that it got the battery out of the engine compartment, where there's no shortage of a battery's biggest enemy: heat.
That arrangement does actually work well. I bought a car on the LH platform (the Stratus was the smaller JA) in 1999 with the same arrangement and drove it daily through 12 years of hot summers and cold winters, all with the same battery that rolled off the assembly line with the rest of the car. It still started the car just fine, but while doing some other work before giving it to a relative, I threw in a new battery so the new owner wouldn't have to.
If they've already been alphabetized, it's easy.
It's no Chicken Chicken Chicken , but it'll do.
The Eastern Shore just got a lesson in why it's the butt of jokes made by the rest of the state.
I'm not convinced that the high dollar helmets are any safer than the cheaper ones.
If you want more convincing, the UK government has a database of helmet ratings that's very enlightening. There are one- and two-star helmets in the same price ranges as the four- and five-star models. http://sharp.direct.gov.uk/
I mean you're looking at less than $100 in raw parts for GPS + Arduino + HD Camera + display controller/OSD. Not sure about the HUD part but I believe it's just a projection on a small piece of glass, probably also less than $100 in parts by itself not to mention alternative hardware implementations that might be cheaper. Add $300 for a decent helmet, wire it up and you're done.
Yep, and what you'll have when you finish is a kludged-up helmet that does nothing unless you manage to source the hard-to-obtain Arduino Motorcycle Helmet Edition that does all of the navigation, phone interface, etc. You're also assuming you'll get it completely right the first time. which you won't, because nobody does. Price in a few helmets and at least two sets of hardware and you're already into the same price as a finished AR1. Don't forget the value of your time to do all of the hardware integration and write all of that nifty software.
More fun: Your modifications will invalidate any safety certifications the helmet you started with, making it not legal for road use almost everywhere. As a free bonus, you'll get to ride around with a niggling question in the back of your head about whether or not the helmet will do its job properly during a crash.
Personally I think I would find the HUD hardware incredibly distracting. Not the HUD itself mind you, but the stalk that sticks up in front of your eye.
If the photos I've seen reflect what will be produced, it doesn't stick up any further than the breath guard, is in a location where vision is not all that important and isn't any larger than Legal Speeding's H.A.R.D., which is often installed in the same spot.
Verizon has pointed that out. Multiple times:
http://publicpolicy.verizon.co...
http://publicpolicy.verizon.co...
http://publicpolicy.verizon.co...
The government develops tons of its own software.
What law says that everything has to be contracted out?
I think his point was more that if it breaks, there needs to be a way to disconect the rear wheel from the motor so the bike can be pushed around. I'd think that from a practical standpoint, you'd have to have that for everyday use anyway unless you can run it in reverse.
The range problem has vanished if your benchmark is bikes with tanks so small they have a range of about 150 km. I ride further than that before my first stop most days. The benchmarks for range are touring and sport-touring bikes with large tanks that are capable of 350-450 km between stops.
When an electric finishes the Iron Butt Rally, I'll say the range and charge time problems are licked.
More likely, you live in a place where there are surfaces behind the riders for the noise to reflect and bounce back in your direction.
Go to a wide open area sometime and have anything with an audible exhaust drive by you. You'll hear a lot more if it as heads away than when it's coming toward you.
...an electric bike that is faster and better performing than any gas bike could ever be...
I'm as excited about electrics as the next guy, but there's a fistful of gassers that will run rings around the current crop of electrics on performance measures alone and an armload if you factor range into it. That will change, but I'm not holding my breath for something that fits my needs (fast, comfortable and capable of 500-mile days without gaps in the middle) in the next 5-7 years.
The Livewire has marginally better torque- and power-to-weight ratios than HD's Sportster 883, which isn't a stellar performer by any measure. What it does have is full torque available from zero, and that makes it a good (but not fantastic) stoplight racer.
Want to take a wild guess at who's providing the underpinnings for that line?
That's a red herring. Why would patients all of a sudden have to understand the ICDs? Will doctors start telling them they have severe cases of 681.02 instead of hangnails?
The insurance industry makes medical billing complex because there's a financial benefit in doing it. The ICDs are just a classification shorthand developed by the World Health Organization for statistical purposes. The insurance industry uses them for its own benefit, which is just fine; if there's a standard, it should be used.
What I tell people about hobby projects is that I tend to do them only if I'm not getting my software ya-yas out at work. Keep me busy with interesting work and almost 100% of my development energy will be yours.
That said, I do write a bit of software outside of work even when work is good. Those cases are the little things that pop up when I have a need I can't easily find something to satisfy.
Which is, amusingly, exactly Tesla's business plan.
Google isn't bound by the Constitution.
Hee hee. I worked for Jack in the early 1980s when he had a teeny little company called Softaid. He had a very down-to-earth take on things, and I suppose that extended to today, he'd advocate picking the tools that make sense. The zealots seem to be the ones that adopt things blindly and hope they'll work, all while declaring those who don't adhere to the "one, true way" as apostates.
'Cept that the order is "worldwide."
Google can comply, but if I put a copy of it up on my web server in the U.S. and refuse to remove it, how are the courts in Ireland going to force me to take them down if I have no interests there?
When you sign up for a Facebook account, you enter into a legally-binding contract that says you'll abide by the terms of service. The terms of service say you won't allow others access. Washington would, essentially, be making it legal for employers to ask employees to breach a contract with a third party, putting themselves at risk of being sued.
Thanks, I'll pass.
But you figure that the uptime is going to be identical between an internet based system and an internal system? ...
Me? I don't figure anything. I do a cost-benefit analysis for the situation at hand. Then I use the results to make a decision about which way would be better for my business. There's a term for a CBA that doesn't take the potential for outages and the time to resolve them into account: "incomplete."
I can think of a half-dozen situations where it might be a better thing to put your business systems out in "the cloud" and another half-dozen where it would be better to keep them in-house. Being able to argue both sides of the argument is usually a good qualifier for participating in a debate.
...room full of 7 figure people twiddling their thumbs because the computers "aren't working", they want to know exactly WHY!
If you think for a minute the same situation doesn't crop up when your systems are in-house and your IT staff is trying like mad to figure out the problem, please think again. Your seven-figure people will still be twiddling their thumbs. If you've outsourced to someone else and you didn't write the contract so it gives you the uptime you need and people to yell at when you don't get it, you failed.
You need to stay in your jobs...
Thanks, but people who use exclamation points in the middle of sentences and make a lot of generalizations probably need to keep their career advice to themselves. I've already put in scads of time doing critical systems in shops where downtime can be measured in dollars or lives, so I already have a good appreciation for what it costs when things don't work and how to avoid those situations.
These are all problems that can be solved. 30 years ago, nobody ever figured the Internet would be able to sustain things like phone calls and streaming video, but it happened.
Point is, don't dismiss it because it's not practical right now. Somebody has to think about these things.
And like anything else, it all depends on how a cost-benefit analysis falls out. People making these decisions without doing their homework first are... well... stoopid.
The last statement is absolutely true. In-house systems have outages, too. Sometimes the cost of outages is more than made up for by not having to run a room with a raised floor.