Well, there you have the same conflict that the consumer industry has. Let's take car manufacturers as an example: - Engineer/Designer: Let's make it as good as possible - Project Leader: Let's have the results as fast as possible - Controller: Let's make it as cheap as possible - Service Dept: Let's make it as serviceable as possible but with a limited maintenance period - Product Planning: Let's include all the cool features the competitor has - Marketing & Sales: Let's limit the expected life time, so that we can sell a replacement as soon as possible...
See? Everybody wants to make money, but in a different way - and has therefore everybody has different ideas about how the product is going to be. I'd say that in the Space Industry, this is valid too, at least the first 3 items... So, since missions are planned for a certain amount of time, I'd be surprised if the probes aren't designed for roughly the same time (times 1.5 times pi as safety margin or so)... Point is: Today we know more about life time of parts and are therefore able to optimise costs by reducing margins. Shortsighted project management then forces most of us, to do exactly this...
...not for being so dumb for getting caught but for stealing the things in the first place. As already being pointed out by others: - The Sceptics View: It's from the moon but looks like a rock, big deal... - The Business Man's View: Who can you sell that stuff to, without any certificate of authenticity? - The Geek View: These things belong to the scientific community, not high-bidding assholes (same goes for art)
Puhish them, why not giving them 6 months (probation?)? This is not the same as sneaking into school one night with a key that happens to open the door to the chemistry lab and stealing some magnesium and other cool stuff... ummm... That was only hypothetical and you can't prove anything!!
Maybe we will soon wittness an updated version of The Player War (I still hope for a new Browser War...). If M$ can find a hair in RN's soop, they will almost certainly pick it up and make a big deal out of it, either as patent infringement or as proof that they indeed do *not* have a monopoly. Either way, it's going to be ugly...
Good news is if the thing is waterproof and 100% Open Source... Maybe time to rejoice after all...
How is this obvious at all, or even correct? The people you spam have no knowledge of how many others get spammed by the same person/company.
100% Ack. Very often I get spam mails to an address like "info" and my address has been included in the "bcc:" field, preventing me from seeing how many others have got the same mail.
But in my case, the theory is valid: the more spam mails I get, the less likely I read them to determine if there is actually something useful among them. I just mark all mails, deselect my personal friends and hit "Delete"... Well if there was a reminder mail of my library... sorry guys...;-)
Well, than it's not research but simply engineering (aka applied research). Still, the technique itself is not pointless at all and the application may be obvious but imho not without any value. Example: Just because you spent millions of dollars to produce something that is worth 1 buck, it doesn't mean the thing is worthless. It's worth 1 buck! But one self is totally worthless as an entrepreneur...:-)
*...yea..yea..I know, there's no such thing as perfect random number generator, but those tests you hear about mathemiticians running on RNG algorithms are for the truly anal-retentive who are worried about patterns showing up after the 2^64th repetion or whatever. I doubt that even a relatively low-tech randum number algorithm would be taxed by this technique. Or the absence of patterns, false ones. A truely *random* generator should be able to reproduce any series (like 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9) for a while, but of course with a very high impropability.
What a pointless "technology". "Pointless" would be to argue with you about the meaning of higher education.
Let's think what the article actually says: IBM has employed a technique which lets them estimate the original distribution of data by adding a certain amount of random data with know distribution. That surely should be useful in other areas as well?! A Google seachr on Random Perturbation gives quite a long list with applications in wheather simulation, computer graphics, chaotic dynamical systems, etc. Still pointless? What about a search in the then NEC Research Index? Wowwww... Pointless, eh...?
Re:Hacking and Ethics are two different entities
on
L0pht And The FBI
·
· Score: 1
I agree totally. Just because someone has technical skills (umm sorry skillz), he doesn't have to be a decent and moral person. Or the other way around (which I happen to see at work quite often...). Aren't we used to hear this kind of behaviour from the cracker scene? Or the warez trading scene? Or maybe even the video tape pirating scene (is this one still out there?)?
Sure, if the feds are holding you by the balls, you have to be a very strong person to not try to cooperate. Now, in this case they seemed to have cooperated voluntarily, i.e. for the money. Well, that's the world we live in. Everybody sells everybody out for a few bucks. Depressing, but we better get used to it.
Re:Heres the entire thing if it *disapears* (sorry
on
L0pht And The FBI
·
· Score: 1
Man, that story was on The Register, with sites in bot UK and US. Highly unlikely that you will slashdot this page... All you did was to waste space in the/.db
Diesels do not burn petrol or any other highly volatile fuel (although they can burn jet fuel, kerosene, or home heating oil, with varying degrees of sucess).
Of course you are right, I simply used the two extremes diesel fuel vs petrol to make a point: fuel has different properties. Peanut oil is not diesel fuel, vegetable oil is not diesel fuel, biodiesel is not 100% diesel fuel and even among the diesel blends the properties differ dramatically. See the DOE'sfuel property database.
Yes, in the good old days of low-pressure distribution pumps (3000-5000psi as one other slashdotter mentioned) you simply could change the injection timing by tampering with the mechanically governor. With modern cars being sooner a mobile network of dedicated ECU's, you can't do this anymore. Not only because of the inaccessability but also because you now have some more objectives than just burning fuel somehow to release torque on the flywheel: You need to control the combustion in order to comply with emission legislations. I do not know if your extensive practical experience covers this topic as well. Usually NOx and smoke show contrary tendencies, so does CO2 and NOx, engine response and smoke etc... you have to think about all those factors when designing an engine and a combustion process. Really, it's not the old days anymore! EPA staff has released an excellent paper where they try to summarize latest trends. Definitely worth a read!
To recap: Modern diesels burn "biodiesel" with no modifications. They can also burn vegetable oil with a few minor modifications, mostly because that's what Dr. Diesel originally designed his machine for.
Theoretically "minor" adjustments but this is only valid for the designer/manufacturer, not the individual customer. See above. BTW: I am not quite sure that Rudolf Diesel ever was a "Dr.", AFAIK he studied Mechanical Engineering in Munich, but that's it. Just because other web sites keep calling him "Dr." doesn't mean it is true... But I'm not 100% sure about this either.
If you really want to promote alternatives then demand earlier introduction of low sulfur fuel. Some more info here and yes, the pretroleum industry is whining about cost increase, while even the car industry is demanding this fuel...
Modern diesel engines are slightly modified to optimally burn the refinery waste products we call "diesel fuel". But only slightly...
This is not true. I cannot give you a full lecture (anyway not without boring you and everybody else) but if this would be true, you could easily modify a diesel engine to burn gasoline. Well, you can't. Think self-ignition. Think cetan number (Diesel fuel) vs octane number (Otto fuel).
This can lead to melting holes in your piston when the fuel doesn't come out of the injector atomized.
Sorry, but atomized?? Sure, fuel is supposed to be sprayed out, but you can hardly expect the nozzle to spearate the CH-chains into atoms... And no, no melting holes either.
But I agree, it won't work on newer diesel engines with high-pressure diect-injection systems (as already explained here)
As the other guy already pointed out, torque is important, not power. Power is "just" the product of applied torque at a certain speed. So, an engine can actually have much larger torque in the low-rev area (where it counts) and still have lower power in the high-rev. Especially when you compare diesel engines with gasoline engines... which should be forbidden by law...;)
Having worked with the development of high-pressure direct-injection diesel engines at both Volkswagen and Volvo, I am quite critical towards any replacement fuel that has not been widely and thoroughly tested.
Due to the very high pressures (up to 2100 bars) and therefore high temperatures with modern fuel injection systems, you really go to the limit of what diesel fuel can do: You use it simultaneously as fuel, coolant and oil and it takes a good blend to fulfill all these requirements! The chemical formula is important as well as the physical properties.
The DOE has a webpage about diesel fuels. Have a look at their online diesel fuel property database and see which properties are essential for characterizing fuel.
Other important factors are - durability - particles/filtration - compressability/resistance against cavitation
Not to forget resistance of all sealings etc against the fuel. Think RME and you know why almost everybody in the industry (e.g. SCANIA) only approves blends with max 5% alternative fuels...
Don't get me wrong, but if those fuels are ruining the car, we really can't talk about environmental advantages then, now can we? On the other hand, serious life cycle analysis like this one and field studies will hopefully help to develop cleaner cars. If those are then driven by gas engines, diesel engines or fuel cells... who knows?
is the idea that the engine controls (or any other drivetrain subsystem) would be running on anything but a dedicated device chock full of proven code.
Of course, the whole car is a network of dedicated devices. Thats how everybody does it.
Switching from Ford-ownedVolvo Cars to self-owned AB Volvo, I would recommend reading some of these articles. Heck, they even have serveral connected ECU's in construction equipment (like a wheel loader or articulated hauler)... Don't know about the OS, though, but I wouldn't think that somebody would rely on Win9x for critical applications...
Those who aren't fans of the book should be perfectly happy with the August release.
I wouldn't quite agree with that conclusion. In my world, No-fans of the book are just persons who didn't spend the time reading it. I went to the movie with friends who didn't - and consequently they were bored by the movie! Can you belive this? Well, I can... because the movie throws a lot of characters and small stories in the air without connecting them to the larger picture of Middle Earth. To be fair - this is a Mission Impossible. The movie does the best it can in the limited amount of time. It would need trice the time to explain the FotR story to the uninitiated, so that they can fully appreciate it. I wouldn't be too surprised if TtT will attract less viewers than FotR just because of this... A shame, though.
Found this on Wired:
China's postal agency launched a new service this week that will enable computer users to have e-mails delivered in hard-copy form to recipients who don't have e-mail. The e-mails will be printed out by postal employees, placed into envelopes, and sent with the rest of the mail to the sender's assigned destination. Oh, and it won't be read by anyone. A spokeswoman for China Post says so.
"Mail is a private matter," the spokeswoman says. "There would be no reason for anybody to read it." Rrrright...
I don't see why the US is concerned with people's rights only in certain places, and never China.
Sorry, but in my opinion the US is *never* really concerned with people's rights in the first place. An old and somewhat plain perspective would be, that the US is run by large coporations and that the goverment therefore has to play along. Economics come first. The terrible thing is, that with all recent events, who can really argue against this? Just scan the archive of GNN and you will find stories like this
Going through a list of "US human rights interventions", I can not find one single full-scale military US-campaign, where not economical interests were at stake...
Slashdot Mirror
Well... you had not even the first post but anyway... here is something just for you...
Well, there you have the same conflict that the consumer industry has. Let's take car manufacturers as an example:
- Engineer/Designer: Let's make it as good as possible
- Project Leader: Let's have the results as fast as possible
- Controller: Let's make it as cheap as possible
- Service Dept: Let's make it as serviceable as possible but with a limited maintenance period
- Product Planning: Let's include all the cool features the competitor has
- Marketing & Sales: Let's limit the expected life time, so that we can sell a replacement as soon as possible...
See? Everybody wants to make money, but in a different way - and has therefore everybody has different ideas about how the product is going to be. I'd say that in the Space Industry, this is valid too, at least the first 3 items... So, since missions are planned for a certain amount of time, I'd be surprised if the probes aren't designed for roughly the same time (times 1.5 times pi as safety margin or so)...
Point is: Today we know more about life time of parts and are therefore able to optimise costs by reducing margins. Shortsighted project management then forces most of us, to do exactly this...
...not for being so dumb for getting caught but for stealing the things in the first place. As already being pointed out by others:
- The Sceptics View: It's from the moon but looks like a rock, big deal...
- The Business Man's View: Who can you sell that stuff to, without any certificate of authenticity?
- The Geek View: These things belong to the scientific community, not high-bidding assholes (same goes for art)
Puhish them, why not giving them 6 months (probation?)? This is not the same as sneaking into school one night with a key that happens to open the door to the chemistry lab and stealing some magnesium and other cool stuff... ummm... That was only hypothetical and you can't prove anything!!
Maybe we will soon wittness an updated version of The Player War (I still hope for a new Browser War...). If M$ can find a hair in RN's soop, they will almost certainly pick it up and make a big deal out of it, either as patent infringement or as proof that they indeed do *not* have a monopoly. Either way, it's going to be ugly...
Good news is if the thing is waterproof and 100% Open Source... Maybe time to rejoice after all...
How is this obvious at all, or even correct? The people you spam have no knowledge of how many others get spammed by the same person/company.
;-)
100% Ack. Very often I get spam mails to an address like "info" and my address has been included in the "bcc:" field, preventing me from seeing how many others have got the same mail.
But in my case, the theory is valid: the more spam mails I get, the less likely I read them to determine if there is actually something useful among them. I just mark all mails, deselect my personal friends and hit "Delete"... Well if there was a reminder mail of my library... sorry guys...
Would be nice to have a dorm full of fiber.
My mom always told me that I can't get enough of them (fibres)...
Well, than it's not research but simply engineering (aka applied research). Still, the technique itself is not pointless at all and the application may be obvious but imho not without any value. :-)
Example: Just because you spent millions of dollars to produce something that is worth 1 buck, it doesn't mean the thing is worthless. It's worth 1 buck! But one self is totally worthless as an entrepreneur...
*...yea..yea..I know, there's no such thing as perfect random number generator, but those tests you hear about mathemiticians running on RNG algorithms are for the truly anal-retentive who are worried about patterns showing up after the 2^64th repetion or whatever. I doubt that even a relatively low-tech randum number algorithm would be taxed by this technique.
Or the absence of patterns, false ones. A truely *random* generator should be able to reproduce any series (like 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9) for a while, but of course with a very high impropability.
What a pointless "technology".
"Pointless" would be to argue with you about the meaning of higher education.
Let's think what the article actually says: IBM has employed a technique which lets them estimate the original distribution of data by adding a certain amount of random data with know distribution. That surely should be useful in other areas as well?!
A Google seachr on Random Perturbation gives quite a long list with applications in wheather simulation, computer graphics, chaotic dynamical systems, etc.
Still pointless? What about a search in the then NEC Research Index? Wowwww... Pointless, eh...?
I agree totally. Just because someone has technical skills (umm sorry skillz), he doesn't have to be a decent and moral person. Or the other way around (which I happen to see at work quite often...).
Aren't we used to hear this kind of behaviour from the cracker scene? Or the warez trading scene? Or maybe even the video tape pirating scene (is this one still out there?)?
Sure, if the feds are holding you by the balls, you have to be a very strong person to not try to cooperate. Now, in this case they seemed to have cooperated voluntarily, i.e. for the money. Well, that's the world we live in. Everybody sells everybody out for a few bucks. Depressing, but we better get used to it.
Man, that story was on The Register, with sites in bot UK and US. Highly unlikely that you will slashdot this page... /.db
All you did was to waste space in the
Diesels do not burn petrol or any other highly volatile fuel (although they can burn jet fuel, kerosene, or home heating oil, with varying degrees of sucess).
Of course you are right, I simply used the two extremes diesel fuel vs petrol to make a point: fuel has different properties. Peanut oil is not diesel fuel, vegetable oil is not diesel fuel, biodiesel is not 100% diesel fuel and even among the diesel blends the properties differ dramatically.
See the DOE's fuel property database.
Yes, in the good old days of low-pressure distribution pumps (3000-5000psi as one other slashdotter mentioned) you simply could change the injection timing by tampering with the mechanically governor.
With modern cars being sooner a mobile network of dedicated ECU's, you can't do this anymore. Not only because of the inaccessability but also because you now have some more objectives than just burning fuel somehow to release torque on the flywheel: You need to control the combustion in order to comply with emission legislations.
I do not know if your extensive practical experience covers this topic as well. Usually NOx and smoke show contrary tendencies, so does CO2 and NOx, engine response and smoke etc... you have to think about all those factors when designing an engine and a combustion process. Really, it's not the old days anymore!
EPA staff has released an excellent paper where they try to summarize latest trends. Definitely worth a read!
To recap: Modern diesels burn "biodiesel" with no modifications. They can also burn vegetable oil with a few minor modifications, mostly because that's what Dr. Diesel originally designed his machine for.
Theoretically "minor" adjustments but this is only valid for the designer/manufacturer, not the individual customer. See above.
BTW: I am not quite sure that Rudolf Diesel ever was a "Dr.", AFAIK he studied Mechanical Engineering in Munich, but that's it. Just because other web sites keep calling him "Dr." doesn't mean it is true... But I'm not 100% sure about this either.
If you really want to promote alternatives then demand earlier introduction of low sulfur fuel. Some more info here and yes, the pretroleum industry is whining about cost increase, while even the car industry is demanding this fuel...
Modern diesel engines are slightly modified to optimally burn the refinery waste products we call "diesel fuel". But only slightly...
This is not true. I cannot give you a full lecture (anyway not without boring you and everybody else) but if this would be true, you could easily modify a diesel engine to burn gasoline. Well, you can't. Think self-ignition. Think cetan number (Diesel fuel) vs octane number (Otto fuel).
They run at 3000-5000 psi(...)
Actually, modern injections systems run with up to 30000 psi... one magnitude higher! =:-o
(more info)
This can lead to melting holes in your piston when the fuel doesn't come out of the injector atomized.
Sorry, but atomized?? Sure, fuel is supposed to be sprayed out, but you can hardly expect the nozzle to spearate the CH-chains into atoms... And no, no melting holes either.
But I agree, it won't work on newer diesel engines with high-pressure diect-injection systems (as already explained here)
As the other guy already pointed out, torque is important, not power. Power is "just" the product of applied torque at a certain speed. So, an engine can actually have much larger torque in the low-rev area (where it counts) and still have lower power in the high-rev. Especially when you compare diesel engines with gasoline engines... which should be forbidden by law... ;)
Sorry for the non-US compliant unit "bar". Here is an online unit converter... 2100bar = ca 30457psi, it says...
Having worked with the development of high-pressure direct-injection diesel engines at both Volkswagen and Volvo, I am quite critical towards any replacement fuel that has not been widely and thoroughly tested.
To begin with, some links for self study:
- Dieselnet.com has a great glossary and provides some excellent links
- Delphi has some nice PDF's on Unit Injectors and Common Rail
- Here some information from Bosch - Siemens has some nice pictures of injection systems, mainly common rail
Due to the very high pressures (up to 2100 bars) and therefore high temperatures with modern fuel injection systems, you really go to the limit of what diesel fuel can do: You use it simultaneously as fuel, coolant and oil and it takes a good blend to fulfill all these requirements! The chemical formula is important as well as the physical properties. The DOE has a webpage about diesel fuels. Have a look at their online diesel fuel property database and see which properties are essential for characterizing fuel. Other important factors are
- durability
- particles/filtration
- compressability/resistance against cavitation
Not to forget resistance of all sealings etc against the fuel. Think RME and you know why almost everybody in the industry (e.g. SCANIA) only approves blends with max 5% alternative fuels...
Don't get me wrong, but if those fuels are ruining the car, we really can't talk about environmental advantages then, now can we? On the other hand, serious life cycle analysis like this one and field studies will hopefully help to develop cleaner cars. If those are then driven by gas engines, diesel engines or fuel cells... who knows?
Hasn't apple tried this with GIF formats?
Nope, Compuserve/Unisys.
Limiting the number of posts per day is censoring. What was wrong with them hidden at -1??
Guess, someone could yell RTFFAQ... lol
is the idea that the engine controls (or any other drivetrain subsystem) would be running on anything but a dedicated device chock full of proven code.
Of course, the whole car is a network of dedicated devices. Thats how everybody does it.
Switching from Ford-owned Volvo Cars to self-owned AB Volvo, I would recommend reading some of these articles. Heck, they even have serveral connected ECU's in construction equipment (like a wheel loader or articulated hauler)... Don't know about the OS, though, but I wouldn't think that somebody would rely on Win9x for critical applications...
Those who aren't fans of the book should be perfectly happy with the August release.
I wouldn't quite agree with that conclusion. In my world, No-fans of the book are just persons who didn't spend the time reading it. I went to the movie with friends who didn't - and consequently they were bored by the movie! Can you belive this? Well, I can... because the movie throws a lot of characters and small stories in the air without connecting them to the larger picture of Middle Earth. To be fair - this is a Mission Impossible. The movie does the best it can in the limited amount of time. It would need trice the time to explain the FotR story to the uninitiated, so that they can fully appreciate it.
I wouldn't be too surprised if TtT will attract less viewers than FotR just because of this... A shame, though.
You should have listened to what Homer said on The Simpsons DVD FAQ page... ;-)
"Versatile" discs are no different from a regular disc. They just put the word "versatile" on so they can charge more.
Found this on Wired:
China's postal agency launched a new service this week that will enable computer users to have e-mails delivered in hard-copy form to recipients who don't have e-mail. The e-mails will be printed out by postal employees, placed into envelopes, and sent with the rest of the mail to the sender's assigned destination.
Oh, and it won't be read by anyone. A spokeswoman for China Post says so. "Mail is a private matter," the spokeswoman says. "There would be no reason for anybody to read it."
Rrrright...
I don't see why the US is concerned with people's rights only in certain places, and never China.
Sorry, but in my opinion the US is *never* really concerned with people's rights in the first place. An old and somewhat plain perspective would be, that the US is run by large coporations and that the goverment therefore has to play along. Economics come first. The terrible thing is, that with all recent events, who can really argue against this?
Just scan the archive of GNN and you will find stories like this Going through a list of "US human rights interventions", I can not find one single full-scale military US-campaign, where not economical interests were at stake...
Kuweit, Somalia, Afghanistan? Oil.
Yes, *Afghanistan*. Please read this story and this quite balanced one, before down-moderating this reply as trollish...