I can't imagine a reason why a turbocharger couldn't be used at the same time as an exhaust-heat-powered steam engine. The steam engine uses the heat from the exhaust to drive the car (efficiency + performance gain), while the turbocharger uses kinetic energy from the exhaust to shove more fuel/air into the combustion engine (performance gain only).
because the heat is kinetic energy. if you transfer the heat to a steam system, you're slowing down the exhaust molecules. if you take the kinetic energy to run a turbine in a turbocharger, you're cooling down the molecules. you only have so much energy to work with. one set of numbers i do know: turbodiesel pickup truck towing a 12,000lb trailer up a hill. exhaust temperature before the turbo: 1200F. exhaust temperature after the turbo: 900F. the energy turning the turbine cooled the exhaust by about 400F.
one thing that i don't think has been mentioned yet, is that cool gasses resist flow more than hot ones. the cooler exhaust gasses will create more backpressure (==work for the engine) in the exhaust, just like adding a turbo - so that's one downside. over all, i think the turbosteamer is kinda neat though.
*Every* industry should have this type of legislation. It should not be the customers responsibility to research the security policies of their prospective banks/stores/whatever. Hell there is no way you could realisticly do that, since theres no way for you to know their internal policies.
i agree! i'm tired of all of these mailings that my bank sends me to tell me how to protect my identity. aside from not giving out personal info to people i don't trust, i should not have to be responsible for protecting my identity. i think that whoever loses personal information on people should be automatically liable for any damages. if the bank loses my info and my account is emptied, they should have to pay it back. if my grocery store loses info that damages me, they should be responsible. my university (http://www.colorado.edu/) just had an incident where the campus health center's computer was hacked and they lost medical records. ignoring the fact that the computer with medial records should never have had internet access to begin with, what was the campus's responce? they just sent out an email telling you how to identify if someone stole your identity, and how to protect yourself! i already protect myself, any info out in the open now, is solely the result of my univerity's mistake! why are they not liable for any damages i receive becuase of their lack of security. if legislation like this was extended to all people who store personal records, you'd immediately see security tighten up. they just don't have an incentive now because they aren't (financially) responsible for their mistakes.
i totally agree. but that will never happen. no one will vote for the congressman who reverts us back to an old (better) way of doing things. it's all about progress and more laws.
except that levying taxes on big business just raises prices for consumers. so the average joe just pays the taxes anyway. fearing that i'm of getting off topic, i'd like to add that what we need is some universal system that you pay taxes against that treats everybody equally. the best i can think of is a national sales tax on everything. i believe that some people will point you to www.fairtax.org, i haven't read the site to know if it's a good implementation (or even if the sales tax is a good implementaion). so if big business needs to buy something to operate their business, they have to pay taxes just like the rest of us, but it's not a big tax that's directed unfairly toward one business over another or anything like that.
thank you! i've been waiting for someone to say this. although technically, i find the price-based-on-popularity model to be a cool idea, it doesn't set a more "accurate" price than the flat $.99 model. i'm not an economist by any means, but i have seen some cool talks given by economists, the best thing i ever learned was that "cost to produce something has no bearing on price, the price is determined by the perceived value of the item by the purchaser." we see stuff like this everyday. you pay $200 for that cell phone that has $2 of electronics and probably $.50 of labor to make? well that's because the cell phone was worth at least $200 to you (convenience of having a cell phone, the cool factor of having something stylish, it doesn't matter what the reason - it's worth something to you). if it costs more to produce something than anyone is willing to pay, then that item won't be produced. back to music - it doesn't matter if the supply is limited or that the marginal cost to download a song is near zero or if the credit card transactions are rediculously large or anything on the supply side. the price a song should sell for is something (slightly) less than than the perceived value by the purchaser. determining that perceived value is an exercise left to the reader.
IAAC, the memorizing is a terrible way to learn chemistry (actually it's a bad way to learn anything). you'll never learn anything by memorizing rules. the best thing to do is learn what's going on underneath, then you won't need to know 50 different reactions, just know the one guiding principle. how do you think your chemistry teacher knows all the reactions, i guarantee you that they don't memorize 1000's of reactions. they know trends: electrons usually go from here to there under these conditions. so rather than wasting your time cataloging reactions (repetition of work that's already been done in your book). take a step back and learn why the reaction happens.
I was recently called up by a pimp (consultancy agent) and he asked if there was any company I wouldn't want to work for. I said anyone connected directly with the defence industry and he told me that I'd be surprised how many people also said that.
As far as I'm concerned, if I write software for a guided missile for example, and that missile happens to kill innocent civilians (even if by mistake) then I feel like there'd be at least some blood on my hands too - which I don't want.
i'm not questioning your stance, and i respect your opinion on this, i just wanted to express another opinion on working for the defence industry. my brother works for a company that makes tank ammo. and he's super anti-war and doesn't trust the government, and all that, so i asked why he works for the company. he said that his job is to design the safest tank ammo possible. so he can have a zero defect rate where a defect is something that ends up killing the soldiers in the tank. the man is always going to fight wars (he always has) and people are going to get killed for the sake of lining the man's pockets. but if you can prevent more of our young soldiers for dying, then i think you've done good. so don't think of working for the defence industry as helping the man kill people, view it as helping keep the wars shorter and saving more of our soldiers. the man will fight the war with whatever technology is available.
the only emission from hydrogen vehicles is water.
this is something that really bothers me. technically, yes the only product of burning hydrogen is water. well, the only products of burning gasoline is carbon dioxide and water. the trouble is, that in the cylinder, there's alot of regular air that's compressed and heated. air contains nitrogen. the heat from burning the gasoline makes the nitrogen and oxygen in the air combine and make the NOx (smog). guess what will happen in a hydrogen car? yup, you'll have nitrogen from the air in there and you'll still make smog. granted, you'll make fewer other pollutants like soot and the associated hydrocarbons, but in reality those are pretty much controlled for now with all the emissions controls. so don't buy the marketing crap that says that H2 cars will save the environment, they may help a little, but not very much.
not everything can be run off of a ups. most ups waveforms outputs are sawtooth rather than sine wave. most things are down converted to DC so it doesn't matter what the waveform is as long as it's 60hz and goes to the right voltage peaks. but some things care about the waveforms. i think flourscent lights are one, and i remember my ups came with a warning to not run a laser printer off of the ups.
if you want to mess with internal wiring then i suggest two circuits for your home office, one connected to the ups and the other just straight from the grid.
oh, i think you misunderstood me. i meant that the typical employeers in the valley are being stupid (and google is being smart). they wouldn't need to offer higher salarys if they'd provide nice working conditions. everyone would be happier and the employeers would save some money.
Makes you wonder why those startups can't improve working conditions. Is it more expensive to improve working conditions than to increase salaries, or just too difficult for these entrepreneurs to do?
i think it's just stupidity. joel from joel on software has a good article about paying people in things "cheaper than money." and that in the end it's cheaper for the company, for example, to give away free drinks because employees value it more than it cost you. here's the article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 50.html
> "and if possible maybe set up some of them to be uninterruptable"
Where, pray tell, would you keep the diesel generator and fuel tank that will power some of your house on demand?
i was thinking of something like having UPS battery backups in the basement that would be hooked up to the UPS outlets in the rooms. it would be awesome to have a generator or something like that, but unless you live on a farm, you proabably can't get away with that. i'm not saying that getting enough UPS batteries would be cheap or anything, i'm just saying it would be cool to have. you obviously would have to make choices about where you'd want your UPS outlets. you probably don't need them in the bathroom, but having them in the living room and computer room would be helpful.
i didn't say the 12VDC lighting was smart, i just said it was getting popular. the reason it's getting popular is because most places have regulation on who can lay high-voltage (110V) wire, but if you only have 12V going through the wire, you don't need an electrician, and you don't have regulations about how close the wires can be to other things, or GFCI circuits, or anything that goes with 110V. it's a stupid energy wasting way around stupid arbitrary housing codes.
how are three circuit per room more dangerous than one? you're splitting up the current draw over three circuits, so the over all load is lowered per circuit. if you're worried about knowing which circuit each socket is on, a simple color scheme could be developed to keep things straight - or just something simple like a small label under each socket that says "living room, circuit #1" and then in the circuit breaker box, you have a breaker labled "living room, circuit #1"
studs are 16" apart. i look at how many powerstrips i have in my rooms. particularlly my living room and computer room. since i'm not home right now, but here's what i can remember having plugged in in my living room: tv, vcr, dvd player, sterio, subwoofer, 2 lamps, 3 laptops, 1 hub, 1 vga -> ntsc converter, 2 cell phone chargers. that's 14 plugs that i can remember right now. plus what about transient items the the vacuum cleaner and stuff like that?
i don't think the cost of the copper wire is going to go up much, generally in houses there are 1-2 sockets per wall, that means the copper has to be run around the perimeter of the room anyway. so it's not much more copper to run from socket to socket (granted it will be more if you put more than one circuit per room, but you can always do 1 circuit per room).
this is a project that should be done it at least two steps. the only thing you really want to worry about now is getting the wires into the walls. so plan on things like (as you say) cat-5 (i suggest cat-6 incase gigabit become affordable in the future), speaker wire, and don't forget enough electrical sockets. i honestly don't think it's too much to ask for one electrical socket on each stud. make sure they're on different circuit breakers, and if possible maybe set up some of them to be uninterruptable. my ideal wall would have a socket on each stud. 2 out of every three would be regular sockets - but on different circuits, and 1 out of three would be on an uninterruptable circuit that's managed elsewhere in the house. you could even look into the new standard 12VDC power that's starting to be popular for some lightning. it wouldnt hurt to put a line of 12VDC in the wall too.
once you have all the wires in the wall, then you can worry about hardware. the nice thing is that you don't need to worry about it now. you can just put in a cheap thermostat now and later when you say, "hey, i'd like to control the thermostat with my webserver" you can then put in a new thermostat and you'll already have the wires in the wall and you can set up the webserver to control the thermostat. likewise with anything else, you can add touch screens later. the benefit to going with normal stuff now and upgrading later is that it forces you to think modularly. if you put in touch screens now and set everything up with those screens, you'll probably be mad next year when newer less buggy hardware is out there and it's impossible for you to upgrade. if you think modularly, then you can upgrade the hardware however you want.
the same goes for your server room. don't worry now about how many servers it's going to take to run your house. just make sure you have a room wired properly that you can put servers in. then when you start putting more services online and you need more computing power, it'll be easy to upgrade as necessary. for example after you get bored having the lights and heat controlled by the computers, you can later upgrade and write your own security system that monitors the windows and doors at night. if some one breaks in, it'll wake you up, auto dial 911, automatically unlock the gun cabinet and give you a lighted path from your bed to the gun cabinet (or at least that's my dream for my comptuer controlled house).
exactly! in fact, this was taught to me by a senior programmer who said: "you should never document your code, your should code your document." in projects where i've followed that rule, i've had many fewer problems than ones where i jumped into the code quickly.
To no surprise, the completed highway doesn't show up on the satellite (though most of it is present). The map, however, shows none of it.
here's a cool view of a place where the map is newer than the sattelite picture. you can see where rt 36 extends to the west over washington street. but in the pure sattellite picture, you can only see the construction. this is a realitively new bypass, so the sattellite doesn't have it in, but the map is updated perfectlly.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=westminster,+co&ll=3 9.825644,-104.980974&spn=0.007749,0.015003&t=h&hl= en
Where the hell is my cell phone that manages my minutes so that it alerts me EXACTLY how much my phone bill will be whenever I press a button, and the amount of minutes I used between the hours of 8am - 6pm?
if you have tmobile then #646# (#min#) will tell you how many minutes you've used in the current billing cycle and #225# (#bal#) will tell you what your current balance is. after years of dealing with terrible customer service vrom AT&T, cingular, and verizion, i have to say that i'm very happy with tmobile. i hope i don't get modded down for looking like to much of an ad, i'm in no way affiliated with tmobile (other than having service with them).
A Mathematician, Physicist, and Engineer are asked to find the volume of a Red Rubber Ball. The mathematician carefully solves the triple integral. The Physicist puts the ball in water and measures the displacement. The engineer finds the serial number of the ball and looks up the volume in his red rubber ball table.
well, with an '89 if i reflash (i don't even know if i can reflash that computer) and screw something up, it'll be really hard to find a new ecu. i don't plan on trimming to the point where i'll be melting pistons, the 4cyl in the truck only puts out 110HP (when it was new, now that it has 240K miles, i'm sure it puts out much less) so no amount of tuning is going to turn it into a race car. i figure if i hook up an o2 sensor gauge so i can see what the o2 sensor is reporting, then when i'm running WOT and the ecu is in open loop, i can trim the reading from the air sensor and tell it that there's less air, so the ecu will put in less fuel and run at 14.7:1 air:fuel rather than slightly rich as it does now at WOT. i bet i could back it off to even 15 or 16:1 without melting the pistons and save even more fuel.
yes, the ecu controls the amount of fuel so that you never run as rich as you did back in the days of carbs, but there are also different settings in the ecu for different driving conditions. here's data from an '89 toyota 4runner (fairly heavy suv with a very underpowered 4cyl) with toyota's 2nd generation efi (new cars should be much better):
aggressive city driving = 18mpg highway 60-65 mph = 22 mpg highway 80 mph = 16 mpg smooth city driving = 20 mpg smooth city driving while always keeping it below 1/3 throttle = 25 mpg (this is really no slower than smooth city driving - just slightly slower acceleration).
the key with my truck is that i know if i keep it below 1/3 throttle, the ecu reads the o2 sensor and runs the fuel injection in closed loop that's optimized for efficiency. if i run it at full throttle (highway at 80) then the ecu is running open loop where it just dumps fuel in to try to get as much power as possible, but it runs richer and really doesn't generate that much power. so even though fuel injection is simpler (to drive) than the days of carbs, you still need to think with them. (as a side note - i'd love to insert a trim pot on a couple of the sensors so that i could adjust the mixture a little more. so when i run at full throttle on the highway, if i could lean it out a little i could gain more milage without a loss of power).
I think regulation is stupid right now. The real reason it's being proposed is to raise the cost of entry for small startups and let the big corporations take the tech all for themselves. That's not to say I'm against reasonable safeguards for the public, but it regulations should be done in a more general way. I believe an earlier post mentioned something about how nano particles are just the right size to be caught in the lungs and that this is similar to asbestos. Rather than having regluations for asbestos and nano particles, how about one broad regulation that says something like "no one is allowed to emit particles of size xx to yy in a concentration greater than zz blah blah blah" of course you could get more specific and say that the particles can't be emitted where there's a gathering of people or something like that. It's just a pet peeve that I have when people try to regulate things so specificly. Rather than regulating the technology, just regulate the effect.
Use the fuel for acceleration, then shift to neutral for downhill/flat coasting will really decrease your car's fuel consumption
this was true in the days of carberators. now with electronic fuel injection, coasting does nothing, and actually may increase fuel usage. the engine computer is constantly monitoring the engine speed and the throttle position. there are presets in the computer that if the engine speed is too high compared to the throtte position it will quit firing the injectors until the speed comes back down. so when you go down a long steep hill, chances are that your ecu has turned off your injectors, and you're burning no fuel. i know this is true on my old '89 toyota with a very primitive efi system - so it's gotta be true on newer cars.
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I can't imagine a reason why a turbocharger couldn't be used at the same time as an exhaust-heat-powered steam engine. The steam engine uses the heat from the exhaust to drive the car (efficiency + performance gain), while the turbocharger uses kinetic energy from the exhaust to shove more fuel/air into the combustion engine (performance gain only).
because the heat is kinetic energy. if you transfer the heat to a steam system, you're slowing down the exhaust molecules. if you take the kinetic energy to run a turbine in a turbocharger, you're cooling down the molecules. you only have so much energy to work with. one set of numbers i do know: turbodiesel pickup truck towing a 12,000lb trailer up a hill. exhaust temperature before the turbo: 1200F. exhaust temperature after the turbo: 900F. the energy turning the turbine cooled the exhaust by about 400F.
one thing that i don't think has been mentioned yet, is that cool gasses resist flow more than hot ones. the cooler exhaust gasses will create more backpressure (==work for the engine) in the exhaust, just like adding a turbo - so that's one downside. over all, i think the turbosteamer is kinda neat though.
*Every* industry should have this type of legislation. It should not be the customers responsibility to research the security policies of their prospective banks/stores/whatever. Hell there is no way you could realisticly do that, since theres no way for you to know their internal policies.
i agree! i'm tired of all of these mailings that my bank sends me to tell me how to protect my identity. aside from not giving out personal info to people i don't trust, i should not have to be responsible for protecting my identity. i think that whoever loses personal information on people should be automatically liable for any damages. if the bank loses my info and my account is emptied, they should have to pay it back. if my grocery store loses info that damages me, they should be responsible. my university (http://www.colorado.edu/) just had an incident where the campus health center's computer was hacked and they lost medical records. ignoring the fact that the computer with medial records should never have had internet access to begin with, what was the campus's responce? they just sent out an email telling you how to identify if someone stole your identity, and how to protect yourself! i already protect myself, any info out in the open now, is solely the result of my univerity's mistake! why are they not liable for any damages i receive becuase of their lack of security. if legislation like this was extended to all people who store personal records, you'd immediately see security tighten up. they just don't have an incentive now because they aren't (financially) responsible for their mistakes.
i totally agree. but that will never happen. no one will vote for the congressman who reverts us back to an old (better) way of doing things. it's all about progress and more laws.
except that levying taxes on big business just raises prices for consumers. so the average joe just pays the taxes anyway. fearing that i'm of getting off topic, i'd like to add that what we need is some universal system that you pay taxes against that treats everybody equally. the best i can think of is a national sales tax on everything. i believe that some people will point you to www.fairtax.org, i haven't read the site to know if it's a good implementation (or even if the sales tax is a good implementaion). so if big business needs to buy something to operate their business, they have to pay taxes just like the rest of us, but it's not a big tax that's directed unfairly toward one business over another or anything like that.
thank you! i've been waiting for someone to say this. although technically, i find the price-based-on-popularity model to be a cool idea, it doesn't set a more "accurate" price than the flat $.99 model. i'm not an economist by any means, but i have seen some cool talks given by economists, the best thing i ever learned was that "cost to produce something has no bearing on price, the price is determined by the perceived value of the item by the purchaser." we see stuff like this everyday. you pay $200 for that cell phone that has $2 of electronics and probably $.50 of labor to make? well that's because the cell phone was worth at least $200 to you (convenience of having a cell phone, the cool factor of having something stylish, it doesn't matter what the reason - it's worth something to you). if it costs more to produce something than anyone is willing to pay, then that item won't be produced. back to music - it doesn't matter if the supply is limited or that the marginal cost to download a song is near zero or if the credit card transactions are rediculously large or anything on the supply side. the price a song should sell for is something (slightly) less than than the perceived value by the purchaser. determining that perceived value is an exercise left to the reader.
IAAC, the memorizing is a terrible way to learn chemistry (actually it's a bad way to learn anything). you'll never learn anything by memorizing rules. the best thing to do is learn what's going on underneath, then you won't need to know 50 different reactions, just know the one guiding principle. how do you think your chemistry teacher knows all the reactions, i guarantee you that they don't memorize 1000's of reactions. they know trends: electrons usually go from here to there under these conditions. so rather than wasting your time cataloging reactions (repetition of work that's already been done in your book). take a step back and learn why the reaction happens.
I was recently called up by a pimp (consultancy agent) and he asked if there was any company I wouldn't want to work for. I said anyone connected directly with the defence industry and he told me that I'd be surprised how many people also said that.
As far as I'm concerned, if I write software for a guided missile for example, and that missile happens to kill innocent civilians (even if by mistake) then I feel like there'd be at least some blood on my hands too - which I don't want.
i'm not questioning your stance, and i respect your opinion on this, i just wanted to express another opinion on working for the defence industry. my brother works for a company that makes tank ammo. and he's super anti-war and doesn't trust the government, and all that, so i asked why he works for the company. he said that his job is to design the safest tank ammo possible. so he can have a zero defect rate where a defect is something that ends up killing the soldiers in the tank. the man is always going to fight wars (he always has) and people are going to get killed for the sake of lining the man's pockets. but if you can prevent more of our young soldiers for dying, then i think you've done good. so don't think of working for the defence industry as helping the man kill people, view it as helping keep the wars shorter and saving more of our soldiers. the man will fight the war with whatever technology is available.
the only emission from hydrogen vehicles is water.
this is something that really bothers me. technically, yes the only product of burning hydrogen is water. well, the only products of burning gasoline is carbon dioxide and water. the trouble is, that in the cylinder, there's alot of regular air that's compressed and heated. air contains nitrogen. the heat from burning the gasoline makes the nitrogen and oxygen in the air combine and make the NOx (smog). guess what will happen in a hydrogen car? yup, you'll have nitrogen from the air in there and you'll still make smog. granted, you'll make fewer other pollutants like soot and the associated hydrocarbons, but in reality those are pretty much controlled for now with all the emissions controls. so don't buy the marketing crap that says that H2 cars will save the environment, they may help a little, but not very much.
not everything can be run off of a ups. most ups waveforms outputs are sawtooth rather than sine wave. most things are down converted to DC so it doesn't matter what the waveform is as long as it's 60hz and goes to the right voltage peaks. but some things care about the waveforms. i think flourscent lights are one, and i remember my ups came with a warning to not run a laser printer off of the ups.
if you want to mess with internal wiring then i suggest two circuits for your home office, one connected to the ups and the other just straight from the grid.
oh, i think you misunderstood me. i meant that the typical employeers in the valley are being stupid (and google is being smart). they wouldn't need to offer higher salarys if they'd provide nice working conditions. everyone would be happier and the employeers would save some money.
Makes you wonder why those startups can't improve working conditions. Is it more expensive to improve working conditions than to increase salaries, or just too difficult for these entrepreneurs to do?
0 50.html
i think it's just stupidity. joel from joel on software has a good article about paying people in things "cheaper than money." and that in the end it's cheaper for the company, for example, to give away free drinks because employees value it more than it cost you. here's the article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000
> "and if possible maybe set up some of them to be uninterruptable"
Where, pray tell, would you keep the diesel generator and fuel tank that will power some of your house on demand?
i was thinking of something like having UPS battery backups in the basement that would be hooked up to the UPS outlets in the rooms. it would be awesome to have a generator or something like that, but unless you live on a farm, you proabably can't get away with that. i'm not saying that getting enough UPS batteries would be cheap or anything, i'm just saying it would be cool to have. you obviously would have to make choices about where you'd want your UPS outlets. you probably don't need them in the bathroom, but having them in the living room and computer room would be helpful.
i didn't say the 12VDC lighting was smart, i just said it was getting popular. the reason it's getting popular is because most places have regulation on who can lay high-voltage (110V) wire, but if you only have 12V going through the wire, you don't need an electrician, and you don't have regulations about how close the wires can be to other things, or GFCI circuits, or anything that goes with 110V. it's a stupid energy wasting way around stupid arbitrary housing codes.
how are three circuit per room more dangerous than one? you're splitting up the current draw over three circuits, so the over all load is lowered per circuit. if you're worried about knowing which circuit each socket is on, a simple color scheme could be developed to keep things straight - or just something simple like a small label under each socket that says "living room, circuit #1" and then in the circuit breaker box, you have a breaker labled "living room, circuit #1"
studs are 16" apart. i look at how many powerstrips i have in my rooms. particularlly my living room and computer room. since i'm not home right now, but here's what i can remember having plugged in in my living room: tv, vcr, dvd player, sterio, subwoofer, 2 lamps, 3 laptops, 1 hub, 1 vga -> ntsc converter, 2 cell phone chargers. that's 14 plugs that i can remember right now. plus what about transient items the the vacuum cleaner and stuff like that?
i don't think the cost of the copper wire is going to go up much, generally in houses there are 1-2 sockets per wall, that means the copper has to be run around the perimeter of the room anyway. so it's not much more copper to run from socket to socket (granted it will be more if you put more than one circuit per room, but you can always do 1 circuit per room).
this is a project that should be done it at least two steps. the only thing you really want to worry about now is getting the wires into the walls. so plan on things like (as you say) cat-5 (i suggest cat-6 incase gigabit become affordable in the future), speaker wire, and don't forget enough electrical sockets. i honestly don't think it's too much to ask for one electrical socket on each stud. make sure they're on different circuit breakers, and if possible maybe set up some of them to be uninterruptable. my ideal wall would have a socket on each stud. 2 out of every three would be regular sockets - but on different circuits, and 1 out of three would be on an uninterruptable circuit that's managed elsewhere in the house. you could even look into the new standard 12VDC power that's starting to be popular for some lightning. it wouldnt hurt to put a line of 12VDC in the wall too.
once you have all the wires in the wall, then you can worry about hardware. the nice thing is that you don't need to worry about it now. you can just put in a cheap thermostat now and later when you say, "hey, i'd like to control the thermostat with my webserver" you can then put in a new thermostat and you'll already have the wires in the wall and you can set up the webserver to control the thermostat. likewise with anything else, you can add touch screens later. the benefit to going with normal stuff now and upgrading later is that it forces you to think modularly. if you put in touch screens now and set everything up with those screens, you'll probably be mad next year when newer less buggy hardware is out there and it's impossible for you to upgrade. if you think modularly, then you can upgrade the hardware however you want.
the same goes for your server room. don't worry now about how many servers it's going to take to run your house. just make sure you have a room wired properly that you can put servers in. then when you start putting more services online and you need more computing power, it'll be easy to upgrade as necessary. for example after you get bored having the lights and heat controlled by the computers, you can later upgrade and write your own security system that monitors the windows and doors at night. if some one breaks in, it'll wake you up, auto dial 911, automatically unlock the gun cabinet and give you a lighted path from your bed to the gun cabinet (or at least that's my dream for my comptuer controlled house).
exactly! in fact, this was taught to me by a senior programmer who said: "you should never document your code, your should code your document." in projects where i've followed that rule, i've had many fewer problems than ones where i jumped into the code quickly.
To no surprise, the completed highway doesn't show up on the satellite (though most of it is present). The map, however, shows none of it.
3 9.825644,-104.980974&spn=0.007749,0.015003&t=h&hl= en
here's a cool view of a place where the map is newer than the sattelite picture. you can see where rt 36 extends to the west over washington street. but in the pure sattellite picture, you can only see the construction. this is a realitively new bypass, so the sattellite doesn't have it in, but the map is updated perfectlly. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=westminster,+co&ll=
Where the hell is my cell phone that manages my minutes so that it alerts me EXACTLY how much my phone bill will be whenever I press a button, and the amount of minutes I used between the hours of 8am - 6pm?
if you have tmobile then #646# (#min#) will tell you how many minutes you've used in the current billing cycle and #225# (#bal#) will tell you what your current balance is. after years of dealing with terrible customer service vrom AT&T, cingular, and verizion, i have to say that i'm very happy with tmobile. i hope i don't get modded down for looking like to much of an ad, i'm in no way affiliated with tmobile (other than having service with them).
Take Nine
A Mathematician, Physicist, and Engineer are asked to find the volume of a Red Rubber Ball. The mathematician carefully solves the triple integral. The Physicist puts the ball in water and measures the displacement. The engineer finds the serial number of the ball and looks up the volume in his red rubber ball table.
not true. check out the solution to this: http://www.techinterview.org/Puzzles/fog0000000026 .html
well, with an '89 if i reflash (i don't even know if i can reflash that computer) and screw something up, it'll be really hard to find a new ecu. i don't plan on trimming to the point where i'll be melting pistons, the 4cyl in the truck only puts out 110HP (when it was new, now that it has 240K miles, i'm sure it puts out much less) so no amount of tuning is going to turn it into a race car. i figure if i hook up an o2 sensor gauge so i can see what the o2 sensor is reporting, then when i'm running WOT and the ecu is in open loop, i can trim the reading from the air sensor and tell it that there's less air, so the ecu will put in less fuel and run at 14.7:1 air:fuel rather than slightly rich as it does now at WOT. i bet i could back it off to even 15 or 16:1 without melting the pistons and save even more fuel.
yes, the ecu controls the amount of fuel so that you never run as rich as you did back in the days of carbs, but there are also different settings in the ecu for different driving conditions. here's data from an '89 toyota 4runner (fairly heavy suv with a very underpowered 4cyl) with toyota's 2nd generation efi (new cars should be much better):
aggressive city driving = 18mpg
highway 60-65 mph = 22 mpg
highway 80 mph = 16 mpg
smooth city driving = 20 mpg
smooth city driving while always keeping it below 1/3 throttle = 25 mpg (this is really no slower than smooth city driving - just slightly slower acceleration).
the key with my truck is that i know if i keep it below 1/3 throttle, the ecu reads the o2 sensor and runs the fuel injection in closed loop that's optimized for efficiency. if i run it at full throttle (highway at 80) then the ecu is running open loop where it just dumps fuel in to try to get as much power as possible, but it runs richer and really doesn't generate that much power. so even though fuel injection is simpler (to drive) than the days of carbs, you still need to think with them. (as a side note - i'd love to insert a trim pot on a couple of the sensors so that i could adjust the mixture a little more. so when i run at full throttle on the highway, if i could lean it out a little i could gain more milage without a loss of power).
I think regulation is stupid right now. The real reason it's being proposed is to raise the cost of entry for small startups and let the big corporations take the tech all for themselves. That's not to say I'm against reasonable safeguards for the public, but it regulations should be done in a more general way. I believe an earlier post mentioned something about how nano particles are just the right size to be caught in the lungs and that this is similar to asbestos. Rather than having regluations for asbestos and nano particles, how about one broad regulation that says something like "no one is allowed to emit particles of size xx to yy in a concentration greater than zz blah blah blah" of course you could get more specific and say that the particles can't be emitted where there's a gathering of people or something like that. It's just a pet peeve that I have when people try to regulate things so specificly. Rather than regulating the technology, just regulate the effect.
Use the fuel for acceleration, then shift to neutral for downhill/flat coasting will really decrease your car's fuel consumption
this was true in the days of carberators. now with electronic fuel injection, coasting does nothing, and actually may increase fuel usage. the engine computer is constantly monitoring the engine speed and the throttle position. there are presets in the computer that if the engine speed is too high compared to the throtte position it will quit firing the injectors until the speed comes back down. so when you go down a long steep hill, chances are that your ecu has turned off your injectors, and you're burning no fuel. i know this is true on my old '89 toyota with a very primitive efi system - so it's gotta be true on newer cars.