I made one of these out of schedule 40 PVC tube from Lowes. Propellent is Aquanet and it's ignited with a grill starter wired to a lawnmower sparkplug. Still have it it's in my garage. 6ft long projects a potato at a little better than 200mph.
The power of these things is pretty shocking actually. I cut one of the potatos in half and put a nice big rock in front of it. Kinda used it like the wadding in a shotgun. I shot it at an old steel lawnchair. The rock went right though it.
Although I haven't done the calculation I would bet $1 that the amount of energy delivered from one of these potato guns is higher than a.45 or probably any other pistol this side of a.44 mag.
Make one of these, get 25lb of potatos. You will giggle for hours.
You can't imagine a piston power car going 180k miles without an engine rebuild? Are you on crack? I've seen tons of Toyotas and Mercedies do this. The myth that a dressed out rotary is lighter than a comparable piston engine is just that a myth. They are smaller but with less hollow spaces much more dense.
I have a 3rd gen RX-7. It's a great car. My fav ever. However in my opinion the engine ruins it.
In your car a rotary is a fine engine. It's a great engine in a low stress low horsepower application. Try to get any more than about 140-150hp out of it and it's not at all reliable.
There are several flaws in the rotary engine that no amount of technology will fix. They are:
Apex seals are fragile and unprotected. The slightest amount of spark induced detonation will break them requiring that you rebuild the engine.
The design of the rotary engine requires a long and narrow comustion chamber with lots of surface area this does two things. #1 transfers the heat of combustion to the coolent lowering specific output and increasing fuel consuption. #2 a lot of the heat of combustion is thrown out the exhaust in the hellishly hot 1800F exhaust stream rather than used to generate actual power.
Compare the 1995 BMW M3 piston powerplant to the 1995 RX-7 and the BMW comes out on top in just about every way. Plus it's likely the BMW would still be running today.
The Wankle engine is marketing BS.
The wankle makes less power, pollutes more and uses more gas than a similar size pistion engine.
On top of that rotaries are very fragile. Just a little spark knock from some bad gas can knock the apex seals off.
But there are quite a few of us that choose to develop and work with Windows XP and deploy on less friendly environments like Unix.
Why? Because from a purely ease of use, great GUI, available software perspective Windows works better than all flavors of Unix. I would rather eat broken glass than use Unix for day to day use. (That includes the Linux flavors too)
Lets see, at home I can have some friends over grill some steaks, watch a movie on my 65 HDTV, 2050 watts of 7 speaker DTS surround sitting on my own sofa. OR I could go the movie theater put up with 14-yo suburban "thugs" driving their mom's Camary, lines and $5 buckets of popcorn and sticky shoes.
I think that choice is easy. Home wins everytime.
My first IBM-PC MS-DOS v1.0 back in the early 80s ran a CPU clock speed of 4.77Mhz. Exactly 1000 times slower than this test chip. Pretty impressive.
In everyone's zeal to slay the Microsoft monster I wonder why everyone misses the real monopoly in computing? Intel.
After all, for every copy of windows there is an Intel CPU. For ever X-Box there is an Intel CPU. For every instance of Linux there is an Intel CPU. It's really Intel's processors that are a threat to Sun and HP not Microsoft's OS.
Microsoft will win this one in time. Sun is in bad shape. People are switching in droves to Linux because it has a better price / performance ratio than Solaris. There is nothing this side of a an IBM mainframe that is more painful than Solaris. Crusty user interface from the 80s. Pain in the ass cryptic config files. Overpriced shit. About the only reason that you'd run this hunk of shit OS is for it's one strong suit. It runs on hardware that is compatiable with large corporate databases with tons of I/O. We had a power failure. We lost a Solaris box because something in the file system FUBARed. Usually it's just a pain in the ass to start after a power outage. All of the windows NT and 2000 boxes rebooted without so much as a hiccup.
Second Intel will (already has) surpassed the SPARC architecture.
Sun from a business perspective is fucked. They will be lucky to stay in business over the long haul. Microsoft has 50 billion in the bank. Sun is letting people go and losing money every 1/4. Microsoft is hiring 5000 for R and D. Linux is eating Sun's lunch.
Windows XP on a strong Intel box will bury a Sun workstation in performance, ease of use, available software, available hardware, you name it. Microsoft on the desktop for any use is better than Sun.
Further, C# and Java are both abstracted from the hardware via a virtual machine. Follow me on this. Sun created a Java VM to run on Windows. What do you think the chances are than Microsoft can create a VM to run on Solaris?
Lastly outside of Struts and Apache open source software sucks. Leading the pack in suckage is CVS. The god forsaken hunk of shit.
You're nuts. You probably like in Northern Cali or Maine and therefor don't have a proper perspective. Try living though July in Florida with no A/C. Good luck!
I with every fiber of being hate CVS. This is one area where most of the commercial products are vastly superior to open source. Starteam makes CVS it's whining little bitch.
In case it wasn't abundently clear. I hate CVS.
I think every five or so years some pinhead comes out and declares the end of civilization in x number of years. Total crap.
I remember reading a paper in like 1980 that predicted that we only had about 8 years of oil left.
Wankel superior to the piston engine? In what way? Superior pain in the ass? I've had a last gen RX-7 for years and it's a giant pain in the ass. I think it's run right for about a total of 5 minutes. Every problem I've had has been engine related. The piston engine in my M3 has run perfectly for three years.
My favorite conribution from the high end audio nutcases *HAS* to be the $100.00+ high end digital
interconnect.
Someone should splain' to them that with a digital signal, you either get it, or you don't
get it. There is no in between.
Please, please, please get out of the software field. It's a dead end. No one wants you here, you will be better off in marketing, or washing dishes, or detailing cars or food service. And besides all of that less compitition will drive up my rate.:)
If there is one thing that pisses me off it's the electric car people. How will generating power in a central spot save fuel? There are losses in generating power, transmitting power and storing power for later use. All of which add up to as much or more than a internal combustion engine.
Plus only a pencil neck weenie would rather than an electric motor over a vee-8.
Assuming there was no loss of data I would suffer though a computer crash so that wouldn't have to listen to Celine Dion. That is a price I am willing to pay.
In my observation you are incorrect. I like to wrench on cars for the fun of it. Looking at the attention to detail and quality of the components BMWs are better designed and more well thought out than any other car I've come in contact with.
Has anyone noticed that if you click the "JOIN" button on that site that the functionality is implemented in JSP? So the anti-Unix site is using BSD/Apache and Java.
Nice.
That is like saying that a McDonalds cheeseburger is the same as a fine piece of perfectly cooked filet. Or that an $90 suit from JC Penny is the same as a $600 suit from Brooks Brothers.
True they both do the same thing feed and cover you. However...
It is as simple as this, when it comes to cars BMW makes some of the finest vehicles at any price. They are built flawlessly. They go, stop and turn like a full on sports car and ride like luxury. If you can appricate those things there is no substitute.
In terms of economics and BMWs if you buy new cars it actually comes out cheaper to drive BMWs than a similar Japanese or American car (well the same size weight etc- since there really aren't any comparable) Factor in depriciation, and the cost of maint over the life of a new car and you will find that a BMW in the end is the better deal. They depricate slower and fewer things break, plus the dealers take care of 100% of maint for the first three years including oil changes.
That is like saying that a McDonalds cheeseburger is the same as a fine piece of perfectly cooked filet. Or that an $90 suit from JC Penny is the same as a $600 suit from Brooks Brothers.
True they both do the same thing feed and cover you. However...
It is as simple as this, when it comes to cars BMW makes some of the finest vehicles at any price. They are built flawlessly. They go, stop and turn like a full on sports car and ride like luxury. If you can appricate those things there is no substitute.
Here is something that I've noticed with the Dell computers that I've purchased over the years. The quality just plain sucks. Right at two years
the things start falling apart. Floppy drive stop working, fans howl etc. My not ever 2 year old Dell laptop is a mess and I take pretty good care of it. I don't know if other brands are as bad Sony, Compaq, etc. I am thinking that Apple might not have some of these issues? I don't know for sure.
On the subject of building your own computer. Unless you just like to do that kind of thing or you make a very small amount of money it doesn't really make economic sense. The time spent researching, buying and building doesn't make up for the cost savings of doing it yourself. I built my last computer in 1995 and don't forsee doing it again.
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Hacking computers and hacking cars is exactly the same with the exception of one thing.
Computer hackers are complete dorks and car hackers are cool.
I made one of these out of schedule 40 PVC tube from Lowes. Propellent is Aquanet and it's ignited with a grill starter wired to a lawnmower sparkplug. Still have it it's in my garage. 6ft long projects a potato at a little better than 200mph. The power of these things is pretty shocking actually. I cut one of the potatos in half and put a nice big rock in front of it. Kinda used it like the wadding in a shotgun. I shot it at an old steel lawnchair. The rock went right though it. Although I haven't done the calculation I would bet $1 that the amount of energy delivered from one of these potato guns is higher than a .45 or probably any other pistol this side of a .44 mag.
Make one of these, get 25lb of potatos. You will giggle for hours.
You can't imagine a piston power car going 180k miles without an engine rebuild? Are you on crack? I've seen tons of Toyotas and Mercedies do this. The myth that a dressed out rotary is lighter than a comparable piston engine is just that a myth. They are smaller but with less hollow spaces much more dense. I have a 3rd gen RX-7. It's a great car. My fav ever. However in my opinion the engine ruins it. In your car a rotary is a fine engine. It's a great engine in a low stress low horsepower application. Try to get any more than about 140-150hp out of it and it's not at all reliable. There are several flaws in the rotary engine that no amount of technology will fix. They are: Apex seals are fragile and unprotected. The slightest amount of spark induced detonation will break them requiring that you rebuild the engine. The design of the rotary engine requires a long and narrow comustion chamber with lots of surface area this does two things. #1 transfers the heat of combustion to the coolent lowering specific output and increasing fuel consuption. #2 a lot of the heat of combustion is thrown out the exhaust in the hellishly hot 1800F exhaust stream rather than used to generate actual power. Compare the 1995 BMW M3 piston powerplant to the 1995 RX-7 and the BMW comes out on top in just about every way. Plus it's likely the BMW would still be running today.
The Wankle engine is marketing BS. The wankle makes less power, pollutes more and uses more gas than a similar size pistion engine. On top of that rotaries are very fragile. Just a little spark knock from some bad gas can knock the apex seals off.
But there are quite a few of us that choose to develop and work with Windows XP and deploy on less friendly environments like Unix. Why? Because from a purely ease of use, great GUI, available software perspective Windows works better than all flavors of Unix. I would rather eat broken glass than use Unix for day to day use. (That includes the Linux flavors too)
Lets see, at home I can have some friends over grill some steaks, watch a movie on my 65 HDTV, 2050 watts of 7 speaker DTS surround sitting on my own sofa. OR I could go the movie theater put up with 14-yo suburban "thugs" driving their mom's Camary, lines and $5 buckets of popcorn and sticky shoes. I think that choice is easy. Home wins everytime.
My first IBM-PC MS-DOS v1.0 back in the early 80s ran a CPU clock speed of 4.77Mhz. Exactly 1000 times slower than this test chip. Pretty impressive. In everyone's zeal to slay the Microsoft monster I wonder why everyone misses the real monopoly in computing? Intel. After all, for every copy of windows there is an Intel CPU. For ever X-Box there is an Intel CPU. For every instance of Linux there is an Intel CPU. It's really Intel's processors that are a threat to Sun and HP not Microsoft's OS.
Hey dude, it's your fucking fault you live in KY. Don't whine to me.
Microsoft will win this one in time. Sun is in bad shape. People are switching in droves to Linux because it has a better price / performance ratio than Solaris. There is nothing this side of a an IBM mainframe that is more painful than Solaris. Crusty user interface from the 80s. Pain in the ass cryptic config files. Overpriced shit. About the only reason that you'd run this hunk of shit OS is for it's one strong suit. It runs on hardware that is compatiable with large corporate databases with tons of I/O. We had a power failure. We lost a Solaris box because something in the file system FUBARed. Usually it's just a pain in the ass to start after a power outage. All of the windows NT and 2000 boxes rebooted without so much as a hiccup. Second Intel will (already has) surpassed the SPARC architecture. Sun from a business perspective is fucked. They will be lucky to stay in business over the long haul. Microsoft has 50 billion in the bank. Sun is letting people go and losing money every 1/4. Microsoft is hiring 5000 for R and D. Linux is eating Sun's lunch. Windows XP on a strong Intel box will bury a Sun workstation in performance, ease of use, available software, available hardware, you name it. Microsoft on the desktop for any use is better than Sun. Further, C# and Java are both abstracted from the hardware via a virtual machine. Follow me on this. Sun created a Java VM to run on Windows. What do you think the chances are than Microsoft can create a VM to run on Solaris? Lastly outside of Struts and Apache open source software sucks. Leading the pack in suckage is CVS. The god forsaken hunk of shit.
You're nuts. You probably like in Northern Cali or Maine and therefor don't have a proper perspective. Try living though July in Florida with no A/C. Good luck!
I with every fiber of being hate CVS. This is one area where most of the commercial products are vastly superior to open source. Starteam makes CVS it's whining little bitch. In case it wasn't abundently clear. I hate CVS.
I think every five or so years some pinhead comes out and declares the end of civilization in x number of years. Total crap. I remember reading a paper in like 1980 that predicted that we only had about 8 years of oil left.
Wankel superior to the piston engine? In what way? Superior pain in the ass? I've had a last gen RX-7 for years and it's a giant pain in the ass. I think it's run right for about a total of 5 minutes. Every problem I've had has been engine related. The piston engine in my M3 has run perfectly for three years.
My favorite conribution from the high end audio nutcases *HAS* to be the $100.00+ high end digital interconnect. Someone should splain' to them that with a digital signal, you either get it, or you don't get it. There is no in between.
Please, please, please get out of the software field. It's a dead end. No one wants you here, you will be better off in marketing, or washing dishes, or detailing cars or food service. And besides all of that less compitition will drive up my rate. :)
Issah one moooa place whan dee whitey debbile is holding the black man down!
If there is one thing that pisses me off it's the electric car people. How will generating power in a central spot save fuel? There are losses in generating power, transmitting power and storing power for later use. All of which add up to as much or more than a internal combustion engine.
Plus only a pencil neck weenie would rather than an electric motor over a vee-8.
Assuming there was no loss of data I would suffer though a computer crash so that wouldn't have to listen to Celine Dion. That is a price I am willing to pay.
In my observation you are incorrect. I like to wrench on cars for the fun of it. Looking at the attention to detail and quality of the components BMWs are better designed and more well thought out than any other car I've come in contact with.
Has anyone noticed that if you click the "JOIN" button on that site that the functionality is implemented in JSP? So the anti-Unix site is using BSD/Apache and Java. Nice.
That is like saying that a McDonalds cheeseburger is the same as a fine piece of perfectly cooked filet. Or that an $90 suit from JC Penny is the same as a $600 suit from Brooks Brothers. True they both do the same thing feed and cover you. However... It is as simple as this, when it comes to cars BMW makes some of the finest vehicles at any price. They are built flawlessly. They go, stop and turn like a full on sports car and ride like luxury. If you can appricate those things there is no substitute. In terms of economics and BMWs if you buy new cars it actually comes out cheaper to drive BMWs than a similar Japanese or American car (well the same size weight etc- since there really aren't any comparable) Factor in depriciation, and the cost of maint over the life of a new car and you will find that a BMW in the end is the better deal. They depricate slower and fewer things break, plus the dealers take care of 100% of maint for the first three years including oil changes.
That is like saying that a McDonalds cheeseburger is the same as a fine piece of perfectly cooked filet. Or that an $90 suit from JC Penny is the same as a $600 suit from Brooks Brothers. True they both do the same thing feed and cover you. However... It is as simple as this, when it comes to cars BMW makes some of the finest vehicles at any price. They are built flawlessly. They go, stop and turn like a full on sports car and ride like luxury. If you can appricate those things there is no substitute.
Here is something that I've noticed with the Dell computers that I've purchased over the years. The quality just plain sucks. Right at two years the things start falling apart. Floppy drive stop working, fans howl etc. My not ever 2 year old Dell laptop is a mess and I take pretty good care of it. I don't know if other brands are as bad Sony, Compaq, etc. I am thinking that Apple might not have some of these issues? I don't know for sure. On the subject of building your own computer. Unless you just like to do that kind of thing or you make a very small amount of money it doesn't really make economic sense. The time spent researching, buying and building doesn't make up for the cost savings of doing it yourself. I built my last computer in 1995 and don't forsee doing it again.
What exchange is this company's stock listed on if any? Does anyone know the ticker? Thank you.
Dude, WHAT IS this shit on your site? http://refridgerator.home.mindspring.com/pbwood/gw enthis.gif