But how well will those high frequencies work? From a brief stint in radar engineering ISTR that around 50 GHz atmospheric absorption gets high enough to limit your range. Also, do regular (omnidirectional) antennas still function at those frequencies? Or are you limited to parabolas (and thus point-to-point links which have to be carefully aligned)?
Over the past few months I've been looking into this. I really want a PVR, but can't buy one off-the-shelf (no service available in.nl).
One of the things I noticed is that it doesn't seem possible to put more than one capture card into a PC. At least I've seen reports that say Windows can only handle on capture card. If this is true, it would be a shame. I currently have two VCRs. If I buy a PVR, I'd like to improve on current functionality and be able to record two programs while watching (with PVR functions like 'pause live TV' available) a third.
Now, I haven't been able to absolutely confirm this. Does anyone here know, and is the situation different when you use Linux?
And how adaptable are current open-PVR efforts? Is it possible for a non-programmer (at least, nothing beyond a few simple Applescripts) to e.g. get the software to recognize guide data from a different website than originally intended? Most software PVRs seem linked pretty much to a single guide data provider.
At least for the PVR part, it does matter. Current commercial PVRs (TiVo/ReplayTV/TVserver) depend on a single commercial provider of guide data, so they can only be used where the guide service is available, which is, at the moment, in only 6 countries AFAIK (US, UK, JP, D, Aus, Sw). All others are left out in the cold.
An open PVR can be adapted to use whatever guide data is available online (and usable guide data is available in a lot more than 6 countries), making PVRs accessible (if the software is usable) to lots more people.
True. But the problem here is, if the performance of your 802.11 network takes a nosedive, how are you going to find out that it's due to a radio amateur jamming your signals?
Yes, the proposal talks about using 802.11 at several different frequencies, only one of which is the band in which WiFi networks operate. But it also states that that is the first frequency that will be used.
802.11 is impractical for many frequencies available for ham radio: an 802.11 transmission (at the speeds specified in 802.11) has way too much bandwidth for sub-Ghz frequencies.
I'd expect they are using regular 802.11 equipment, remove the antennas and connect the antenna ports to their own transmitters/receivers/large antennas. So no, it's not cheaper than off-the-shelf 802.11 equipment.
A radio amateur with an 802.11 transmitter could easily jam the low-power, shitty-antenna transceivers used in 802.11 networks. Only a few channels (up to 14) have been defined for 802.11 use, and it only works because transmitters have limited range. Change that, and you've got instant DOS.
So now, instead of walking to the computer to choose a song, I'm walking to my stereo to choose a song. That's no progress, it needs a remote.
And why use 802.11? Wouldn't it be easier to have an FM transmitter next to the computer, so I can receive the audio with a credit-card-sized radio (they talk about using the HomePod in the garden. Yeah, right). And again, a remote controller to choose songs.
And it's butt-ugly. On top (it won't fit anywhere else due to the display on top) of my neat stack of 44 cm wide black boxes, I've got some blue-gray blob with an antenna sticking out.
And can the HomePod digitize audio and send it from the stereo to the computer?
I'll stick with the RCA cables between my computer and stereo, thank you.
the supply of the raw materials is really less than we'll ever use. no one knows exactly how much supply of those raw materials exists. people have guesses, and all the time they keep finding more and more.
However much there is, it's a finite supply, so it will run out eventually. Probably somewhere this century.
this decrease will probably be slow in order to protect the huge economies built around the industry, but it looks to be in progress
Currently, oil consumption is increasing every year. And that's a trend that looks set to continue. A decrease is decades off.
It's either Renault (Espace) or Mitsubishi (Space Wagon) that introduced the modern minivan. They weren't far apart (same year?). Chrysler followed soon.
Of course, there have been earlier cars that could be called minivans. The Fiat Multipla, for one. IIRC Tatra also built something that coul be called a minivan.
Usually it's Citroën that gets credited with that. The DS, you know.
In the 1980's Cadillac pioneered computer control of fuel injection systems as well as 4 wheel antilock disk breaks.
Again, they weren't there first. Jensen did ABS in 1970, EFI was common by 1980, Saab got there in 1976 IIRC (the EMS).
The greatest achievement that took the Europeans YEARS to reverse engineer however was the transaxal automatic transmission, which even today was an incredibly brilliant innovation.
While US car makers were playing with transaxles, European car makers switched to front wheel drive for most cars, making real inroads into freeing up cabin space.
The examples you have cited are just bad
Quite the contrary. We were talking about roadholding, not reliability.
I am amazed you are unfamiliar with the technical superiority of the Northstar V-8 over anything else on the market.
Oh, the Northstar is a good engine. But technically superior over anything on the market? No. And it is an exception. It's just about the only advanced engine available in US cars. All others use mediocre to medieval power plants.
Cadillac has woken up. Northstar is good, and the new models they recently showed look like Europeans might accept them. But apart from those two, there are only two US cars that have taken off in Europe: the Voyager and the PT Cruiser. And even those aren't being bought because they offer brilliant engineering.
When RFID tags are used to prevent theft, what's stopping a thief from bringing a jammer, or a device that nukes the RFID tags, to the store? RFID tags are more easily defeated than the current (larger) RF tags.
GM practically invented everything about the modern car
Excuse me while I fall about laughing. You credit Cadillac with inventing active suspension. In fact, Lotus invented it, around 1980. Citroën offered cars with active suspension since 1989, Cadillac introduced it in 1996.
Personally, variable suspension is preferable in the Americas.
And not only there, which is why more and more manufacturers are offering it. European manufacturers, mostly.
There are many instances where a stiff suspension will not provide optimum road handling, almost to a dangerous degree.
There are quite a few European manufacturers which have shown that it's possible to build a car that rides comfortably and still handles well (Peugeot, Jaguar), and they didn't need active suspension to achieve that.
Seriously, we having been designing cars for 100 years. All cars are produced with exceptional quality today. BMW produces a car which never changes, never improves.
Bull. BMW generations may look very similar (that ended with the new 7-series), but they constantly innovate. iDrive may not be the best possible solution to clutter, but at least they made an attempt to deal with it. Valvetronic is a huge step forward.
The US car makers, on the other hand, change the exterior of the cars every year, but forget to innovate the underlying technology. They still mainly churn out square boxes with 2-valve V8 gas guzzling engines.
There, the sheer size of some American cars would be decadent enough.
Decadent, yes. Desirable, no. The design sucks, and they are completely unsuitable for our European roads (especially for travelling at high speed).
Cadillac is a premier name in the same class as Jaguar, BWM, Mercedes-Benz** and Lincoln.
Only if you like tacky interiors and don't care about roadholding.
And outside the US, there still is a big difference in perception (and with these prestige brands, that is important) between Cadillac/Lincoln on one hand, and the European marques on the other.
No, I don't miss those 2-ton Detroit steel barges. Mainly because they don't handle, but also because they're criminally inefficient.
About the looks: this isn't the only concept car that's come out of Detroit recently. There were several that should be more to your liking. The Ford 'Tonka' pickup, for example (even more monstrous than current offerings), Dodge had another 'full size' pickup, and they were both shown with alternative propulsion (the Ford was Diesel-electric, and the Dodge used LNG, IIRC).
The HyWire mainly looks goofy because it can. It's not only a hydrogen-power prototype, it shows off an entirely different way of building cars. Why stick that underneath some bog-standard undistinctive bodyshell?
Once this technology goes mainstream, you can bet there'll be body styles to suit everyone.
Yep. This is a big problem with radar installations (which can radiate in the megawatt range at these frequencies). For safety reasons, you want a no-access zone around the radar, but e.g. on naval ships, you don't have room for that. So they set the radar not to transmit in certain directions (e.g. the bridge).
There are stories about radars being used to de-ice parking lots etc., but I haven't been able to verify them.
Ah, but they didn't use "more or less standard equipment". They used "huge, ultra-sensitive directional antennas", at least on the receiving side (and 2.4 m is huge, compared to what's available at most computer stores).
This technology may be cheaper than laying 300 km of cable, but it isn't exactly free. The receiving end used a 2.4 m dish with a tracking system, and I expect the receiver was of a rather higher grade than the one in an 802.11 card as well.
Basically, all they have done is show that 802.11 (I assume) communication via satellites (balloons, high-altitude UAVs, whatever) is feasible. Other than the protocol used, that's no big deal.
Many diesels are easy to tune because turbochargers are so common on diesels. Most petrol cars are normally aspirated, which makes it harder (or at least more expensive) to get real performance gains.
VW also has a 1.9 Diesel which they sell in 90, 110, 130 and 150 bhp variants. They look the same, but on the more powerful engines, crucial components have been strengthened.
For the punier variants you can get chips: the 90 bhp version can be tuned to 130 bhp. But you lose the warranty, and I'm willing to bet that that chipped engine won't last as long as the factory 130-bhp unit. And that's the common situation. Why would the manufacturer vastly overengineer an engine (making it more expensive to build) when they can build a marginal one instead?
I know there are cases when overengineered engines do make it to production, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
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But how well will those high frequencies work? From a brief stint in radar engineering ISTR that around 50 GHz atmospheric absorption gets high enough to limit your range. Also, do regular (omnidirectional) antennas still function at those frequencies? Or are you limited to parabolas (and thus point-to-point links which have to be carefully aligned)?
Over the past few months I've been looking into this. I really want a PVR, but can't buy one off-the-shelf (no service available in .nl).
One of the things I noticed is that it doesn't seem possible to put more than one capture card into a PC. At least I've seen reports that say Windows can only handle on capture card. If this is true, it would be a shame. I currently have two VCRs. If I buy a PVR, I'd like to improve on current functionality and be able to record two programs while watching (with PVR functions like 'pause live TV' available) a third.
Now, I haven't been able to absolutely confirm this. Does anyone here know, and is the situation different when you use Linux?
And how adaptable are current open-PVR efforts? Is it possible for a non-programmer (at least, nothing beyond a few simple Applescripts) to e.g. get the software to recognize guide data from a different website than originally intended? Most software PVRs seem linked pretty much to a single guide data provider.
And a PVR is available, too: the EyeTV
Too bad it's US only, and uses USB to connect the capture hardware to the Mac.
At least for the PVR part, it does matter. Current commercial PVRs (TiVo/ReplayTV/TVserver) depend on a single commercial provider of guide data, so they can only be used where the guide service is available, which is, at the moment, in only 6 countries AFAIK (US, UK, JP, D, Aus, Sw). All others are left out in the cold.
An open PVR can be adapted to use whatever guide data is available online (and usable guide data is available in a lot more than 6 countries), making PVRs accessible (if the software is usable) to lots more people.
It rarely happens on purpose.
True. But the problem here is, if the performance of your 802.11 network takes a nosedive, how are you going to find out that it's due to a radio amateur jamming your signals?
Yes, the proposal talks about using 802.11 at several different frequencies, only one of which is the band in which WiFi networks operate. But it also states that that is the first frequency that will be used.
802.11 is impractical for many frequencies available for ham radio: an 802.11 transmission (at the speeds specified in 802.11) has way too much bandwidth for sub-Ghz frequencies.
The ruling said that the 20-year copyright extension ("Sonny Bono act"?) was not unconstitutional. RTFA.
I'd expect they are using regular 802.11 equipment, remove the antennas and connect the antenna ports to their own transmitters/receivers/large antennas. So no, it's not cheaper than off-the-shelf 802.11 equipment.
A radio amateur with an 802.11 transmitter could easily jam the low-power, shitty-antenna transceivers used in 802.11 networks. Only a few channels (up to 14) have been defined for 802.11 use, and it only works because transmitters have limited range. Change that, and you've got instant DOS.
So now, instead of walking to the computer to choose a song, I'm walking to my stereo to choose a song. That's no progress, it needs a remote.
And why use 802.11? Wouldn't it be easier to have an FM transmitter next to the computer, so I can receive the audio with a credit-card-sized radio (they talk about using the HomePod in the garden. Yeah, right). And again, a remote controller to choose songs.
And it's butt-ugly. On top (it won't fit anywhere else due to the display on top) of my neat stack of 44 cm wide black boxes, I've got some blue-gray blob with an antenna sticking out.
And can the HomePod digitize audio and send it from the stereo to the computer?
I'll stick with the RCA cables between my computer and stereo, thank you.
the supply of the raw materials is really less than we'll ever use. no one knows exactly how much supply of those raw materials exists. people have guesses, and all the time they keep finding more and more.
However much there is, it's a finite supply, so it will run out eventually. Probably somewhere this century.
this decrease will probably be slow in order to protect the huge economies built around the industry, but it looks to be in progress
Currently, oil consumption is increasing every year. And that's a trend that looks set to continue. A decrease is decades off.
It's either Renault (Espace) or Mitsubishi (Space Wagon) that introduced the modern minivan. They weren't far apart (same year?). Chrysler followed soon.
Of course, there have been earlier cars that could be called minivans. The Fiat Multipla, for one. IIRC Tatra also built something that coul be called a minivan.
since they invented hydraulic suspension
Usually it's Citroën that gets credited with that. The DS, you know.
In the 1980's Cadillac pioneered computer control of fuel injection systems as well as 4 wheel antilock disk breaks.
Again, they weren't there first. Jensen did ABS in 1970, EFI was common by 1980, Saab got there in 1976 IIRC (the EMS).
The greatest achievement that took the Europeans YEARS to reverse engineer however was the transaxal automatic transmission, which even today was an incredibly brilliant innovation.
While US car makers were playing with transaxles, European car makers switched to front wheel drive for most cars, making real inroads into freeing up cabin space.
The examples you have cited are just bad
Quite the contrary. We were talking about roadholding, not reliability.
I am amazed you are unfamiliar with the technical superiority of the Northstar V-8 over anything else on the market.
Oh, the Northstar is a good engine. But technically superior over anything on the market? No. And it is an exception. It's just about the only advanced engine available in US cars. All others use mediocre to medieval power plants.
Cadillac has woken up. Northstar is good, and the new models they recently showed look like Europeans might accept them. But apart from those two, there are only two US cars that have taken off in Europe: the Voyager and the PT Cruiser. And even those aren't being bought because they offer brilliant engineering.
When RFID tags are used to prevent theft, what's stopping a thief from bringing a jammer, or a device that nukes the RFID tags, to the store? RFID tags are more easily defeated than the current (larger) RF tags.
GM practically invented everything about the modern car
Excuse me while I fall about laughing. You credit Cadillac with inventing active suspension. In fact, Lotus invented it, around 1980. Citroën offered cars with active suspension since 1989, Cadillac introduced it in 1996.
Personally, variable suspension is preferable in the Americas.
And not only there, which is why more and more manufacturers are offering it. European manufacturers, mostly.
There are many instances where a stiff suspension will not provide optimum road handling, almost to a dangerous degree.
There are quite a few European manufacturers which have shown that it's possible to build a car that rides comfortably and still handles well (Peugeot, Jaguar), and they didn't need active suspension to achieve that.
Seriously, we having been designing cars for 100 years. All cars are produced with exceptional quality today. BMW produces a car which never changes, never improves.
Bull. BMW generations may look very similar (that ended with the new 7-series), but they constantly innovate. iDrive may not be the best possible solution to clutter, but at least they made an attempt to deal with it. Valvetronic is a huge step forward. The US car makers, on the other hand, change the exterior of the cars every year, but forget to innovate the underlying technology. They still mainly churn out square boxes with 2-valve V8 gas guzzling engines.
There, the sheer size of some American cars would be decadent enough.
Decadent, yes. Desirable, no. The design sucks, and they are completely unsuitable for our European roads (especially for travelling at high speed).
From the announcement:1) If you participate in illegal file-sharing networks, your computer now belongs to the RIAA.
Obviously, it's called all_your_file_are_belong_to_us.exe :-P
Cadillac is a premier name in the same class as Jaguar, BWM, Mercedes-Benz** and Lincoln.
Only if you like tacky interiors and don't care about roadholding.
And outside the US, there still is a big difference in perception (and with these prestige brands, that is important) between Cadillac/Lincoln on one hand, and the European marques on the other.
No, I don't miss those 2-ton Detroit steel barges. Mainly because they don't handle, but also because they're criminally inefficient.
About the looks: this isn't the only concept car that's come out of Detroit recently. There were several that should be more to your liking. The Ford 'Tonka' pickup, for example (even more monstrous than current offerings), Dodge had another 'full size' pickup, and they were both shown with alternative propulsion (the Ford was Diesel-electric, and the Dodge used LNG, IIRC).
The HyWire mainly looks goofy because it can. It's not only a hydrogen-power prototype, it shows off an entirely different way of building cars. Why stick that underneath some bog-standard undistinctive bodyshell?
Once this technology goes mainstream, you can bet there'll be body styles to suit everyone.
Yep. This is a big problem with radar installations (which can radiate in the megawatt range at these frequencies). For safety reasons, you want a no-access zone around the radar, but e.g. on naval ships, you don't have room for that. So they set the radar not to transmit in certain directions (e.g. the bridge).
There are stories about radars being used to de-ice parking lots etc., but I haven't been able to verify them.
Ah, but they didn't use "more or less standard equipment". They used "huge, ultra-sensitive directional antennas", at least on the receiving side (and 2.4 m is huge, compared to what's available at most computer stores).
This technology may be cheaper than laying 300 km of cable, but it isn't exactly free. The receiving end used a 2.4 m dish with a tracking system, and I expect the receiver was of a rather higher grade than the one in an 802.11 card as well.
Basically, all they have done is show that 802.11 (I assume) communication via satellites (balloons, high-altitude UAVs, whatever) is feasible. Other than the protocol used, that's no big deal.
Downhill bikers - hmmm. Does it include a hydraulic ram to fling the biker over the handlebars at random intervals?
Until you get to the first corner, of course...
Many diesels are easy to tune because turbochargers are so common on diesels. Most petrol cars are normally aspirated, which makes it harder (or at least more expensive) to get real performance gains.
VW also has a 1.9 Diesel which they sell in 90, 110, 130 and 150 bhp variants. They look the same, but on the more powerful engines, crucial components have been strengthened.
For the punier variants you can get chips: the 90 bhp version can be tuned to 130 bhp. But you lose the warranty, and I'm willing to bet that that chipped engine won't last as long as the factory 130-bhp unit. And that's the common situation. Why would the manufacturer vastly overengineer an engine (making it more expensive to build) when they can build a marginal one instead?
I know there are cases when overengineered engines do make it to production, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
If you look at the performance improvement 10% more power gives you, then no (10% more power !=10% more speed).