Diesels, which they do get good mileage, one fact is almost always overlooked: Diesel fuel contains about 10-15% more available heat content per gallon than gas. So 40MPG diesel is actually 35-37 MPPGE (Miles per gallon gasoline equivalent). While diesel engines ARE thermally more efficent than traditional otto cycle gasoline engines, the numbers are skewed further by this fact.
The other killer for Diesel is particulate and NOx emissions, which are two major components of smog. Newer engines are rapidly improving on this, but most production diesels now can't touch gasoline engines as far as emissions go.
As far as starter motors go, you're right, you can't run a regular starter motor more than 30-40 seconds before it starts to overheat. However, new Stater-Altenator technology is emegering in the form of "Mild Hybrids" that have essentially an oversize starter motor that doubles as the altenator for the vehicle, and is capable of providing a few kW of starting torque to take the low-end load off the engine. These systems usually cut about 10% off the fuel consumption. I believe the GM hybrid will be of this type.
You've just described the way OBD-II logs data. If you drive a car made after 1994 or so, this system, almost exactly how you describe it, is in place. It was engineered as a diagnostic function, and not a blackbox function, so that mechanics could check the recent sensor history before a fault to help troubleshoot problems ("Ahh, I see before your engine melted, the temp sensor showed the temperature rising to 500 degrees..."). Trouble is, in a wreck, there tends to be sensor faults (e.g. airbag deployment), so the freeze frame data turns into a black box.
The original intention was to standardize the vehicle's sensor data so that there would be a somewhat standard set of diagnostic codes and procedures for all vehicles.
For more information, look up the SAE J1979 standard which documents many of these codes and procedures.
It is also easy to reset this data by sending a certain code to the engine computer through the diagnostic connector located underneath your dashboard. Some avaialble OBD-II tools can do this.
If you're in the tinfoil club, carry one around in your glovebox, and if you get in a wreck, hook it up and erase your history before anyone sees you!
According to the article, he uses ethanol at some points. When used in cars, it is acutally called E85, which is a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline...
Systems like this will never catch on with common consumers, they're simply too complicated.
The simplest and most effective solution would be to have a mail server authority, much like the DNS authority is run, and then have everyone register their servers. If the server is abused, they're investigated/deleted from the registry. Users configure their mail clients not to receive mail from unregistered servers, and voila, no more spam.
It won't catch on overnight, but it will be necessary. Such a service might cost a $5 one-time fee or small yearly fee, whatever. Any server that's worth running will pay for this. The real-world analogy is you can't have unlicensed drivers on the road.
One good way to authenticate an image would be to embed a GPS with a camera. Seeing as this is done on relatively inexpensive cell phones, it shouldn't be too hard. Market the camera as "secure" or "evidence-class" camera, somehow tie the info to the image...
There are security details, but if it is possible to tag an image with WHERE it was taken in a secure fashion, it would eliminate all but the most enterprising forgers.
A significant number of ecommerce ad sites only do business with certain countries, and it seems like a simple and somewhat effective solution is to allow the company to opt not to pay for or receive traffic from countries outside their sales zone. In other words, a reverse ad block based on the visitor's IP address.
I work with a mail order business which does zero orders to third world countries like India, and it's no skin off our back of we were to simply "ban" our ads from India.
You're kidding, right? The submitter is either purposely acting ignorant or really has had their head under a rock for the past five years. Software piracy is "far-fetched?" Why do you think all the games companies are so eager to move to consoles now?
I would argue game companies are leaning more toward consoles because they are easier to develop for, sufficiently powerful now, and have reached a critical mass for an audience (Average gamer vs. L33t PC geek with his tricked out box).
Software piracy is probably not as common as you think. Here on slashdot, I guarantee a vast majority of users have at some point "borrowed" an application. The general population, on the other hand, the kids and average parents on AOL, probably have not.
There will always be a segment of the population that steals software. I am willing to bet, however, that this PERCENTAGE of users has not increased over the years (noting that the total number of users, therefore pirates, have).
There are two types of piracy in my book: the for-profit pirates, and the tinkerers. The former is what the BSA is (or should be) focusing on, such as Russian mafia groups burning windows XP cds and selling them and profitting from the stolen software. I think almost everyone can agree this is unacceptable in any form, morally and ethically.
Then, there's the tinkerers. The college kids who download that $700 photoshop program, or $2000 Matlab program, or $10,000 Maya suite for the purposes of learning it and toying with it. Here's the shocker, by these kids learning these packages because they stole them, they make the software more valuable. Once they get into a real job, and boss asks you to whip together some images, the kid who knows Photoshop is gonna make said company go out and buy that software.
Now granted, this is an idealization, and I'm sure businesses pirate software as well, but the larger the user base that knows your software, the more valuable it is and more likely it is to be purchased. I'm willing to bet Microsoft actively looked away from pirates back in the early days when their market share wasn't so certain, because these new users were using the software, getting hooked on it, and eventually landed in a situation where they had to buy the packages.
As far as games go, the reality is that almost every new game will have some sort of network functionality. Users may pirate a copy of a game, and play it in single player mode, but now they're hooked, and want to play online, where now it's very easy to check to see if your copy is legit. Again, another user roped in and hooked.
Still, a hax0r kiddie who steals a copy of Autocad is no skin off of anyone's back, because he was never a potential customer to begin with. But if he learns it, and eventually ends up in the business world, then that's one more license sold for Autodesk.
Public trade shows in general are dying, IMO. Before, they served as a big marketplace of new stuff, but with the internet at the level it's at now, there's nothing new once you hit the tradeshow floor as you've heard about it already.
Also, since tradeshows are traditionally targetted at business-to-business type transactions and networking, I doubt that shows like Comdex actually netted exhibitors signficant sales. When you get a bunch of geeks wandering around, chatting up exhibitors, but not spending any money, it chases away both exhibitors and attendees who prefer to go to more exclusive gatherings.
Now, industry-insider tradeshows (The ones you have to know someone to get into), now THOSE are still the places to be at, if you're fortunate enough to get into one. Try IAAPA or the Bar and Nightclub show on for size (those are simply fantastic).
And still, the analog hole remains wide open. Plug player into your line-in port, rip to mp3, download it to your iPod, send to your friends, post it on Kazaa, and enjoy.
How do you think mp3's of vinyl releases end up online? Granted, it takes longer because it's harder to do, but it eventually gets there.
As long as you can listen to it, there's simply no way to prevent it from being duplicated. But we all knew that already.
In industry speak, the system uptime is referred to as a number of nines. As in, a system with 3 nines is up 99.999% of the time. Every extra nine after the decimal point costs ya more money.
Obviously, hotmail isn't working with too many nines at their end.
I have used this setup to scan in tens of thousands of pages. All you need is Adobe Acrobat 4 or 5 (full version) and the Deskscan driver. Drop a stack in, click scan, and walk off and go do something. Come back in 5 minutes, put the pile back in to scan the back sides, click continue, you're done. Acrobat automatically interweaves the fronts and backs for you so the no-duplex thing is a non-issue.
Ideal speed/quality settings: 300 dpi black and white threshold scanning. Tweak the threshold for the first page, should be good for the rest of them... Resulting files are 30-40k a page and look great when reproduced on a laser printer.
I've noticed that in situations where you have to have your ringer on (ie you have to leave your phone on a desk in a shop or something), distinctive rings offer the advantage of not having everyone in the room running to check their phones when a phone rings. Think back to a few years ago to the standard beep rings and a phone went off, everyone in a room would check theirs to see if it was them.
So while a phone ring is still frustrating, at least knowing which phone it is takes the edge off. Also, the song rings don't make your nerves crunch every time they go off like the old single-tone rings did.
I can understand distaste for SUVs because of the people that drive them, but this comparison is simply stupid. First of all, there is no data backing up the 20MPG claim for this thing. Second, the emissions on this thing are probably horrible as I seriously doubt they implement all of the emissions controls that modern SUVs and other vehicles use in the interest of weight. I doubt they put a catalytic converter on there, for example. Wankel engines are notoriously difficult to have clean emissions, one of the reasons they stopped importing the Mazda RX-7 until recently.
First off, I am an engineer and have studied the Prius quite a bit. High Voltage safety on production hybrid/electric vehicles is great.
First off, 500 volts is absolutely wrong, the battery pack in the Prius runs at a hair over 200 volts.
Second, no high voltage wiring is run in the doors or roof or anywhere besides under the undercarriage of the vehicle between the packs and the inverters.
Third, there are main cutoff relays located inside the battery boxes that are hooked to an inertial switch that will disable any voltage coming from the boxes if an impact is detected. This is the same switch that kills your fuel pump if you get into a wreck.
Fourth, the high voltage pack is completely isolated from the vehicle's chassis, unlike the 12-volt system which has one side attached to the frame. What this means is should through a near-impossible combination of events one of the leads get cut into the frame and become energized, it would be impossible for you to complete a circuit and get shocked because the other end is still isolated. (houshold wiring can shock you because your feet complete a circuit through the earth, but this isn't the case in a vehicle!) If both ends of the pack were to connect to the frame, the fuse built into the pack would blow from the short-circuit.
The only real danger is from a ruptured battery pack itself, but that's pretty easy to spot.
Nothing to see here, move along.
While US users may be originating the spam, quite often it's by using off-shore unsecured servers. It's technologically eaiser to block out these unsecured servers than individually tracking down every abusive user.
It is true that cars are harder to work on nowadays, but back up for a second and recall how unreliable cars used to be. Nowadays, it's not uncommon for a vehicle to go for 100,000 miles with zero major problems. That was not very common 20 years ago.
Just for example, there are lots of things that used to have to be performed on vehicles just to keep them driveable: -Adjust engine timing. Don't need to do that anymore, computer takes care of it. -Clean the carburator. Clean the points and distributor. All of that's gone with electronic fuel injection. -The whole "tune up" procedure is obsolete, as the engine computer keeps fuel mixtures, timings, and environmental conditions in top performance at all times.
Granted, you can still perform the generic maintenance you're used to, such as changing fluids, etc. Cars have become easier to troubleshoot as far as sensors go. Simply hook up the diagnositc tool, and it tells you what sensor is broken or what's acting up. Whip out the shop manual, and it'll tell you exactly where to look.
Modern cars are documented so well, anyone who gets manufacturer support can work on the cars.
The only thing changing is that shadetree mechanics are getting pushed out of the game, but that's inevitable with the level of technology. I don't hear anyone complaining they can't swap out individual memory chips of thier PCs or solder parts onto their motherboards anymore to change options. Hell, you don't even have to set jumpers anymore. It's part of the evolution of the technology.
Also, the article is slightly wrong about Xenon headlamps, the whole system costs $3,000, but the bulbs themselves are only a few hundred bucks. Granted, anyone who owns a vehicle with those headlights is highly unlikely to be doing his own maintenance to begin with.
I heard from a confidental source that the next NVidia card was going to be called the Super GEForce 95050++ Hyper-titanium Happy Extreme-platinum Ultra MK-II Enhanced V2.2 Omicron version.
Keep your eyes open.
The juice coming out of your wall has two primary conductors, a 'hot' one with a sine wave at 60Hz and a 'neutral'. Household applicances use the voltage between netural and the hot wire, which has an average value of 120V. That's good and dandy, but when you need to run something big, you need fat wires for the high currents
Someoen figured out (probably Tesla, he's the god of AC power) that if you run a third conductor with a second sine wave 180 degrees out of phase from the first one (now you have two phases!), the voltage between the two wires is twice that of just one wire and neutral. (Two-phase appliances typically don't use the neutral wire).
Three phase is similar, except you have three conductors and a ground, and the waves evenly spaced 120 degrees out of phase to each other(120*3 = 360). Three phase supplies operate at a higher nomical voltage of 206V, so the three phases added together equals 480V. Not commonly found at home, but very useful in industry as you can run this directly into a big-ass AC induction motor and it'll spin. Those motors don't use brushes to switch the field around the rotor, but rather the changing field of the 3-phase AC turns the rotor.
That's the rough and dirty version, it gets wayyy more complicated when you start doing all the math.
I'll point out that the vast majority of household supplies have 240V / 2-phase power available, such as the power supplied to your dryer. At 240V, about 30-35A is drawn, which isn't too unreasonable a load for a 240V receptacle. (Your typical dryer or electric water heater pulls this much power).
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Diesels, which they do get good mileage, one fact is almost always overlooked: Diesel fuel contains about 10-15% more available heat content per gallon than gas. So 40MPG diesel is actually 35-37 MPPGE (Miles per gallon gasoline equivalent). While diesel engines ARE thermally more efficent than traditional otto cycle gasoline engines, the numbers are skewed further by this fact.
The other killer for Diesel is particulate and NOx emissions, which are two major components of smog. Newer engines are rapidly improving on this, but most production diesels now can't touch gasoline engines as far as emissions go.
As far as starter motors go, you're right, you can't run a regular starter motor more than 30-40 seconds before it starts to overheat. However, new Stater-Altenator technology is emegering in the form of "Mild Hybrids" that have essentially an oversize starter motor that doubles as the altenator for the vehicle, and is capable of providing a few kW of starting torque to take the low-end load off the engine. These systems usually cut about 10% off the fuel consumption. I believe the GM hybrid will be of this type.
You've just described the way OBD-II logs data. If you drive a car made after 1994 or so, this system, almost exactly how you describe it, is in place. It was engineered as a diagnostic function, and not a blackbox function, so that mechanics could check the recent sensor history before a fault to help troubleshoot problems ("Ahh, I see before your engine melted, the temp sensor showed the temperature rising to 500 degrees..."). Trouble is, in a wreck, there tends to be sensor faults (e.g. airbag deployment), so the freeze frame data turns into a black box.
The original intention was to standardize the vehicle's sensor data so that there would be a somewhat standard set of diagnostic codes and procedures for all vehicles.
For more information, look up the SAE J1979 standard which documents many of these codes and procedures.
It is also easy to reset this data by sending a certain code to the engine computer through the diagnostic connector located underneath your dashboard. Some avaialble OBD-II tools can do this.
If you're in the tinfoil club, carry one around in your glovebox, and if you get in a wreck, hook it up and erase your history before anyone sees you!
According to the article, he uses ethanol at some points. When used in cars, it is acutally called E85, which is a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline...
"For every good CD that you want to buy, there are 20 others published that very few people give a shit about."
Close... I recall seeing a statistic a while back that something like 90-98% of all releases don't sell over 500 copies.
Systems like this will never catch on with common consumers, they're simply too complicated.
The simplest and most effective solution would be to have a mail server authority, much like the DNS authority is run, and then have everyone register their servers. If the server is abused, they're investigated/deleted from the registry. Users configure their mail clients not to receive mail from unregistered servers, and voila, no more spam.
It won't catch on overnight, but it will be necessary. Such a service might cost a $5 one-time fee or small yearly fee, whatever. Any server that's worth running will pay for this. The real-world analogy is you can't have unlicensed drivers on the road.
One good way to authenticate an image would be to embed a GPS with a camera. Seeing as this is done on relatively inexpensive cell phones, it shouldn't be too hard. Market the camera as "secure" or "evidence-class" camera, somehow tie the info to the image...
There are security details, but if it is possible to tag an image with WHERE it was taken in a secure fashion, it would eliminate all but the most enterprising forgers.
A significant number of ecommerce ad sites only do business with certain countries, and it seems like a simple and somewhat effective solution is to allow the company to opt not to pay for or receive traffic from countries outside their sales zone. In other words, a reverse ad block based on the visitor's IP address.
I work with a mail order business which does zero orders to third world countries like India, and it's no skin off our back of we were to simply "ban" our ads from India.
I would argue game companies are leaning more toward consoles because they are easier to develop for, sufficiently powerful now, and have reached a critical mass for an audience (Average gamer vs. L33t PC geek with his tricked out box).
Software piracy is probably not as common as you think. Here on slashdot, I guarantee a vast majority of users have at some point "borrowed" an application. The general population, on the other hand, the kids and average parents on AOL, probably have not.
There will always be a segment of the population that steals software. I am willing to bet, however, that this PERCENTAGE of users has not increased over the years (noting that the total number of users, therefore pirates, have).
There are two types of piracy in my book: the for-profit pirates, and the tinkerers. The former is what the BSA is (or should be) focusing on, such as Russian mafia groups burning windows XP cds and selling them and profitting from the stolen software. I think almost everyone can agree this is unacceptable in any form, morally and ethically.
Then, there's the tinkerers. The college kids who download that $700 photoshop program, or $2000 Matlab program, or $10,000 Maya suite for the purposes of learning it and toying with it. Here's the shocker, by these kids learning these packages because they stole them, they make the software more valuable. Once they get into a real job, and boss asks you to whip together some images, the kid who knows Photoshop is gonna make said company go out and buy that software.
Now granted, this is an idealization, and I'm sure businesses pirate software as well, but the larger the user base that knows your software, the more valuable it is and more likely it is to be purchased. I'm willing to bet Microsoft actively looked away from pirates back in the early days when their market share wasn't so certain, because these new users were using the software, getting hooked on it, and eventually landed in a situation where they had to buy the packages.
As far as games go, the reality is that almost every new game will have some sort of network functionality. Users may pirate a copy of a game, and play it in single player mode, but now they're hooked, and want to play online, where now it's very easy to check to see if your copy is legit. Again, another user roped in and hooked.
Still, a hax0r kiddie who steals a copy of Autocad is no skin off of anyone's back, because he was never a potential customer to begin with. But if he learns it, and eventually ends up in the business world, then that's one more license sold for Autodesk.
Public trade shows in general are dying, IMO. Before, they served as a big marketplace of new stuff, but with the internet at the level it's at now, there's nothing new once you hit the tradeshow floor as you've heard about it already.
Also, since tradeshows are traditionally targetted at business-to-business type transactions and networking, I doubt that shows like Comdex actually netted exhibitors signficant sales. When you get a bunch of geeks wandering around, chatting up exhibitors, but not spending any money, it chases away both exhibitors and attendees who prefer to go to more exclusive gatherings.
Now, industry-insider tradeshows (The ones you have to know someone to get into), now THOSE are still the places to be at, if you're fortunate enough to get into one. Try IAAPA or the Bar and Nightclub show on for size (those are simply fantastic).
And still, the analog hole remains wide open. Plug player into your line-in port, rip to mp3, download it to your iPod, send to your friends, post it on Kazaa, and enjoy.
How do you think mp3's of vinyl releases end up online? Granted, it takes longer because it's harder to do, but it eventually gets there.
As long as you can listen to it, there's simply no way to prevent it from being duplicated. But we all knew that already.
In industry speak, the system uptime is referred to as a number of nines. As in, a system with 3 nines is up 99.999% of the time. Every extra nine after the decimal point costs ya more money. Obviously, hotmail isn't working with too many nines at their end.
Just remember, copying from one source is plagarism, but copying from many sources is research!
I have used this setup to scan in tens of thousands of pages. All you need is Adobe Acrobat 4 or 5 (full version) and the Deskscan driver. Drop a stack in, click scan, and walk off and go do something. Come back in 5 minutes, put the pile back in to scan the back sides, click continue, you're done. Acrobat automatically interweaves the fronts and backs for you so the no-duplex thing is a non-issue. Ideal speed/quality settings: 300 dpi black and white threshold scanning. Tweak the threshold for the first page, should be good for the rest of them... Resulting files are 30-40k a page and look great when reproduced on a laser printer.
I've noticed that in situations where you have to have your ringer on (ie you have to leave your phone on a desk in a shop or something), distinctive rings offer the advantage of not having everyone in the room running to check their phones when a phone rings. Think back to a few years ago to the standard beep rings and a phone went off, everyone in a room would check theirs to see if it was them. So while a phone ring is still frustrating, at least knowing which phone it is takes the edge off. Also, the song rings don't make your nerves crunch every time they go off like the old single-tone rings did.
Has anyone considered the possibility that this technology could be scaled up to increae production to a meaningful amount? :-)
Then there's the issue of whether there's enough agricultural waste to power all of these plants....
I can understand distaste for SUVs because of the people that drive them, but this comparison is simply stupid. First of all, there is no data backing up the 20MPG claim for this thing. Second, the emissions on this thing are probably horrible as I seriously doubt they implement all of the emissions controls that modern SUVs and other vehicles use in the interest of weight. I doubt they put a catalytic converter on there, for example. Wankel engines are notoriously difficult to have clean emissions, one of the reasons they stopped importing the Mazda RX-7 until recently.
With that said, I'd still love to have one!
I guess he doesn't have to worry about people asking for their money back if it doesn't work right...
First off, I am an engineer and have studied the Prius quite a bit. High Voltage safety on production hybrid/electric vehicles is great. First off, 500 volts is absolutely wrong, the battery pack in the Prius runs at a hair over 200 volts. Second, no high voltage wiring is run in the doors or roof or anywhere besides under the undercarriage of the vehicle between the packs and the inverters. Third, there are main cutoff relays located inside the battery boxes that are hooked to an inertial switch that will disable any voltage coming from the boxes if an impact is detected. This is the same switch that kills your fuel pump if you get into a wreck. Fourth, the high voltage pack is completely isolated from the vehicle's chassis, unlike the 12-volt system which has one side attached to the frame. What this means is should through a near-impossible combination of events one of the leads get cut into the frame and become energized, it would be impossible for you to complete a circuit and get shocked because the other end is still isolated. (houshold wiring can shock you because your feet complete a circuit through the earth, but this isn't the case in a vehicle!) If both ends of the pack were to connect to the frame, the fuse built into the pack would blow from the short-circuit. The only real danger is from a ruptured battery pack itself, but that's pretty easy to spot. Nothing to see here, move along.
I've always had a vision of an electric car getting in an accident and welding itself to whatever it hit.
While US users may be originating the spam, quite often it's by using off-shore unsecured servers. It's technologically eaiser to block out these unsecured servers than individually tracking down every abusive user.
Wonder if it's faster than loading up a cargo plane with a few hundred TB of hard drives and flying it over?
It is true that cars are harder to work on nowadays, but back up for a second and recall how unreliable cars used to be. Nowadays, it's not uncommon for a vehicle to go for 100,000 miles with zero major problems. That was not very common 20 years ago.
Just for example, there are lots of things that used to have to be performed on vehicles just to keep them driveable:
-Adjust engine timing. Don't need to do that anymore, computer takes care of it.
-Clean the carburator. Clean the points and distributor. All of that's gone with electronic fuel injection.
-The whole "tune up" procedure is obsolete, as the engine computer keeps fuel mixtures, timings, and environmental conditions in top performance at all times.
Granted, you can still perform the generic maintenance you're used to, such as changing fluids, etc. Cars have become easier to troubleshoot as far as sensors go. Simply hook up the diagnositc tool, and it tells you what sensor is broken or what's acting up. Whip out the shop manual, and it'll tell you exactly where to look.
Modern cars are documented so well, anyone who gets manufacturer support can work on the cars.
The only thing changing is that shadetree mechanics are getting pushed out of the game, but that's inevitable with the level of technology. I don't hear anyone complaining they can't swap out individual memory chips of thier PCs or solder parts onto their motherboards anymore to change options. Hell, you don't even have to set jumpers anymore. It's part of the evolution of the technology.
Also, the article is slightly wrong about Xenon headlamps, the whole system costs $3,000, but the bulbs themselves are only a few hundred bucks. Granted, anyone who owns a vehicle with those headlights is highly unlikely to be doing his own maintenance to begin with.
I heard from a confidental source that the next NVidia card was going to be called the Super GEForce 95050++ Hyper-titanium Happy Extreme-platinum Ultra MK-II Enhanced V2.2 Omicron version. Keep your eyes open.
The juice coming out of your wall has two primary conductors, a 'hot' one with a sine wave at 60Hz and a 'neutral'. Household applicances use the voltage between netural and the hot wire, which has an average value of 120V. That's good and dandy, but when you need to run something big, you need fat wires for the high currents
Someoen figured out (probably Tesla, he's the god of AC power) that if you run a third conductor with a second sine wave 180 degrees out of phase from the first one (now you have two phases!), the voltage between the two wires is twice that of just one wire and neutral. (Two-phase appliances typically don't use the neutral wire).
Three phase is
similar, except you have three conductors and a ground, and the waves evenly spaced 120 degrees out of phase to each other(120*3 = 360). Three phase supplies operate at a higher nomical voltage of 206V, so the three phases added together equals 480V. Not commonly found at home, but very useful in industry as you can run this directly into a big-ass AC induction motor and it'll spin. Those motors don't use brushes to switch the field around the rotor, but rather the changing field of the 3-phase AC turns the rotor.
That's the rough and dirty version, it gets wayyy more complicated when you start doing all the math.
I'll point out that the vast majority of household supplies have 240V / 2-phase power available, such as the power supplied to your dryer. At 240V, about 30-35A is drawn, which isn't too unreasonable a load for a 240V receptacle. (Your typical dryer or electric water heater pulls this much power).