the best place to start might be the local car club. The folks in the club can direct you to race tracks that have a fairly large VW contingent. Go to these tracks and talk to people - drivers and builders - in the pits (but don't be a nuisance).
Years ago I was fortunate enough to find a VW shop run by a) a close-to-retirement gentleman who had everything and knew everything and b) his assistant who drag-raced VWs professionally (i.e. for money). Through them I bought an engine w/ the following specs:
1835cc (stock is 1585cc, also called a 1600)
044 heads, 40mm intake and 25mm exhaust [stainless] valves with high-RPM valve springs
an Engle 120 cam, 294 degrees duration and.435" lift
a pair of Weber 48IDA carburetors, velocity stacks only - no air filters (I was young+stupid but it seemed like a good idea at the time)
The carbs, heads, and cam worked together to make rather a lot of midrange to top end power. I ran a 16.65 quarter mile but had trouble getting first and second gear to hook up. (The tires were 195/50-15 street radials.)
Anyway, the point - besides a bit of bragging about my old car:-) - is that a book might help in certain areas, but the real in-depth knowledge usually comes from people who are already doing what you want to do. These folks can help you be sure the whole will be better than the sum of the parts, or at least that the individual parts will work together satisfactorily.
Can we PLEASE STOP linking to this guy's blog???
on
Jet Engine on a Chip
·
· Score: 5, Informative
In all seriousness, why does/. continue to link to his ramblings instead of to articles that contain real, useful, technical content?
Yes, this is probably off-topic (as in "not about tiny turbines") but it is still relevant. At least give us the option to ignore him.
"I'm very excited about the prospect of monkeys flying out of UrgleHoth's nether eye," said Dr. Dew. "I'm just glad they're not going to fly out of mine."
Only on/. would a post about nether-monkey-flight be modded to +5, Insightful. That, my friends, is the beauty of free speech.
/Kidding /Or am I?
I was hoping for a bit more detail, too
on
Rob Pike Responds
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
(I submitted this particular question, and appreciate the mod point.)
I was looking at it from a slightly simpler and broader angle: the functionality of discrete widgets. There are so many products (software in particular; computing devices in general) that are designed to be a single answer to all of the customer's needs. This is extremely difficult to do correctly, and many efforts end up as one or more of the following:
too hefty/bulky/bloated
too expensive
too resource-hungry (be it RAM or battery power)
too fragile (where one misbehaving widget causes a ripple effect throughout the device/app/entity)
performing several functions but not doing any one task particularly well Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl seems to mean that we only need one tool to do our jobs, and that tool is perl. I respectfully disagree with this: perl is very handy but it is not always The Right Tool for the Job(tm).
I believe the phrase you wanted is "dog-eat-dog" not "doggy dog". The idea is that one dog will try to eat another dog when competition becomes fierce. Compare this with "doggy dog", which sounds like another name for a cute little puppy pup.
/ties an onion to his belt, which was the style at the time
You see, kids... Once upon a time, radios were controlled by analog potentiometers, variable resistors, and yams filled with gunpowder. If you wanted to change the station, you had to walk dickety-six feet over to the wireless radio-set and fiddle around with the knob. If you moved it too far, that was a paddlin'. If you didn't move it far enough, that was a paddlin'. If you tuned in to the canoe races, that was definitely a paddlin'. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes - the important thing to remember is that nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Give me five bees for a quarter" you'd say...
Another way to get around saying "cluster f**k" in polite company is to call it a "Charlie Foxtrot". Ex-military will probably recognize the term and most civilians will assume Charlie is a person.:-)
The spreadsheet native format takes an age to save. Writer is way too slow on my P266 laptop. Menus are unintuitive, user interface design is lacklustre. Presenter is a pain. They've even managed to clone Clippy, with an annoying lightbulb thing that gives you pointless advice. (Oh, and the help system for that advice takes an age to load.) (Emphasis mine.)
So... You have an old and MHz-challeneged laptop, most likely with an aged 4500RPM ATA-33 or -66 hard drive - and you are grumbling about speed? Hmmm.
Before anyone starts thinking "troll" or "flamebait", I have (and still do) run Linux on an old PII-266 ThinkPad 600 with 288MB RAM. Yes, it's slow - but with specs like that one must expect a graphical office suite to be slow. It seems a bit inappropriate to blame the slugishness solely on the suite.
The very nature of CS - a printed collection of ads and articles (w/ emphasis on 'ads') - was doomed right around 1995. Why buy the hard copy when shopping and review web sites can be updated frequently (i.e. more than once a month)?
I am not drawn to this updated format?
Okay, it doesn't work for you. You are not a statistically significant sample set.
The magazine is just like every other one out there and doesn't stand out on the rack like it used to (as I mentioned above)
Computer Shopper had its time in the early 1990s. The market changed, and shoppers' habits (and options) changed. Computer Shopper became less and less relevant in much the same way that LPs and 8-track tapes became less relevant when CDs became mainstream. Let it go.
Well, as much as I loved computer shopper back in the early 1990s I stopped reading it somewhere in the late 1990s. I saw it recently on a magazine rack and was quite disappointed to see it being thin and boring. ... Why they would change formats to be like everyone else I'll never know.
They changed formats because the web made their service much less useful in the mid/late 1990s.
I read just about every issue of CS in the early 1990s, but as web shopping/searching/reviewing became more prevalent I had decreasing use for the dead-tree version.
As for them changing format: don't people on/. always say that large media companies must update their business models to reflect changing times and consumer tastes? It appears CS has done just that. Where is the problem?
Given the nature of current operating systems and applications, do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job well" has been abandoned? If so, do you think a return to this model would help bring some innovation back to software development?
(It's easier to toss a small, single-purpose app and start over than it is to toss a large, feature-laden app and start over.)
On vehicles that have rear drum brakes, I believe the cable actuates the brake pad/cam lever mechanism in the same way as the hydraulic cylinder does. Of course one probably cannot get the same amount of braking power without the hydraulic assist, but saying they have "just enough power to hold the car from rolling" is a bit off the mark. Besides, most of the vehicle's stopping power is in the front brakes, so the alternate actuating mechanism for the rear brakes is not a huge loss. (The emergency brake actuates the rear brakes because suddenly engaging the front brakes at speed can make an unpleasant situation worse.)
As an aside, placing the transmission in neutral is part of a belt-and-suspenders approach: if something should go awry with the parking brake, the transmission will then hold the car in place. The transmission is not there to add holding power [to that of the parking brake]; it is there to add an additional source of holding power in case the parking brake fails.
Highly modular, the Cray XD1 base unit is a chassis. Up to 12 chassis can be installed in a rack. Multirack configurations integrate hundreds of processors into a single system.
Farther down the same page:
The Cray XD1 compute subsystem is composed of 12 AMD Opteron(TM) 64-bit processors that run Linux and are organized as six 2-way SMPs to deliver 58 GFLOPs* per chassis. Finely tuned memory and I/O performance removes bottlenecks and maximizes processor performance.
Wow - do the math: 696 GFLOPs per chassis. That's rather impressive.
However, part of me is a bit saddened by seeing the Cray name attached to X86s. Yes, I felt the same thing with SGI, DEC, and Sun. Yes, I need to get over it and move on.:-)
Such disasters are often blamed on bad software, but the cause is rarely bad programming. As systems grow more complicated, failures instead have far less technical explanations: bad management, communication or training.
Really? So the buffer overflows, et al occur because people are not properly trained? I believe the buffer overflow is one of the more prevalent causes of vulnerabilities. The SANS Top 20 list text contains 24 instances of the word 'overflow'. Hmmm.
"In 90 percent of the cases, it's because the implementer did a bad job, training was bad, the whole project was poorly done," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley. "At which point, you have a real garbage in, garbage out problem."
Perhaps we need an additional step in here: garbage processing.
1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.
I thought the standard unit of explosive power was the ton of dynamite...
Perhaps more interesting, after an initial inquiry by the Chronicle in the summer, the Air Force issued a gag order that prohibits any Air Force employee from discussing antimatter research or funding
This isn't really that interesting or even unusual: Uncle Sam frequently limits what military folks can say about ongoing projects. There is a classification called "Sensitive But Unclassified", or SBU, whcih means the info is not classified as such (Secret, TS, etc.) but it is still not for public disclosure. (Years ago SBU was called "For Official Use Only" or FOUO.) Budgets are generally considered at least SBU, so it should be no suprise that the budget is not publicized.
There was an interview in Business 2.0 a couple years ago with an individual who claimed she had had a very similar problem: she had just finished a presentation for a conference; the weekend before the conference she had a mishap in the kitchen and burned her finger, so she couldn't use the biometric authentication mechanism on her laptop. Her solution? She got on a plane and went to see her twin sister in Florida. She actually claimed in the article that "twins have identical fingerprints" and her sister was able to log in to her laptop for her and save the day.
The huge, glaring flaw in this scenario is that even identical twins will have fingerprints that look as much alike as the fingerprints of two random strangers on the street. The interview was good for a laugh, but sadly it does not appear to be available on the Business 2.0 site any more.
The individual was Bondra Bchneider, where B==S. She also referred to binary 1010 as "ten-ten"...
If they designed it in such a way that the LEA backdoor is secure (say, it's got an LEA public key on it, and the private key is kept in the forensics labs), I'll buy one tomorrow. I don't have a need to defend against.gov adversaries
LEA means Law Enforcement Access. Some crypto and other security tokens [as in hardware, not Kerberos] have what is called LEAF - the Law Enforcement Access Field. The tokens themselves can be referenced as 'non-LEAF' and 'LEAF-enabled'.
Plays on words are amazingly dissimilar to witless comments about wishing a specific individual had been involved in an auto accident. Frankly I'm a little surprised that this required clarification.
Please do not make any snarky comments about RMS getting out of the car before the accident. Regardless of your personal feelings, a person escaping potential serious injury or death should not be joke fodder - contrary to the first several posts.
Bollocks, indeed. I have two laptops that originally shipped with Windows (one 98, one 2k) that are now running Linux, one of the BSDs, or Solaris X86 depending on the day. We can add those, yours, and everyone else's to achieve some kind of karmic realignment (i.e. to counter the Gartner position that Linux machines are converted to [unlicensed] Windows).
Slashdot Mirror
the best place to start might be the local car club. The folks in the club can direct you to race tracks that have a fairly large VW contingent. Go to these tracks and talk to people - drivers and builders - in the pits (but don't be a nuisance).
Years ago I was fortunate enough to find a VW shop run by a) a close-to-retirement gentleman who had everything and knew everything and b) his assistant who drag-raced VWs professionally (i.e. for money). Through them I bought an engine w/ the following specs:
1835cc (stock is 1585cc, also called a 1600)
044 heads, 40mm intake and 25mm exhaust [stainless] valves with high-RPM valve springs
an Engle 120 cam, 294 degrees duration and .435" lift
a pair of Weber 48IDA carburetors, velocity stacks only - no air filters (I was young+stupid but it seemed like a good idea at the time)
:-) - is that a book might help in certain areas, but the real in-depth knowledge usually comes from people who are already doing what you want to do. These folks can help you be sure the whole will be better than the sum of the parts, or at least that the individual parts will work together satisfactorily.
The carbs, heads, and cam worked together to make rather a lot of midrange to top end power. I ran a 16.65 quarter mile but had trouble getting first and second gear to hook up. (The tires were 195/50-15 street radials.)
Anyway, the point - besides a bit of bragging about my old car
In all seriousness, why does
Yes, this is probably off-topic (as in "not about tiny turbines") but it is still relevant. At least give us the option to ignore him.
"I'm very excited about the prospect of monkeys flying out of UrgleHoth's nether eye," said Dr. Dew. "I'm just glad they're not going to fly out of mine."
Only on
(I submitted this particular question, and appreciate the mod point.)
I was looking at it from a slightly simpler and broader angle: the functionality of discrete widgets. There are so many products (software in particular; computing devices in general) that are designed to be a single answer to all of the customer's needs. This is extremely difficult to do correctly, and many efforts end up as one or more of the following:
too hefty/bulky/bloated
too expensive
too resource-hungry (be it RAM or battery power)
too fragile (where one misbehaving widget causes a ripple effect throughout the device/app/entity)
performing several functions but not doing any one task particularly well
Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl seems to mean that we only need one tool to do our jobs, and that tool is perl. I respectfully disagree with this: perl is very handy but it is not always The Right Tool for the Job(tm).
Rob - thank you for the answer.
you'll notice it's a doggy dog world out there
I believe the phrase you wanted is "dog-eat-dog" not "doggy dog". The idea is that one dog will try to eat another dog when competition becomes fierce. Compare this with "doggy dog", which sounds like another name for a cute little puppy pup.
don't touch that dial!
Wow, that's quite the anachronism.
You see, kids... Once upon a time, radios were controlled by analog potentiometers, variable resistors, and yams filled with gunpowder. If you wanted to change the station, you had to walk dickety-six feet over to the wireless radio-set and fiddle around with the knob. If you moved it too far, that was a paddlin'. If you didn't move it far enough, that was a paddlin'. If you tuned in to the canoe races, that was definitely a paddlin'. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes - the important thing to remember is that nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Give me five bees for a quarter" you'd say...
Another way to get around saying "cluster f**k" in polite company is to call it a "Charlie Foxtrot". Ex-military will probably recognize the term and most civilians will assume Charlie is a person.
The spreadsheet native format takes an age to save. Writer is way too slow on my P266 laptop. Menus are unintuitive, user interface design is lacklustre. Presenter is a pain. They've even managed to clone Clippy, with an annoying lightbulb thing that gives you pointless advice. (Oh, and the help system for that advice takes an age to load.) (Emphasis mine.)
So... You have an old and MHz-challeneged laptop, most likely with an aged 4500RPM ATA-33 or -66 hard drive - and you are grumbling about speed? Hmmm.
Before anyone starts thinking "troll" or "flamebait", I have (and still do) run Linux on an old PII-266 ThinkPad 600 with 288MB RAM. Yes, it's slow - but with specs like that one must expect a graphical office suite to be slow. It seems a bit inappropriate to blame the slugishness solely on the suite.
They weren't successful?
The very nature of CS - a printed collection of ads and articles (w/ emphasis on 'ads') - was doomed right around 1995. Why buy the hard copy when shopping and review web sites can be updated frequently (i.e. more than once a month)?
I am not drawn to this updated format?
Okay, it doesn't work for you. You are not a statistically significant sample set.
The magazine is just like every other one out there and doesn't stand out on the rack like it used to (as I mentioned above)
Computer Shopper had its time in the early 1990s. The market changed, and shoppers' habits (and options) changed. Computer Shopper became less and less relevant in much the same way that LPs and 8-track tapes became less relevant when CDs became mainstream. Let it go.
Well, as much as I loved computer shopper back in the early 1990s I stopped reading it somewhere in the late 1990s. I saw it recently on a magazine rack and was quite disappointed to see it being thin and boring.
...
Why they would change formats to be like everyone else I'll never know.
They changed formats because the web made their service much less useful in the mid/late 1990s.
I read just about every issue of CS in the early 1990s, but as web shopping/searching/reviewing became more prevalent I had decreasing use for the dead-tree version.
As for them changing format: don't people on
caused the problem?
This morning I withdrew my $4.81 so I could get a pack of smokes and a cup-o-noodle.
Unbelievable, but if you want to kill yourself that's your problem.
Those cup-o-noodle things are evil.
maybe she said should.
Given the nature of current operating systems and applications, do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job well" has been abandoned? If so, do you think a return to this model would help bring some innovation back to software development?
(It's easier to toss a small, single-purpose app and start over than it is to toss a large, feature-laden app and start over.)
On vehicles that have rear drum brakes, I believe the cable actuates the brake pad/cam lever mechanism in the same way as the hydraulic cylinder does. Of course one probably cannot get the same amount of braking power without the hydraulic assist, but saying they have "just enough power to hold the car from rolling" is a bit off the mark. Besides, most of the vehicle's stopping power is in the front brakes, so the alternate actuating mechanism for the rear brakes is not a huge loss. (The emergency brake actuates the rear brakes because suddenly engaging the front brakes at speed can make an unpleasant situation worse.)
As an aside, placing the transmission in neutral is part of a belt-and-suspenders approach: if something should go awry with the parking brake, the transmission will then hold the car in place. The transmission is not there to add holding power [to that of the parking brake]; it is there to add an additional source of holding power in case the parking brake fails.
as described above, then the emergency brake can be used to normal effect.
I meant "696 GFLOPs per rack", not "per chassis", where a fully-loaded rack contains 12 chassis (58 * 12 = 696). D'oh! I appreciate the correction.
From the linked page:
Highly modular, the Cray XD1 base unit is a chassis. Up to 12 chassis can be installed in a rack. Multirack configurations integrate hundreds of processors into a single system.
Farther down the same page:
The Cray XD1 compute subsystem is composed of 12 AMD Opteron(TM) 64-bit processors that run Linux and are organized as six 2-way SMPs to deliver 58 GFLOPs* per chassis. Finely tuned memory and I/O performance removes bottlenecks and maximizes processor performance.
Wow - do the math: 696 GFLOPs per chassis. That's rather impressive.
However, part of me is a bit saddened by seeing the Cray name attached to X86s. Yes, I felt the same thing with SGI, DEC, and Sun. Yes, I need to get over it and move on.
Such disasters are often blamed on bad software, but the cause is rarely bad programming. As systems grow more complicated, failures instead have far less technical explanations: bad management, communication or training.
Really? So the buffer overflows, et al occur because people are not properly trained? I believe the buffer overflow is one of the more prevalent causes of vulnerabilities. The SANS Top 20 list text contains 24 instances of the word 'overflow'. Hmmm.
"In 90 percent of the cases, it's because the implementer did a bad job, training was bad, the whole project was poorly done," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley. "At which point, you have a real garbage in, garbage out problem."
Perhaps we need an additional step in here: garbage processing.
1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.
I thought the standard unit of explosive power was the ton of dynamite...
Perhaps more interesting, after an initial inquiry by the Chronicle in the summer, the Air Force issued a gag order that prohibits any Air Force employee from discussing antimatter research or funding
This isn't really that interesting or even unusual: Uncle Sam frequently limits what military folks can say about ongoing projects. There is a classification called "Sensitive But Unclassified", or SBU, whcih means the info is not classified as such (Secret, TS, etc.) but it is still not for public disclosure. (Years ago SBU was called "For Official Use Only" or FOUO.) Budgets are generally considered at least SBU, so it should be no suprise that the budget is not publicized.
There was an interview in Business 2.0 a couple years ago with an individual who claimed she had had a very similar problem: she had just finished a presentation for a conference; the weekend before the conference she had a mishap in the kitchen and burned her finger, so she couldn't use the biometric authentication mechanism on her laptop. Her solution? She got on a plane and went to see her twin sister in Florida. She actually claimed in the article that "twins have identical fingerprints" and her sister was able to log in to her laptop for her and save the day.
The huge, glaring flaw in this scenario is that even identical twins will have fingerprints that look as much alike as the fingerprints of two random strangers on the street. The interview was good for a laugh, but sadly it does not appear to be available on the Business 2.0 site any more.
The individual was Bondra Bchneider, where B==S. She also referred to binary 1010 as "ten-ten"...
If they designed it in such a way that the LEA backdoor is secure (say, it's got an LEA public key on it, and the private key is kept in the forensics labs), I'll buy one tomorrow. I don't have a need to defend against
LEA means Law Enforcement Access. Some crypto and other security tokens [as in hardware, not Kerberos] have what is called LEAF - the Law Enforcement Access Field. The tokens themselves can be referenced as 'non-LEAF' and 'LEAF-enabled'.
Plays on words are amazingly dissimilar to witless comments about wishing a specific individual had been involved in an auto accident. Frankly I'm a little surprised that this required clarification.
Please do not make any snarky comments about RMS getting out of the car before the accident. Regardless of your personal feelings, a person escaping potential serious injury or death should not be joke fodder - contrary to the first several posts.
Condolences to the family of the deceased.
Bollocks, indeed. I have two laptops that originally shipped with Windows (one 98, one 2k) that are now running Linux, one of the BSDs, or Solaris X86 depending on the day. We can add those, yours, and everyone else's to achieve some kind of karmic realignment (i.e. to counter the Gartner position that Linux machines are converted to [unlicensed] Windows).
in Federal laws. Since this is
IIRC it is there to distinguish acts committed intentionally from those committed by accident (or 'recklessly').
(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.)