Even in the case of a hybrid you have no idea what part of the benefit is from the hybrid engine as opposed to all the other improvements that toyota and honda put into the same cars.
Actually, I do. The efficiency of the Prius engine, a variation on the Atkinson cycle, is known to be about 37 percent (with not much variation over a fairly wide range of loads). Other engines with the traditional Otto cycle have peak efficiencies of around 30 to 33 percent.
That's the efficiency of the ICE, not the hybrid drivetrain. IOW, you can't compare how a prius would run with the same ICE, the same transmission, the same body, the same everything except without the electric engine. Until you can do that you don't really know what the "hybrid" part of the design is worth.
I never said weight is free in terms of energy costs; you are setting up a straw man. But, I repeat, you did not show how hybrids do not have any efficiency benefits in highway driving. What, exactly, do you expect? There is absolutely no way to show hard data on this because you can't do a head-to-head comparison between equivalent hybrid and conventional powered vehicles. All you offered was a potential way that hybrids could benefit at highway speed. I offered a potential reason why the hybrids would have an additional disadvantage at highway speed. You complain that disadvantage is minimal--I believe that your advantage is minimal. Go ahead and "show" me that you're right in whatever way you think is appropriate. Until you do, don't complain that I'm not "showing" anything.
I only said that I don't have any hard data on how much mileage benefit these technologies offer. Do you? Of course not; the only people who do are the manufacturers. Even in the case of a hybrid you have no idea what part of the benefit is from the hybrid engine as opposed to all the other improvements that toyota and honda put into the same cars. (That is, you can't compare a hybrid insight to a conventional insight. In the case of cars which can be more directly compared, like the hybrid & conventional highlander, the benefits aren't nearly as impressive as they are on the pure hybrids--perhaps because those other improvents are responsible for a big chunk of the efficiencies.)
The rub is, not all driving is highway. So a technology that has benefits under city driving conditions as well as highway conditions is well-suited to someone (like me) who drives mostly under the former. Dude, I already said there was a place for hybrids, that's not being argued.
The counter to that is that you're carting around the extra weight of the batteries and electric drive system all the time to no positive effect while cruising at highway speed.
How is that a counter? The weight has no negative effect on cruising MPG (the topic of this thread).
You still have to cart the weight around, and that costs energy. Even at a constant speed you've got to push the weight up hills (acceleration against gravity) and you're going to pay more in rolling resistance (which also means you're not going to recover your energy when going back down the hill).
Remember I originally was responding to your statement that "At highway speeds there aren't any inherent efficiencies to hybrid engines", and you still haven't offered any support to that assertion. Sure I did--for some reason you just seem to believe that weight is free in terms of energy costs, which is false.
True that the weight matters when under acceleration, but its negative effect is more than outweighed by the overall efficiency increase which occurs under all conditions. That really depends on how you drive, doesn't it? I drive about 70 miles per day, almost all of which is over 60MPH. (I'm off of divided highway for about a mile each way.) I guess I just don't count as "all conditions"? There are a lot of people in this country that are long-distance highway drivers, and hybrids really just aren't the right vehicle for them at this time. (Maybe when the costs come down a lot and the technology matures things will be different.)
[snip mention of VCM and turbocharging] Perhaps. Few models employ those techniques, and I don't know how well they compare with hybrid technology. It's getting a whole lot more common. Someone who has so much to say about how hybrids are a superior technology should really know more about what technologies are available, no? My diesel is turbocharged (almost all are) and my minivan has variable cylinder management. The diesel is rated at 90HP (and about 150ft-lb of torque) with the turbo and something like 45 without. The van can shut off 2 or 3 cylinders (it's late, I forget). Both of these are equivalent to having a smaller engine while cruising than when accelerating (which is what you said the inherent efficiency was for a hybrid at highway speed) but don't require carting around a whole seperate engine. If getting more on-demand acceleration out of a smaller engine is all the hybrid's got going for it for highway driving, there are cheaper and easier ways (including those that I've already mentioned) to get the same thing. Now, as it happens, the minivan would actually be a good target for hybrid technology, since it's used mainly for short in-town trips, but nobody would sell me one. Replacing the diesel with a hybrid would be brain-dead--I'd pay more up front for roughly similar fuel economy and unknown reliability (the hybrids just haven't been around long enough to get a feel for how they'll last).
My A1200 had 2 meg chip and 8 meg fast ram and my original harddrive loaded with applications was 52 Meg and I got on the internet with that. just compare those specifications with what you are using right now. Similar to my palm phone, which is great for such a limited platform. For my desktop, I'm gonna want a whole lot more resources--just the frame buffer for my display is gonna take more than 52M.
I think that, in one respect, hybrids are more efficient at highway speeds. Most non-hybrid cars have engines that are sized to give them acceptable acceleration. That might mean putting in, say, a 135 HP engine. To get comparable acceleration, a hybrid might have a 90-HP engine and a 30-HP electric motor (total horsepower is less because the electric motor is better at delivering torque at lower speed, which is what count when accelerating). At 70 MPH, the 135-HP engine will be running less efficiently than the hybrid's 90-HP engine. The counter to that is that you're carting around the extra weight of the batteries and electric drive system all the time to no positive effect while cruising at highway speed. Also, you can get similar efficiencies by either turbocharging or with variable cylinder management (turning off some cylinders, as at least some hondas and corvettes do).
Little known secret is that there are several models of minivans available with AWD.
Oh, I know that. But AWD minivans tend to drive like crap, have lower fuel economy, and are still lousy in the snow because of low ground clearance--an SUV is still better if you really have to drive in the snow. (Deep snow; for light, quickly-cleared snow just slow down, fer chrissake--you don't AWD for that, just some common sense.)
SUV's are the only category of vehicle that is available with 7+ passenger seating, aside from minivans. There are whole swaths of suburbia where mommies and daddies cart their kids and their kids' friends around every weekend. A 4 passenger econobox is simply not adequate for this task and I absolutely guarantee that this is part of the purchase decision. (Minivans, as an alternative, are not much more fuel efficient than SUVs.) I bought a minivan recently. Most are significantly more fuel-economical than an equivalently sized SUV. (Mine holds 7 and is rated at 27 highway, which is about what I've observed.) From my observations people buy SUVs for "style" reasons, nothing more. (We don't get snow around here, so don't drag out the 4wd canard.)
Hybrids will continue to be more efficient than gasoline powered vehicles despite how the numbers fall out. Spoken like a true hybrid zealot! At highway speeds there aren't any inherent efficiencies to hybrid engines. The current EPA tests allow stored battery power to be used to increase the MPG rating on the highway portion of the test. In the real world of sustained highway driving that factor is insignficant because the batteries are exhausted relatively quickly on a long-distance drive. Don't get me wrong--hybrids are great for city driving, they're just not all that great on the open road. (Diesels, on the other hand, are relatively lousy at city driving and great at a constant RPM on the highway.)
The engine has to turn faster to keep the wheels spinning at the samme speed with the air on because it represents a very high load on the engine.
The GP was correct. The increased load makes the engine use more fuel to maintain the same RPM, but the engine can't increase by 200RPM at a constant speed and divert the extra 200RPM to the A/C unless you're using a very funky drivetrain; that's not going to happen on a regular car.
I had an '84 Nissan Sentra that could do 45+ on long highway trips AFTER 75,000 miles. Yes, it's a "hampster-mobile" but it worked. There's nothing on the market equivelant to that... 20+ years later? WTF. The emissions on those old cars were terrible. Newer cars have dramatically better tailpipe emissions at the cost of MPG. That's not to say that they couldn't do better than they are, but there are good reasons why you can't buy an '84 sentra new anymore. That, and the fact that modern safety standards require a whole lot more survivable (and heavy) construction.
my 1995 mazda protege did not. my 1995 mazda mx6 does not. my 2000 audi does. however, i can downshift a gear to spool up the turbo while still keeping the a/c engaged when doing things like climbing a mountain or passing a truck. power+cooling on a 4banger budget. My '88 subaru did, and it sure wasn't a drive by wire. There's more than one way to implement such a thing...
Keep in mind that Ubuntu is Free Software. And Free Software is not always about being better, it's about being Free.
That statement sums up why Ubuntu, and probably Linux, will never be a suitable replacement OS on most desktop systems. And would the statement "Keep in mind that...commercial software is not always about being better, it's about being Profitable" sum up why Windows will never be a suitable replacement OS on most desktop systems?
Speaking as a novice, cat|grep is easier to understand. Until I skimmed the fancy article, I was unaware that grep could take a filename like that. I thought that to do filenames you needed fgrep. To an experienced unix guru, it may not be any clearer, but to a novice there's a world of difference.
So by "easier to understand" you meant "confuses you as to the proper way to use the command"? fgrep has an 'f' because it works with fixed strings rather than regexes, not because it has something to do with files. It's also deprecated in favor of "grep -F" in current POSIX. Also "cat file |" isn't inherently easier to understand, it's simply more familiar because all too many examples on the 'net do something godawful ugly like that. I'd argue that "<file command", which has the same visual cue (file first), is less to type, and more efficient, is superior to "cat file |" in every case. (cat still wins for "cat file file |", which is what it was intended for in the first place--concatenation.)
No you're not. The sad thing is that before the invention of XML there already was a great standard for this: ASN.1
Wow, I've never heard ASN.1 called "great" before. "Difficult to implement", "overly complex", "product of telecom committees"--those I'm familiar with. If you look at the history of ASN.1 parser security problems you'll get some idea of just how hard it is parse sanely in the real world for all corner cases.
Shared libraries don't just save disk space, they save RAM. If you include a complete copy of, e.g., the gnome libraries in every gnome applet that you install, you'll end up with a copy of those libraries in memory for every applet you run. Unix shared libraries are implemented that way for a reason, not just because distribution makers can't figure out how to just shove everything in a single directory because it's too hard to get dependency handling right. (Which is why MS does it the way it does--they have no facilities for dependency handling; the funny thing is that they've convinced people that's a feature.)
you think that mysql support will buy unlimited legal/financial liability for costs incurred by downtime of your mysql installation?
really?
seriously?
hahahahahahaha
What your support contract buys you is the ability to call someone on the phone. If it makes your boss happy to have someone to call and yell at when shit breaks, well, ok.
An illegal search of a house might be breaking and entering, or trespass or maybe burglary. An officer could go to jail for that search. Don't you think that's a fairly significant deterrent?
That's one potential scenario for an illegal search, but not the only one (and not even the most likely one, IMO). Most wouldn't be so cut and dried and easily prosecuted. (E.g., see my previous post about chain of custody issues, which are the thing most likely to get evidence declared to be tainted and thus excluded. And we really don't want to relax the standards for evidence handling.)
What I am trying to say is that maybe we look at evidence in a different way. Evidence is evidence, no matter how it is produced. If it is genuine and it proves that someone is guilty, they are going down. The evidence kind of stands on its own merits.
You left a really big qualifier in there: "if it is genuine". The rules of evidence are there to assure the courts (and the citizens) that the evidence is genuine. The police know before they start searching that there are rules that have to be followed. If they decide to break the rules governing the search, why would you then assume that the evidence they produce is genuine? Note that it is not that hard to follow the rules if you want to, and there standard procedures for handling exceptional cases (e.g., find evidence when entering a home because you hear gunshots) so it's not as though the rules make it impossible to act. Good cops tend to like the rules (even when they are ocassionally annoying) because they themselves want to be sure that they've gotten the right person beyond a reasonable doubt.
Well, in Finland we don't throw "illegal" evidence out of court. Instead we just punish the person(s) who did this illegal activity. This keeps the government, or representatives of that government, following the rules and doesn't allow criminals to get free on technicality.
So in the case of something like a missing chain of custody, you'd use the evidence but prosecute the unknown person who has the missing documentation? Or you'd prosecute all the evidence custodians? The US legal system is a lot more complicated than/. makes it out to believe, and there are various standards for different kinds of cases (criminal vs civil) and the judge has different remediations available depending on the circumstances. But the bottom line is that the standard in a criminal case is "beyond a reasonable doubt", which means that things that are probably ok--but might not be--can be thrown out. Overall, I'm happy with that system. Everyone knows the rules going in, and any reasonably competent law enforcement type isn't going to get real evidence thrown out on a "technicality".
BTW, patents are public record -- they are all publicly available on the USPTO website. Should a patent holder have to go out and notify any potential infringers before they begin developing a product?
That would be at least as feasable as the current system. "Publicly available" and "usefully available" are different. How's this: I'd like to write an application to keep track of my photos. I'll scan them in, add descriptive keywords, make use of metadata like timestamps. I'll put the application on my server, and access it via a web browser. Can you use the wonderful patent public record to tell me what patents my idea might infringe on? Can you use the wonderful patent system to show me implementations that might help me do what I want (the original purpose of the patent system)? If not, the system isn't working.
The purpose of patents, as is oft repeated, is to advance the useful arts (whether it does a good job or not is not really the point here, though!). A patent, for better or worse, at least makes public the invention, so others can see it, benefit from it, and build upon it -- maybe not immediately, but eventually.
In theory. In practice, there are so many junk patents that no reasonable person can read, understand and learn from the body of patents--so the publication has no practical benefit.
Yep - just think how often your credit card signature is actually checked against that on the slip. Over here in the UK we've moved to chip 'n PIN, but a couple of recent trips to America really shocked me - my signature was NEVER checked against that on the card and on several occasions I paid using a terminal where the card was swiped, no PIN needed, no signature.
And thank god for that--I really don't need to be held up in line because some junior private eye behind the checkout counter thinks he's a handwriting expert because of what he just learned on the latest crime drama. Signatures are a useless element in any security program, because most people can't tell a real signature from a forgery. (In practice, a forger is more likely to have a signature which matches that on the card than a legitimate card holder in a hurry.)
I have some experience dealing with AT&T ^W New England Telephone ^W^W^W NYNEX ^W Bell Atlantic ^W^W Verizon. I can say with assurance that there *is* a plan to increase the rates. You just may not be aware of it yet.
Around here Verizon's DSL pricing has decreased over the past few years, while the data rates have increased.
I pay $40/month for my 4Mb/300Kb connection. My city owns a network that doesn't quite extend to my corner of town (I'm one block from the edge of the network). The ISPs on that network offer up to 10Mb Up/Down for slightly less, but what are prices and speeds in other countries in the world? I've heard numbers tossed around here on Slashdot that put these to shame, but I don't know how reliable those are. So what I want to know is how does the U.S. compare when it comes to our broadband speeds and prices (for residential users, particularly)?
In the US I pay about the same for 15/2 service over fiber. I don't see that ramping up much higher anytime soon--the fiber can support a lot more, but the backbone can't. I've always wondered about the 50 or 100Mbps service people talk about--can you actually sustain that? Maybe if you're in a really technophobic neighborhood it would work, but even an OC-768 ($$$) would only support 400 houses filling their pipes with p2p traffic at those rates.
If something is going to get done, it's going to get done- especially with the enormous volume of cable already laid for cable TV and telephone service.
The existing infrastructure is basically useless for broadband. The old copper phone lines in much of the country won't carry a high speed signal (a lot of the ones on overhead lines are really rotting due to weather exposure, etc.) The cable infrastructure is crap, a lot of installed 30 years ago by people who didn't really know what they were doing--splitters all over the place, loose crimps, low quality/squashed coax. And for real broadband (50+Mbps) you're not going very far on cable; you need a neighborhood distribution point with fiber running into it--which isn't viable in a lot of the more rural areas. The real issue isn't "we've got more land to cover", it's that the US was fairly early in adopting universal telephone coverage. In countries that didn't have a reliable telephone system 100 years ago, they deployed a much more modern infrastructure that can handle higher data rates (VDSL, etc.). In the US, there's not much incentive to deploy an upgraded telephone network, because the phones already work (meaning that your deployment costs are recouped only from broadband users, not amortized across all telephone customers). That said, some companies are starting to deploy solid cable and FTTH systems. That process is slow, but the see-saw will flip in 15-20 years when those fiber networks can ramp up and other countries who currently have nice high-speed DSL networks hit a wall and they need to swallow throwing out their copper infrastructure and moving to fiber.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I do. The efficiency of the Prius engine, a variation on the Atkinson cycle, is known to be about 37 percent (with not much variation over a fairly wide range of loads). Other engines with the traditional Otto cycle have peak efficiencies of around 30 to 33 percent.
That's the efficiency of the ICE, not the hybrid drivetrain. IOW, you can't compare how a prius would run with the same ICE, the same transmission, the same body, the same everything except without the electric engine. Until you can do that you don't really know what the "hybrid" part of the design is worth.How is that a counter? The weight has no negative effect on cruising MPG (the topic of this thread).
You still have to cart the weight around, and that costs energy. Even at a constant speed you've got to push the weight up hills (acceleration against gravity) and you're going to pay more in rolling resistance (which also means you're not going to recover your energy when going back down the hill). Remember I originally was responding to your statement that "At highway speeds there aren't any inherent efficiencies to hybrid engines", and you still haven't offered any support to that assertion. Sure I did--for some reason you just seem to believe that weight is free in terms of energy costs, which is false. True that the weight matters when under acceleration, but its negative effect is more than outweighed by the overall efficiency increase which occurs under all conditions. That really depends on how you drive, doesn't it? I drive about 70 miles per day, almost all of which is over 60MPH. (I'm off of divided highway for about a mile each way.) I guess I just don't count as "all conditions"? There are a lot of people in this country that are long-distance highway drivers, and hybrids really just aren't the right vehicle for them at this time. (Maybe when the costs come down a lot and the technology matures things will be different.) [snip mention of VCM and turbocharging]Perhaps. Few models employ those techniques, and I don't know how well they compare with hybrid technology. It's getting a whole lot more common. Someone who has so much to say about how hybrids are a superior technology should really know more about what technologies are available, no? My diesel is turbocharged (almost all are) and my minivan has variable cylinder management. The diesel is rated at 90HP (and about 150ft-lb of torque) with the turbo and something like 45 without. The van can shut off 2 or 3 cylinders (it's late, I forget). Both of these are equivalent to having a smaller engine while cruising than when accelerating (which is what you said the inherent efficiency was for a hybrid at highway speed) but don't require carting around a whole seperate engine. If getting more on-demand acceleration out of a smaller engine is all the hybrid's got going for it for highway driving, there are cheaper and easier ways (including those that I've already mentioned) to get the same thing. Now, as it happens, the minivan would actually be a good target for hybrid technology, since it's used mainly for short in-town trips, but nobody would sell me one. Replacing the diesel with a hybrid would be brain-dead--I'd pay more up front for roughly similar fuel economy and unknown reliability (the hybrids just haven't been around long enough to get a feel for how they'll last).
just compare those specifications with what you are using right now. Similar to my palm phone, which is great for such a limited platform. For my desktop, I'm gonna want a whole lot more resources--just the frame buffer for my display is gonna take more than 52M.
Oh, I know that. But AWD minivans tend to drive like crap, have lower fuel economy, and are still lousy in the snow because of low ground clearance--an SUV is still better if you really have to drive in the snow. (Deep snow; for light, quickly-cleared snow just slow down, fer chrissake--you don't AWD for that, just some common sense.)
The GP was correct. The increased load makes the engine use more fuel to maintain the same RPM, but the engine can't increase by 200RPM at a constant speed and divert the extra 200RPM to the A/C unless you're using a very funky drivetrain; that's not going to happen on a regular car.
my 1995 mazda protege did not. my 1995 mazda mx6 does not. my 2000 audi does. however, i can downshift a gear to spool up the turbo while still keeping the a/c engaged when doing things like climbing a mountain or passing a truck. power+cooling on a 4banger budget. My '88 subaru did, and it sure wasn't a drive by wire. There's more than one way to implement such a thing...
So by "easier to understand" you meant "confuses you as to the proper way to use the command"? fgrep has an 'f' because it works with fixed strings rather than regexes, not because it has something to do with files. It's also deprecated in favor of "grep -F" in current POSIX. Also "cat file |" isn't inherently easier to understand, it's simply more familiar because all too many examples on the 'net do something godawful ugly like that. I'd argue that "<file command", which has the same visual cue (file first), is less to type, and more efficient, is superior to "cat file |" in every case. (cat still wins for "cat file file |", which is what it was intended for in the first place--concatenation.)
Wow, I've never heard ASN.1 called "great" before. "Difficult to implement", "overly complex", "product of telecom committees"--those I'm familiar with. If you look at the history of ASN.1 parser security problems you'll get some idea of just how hard it is parse sanely in the real world for all corner cases.
Shared libraries don't just save disk space, they save RAM. If you include a complete copy of, e.g., the gnome libraries in every gnome applet that you install, you'll end up with a copy of those libraries in memory for every applet you run. Unix shared libraries are implemented that way for a reason, not just because distribution makers can't figure out how to just shove everything in a single directory because it's too hard to get dependency handling right. (Which is why MS does it the way it does--they have no facilities for dependency handling; the funny thing is that they've convinced people that's a feature.)
you think that mysql support will buy unlimited legal/financial liability for costs incurred by downtime of your mysql installation?
really?
seriously?
hahahahahahaha
What your support contract buys you is the ability to call someone on the phone. If it makes your boss happy to have someone to call and yell at when shit breaks, well, ok.
That's one potential scenario for an illegal search, but not the only one (and not even the most likely one, IMO). Most wouldn't be so cut and dried and easily prosecuted. (E.g., see my previous post about chain of custody issues, which are the thing most likely to get evidence declared to be tainted and thus excluded. And we really don't want to relax the standards for evidence handling.)
You left a really big qualifier in there: "if it is genuine". The rules of evidence are there to assure the courts (and the citizens) that the evidence is genuine. The police know before they start searching that there are rules that have to be followed. If they decide to break the rules governing the search, why would you then assume that the evidence they produce is genuine? Note that it is not that hard to follow the rules if you want to, and there standard procedures for handling exceptional cases (e.g., find evidence when entering a home because you hear gunshots) so it's not as though the rules make it impossible to act. Good cops tend to like the rules (even when they are ocassionally annoying) because they themselves want to be sure that they've gotten the right person beyond a reasonable doubt.
So in the case of something like a missing chain of custody, you'd use the evidence but prosecute the unknown person who has the missing documentation? Or you'd prosecute all the evidence custodians? The US legal system is a lot more complicated than
That would be at least as feasable as the current system. "Publicly available" and "usefully available" are different. How's this: I'd like to write an application to keep track of my photos. I'll scan them in, add descriptive keywords, make use of metadata like timestamps. I'll put the application on my server, and access it via a web browser. Can you use the wonderful patent public record to tell me what patents my idea might infringe on? Can you use the wonderful patent system to show me implementations that might help me do what I want (the original purpose of the patent system)? If not, the system isn't working.
In theory. In practice, there are so many junk patents that no reasonable person can read, understand and learn from the body of patents--so the publication has no practical benefit.
And thank god for that--I really don't need to be held up in line because some junior private eye behind the checkout counter thinks he's a handwriting expert because of what he just learned on the latest crime drama. Signatures are a useless element in any security program, because most people can't tell a real signature from a forgery. (In practice, a forger is more likely to have a signature which matches that on the card than a legitimate card holder in a hurry.)
Around here Verizon's DSL pricing has decreased over the past few years, while the data rates have increased.
In the US I pay about the same for 15/2 service over fiber. I don't see that ramping up much higher anytime soon--the fiber can support a lot more, but the backbone can't. I've always wondered about the 50 or 100Mbps service people talk about--can you actually sustain that? Maybe if you're in a really technophobic neighborhood it would work, but even an OC-768 ($$$) would only support 400 houses filling their pipes with p2p traffic at those rates.
The existing infrastructure is basically useless for broadband. The old copper phone lines in much of the country won't carry a high speed signal (a lot of the ones on overhead lines are really rotting due to weather exposure, etc.) The cable infrastructure is crap, a lot of installed 30 years ago by people who didn't really know what they were doing--splitters all over the place, loose crimps, low quality/squashed coax. And for real broadband (50+Mbps) you're not going very far on cable; you need a neighborhood distribution point with fiber running into it--which isn't viable in a lot of the more rural areas. The real issue isn't "we've got more land to cover", it's that the US was fairly early in adopting universal telephone coverage. In countries that didn't have a reliable telephone system 100 years ago, they deployed a much more modern infrastructure that can handle higher data rates (VDSL, etc.). In the US, there's not much incentive to deploy an upgraded telephone network, because the phones already work (meaning that your deployment costs are recouped only from broadband users, not amortized across all telephone customers). That said, some companies are starting to deploy solid cable and FTTH systems. That process is slow, but the see-saw will flip in 15-20 years when those fiber networks can ramp up and other countries who currently have nice high-speed DSL networks hit a wall and they need to swallow throwing out their copper infrastructure and moving to fiber.