Oh, all right, I'll jump on the bandwagon. My site got these numbers for last month:
Mozilla 108215 59.8 % MS Internet Explorer 42646 23.5 % Konqueror 10016 5.5 % Opera 7815 4.3 % Safari 3042 1.6 % Netscape 2574 1.4 % Galeon 2392 1.3 % Unknown 1414 0.7 % Firebird 1214 0.6 %
The web hosting guys don't filter out my own IP address and I haven't gotten around to writing the cron job to download the logs for analysis on my own box. OTOH, I only hit my site maybe 4 times a day, but it gets much more than that in other traffic, so my own page views can't be skewing the numbers that much. And for last month I'd have been in both the Mozilla and the Konqueror category, since I had to use Konqueror for the first part of the month (long story), and that was when I actually hit the website more than normal.
So, anyway, yeah.
It's great to see Mozilla doing so well against IE, but for those of us actually maintaining websites we've still gotta keep in mind the usage statistics that matter come out of our own logs. And also, if we code to a specific browser and restrict others, then our own logs are worthless, even.
Heh, changing your user agent for that site wouldn't help you a damn bit. To run the update you need both VBScript in your browser and ActiveX, and you have to download an activex control.
So, no, Mozilla won't work at all there. (I've heard rumors you can still download the updates, but I haven't tried. You see, I'm one of those people, you know, I'm not "everybody" because I *never* go to that site. No need. I don't boot my windows partition because it's been so long without an update I'm worried it'll get rooted when booted)
The reason I see biodiesel as a coal replacement as well as nuke power is because we can use technology we already know and understand to build diesel power plants. Then we can kick-start a biodiesel industry (assuming the "harvesting from algae" thing is actual practical) and phase out fossil-based diesel in favor of biodiesel. Biodiesel is probably about as "green" as you can get, although we still have to deal with the products of the combustion in some form, they become far less dangerous than in regular diesel and coal because of the simple fact that the atoms themselves came out of the atmosphere to make the fuel, and they just get put right back into the atmosphere. For a switch to biodiesel, no new technology is needed and no new infrastructure is needed, just new power plants (arguably part of infrastructure, but I'm referring to shipping/storage/disposal). It also gives us a way to phase in biodiesel as a replacement for diesel in cars and trucks that use it already and transition them to a more environmentally friendly energy source. The algae paper I read also cited DoE reports (or maybe it was DoT) showing that 20% of automobiles on the road in the US right now are diesel-powered. That's a huge percentage to switch over to homegrown biodiesel and should make a substantial impact on current world politics over oil and global warming. Now, as an immediately practical replacement for coal, biodiesel isn't here but diesel is, so a plan can be made and implemented *now* for this transition. We might need some help from the government to kick-start the biodiesel end of things.
Ethanol, I hear, is a net loss unless a new way is found to produce it. So my question here is can it be produced with a plan similar to the algae plan? If it can, then it might actually become feasible to use, and we can actually transition existing cars to ethanol. Start with voluntary ethanol conversions, run that for awhile while the infrastructure takes it in, and ultimately legislate in ethanol conversions. Most old, nasty, gas-guzzlers (like my truck) can run ethanol by just making a few carb adjustments, timing, and changing the spark plugs. Newer cars would need a new computer and a few other gizmos (the flex-fuel cars need no changes), but nothing that's unreasonably expensive. We've already done a similar changeover from R-12 to R-134a in a/c, and the modifications needed to switch to ethanol are on the same scale as those. (And yes, as a matter of fact I am a mechanic;) ) Ethanol isn't here now either, and can't serve as a coal replacement in the immediate future, and likely never will. And my only reason for mentioning it is predicated on the feasibility of the biodiesel switch, which is very feasible and can be started *now*, even if we have to start the changes to the power grid with regular diesel and temporarily increase our reliance on oil while we kick-start a biodiesel industry. But if the algae plan works for biodiesel, then it seems reasonable to me to pursue a similar plan for ethanol. It might still wind up a net loss, but that would be fine so long as the power grid itself is fine. Hell, the only reason oil isn't a net loss right now, near as I can tell, is because coal is so cheap to mine.
Hydroelectric does have drawbacks. The main one of these isn't fish, its the human impact. Yes, fish die. Try to remember that these fish which are dieing were bread in hatcherys so that people could catch them. There is some hydroelectric in rivers and such bust most of it is at dams and those resivours are stocked. The dams are really the problem. We drasticly chance how water flows and where the "lake" is in order to suit our needs to pin up that water and release it at our rate. However, since this also provides us with drinking water and watersports, I can't really get too down on this practice.
Don't get me wrong, Hydroelectric is great, and you've made some strong points here. I'm recently moved back to Texas from Seattle, and up there they're having some serious politics over the salmon/dam issue, so it's kinda on my mind. My only point is that hydroelectric isn't perfect either. Not that it should be dismantled and/or not pursued, because it should be pursued. It's clean and renewable, and it's the *only* power generation method we have that is fully understood (or at least understood to the depth that hydroelectric is understood, if you don't mind the pun).
Solar is a great source of power. I dont see how it constitues a "net loss". It has been effectivly producing power for years. It's not alot of power for the cost or size but NASA seems to find it reliable and suffienct. If you go out into the California desert and look at the houses out there. Many of them are disconnected from the power grid. They run off of the solar power on their rooftops alone. We could actually get some real power if we were to commit serious time, money, and space to this. Imagine what a "sun field" could do out in arizona, just an acre or two of solar cells.
Solar power is a net loss because it takes more energy to build the cells than they return in their lifetime. Now, I'm not relating any facts I actually know, so I might just be repeating lies here. Solar power has many practical uses, and in my time in New MExico I saw more than a few houses with cells on them too, so it's not like I know *nothing* about it, just very little. The main problem with solar power as far as the environment goes is the really nasty byproducts made in manufacturing the cells. The sun has lots of power for us to harness, I'm just not convinced that solar cells harnessing that power directly is the best way to do it. I've also seen numbers (this is real fact, but I don't have links to back it up right now) that show that it's not possible at current efficiency levels to use solar power en masse in place of coal. As yet another tool for power generation, great. But I would suggest that solar power's best uses are going to be in orbit for the foreseeable future.
Wave power is a real alternitive. Waves are predictable and powerfull. The ocean is a volitale place to exist and these thing are not easy to maintain. This is a field that needs more reseach before its widespread adopted.
Wave power is a real and very awesome alternative. I definitely want to see more money spent on research. As an alternative we cna implement *now*, which was my point entirely, it's not practical because it needs more research. So yes, spend money on researching it and get it down, it is, after all, just an application of wind power, it's just under water.
Wind power is awesome. Im sorry but it sound like your education on wind power is a bit old. THe first wind fields went up in the 60s and 70s. The mills were clunky, noisey, ineffient, and unreliable. Those things are no longer true. Wind mills are silent. Modern power storage has practically eliminated the spikes.
Actually, my comments on wind power are all based on news published within the last 1-2 years. One article talked about the wind farm out in Wyoming and the spiking problems there (and how they overcame them for *that* field), another w
The main problem with wind power is that it's unprectable and subject to spikes. So you might produce an average of, say 1 megawatt for a week (madeup number), but most of that will be made in a day. Not quite right, it's more like the thing does nothing for 20 minutes, and then for 20 minutes it produces a whole bunch, and then does nothing again for 30 minutes (or an hour, or whatever).
These sorts of spikes aren't just hard to assimilate onto the power grid, they're impossible. They actually break things. The real stopping point on wind power right now is the same problem with fusion: it's an engineering problem. The problem with wind is how to flatten out the spikes so that the power can actually be used on the power grid.
The long-term problem (and this might be a straw man, so consider yourself warned) is the amount of intertia mass adoption of wind power would be absorbing from the atmosphere. What impact will it have on weather conditions, and therefore what is its impact on the environment? Maybe we could generate enough power off wind and other means that there will never be a measurable impact, but that's not to say that it's perfect.
There is no perfect solution, but when the engineering problem for wind power is solved it will be damn close. It's still unreliable, as unreliable as the weather, and the real payoffs come the same way as the insurance companies: having enough wind turbines setup that the total amount generated by all the turbines is statistically predictable. That's a lot of money that has to be invested to make it happen, and along the way the investors are *hoping* there will be a return at the end.
Other solutions, anyone? After reading somebody's link to using algae for producing biodiesel, that looks pretty good. Maybe not as for mass adoption, but there is already a lot of infrastructure in place, and at least then the products of combustion that are being released into the atmosphere are things that were already there, so the impact to the environment is much *much* less (there will still be dangerous hydrocarbons and stuff, but it'll all come out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other stuff that was already there, a mroe manageable problem than what we have now: face it, what we have now is irresponsible at best and reckless at worst). But there's still a lot of power infrastructure that would have to be completely rebuilt to accomodate it. What's cheaper, though? Kick-starting a biodiesel industry and building a bunch of diesel generators to replace coal or resurrecting a nuclear industry that's on the brink of dying out and building a bunch of reactors, and then disposing of the waste? At least with the biodiesel thing, it would be possible to use existing real numbers to calculate TCO, from which you can derive a reliable ROI prediction. You don't have that with wind or nuclear power (mind you, I'm a big fan of nuclear power). You have a net loss with solar power (with the minor caveat the biodiesel is solar power, it's just a lot more efficient because you let the plants harness the sunlight through photosynthesis and turn it into oils that become the biodiesel fuel).
Is there an algae (or similar) solution that'll make more ethanol? Ethanol has the same infrastructure advantages of biodiesel (in that it can be put in place of gasoline), with the exception that existing gasoline engines would need slight modifications to use it (not horribly expensive, and government subsidies could make it happen for real). Still not a power generation solution specifically, but an energy solution, with the caveat that it has to meet the same standards that biodiesel has to meet, and the algae solution meets the land requirements standards.
And keep in mind that hydroelectric is "green" only in the sense that it's renewable. It kills salmon and numerous other types of river life, and there's still not enough research to indicate that wave power is safe. When you get right down to it, what we can build today is nuke power, and we know
When we have a permanent place to store nuclear waste, then I think that we can look to the future of Nuclear reactors in America, but until that point, it has to wait.
This looks sensible at first glance, but this attitude creates a chicken and egg problem. Practically speaking, the disposal problem will be solved when there is a disposal problem, and without nuke power, there is no disposal problem, therefore it won't be solved.
I'm all for generating scenarios that may or may not solve the disposal problem, but at a certain point we have to say "We have *this many* scenarios that we can use to dispose of the waste, let's move on it". And I think we are already at that point, so it makes sense to move on it. And if our existing scenarios don't work out? Fine, we make new ones, when we have a problem that needs to be solved.
In the meantime, you're waiting for a pie in the sky (rock star, home run, it's all the same attitude) solution to a problem that doesn't even exist because you're waiting for a solution to it.
This gets down to basic facts of life, here. If you sit around waiting for solutions to present themselves before you're willing to take any risks, then you wind up sitting around doing nothing. This same attitude is manifest by such things as "When you pay me what i'm worth, then I'll work what I'm worth". Is this what humanity is all about? Waiting for solutions to just magically appear? Is that how we built our tech base in the first place? Sure, we hit a few bumps, and in the process we did some damage. But in most cases, the damage was repaired when the problem was identified and solutions were found. Some cases are still pending, but realistically if you look at the amount of technology we have now and how much of it is managed responsibly, how does it compare to the amount of technology available 500 years ago and how responsibly it was managed?
We have advanced, and we have grown, and I feel confident enough about us as a species to proceed with nuke power knowing that we have many good scenarios for dealing with the waste and that if none of them turn out to work, we'll be able to solve the problem another way, and still keep the nuke power.
Also, I think theres a corollary to that rule that states something like calling someone gay is the ultimate rebuttal to any argument.
You're a fag. At least I've got one!
(Demonstrating the "at least I've got one" tactic of winning any discussion. It even works if you've already been called either gay, Nazi, or had the "your mother!" invoked against you)
Here in Colorado, the uranium miners from the 60's have suffered a very large amount of lung cancer. On e article that I saw showed that health problems in the miners for coal was at 1/10 of what uranium had.
Let's not forget that coal mining is an old and established trade that stretches back close to a millenia--dealing with the problems of coal mining is something we've learned and might be part of some folks' genetic codes (ok, that's exaggeration). Uranium mining, on the other hand, is still a very young industry. I'd say that uranium mining is a huge success, based on your post. Can the first few generations of coal miners attest to the safety levels of the first few generations of uranium miners?
When Uranium mining is as old an industry of coal, let's see *then* how safely it compares to coal *now*.
Now, that's trying to turn apples to apples. In reality, in order to consider making the switch now, we have to compare now to now, but we can't ignore the possibility that maybe we've topped out on efficiency/safety for coal mining where we're only just beginning with uranium. So when you compare the raw amounts of fuel mining that is actually needed (and you inevitably find less total accidents, even if the proportions are higher for uranium mining), and the fact that it's still a fairly young industry compared to coal mining, then the argument actually holds up that uranium mining is better, even if it is not *safer* compared to mining equal amounts of uranium and coal.
Heh, I actually agree with both of you. You see, since we have such a small amount of data with which to judge our own bias, we're not capable of judging how much bias we may be attaching to the data you're using to make the decision. Pretty convoluted, I guess.
The thing is, as you've pointed out, we're coming to understand a large part of our own observable universe. The planet I live on finds certain EM bands to be useful for communication, but a planet around another star might well have natural phenomena capable of emitting EM signals that we view as "must be artificial", only naturally, so they'd be looking elsewhere and transmitting elsewhere.
When you get right down to it, we have to do something, and we have to make the best decision we can with the facts we have available. I think we have done so, and I wouldn't be surprised if in another hundred the decision changes due to new facts becoming available. Big deal, right? That's what science is all about.
Jesus Christ. Voyager: Veeger, get it? Or have you forgotten the one with the transporter accident where the Vulcan gets beamed onboard and then sent back and doesn't quite arrive in one piece? You know, the one with the theme song that was used when a Frenchman was Captain...
It would help if I hadn't lost track of what I was thinking. Maybe I should go to bed.;)
Anyway, if you look around at the open source games that are there, you'll find certain patterns repeated. The games are generally small, become playable very early in life, and easily expandable. In some cases, they're not even easily expandable (Armagetron, anyone?), they're just good games. Frozen Bubble is expandable, and reuses all the same graphics over and over. The card games are all small and simple, and so forth.
This model doesn't work for large-scale games precisely because the games don't get particularly playable until they're almost complete, and by then you've invested four years of your time into it only to find that the technology you were aiming for it to run in is now obsolete, and nobody wants to play the game because it's too old.
So, to solve this problem, a couple of game engines per genre of game would be needed, with lively development that keeps them up with the latest technology. That prevents the engine itself from becoming outdated.
As you and other folks have pointed out (which I already knew anyway, and the article mentions, and so forth), developing the engine isn't the bulk of a gaming project. Story and multi-media are the biggest parts of the project. So each engine would need a standard way of representing the story and use standard ways of dealing with multimedia (that's graphics, music, and sound effects, in case you're wondering) so that the writers, musicians, and graphic artists can use their fancy RAD tools to design the stuff. And we'll just assume there would be reusable components (there would, and we can debate that all day long, but they're reusable the same way libraries are now, pieces that need to be assembled into something useful).
So we're talking infrastructure that won't appear overnight, certainly. There's no silver bullet that "If Carmac develops Doom 400 from the ground up as open source all our woes are over". It's a large problem, and it's getting solved piece by piece, as with any large problem.
But when/if it gets solved, the focus on games will be solely gameplay, nice graphics, and nice sounds/music. Technology will take a backseat because it would be assured in the engines. But everything else has to be open source as well for game design to become open source, you can't just say "open source" and only be talking about the engine, you have to be talking about the art, music, and story also, otherwise what you said in your post will always be true.
The strength of open source in applications has always been about reusable components, so it's actually fairly obvious that to make open source game development work you have to reduce games to a series of reusable parts that require a minimal amount of assembly to facilitate maximal development. (Jesus fucking christ, I didn't know I could speak corporatespeak!)
The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees, yet you still have to expend the time and money to develop the engine in the first place.
I think this statement pretty much proves the open source development model.;)
You see, the reason the situation is as you've stated is because each game design company is having to make a new engine from scratch. Because the technological advancement involved in making a game provides a more marketable edge on the game itself, and the engine. If the engine were open sourced though...
Then everybody making a FPS could use the same engine. Now, instead of everybody having to write their own special engine, they could take the same basic engine, fork it to make their own technological advancements, and then maybe merge their code back, or something. At that point, sure, they lose licensing revenue from the engine, but they gain the ability to cut a certain amount of development from the game.
That would force them to focus on gameplay, story, and so forth. There wouldn't be any more "No plot, just kill everything" games whose only purpose is to sell the engine that drives it.
Realistically, you don't actually put 1 million triangles in an object, your renderer does that for you. Take a look at POVRay sometime and see what kind of input it takes. It's a well-reputed rendering engine, and will give you an idea of what 3d data really is, and why text is a perfectly fine way to handle it, and even preferable, especially when cross-platform is one of your goals.
And, oh yeah, the reason PNG files can be opened fine on different architectures has to do more with the fact that there are dozens of PNG-reading and writing implementations and less with the nature of the format. 2d graphic file formats are nothing at all like 3d graphic file formats, there's no relationship. They're as different as mbox and your toilet. Really.
If I want to represent a colour in binary, I do it with 3 bytes, one for red, green and blue.
...and you have to write a custom tool for every platform to deal with it.
This conversation is tired already. You've totally forgotten that computers are supposed to help humans, not vice versa. The computer works for you, so put it to work.
Graphics cards do not speak XML.
You're right, graphics cards are plagued with proprietary languages. So binary is definitely a better solution, I guess.
The file format doesn't matter that much because in practice you will *never* be copying the file directly into memory. Not only is that bad, but it's not practical. You *always* have to take a step to translate the file data into whatever form your graphics card will understand, whether it's OpenGL, or NVidia's latest vid-card psychobabble. That is, if you need your file to be read on any processor platform + vid card combination, and in any app that wants to read it. Binary formats fall down every time compared to plaintext when you need lots of different platforms to be able to understand it.
That's the point. They're not after speed and efficiency in a file format, they're after clarity, ease of implementation of apps that use the file format, and a whole slew of other things that have *nothing* to do with performance. If performance were the only qualification, then great! Binary all the way. But there's a reason more and more data files are going xml, and I"ll give you a hint: our computers are plenty fast enough to deal with it.
Size isn't the issue either, since you're talking about something that gets transmitted over the internet, as needed. If you're talking about distributing a fancy game, then you don't have to worry about it. Pick the format that works best for your game. Since you'll have this nice standard file format to use if you choose, you can *gasp* write some XSL to convert from that format to your own, and now your players can extend your game with any program they want! And how much space is that XSL going to take up on your 6 CD game distribution?
A short-sighted view places binary as the best and only file format worth using, but when you have to consider what works best in the long run, binary file formats have proven not to be the way to go. Hell, even POVray uses a text file for its input. In fact, all the renderers with which I'm familiar use text files for their input.
Try and reimplement a graphics format like OGG in XML and see what you get.
Heh. *steps on pedantic box*
Ogg is just a container, a multi-media container. As far as I know, Ogg is not intended to contain just a pictures, but it could. It is intended to contain music, animation, and a combination of the two. It's most popular use right now is to contain vorbis-encoded sound.
*steps off pedantic box*
Here's a real problem for you to solve with your binary only format, ok?
I want to make a cycle model for ArmageTron Advanced. I want to use Blender, not just because I'm on Linux but also because it's the program I know and love and prefer, and assuming I could get another 3d modeling program and piece it together, I'm still going to have to deal with outputting to.ase format.
Now, Blender is slated (and may already have) to adopt an xml-based file format. Assuming I can dig up specs on.ase, then I could write a little bit of XSL to do my conversion.
Now I want to take that same cycle model and throw it up on the web using one of these nice 3d standards that are in discussion. How do I convert it?
Now I have a friend using some po-dunk little 3d package like 3dsmax and *he* wants to screw with the model. (yeah, I know, there are python scripts available to do it now, but they'll be totally irrelevant at the point where Blender finally has an xml-based file format)
Do you see where I'm going with this?
With just a little bit of knowledge of XSL, anyone can open up any XML file, read it, and convert it to the target format they want (they do have to know about the target format, of course). Yeah, that doesn't mean your average bear is going to do much with it, but it does significantly increase the interoperability of a file format and the application that writes that file format.
XML should be used for everything under the sun for those reasons. In fact, it's not even appropriate for config files, in this case. I'm not actually saying it's not appropriate for config files because there are many reasons to use it besides interoperability.
And what about performance, anyway? How is having an xml data file going to hurt 3d performance? Just because your app reads the models in xml doesn't mean it's storing the model internally as ASCII data. No matter how binary your file is (heh), you still have to translate the file into memory when you parse it, and that only affects how long it takes to load the file.
As for rendering a scene? Perhaps you should take a minute to learn about how xml is typically parsed. That would be extremely useful to you, since you almost never read the whole file into memory at once. You read it line by line, complying with the standard that says how to read it top-to-bottom. It's a format that you don't have to pull all into memory at once to understand, you really can understand it one piece at a time.
When you get right down to it, the whole reason so many people have embraced xml is because performance is no longer an issue, and we're fucking sick of wearing handcuffs dealing with binary files. Binary files are very limiting and very difficult to deal with. What does it take to edit a GIF? Conversely, take an XPM (or is it XBM? I forget). It's just image data stored in ascii format, not really very hard to parse by a human, and very easy to parse by a computer. Granted it's not xml, but there's really no reason you can't make a graphics format in xml, and being able to edit the graphic file that just crashed your X server from a console, recompile, then telinit 5 to test the program you're working on that fucked up with the file is quite an advantage. Not saying you'd actually do it, but having the option to fix the programming problem before fixing the damage your programming problem did to your system is *always* good.
I forgot to mention, this is all intended to be compared to just sticking a diesel in there, since there are plenty of diesels that'll bolt right up to the tranny.;)
Ok, I'm following all that. Now, how do I read the specs on an AC motor and a generator so that I can determine this sort of thing? I have the specs on the tranny (gear ratios, anyway), and I have the specs on the differential (gear ratio, again), so I can do the math to figure out how much RPM I need off an electric motor. What I'm having the most trouble doing is reading the specs on the available electric motors and generators to figure out what the motor requires.
Obviously step one is to find an electric motor that meets my requirements. Step two is to figure out how many batteries I'll need to provide power from a stop (simple math, really), and step three is to figure out what generator I'll need to recharge the whole system and provide power for the electric motor.
I do intend to use the truck as a truck, tow shit and so forth, but my requirements are only that it perform as it does now, which isn't very well. The 307 in it had a stock HP rating of 200 (I think that was measured at the wheels, but I could be wrong on that), and it's over 30 years old now, so it's obviously not getting it's new performance specs. I only need the thing to perform practically as well as it does now, and any additional performance I get is just a bonus.
When all this is done, I intend to try to calculate mpg for the system, and hopefully that will provide the justification (and up-front costs) for doing the deed. Then I have to raise money, but if I can show a workable system I might be able to raise at least some of it from family, since it's a family heirloom of sorts, and I'm like the fourth owner within the family.
In the long run, the benefit of having a power supply that can be replaced as new technology appears practical without having to do thousands of dollars in upgrading the drivetrain is worth a lot more than any cost savings. The truck has a lot of sentimental value in my family.;)
Last time I drove cross-country (the end of last month), I couldn't help but notice all the restaurants along the way.;) Since I had to stop about as often as anybody ever needs to stop (thanks to my really old, gas-guzzling pickup heavily loaded and towing a trailer), approximately every 50-75 miles, for *gas*, I had plenty of opportunity to observe that there was always a fast food joint on/near the gas station. I also drove through SW Wyoming, an area somewhat notorious for a lack of people and gas stations, and I drove through the Continental Divide Basin and almost ran out of gas. Jesus, what a place to run out of gas! No opportunity to even MacGyver your way to survival without crossing the mountains, all the water there is stale and really really nasty! Not even a cactus to be seen, I don't think. I didn't see any, anyway.
What's will all this reasonableness and decency today? Didn't *any* of you people go to MIT?
Shut up, asshole. We don't need this bullshit around here. If you'd read the fucking post, you'd have seen that the guy doesn't really want to start a fight, and that he'd prefer to just exchange information.
If you've got a problem with it, you can kiss my happy white ass, shitmonger. Cumbubble.
Remember that any DC motor can work equally well as a generator.
Ok, this is a rule of thumb, how about some hard numbers? I'm not asking for proof, I'm asking because...
I've been looking into converting my truck into an electric truck, and the power source is the real holdup there (well, the practical holdup is money, but for the purposes of 'looking into', I'm assuming money is no object). I can get just about any electric motor I want, and the truck is so old that there's so much room that space isn't an issue either.
So I hatched a scheme to stick in a two-stroke or four-stroke generator and an array of batteries. The batteries would be used to power the motor from a standstill and the generator would kick on when the batteries needed to be charged (thus making it safe to park my truck in the garage attached to my house).
The real problem I've encountered is that while I can turn wrenches all day, soup up IC engines, and fix electrical motors, I don't actually know anything else.;)
So the question is, in order to power a DC motor of a given size, is it *required* to have another DC motor of the same size or higher acting as a generator (assuming I have a way to turn the thing)? Or is there some configuration that will allow me to use one of those neato camping generators to power a DC motor installed in place of my 307? (I'm willing to remove the transmission and the engine and replace them with a motor if necessary, but one of the reasons my truck is sooooo cool is that it's a column shift, and I would like to keep that)
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft follows standards like fish follow migrating caribou.
Flopping around and suffocating while the caribou runs off chuckling?
Oh, all right, I'll jump on the bandwagon. My site got these numbers for last month:
The web hosting guys don't filter out my own IP address and I haven't gotten around to writing the cron job to download the logs for analysis on my own box. OTOH, I only hit my site maybe 4 times a day, but it gets much more than that in other traffic, so my own page views can't be skewing the numbers that much. And for last month I'd have been in both the Mozilla and the Konqueror category, since I had to use Konqueror for the first part of the month (long story), and that was when I actually hit the website more than normal.
So, anyway, yeah.
It's great to see Mozilla doing so well against IE, but for those of us actually maintaining websites we've still gotta keep in mind the usage statistics that matter come out of our own logs. And also, if we code to a specific browser and restrict others, then our own logs are worthless, even.
Heh, changing your user agent for that site wouldn't help you a damn bit. To run the update you need both VBScript in your browser and ActiveX, and you have to download an activex control.
So, no, Mozilla won't work at all there. (I've heard rumors you can still download the updates, but I haven't tried. You see, I'm one of those people, you know, I'm not "everybody" because I *never* go to that site. No need. I don't boot my windows partition because it's been so long without an update I'm worried it'll get rooted when booted)
I forgot to go back over my original points. ;)
The reason I see biodiesel as a coal replacement as well as nuke power is because we can use technology we already know and understand to build diesel power plants. Then we can kick-start a biodiesel industry (assuming the "harvesting from algae" thing is actual practical) and phase out fossil-based diesel in favor of biodiesel. Biodiesel is probably about as "green" as you can get, although we still have to deal with the products of the combustion in some form, they become far less dangerous than in regular diesel and coal because of the simple fact that the atoms themselves came out of the atmosphere to make the fuel, and they just get put right back into the atmosphere. For a switch to biodiesel, no new technology is needed and no new infrastructure is needed, just new power plants (arguably part of infrastructure, but I'm referring to shipping/storage/disposal). It also gives us a way to phase in biodiesel as a replacement for diesel in cars and trucks that use it already and transition them to a more environmentally friendly energy source. The algae paper I read also cited DoE reports (or maybe it was DoT) showing that 20% of automobiles on the road in the US right now are diesel-powered. That's a huge percentage to switch over to homegrown biodiesel and should make a substantial impact on current world politics over oil and global warming. Now, as an immediately practical replacement for coal, biodiesel isn't here but diesel is, so a plan can be made and implemented *now* for this transition. We might need some help from the government to kick-start the biodiesel end of things.
Ethanol, I hear, is a net loss unless a new way is found to produce it. So my question here is can it be produced with a plan similar to the algae plan? If it can, then it might actually become feasible to use, and we can actually transition existing cars to ethanol. Start with voluntary ethanol conversions, run that for awhile while the infrastructure takes it in, and ultimately legislate in ethanol conversions. Most old, nasty, gas-guzzlers (like my truck) can run ethanol by just making a few carb adjustments, timing, and changing the spark plugs. Newer cars would need a new computer and a few other gizmos (the flex-fuel cars need no changes), but nothing that's unreasonably expensive. We've already done a similar changeover from R-12 to R-134a in a/c, and the modifications needed to switch to ethanol are on the same scale as those. (And yes, as a matter of fact I am a mechanic ;) ) Ethanol isn't here now either, and can't serve as a coal replacement in the immediate future, and likely never will. And my only reason for mentioning it is predicated on the feasibility of the biodiesel switch, which is very feasible and can be started *now*, even if we have to start the changes to the power grid with regular diesel and temporarily increase our reliance on oil while we kick-start a biodiesel industry. But if the algae plan works for biodiesel, then it seems reasonable to me to pursue a similar plan for ethanol. It might still wind up a net loss, but that would be fine so long as the power grid itself is fine. Hell, the only reason oil isn't a net loss right now, near as I can tell, is because coal is so cheap to mine.
Ok, I'll take them one at a time too. ;)
Hydroelectric does have drawbacks. The main one of these isn't fish, its the human impact. Yes, fish die. Try to remember that these fish which are dieing were bread in hatcherys so that people could catch them. There is some hydroelectric in rivers and such bust most of it is at dams and those resivours are stocked. The dams are really the problem. We drasticly chance how water flows and where the "lake" is in order to suit our needs to pin up that water and release it at our rate. However, since this also provides us with drinking water and watersports, I can't really get too down on this practice.
Don't get me wrong, Hydroelectric is great, and you've made some strong points here. I'm recently moved back to Texas from Seattle, and up there they're having some serious politics over the salmon/dam issue, so it's kinda on my mind. My only point is that hydroelectric isn't perfect either. Not that it should be dismantled and/or not pursued, because it should be pursued. It's clean and renewable, and it's the *only* power generation method we have that is fully understood (or at least understood to the depth that hydroelectric is understood, if you don't mind the pun).
Solar is a great source of power. I dont see how it constitues a "net loss". It has been effectivly producing power for years. It's not alot of power for the cost or size but NASA seems to find it reliable and suffienct. If you go out into the California desert and look at the houses out there. Many of them are disconnected from the power grid. They run off of the solar power on their rooftops alone. We could actually get some real power if we were to commit serious time, money, and space to this. Imagine what a "sun field" could do out in arizona, just an acre or two of solar cells.
Solar power is a net loss because it takes more energy to build the cells than they return in their lifetime. Now, I'm not relating any facts I actually know, so I might just be repeating lies here. Solar power has many practical uses, and in my time in New MExico I saw more than a few houses with cells on them too, so it's not like I know *nothing* about it, just very little. The main problem with solar power as far as the environment goes is the really nasty byproducts made in manufacturing the cells. The sun has lots of power for us to harness, I'm just not convinced that solar cells harnessing that power directly is the best way to do it. I've also seen numbers (this is real fact, but I don't have links to back it up right now) that show that it's not possible at current efficiency levels to use solar power en masse in place of coal. As yet another tool for power generation, great. But I would suggest that solar power's best uses are going to be in orbit for the foreseeable future.
Wave power is a real alternitive. Waves are predictable and powerfull. The ocean is a volitale place to exist and these thing are not easy to maintain. This is a field that needs more reseach before its widespread adopted.
Wave power is a real and very awesome alternative. I definitely want to see more money spent on research. As an alternative we cna implement *now*, which was my point entirely, it's not practical because it needs more research. So yes, spend money on researching it and get it down, it is, after all, just an application of wind power, it's just under water.
Wind power is awesome. Im sorry but it sound like your education on wind power is a bit old. THe first wind fields went up in the 60s and 70s. The mills were clunky, noisey, ineffient, and unreliable. Those things are no longer true. Wind mills are silent. Modern power storage has practically eliminated the spikes.
Actually, my comments on wind power are all based on news published within the last 1-2 years. One article talked about the wind farm out in Wyoming and the spiking problems there (and how they overcame them for *that* field), another w
The main problem with wind power is that it's unprectable and subject to spikes. So you might produce an average of, say 1 megawatt for a week (madeup number), but most of that will be made in a day. Not quite right, it's more like the thing does nothing for 20 minutes, and then for 20 minutes it produces a whole bunch, and then does nothing again for 30 minutes (or an hour, or whatever).
These sorts of spikes aren't just hard to assimilate onto the power grid, they're impossible. They actually break things. The real stopping point on wind power right now is the same problem with fusion: it's an engineering problem. The problem with wind is how to flatten out the spikes so that the power can actually be used on the power grid.
The long-term problem (and this might be a straw man, so consider yourself warned) is the amount of intertia mass adoption of wind power would be absorbing from the atmosphere. What impact will it have on weather conditions, and therefore what is its impact on the environment? Maybe we could generate enough power off wind and other means that there will never be a measurable impact, but that's not to say that it's perfect.
There is no perfect solution, but when the engineering problem for wind power is solved it will be damn close. It's still unreliable, as unreliable as the weather, and the real payoffs come the same way as the insurance companies: having enough wind turbines setup that the total amount generated by all the turbines is statistically predictable. That's a lot of money that has to be invested to make it happen, and along the way the investors are *hoping* there will be a return at the end.
Other solutions, anyone? After reading somebody's link to using algae for producing biodiesel, that looks pretty good. Maybe not as for mass adoption, but there is already a lot of infrastructure in place, and at least then the products of combustion that are being released into the atmosphere are things that were already there, so the impact to the environment is much *much* less (there will still be dangerous hydrocarbons and stuff, but it'll all come out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other stuff that was already there, a mroe manageable problem than what we have now: face it, what we have now is irresponsible at best and reckless at worst). But there's still a lot of power infrastructure that would have to be completely rebuilt to accomodate it. What's cheaper, though? Kick-starting a biodiesel industry and building a bunch of diesel generators to replace coal or resurrecting a nuclear industry that's on the brink of dying out and building a bunch of reactors, and then disposing of the waste? At least with the biodiesel thing, it would be possible to use existing real numbers to calculate TCO, from which you can derive a reliable ROI prediction. You don't have that with wind or nuclear power (mind you, I'm a big fan of nuclear power). You have a net loss with solar power (with the minor caveat the biodiesel is solar power, it's just a lot more efficient because you let the plants harness the sunlight through photosynthesis and turn it into oils that become the biodiesel fuel).
Is there an algae (or similar) solution that'll make more ethanol? Ethanol has the same infrastructure advantages of biodiesel (in that it can be put in place of gasoline), with the exception that existing gasoline engines would need slight modifications to use it (not horribly expensive, and government subsidies could make it happen for real). Still not a power generation solution specifically, but an energy solution, with the caveat that it has to meet the same standards that biodiesel has to meet, and the algae solution meets the land requirements standards.
And keep in mind that hydroelectric is "green" only in the sense that it's renewable. It kills salmon and numerous other types of river life, and there's still not enough research to indicate that wave power is safe. When you get right down to it, what we can build today is nuke power, and we know
When we have a permanent place to store nuclear waste, then I think that we can look to the future of Nuclear reactors in America, but until that point, it has to wait.
This looks sensible at first glance, but this attitude creates a chicken and egg problem. Practically speaking, the disposal problem will be solved when there is a disposal problem, and without nuke power, there is no disposal problem, therefore it won't be solved.
I'm all for generating scenarios that may or may not solve the disposal problem, but at a certain point we have to say "We have *this many* scenarios that we can use to dispose of the waste, let's move on it". And I think we are already at that point, so it makes sense to move on it. And if our existing scenarios don't work out? Fine, we make new ones, when we have a problem that needs to be solved.
In the meantime, you're waiting for a pie in the sky (rock star, home run, it's all the same attitude) solution to a problem that doesn't even exist because you're waiting for a solution to it.
This gets down to basic facts of life, here. If you sit around waiting for solutions to present themselves before you're willing to take any risks, then you wind up sitting around doing nothing. This same attitude is manifest by such things as "When you pay me what i'm worth, then I'll work what I'm worth". Is this what humanity is all about? Waiting for solutions to just magically appear? Is that how we built our tech base in the first place? Sure, we hit a few bumps, and in the process we did some damage. But in most cases, the damage was repaired when the problem was identified and solutions were found. Some cases are still pending, but realistically if you look at the amount of technology we have now and how much of it is managed responsibly, how does it compare to the amount of technology available 500 years ago and how responsibly it was managed?
We have advanced, and we have grown, and I feel confident enough about us as a species to proceed with nuke power knowing that we have many good scenarios for dealing with the waste and that if none of them turn out to work, we'll be able to solve the problem another way, and still keep the nuke power.
Also, I think theres a corollary to that rule that states something like calling someone gay is the ultimate rebuttal to any argument.
You're a fag. At least I've got one!
(Demonstrating the "at least I've got one" tactic of winning any discussion. It even works if you've already been called either gay, Nazi, or had the "your mother!" invoked against you)
Here in Colorado, the uranium miners from the 60's have suffered a very large amount of lung cancer. On e article that I saw showed that health problems in the miners for coal was at 1/10 of what uranium had.
Let's not forget that coal mining is an old and established trade that stretches back close to a millenia--dealing with the problems of coal mining is something we've learned and might be part of some folks' genetic codes (ok, that's exaggeration). Uranium mining, on the other hand, is still a very young industry. I'd say that uranium mining is a huge success, based on your post. Can the first few generations of coal miners attest to the safety levels of the first few generations of uranium miners?
When Uranium mining is as old an industry of coal, let's see *then* how safely it compares to coal *now*.
Now, that's trying to turn apples to apples. In reality, in order to consider making the switch now, we have to compare now to now, but we can't ignore the possibility that maybe we've topped out on efficiency/safety for coal mining where we're only just beginning with uranium. So when you compare the raw amounts of fuel mining that is actually needed (and you inevitably find less total accidents, even if the proportions are higher for uranium mining), and the fact that it's still a fairly young industry compared to coal mining, then the argument actually holds up that uranium mining is better, even if it is not *safer* compared to mining equal amounts of uranium and coal.
My grandfather died in his 50s of black lung disease from mining coal.
Just for the record, I'm pro-nuke. ;)
So are you suggesting that SETI is just an extension of our basic sex drive? That SETI is just a really expensive attempt to get laid?
Deep, man, deep. Put...the pipe...down!
Heh, I actually agree with both of you. You see, since we have such a small amount of data with which to judge our own bias, we're not capable of judging how much bias we may be attaching to the data you're using to make the decision. Pretty convoluted, I guess.
The thing is, as you've pointed out, we're coming to understand a large part of our own observable universe. The planet I live on finds certain EM bands to be useful for communication, but a planet around another star might well have natural phenomena capable of emitting EM signals that we view as "must be artificial", only naturally, so they'd be looking elsewhere and transmitting elsewhere.
When you get right down to it, we have to do something, and we have to make the best decision we can with the facts we have available. I think we have done so, and I wouldn't be surprised if in another hundred the decision changes due to new facts becoming available. Big deal, right? That's what science is all about.
Jesus Christ. Voyager: Veeger, get it? Or have you forgotten the one with the transporter accident where the Vulcan gets beamed onboard and then sent back and doesn't quite arrive in one piece? You know, the one with the theme song that was used when a Frenchman was Captain...
It's only the worst Star Trek movie ever made...
Finally, a post that makes this ontopic. ;)
I can't believe this didn't get a funny mod. ;(
It would help if I hadn't lost track of what I was thinking. Maybe I should go to bed. ;)
Anyway, if you look around at the open source games that are there, you'll find certain patterns repeated. The games are generally small, become playable very early in life, and easily expandable. In some cases, they're not even easily expandable (Armagetron, anyone?), they're just good games. Frozen Bubble is expandable, and reuses all the same graphics over and over. The card games are all small and simple, and so forth.
This model doesn't work for large-scale games precisely because the games don't get particularly playable until they're almost complete, and by then you've invested four years of your time into it only to find that the technology you were aiming for it to run in is now obsolete, and nobody wants to play the game because it's too old.
So, to solve this problem, a couple of game engines per genre of game would be needed, with lively development that keeps them up with the latest technology. That prevents the engine itself from becoming outdated.
As you and other folks have pointed out (which I already knew anyway, and the article mentions, and so forth), developing the engine isn't the bulk of a gaming project. Story and multi-media are the biggest parts of the project. So each engine would need a standard way of representing the story and use standard ways of dealing with multimedia (that's graphics, music, and sound effects, in case you're wondering) so that the writers, musicians, and graphic artists can use their fancy RAD tools to design the stuff. And we'll just assume there would be reusable components (there would, and we can debate that all day long, but they're reusable the same way libraries are now, pieces that need to be assembled into something useful).
So we're talking infrastructure that won't appear overnight, certainly. There's no silver bullet that "If Carmac develops Doom 400 from the ground up as open source all our woes are over". It's a large problem, and it's getting solved piece by piece, as with any large problem.
But when/if it gets solved, the focus on games will be solely gameplay, nice graphics, and nice sounds/music. Technology will take a backseat because it would be assured in the engines. But everything else has to be open source as well for game design to become open source, you can't just say "open source" and only be talking about the engine, you have to be talking about the art, music, and story also, otherwise what you said in your post will always be true.
The strength of open source in applications has always been about reusable components, so it's actually fairly obvious that to make open source game development work you have to reduce games to a series of reusable parts that require a minimal amount of assembly to facilitate maximal development. (Jesus fucking christ, I didn't know I could speak corporatespeak!)
The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees, yet you still have to expend the time and money to develop the engine in the first place.
I think this statement pretty much proves the open source development model. ;)
You see, the reason the situation is as you've stated is because each game design company is having to make a new engine from scratch. Because the technological advancement involved in making a game provides a more marketable edge on the game itself, and the engine. If the engine were open sourced though...
Then everybody making a FPS could use the same engine. Now, instead of everybody having to write their own special engine, they could take the same basic engine, fork it to make their own technological advancements, and then maybe merge their code back, or something. At that point, sure, they lose licensing revenue from the engine, but they gain the ability to cut a certain amount of development from the game.
That would force them to focus on gameplay, story, and so forth. There wouldn't be any more "No plot, just kill everything" games whose only purpose is to sell the engine that drives it.
Aaa, I've lost track of what I was saying. Sorry.
Realistically, you don't actually put 1 million triangles in an object, your renderer does that for you. Take a look at POVRay sometime and see what kind of input it takes. It's a well-reputed rendering engine, and will give you an idea of what 3d data really is, and why text is a perfectly fine way to handle it, and even preferable, especially when cross-platform is one of your goals.
And, oh yeah, the reason PNG files can be opened fine on different architectures has to do more with the fact that there are dozens of PNG-reading and writing implementations and less with the nature of the format. 2d graphic file formats are nothing at all like 3d graphic file formats, there's no relationship. They're as different as mbox and your toilet. Really.
If I want to represent a colour in binary, I do it with 3 bytes, one for red, green and blue.
...and you have to write a custom tool for every platform to deal with it.
This conversation is tired already. You've totally forgotten that computers are supposed to help humans, not vice versa. The computer works for you, so put it to work.
Graphics cards do not speak XML.
You're right, graphics cards are plagued with proprietary languages. So binary is definitely a better solution, I guess.
The file format doesn't matter that much because in practice you will *never* be copying the file directly into memory. Not only is that bad, but it's not practical. You *always* have to take a step to translate the file data into whatever form your graphics card will understand, whether it's OpenGL, or NVidia's latest vid-card psychobabble. That is, if you need your file to be read on any processor platform + vid card combination, and in any app that wants to read it. Binary formats fall down every time compared to plaintext when you need lots of different platforms to be able to understand it.
That's the point. They're not after speed and efficiency in a file format, they're after clarity, ease of implementation of apps that use the file format, and a whole slew of other things that have *nothing* to do with performance. If performance were the only qualification, then great! Binary all the way. But there's a reason more and more data files are going xml, and I"ll give you a hint: our computers are plenty fast enough to deal with it.
Size isn't the issue either, since you're talking about something that gets transmitted over the internet, as needed. If you're talking about distributing a fancy game, then you don't have to worry about it. Pick the format that works best for your game. Since you'll have this nice standard file format to use if you choose, you can *gasp* write some XSL to convert from that format to your own, and now your players can extend your game with any program they want! And how much space is that XSL going to take up on your 6 CD game distribution?
A short-sighted view places binary as the best and only file format worth using, but when you have to consider what works best in the long run, binary file formats have proven not to be the way to go. Hell, even POVray uses a text file for its input. In fact, all the renderers with which I'm familiar use text files for their input.
You were making sense until you said:
Try and reimplement a graphics format like OGG in XML and see what you get.
Heh. *steps on pedantic box*
Ogg is just a container, a multi-media container. As far as I know, Ogg is not intended to contain just a pictures, but it could. It is intended to contain music, animation, and a combination of the two. It's most popular use right now is to contain vorbis-encoded sound.
*steps off pedantic box*
Here's a real problem for you to solve with your binary only format, ok?
I want to make a cycle model for ArmageTron Advanced. I want to use Blender, not just because I'm on Linux but also because it's the program I know and love and prefer, and assuming I could get another 3d modeling program and piece it together, I'm still going to have to deal with outputting to .ase format.
Now, Blender is slated (and may already have) to adopt an xml-based file format. Assuming I can dig up specs on .ase, then I could write a little bit of XSL to do my conversion.
Now I want to take that same cycle model and throw it up on the web using one of these nice 3d standards that are in discussion. How do I convert it?
Now I have a friend using some po-dunk little 3d package like 3dsmax and *he* wants to screw with the model. (yeah, I know, there are python scripts available to do it now, but they'll be totally irrelevant at the point where Blender finally has an xml-based file format)
Do you see where I'm going with this?
With just a little bit of knowledge of XSL, anyone can open up any XML file, read it, and convert it to the target format they want (they do have to know about the target format, of course). Yeah, that doesn't mean your average bear is going to do much with it, but it does significantly increase the interoperability of a file format and the application that writes that file format.
XML should be used for everything under the sun for those reasons. In fact, it's not even appropriate for config files, in this case. I'm not actually saying it's not appropriate for config files because there are many reasons to use it besides interoperability.
And what about performance, anyway? How is having an xml data file going to hurt 3d performance? Just because your app reads the models in xml doesn't mean it's storing the model internally as ASCII data. No matter how binary your file is (heh), you still have to translate the file into memory when you parse it, and that only affects how long it takes to load the file.
As for rendering a scene? Perhaps you should take a minute to learn about how xml is typically parsed. That would be extremely useful to you, since you almost never read the whole file into memory at once. You read it line by line, complying with the standard that says how to read it top-to-bottom. It's a format that you don't have to pull all into memory at once to understand, you really can understand it one piece at a time.
When you get right down to it, the whole reason so many people have embraced xml is because performance is no longer an issue, and we're fucking sick of wearing handcuffs dealing with binary files. Binary files are very limiting and very difficult to deal with. What does it take to edit a GIF? Conversely, take an XPM (or is it XBM? I forget). It's just image data stored in ascii format, not really very hard to parse by a human, and very easy to parse by a computer. Granted it's not xml, but there's really no reason you can't make a graphics format in xml, and being able to edit the graphic file that just crashed your X server from a console, recompile, then telinit 5 to test the program you're working on that fucked up with the file is quite an advantage. Not saying you'd actually do it, but having the option to fix the programming problem before fixing the damage your programming problem did to your system is *always* good.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point. ;)
I forgot to mention, this is all intended to be compared to just sticking a diesel in there, since there are plenty of diesels that'll bolt right up to the tranny. ;)
Ok, I'm following all that. Now, how do I read the specs on an AC motor and a generator so that I can determine this sort of thing? I have the specs on the tranny (gear ratios, anyway), and I have the specs on the differential (gear ratio, again), so I can do the math to figure out how much RPM I need off an electric motor. What I'm having the most trouble doing is reading the specs on the available electric motors and generators to figure out what the motor requires.
Obviously step one is to find an electric motor that meets my requirements. Step two is to figure out how many batteries I'll need to provide power from a stop (simple math, really), and step three is to figure out what generator I'll need to recharge the whole system and provide power for the electric motor.
I do intend to use the truck as a truck, tow shit and so forth, but my requirements are only that it perform as it does now, which isn't very well. The 307 in it had a stock HP rating of 200 (I think that was measured at the wheels, but I could be wrong on that), and it's over 30 years old now, so it's obviously not getting it's new performance specs. I only need the thing to perform practically as well as it does now, and any additional performance I get is just a bonus.
When all this is done, I intend to try to calculate mpg for the system, and hopefully that will provide the justification (and up-front costs) for doing the deed. Then I have to raise money, but if I can show a workable system I might be able to raise at least some of it from family, since it's a family heirloom of sorts, and I'm like the fourth owner within the family.
In the long run, the benefit of having a power supply that can be replaced as new technology appears practical without having to do thousands of dollars in upgrading the drivetrain is worth a lot more than any cost savings. The truck has a lot of sentimental value in my family. ;)
Last time I drove cross-country (the end of last month), I couldn't help but notice all the restaurants along the way. ;) Since I had to stop about as often as anybody ever needs to stop (thanks to my really old, gas-guzzling pickup heavily loaded and towing a trailer), approximately every 50-75 miles, for *gas*, I had plenty of opportunity to observe that there was always a fast food joint on/near the gas station. I also drove through SW Wyoming, an area somewhat notorious for a lack of people and gas stations, and I drove through the Continental Divide Basin and almost ran out of gas. Jesus, what a place to run out of gas! No opportunity to even MacGyver your way to survival without crossing the mountains, all the water there is stale and really really nasty! Not even a cactus to be seen, I don't think. I didn't see any, anyway.
What's will all this reasonableness and decency today? Didn't *any* of you people go to MIT?
Shut up, asshole. We don't need this bullshit around here. If you'd read the fucking post, you'd have seen that the guy doesn't really want to start a fight, and that he'd prefer to just exchange information.
If you've got a problem with it, you can kiss my happy white ass, shitmonger. Cumbubble.
Remember that any DC motor can work equally well as a generator.
Ok, this is a rule of thumb, how about some hard numbers? I'm not asking for proof, I'm asking because...
I've been looking into converting my truck into an electric truck, and the power source is the real holdup there (well, the practical holdup is money, but for the purposes of 'looking into', I'm assuming money is no object). I can get just about any electric motor I want, and the truck is so old that there's so much room that space isn't an issue either.
So I hatched a scheme to stick in a two-stroke or four-stroke generator and an array of batteries. The batteries would be used to power the motor from a standstill and the generator would kick on when the batteries needed to be charged (thus making it safe to park my truck in the garage attached to my house).
The real problem I've encountered is that while I can turn wrenches all day, soup up IC engines, and fix electrical motors, I don't actually know anything else. ;)
So the question is, in order to power a DC motor of a given size, is it *required* to have another DC motor of the same size or higher acting as a generator (assuming I have a way to turn the thing)? Or is there some configuration that will allow me to use one of those neato camping generators to power a DC motor installed in place of my 307? (I'm willing to remove the transmission and the engine and replace them with a motor if necessary, but one of the reasons my truck is sooooo cool is that it's a column shift, and I would like to keep that)