That's silly. Nobody has forced me to upgrade my 98 machine or my mainstay, which runs NT4. The only thing that would force me to upgrade is if I want to run a new software package, which is MY choice, no one elses.
You could make exactly the same comment about Apple, for example. At least I can run DOS games on XP by and large, try running Hypercard from system 7 on OSX.
I dd a sort of general engineering course, with a mechanical bent, at a very spiffy uni.
At said uni the electricals and the rest of us did almost identical first year content, and our second year content still had about 50% overlap.
One thing that made me laugh as I cursed the difficulty of understanding power electrics (eg why is power=v.I') was the thought that some poor electronics geek was attempting to understand the thermodynamics of steam engines at the same time.
In my career I have used concepts from many of the papers I took, and last month I just got to use triple products for the first time, in anger. That's 22 years after leaving uni.
If allofmp3 charges 30c for a track, and iTunes charges 99c, do you really believe the artiste sees 69c? More like 3c, at a rough guess. I wish allofmp3 had set up a fund to pay the artiste via a VOLUNTARY donation equivalent to whatever pittance they normally get from a track.
A factor of three or four? Get a fucking grip. 15 years ago gasoline in Australia was around 65c a litre, at its high point this year it was $1.40. That's a doubling in 15 years, not three or four times in 6 years
In Oz, some gold mines are being re-opened for the 4th time, or the tailings from previous extraction processes are being remined for the third time. New extraction processes, and possibly the price of gold, makes this feasible.
Bear in mind that we think gold is expensive, yet I bet every Slashdotter here has thrown away quite a lot of pure gold. Printer cartridges, circuit boards etc.
Oil is just so cheap that we are still at the stage of burning it, fercrisake.
it depends. I've got some cheap noise-cancelling earphones (some generic brand), and in the office they are better than I have ever hoped. They kill air con rumble, people's voices are substantially quietened, and they are good for computers as well. What I really like is that I can turn the volume on my mp3s down, as I am somehwat paranoid about hearing loss.
But as an experiment I tried using them in my car. They definitely made things quieter... until they ran out of oomph, at which point they emit a loud impulsive noise. Fair enough, they were cheap.
As to the other claim, about ringing etc. These cheap headphones are non-adaptive. The developer basically measured the transmission loss of the headset, inverted that, and applies that inverted spectrum to the external mic, and mixes that into the audio stream. That's all it does. If you have adaptive filters then you can get weird effects such as ringing, but I don't see why a headphone would need an adaptive solution.
NT4, W2k, and XP, are all capable of up times of at least a month. The reason I know i s that I run optmisation jobs that run for two weeks at a time, and I would get very cross if the OS crashed in the middle of one.
Still, we've come a long way from Mac 7.5 which would crash twice a day.
The Prius engine is about 37% efficient according to Argonne, at its most efficient. When on its optimal demand curve the efficiency is always above 30%.
So far as the other efficiencies in the driveline go, 85% would be a good round number to use. Knock another 5% off around town.
The Prius engine is not all that fancy. It does conventional things well, rather than being strikingly different in design. In fact, for a given efficiency and power to weight ratio a VW turbo diesel is probably a better bet.
So, there is no particualr problem in getting the IC engine into roughly the same ballpark of effiency as your fuel cell. In fact if there was any economic desire to do so efficiencies in excess of 40% are not really very difficult. Oil is so cheap that is not economically viable.
But, a fuel cell car with the same range, passenger space, safety and performance as a Prius or VW Diesel Jetta, will weigh substantially more than those cars, and will be a lot bigger. So its 20% advantage in prime mover efficiency will be used to propel a larger vehicle, leaving you no (or scarcely) better off. If it uses a hydrocarbon reformulator then its efficiency will be no better than the Jetta, and it will cost twice what the simple fuel cell car would, and still be rather large.
Actually my main point was that the waste heat from a fuel cell is at 80 deg C, as the cooling system will have to be substantially larger (again) per kW than that of the IC engine, which rejects heat at around 105 deg C, and the rad size is going to be proportional to the deltaT to the environment, which around here is 35 deg C.
Also the BMW hydrogen car boils off 30% of its hydrogen every day, when it is parked. That would be a bit of a bummer efficiency wise, no?
If you dig around on their site you'll find that the only documented range for their car is 7 km (from memory). That is less than 5 of your Earth miles. They then demonstrate that this can be extrapolated out to several hundred kilometres by multiplying it by a series of numbers. That is pretty funny.
Note that vehicles powered by compressed air have a long history, it has been used in a shunting lococmotive, and many early torpedoes. I am quite sure they have a running vehicle, what they don't have is a useful solution for most people.
"a poorly run mainly US company that doesn't want to pay for someone that can already do the job but instead gets someone cheaper and expects them to learn how to do it." Except that they seem to be making it work. Sure, they had some start-up problems... but they also made some mistakes in the parts they brought over. It seems like it went fairly well overall, to me.
"how can anyone competant outsource anything critical to another country without having someone on staff fluent in the language?"
Do you understand why the standard chip ran rich at WOT?
No, thought not.
Clue: running rich cools the exhaust valve, turbo, and cat. The OEM had to make sure they would last for 100000 miles. your aftermarket chipper does not.
"but they are pretty damn knowledgable when it comes to engineering and engineering is largely trial and error. You don't get to their level in their fields (each taking on very large clients before doing mythbusters) without acknowledging the scientific method."
Bollocks. Engineering is not 'largely trial and error'. Often some of the complex interactions are fine tuned by designed experiments, but the basic concepts are anlytically derived.
For example when we set up the road springs for a new car we know what ride frequencies we want, we know the moments of inertia, and the mass, and desired ground clearance, so we can work out the spring rates and lengths. Where's the trial and error? Admittedly we'll order in 3 sets of springs around that calculated sweet spot, so the ride and handling guys have something to play with, but typically the final choce will be within 3% of the calculated rate.
I vaguely attempt to keep the vehicle dynamics part of wiki in line with reality. Pop Mechanics is not a terrible reference, but generally is not detailed enough. The problem with car related stuff is that EVERYONE is an expert, and if you are a wanker with a TVR (for example) that apparently means you know everything about cars.
Since there are perfectly good textbooks out there it is not hard to find references, but the cheap books are often wrong or have weird theories and rarely cover the maths properly. The decent books all sound alike, cost about the same ($150), and agree. So, which should I use for references? websites that happen to have the right equation on them, but are likely to vanish, or sensible books that will exist for another 30 years?
"If any intelligent self-directed person without other responsibilities cannot duplicate that performance then in my opinion they are complacent." Or have other priorities, which is fine, but is still their decision.
Slashdot Mirror
That's silly. Nobody has forced me to upgrade my 98 machine or my mainstay, which runs NT4. The only thing that would force me to upgrade is if I want to run a new software package, which is MY choice, no one elses.
You could make exactly the same comment about Apple, for example. At least I can run DOS games on XP by and large, try running Hypercard from system 7 on OSX.
Scilab,Calculix, Scilab, respectively. OpenFOAM for CFD. Actually the whole project stalled because there is no decent open source CAD program.
I'm betting most were specced by engineers. With real engineering degrees. Not software 'engineers'.
I dd a sort of general engineering course, with a mechanical bent, at a very spiffy uni.
At said uni the electricals and the rest of us did almost identical first year content, and our second year content still had about 50% overlap.
One thing that made me laugh as I cursed the difficulty of understanding power electrics (eg why is power=v.I') was the thought that some poor electronics geek was attempting to understand the thermodynamics of steam engines at the same time.
In my career I have used concepts from many of the papers I took, and last month I just got to use triple products for the first time, in anger. That's 22 years after leaving uni.
That's a weird point of view.
If allofmp3 charges 30c for a track, and iTunes charges 99c, do you really believe the artiste sees 69c? More like 3c, at a rough guess. I wish allofmp3 had set up a fund to pay the artiste via a VOLUNTARY donation equivalent to whatever pittance they normally get from a track.
From TFA his mother wouldn't let him build a hyperbolic chamber.
Definition of hyperbolic
exaggerated: enlarged beyond truth or reasonableness; "had an exaggerated (or inflated) opinion of himself"; "a hyperbolic style"
A factor of three or four? Get a fucking grip. 15 years ago gasoline in Australia was around 65c a litre, at its high point this year it was $1.40. That's a doubling in 15 years, not three or four times in 6 years
In Oz, some gold mines are being re-opened for the 4th time, or the tailings from previous extraction processes are being remined for the third time. New extraction processes, and possibly the price of gold, makes this feasible.
Bear in mind that we think gold is expensive, yet I bet every Slashdotter here has thrown away quite a lot of pure gold. Printer cartridges, circuit boards etc.
Oil is just so cheap that we are still at the stage of burning it, fercrisake.
it depends. I've got some cheap noise-cancelling earphones (some generic brand), and in the office they are better than I have ever hoped. They kill air con rumble, people's voices are substantially quietened, and they are good for computers as well. What I really like is that I can turn the volume on my mp3s down, as I am somehwat paranoid about hearing loss.
But as an experiment I tried using them in my car. They definitely made things quieter... until they ran out of oomph, at which point they emit a loud impulsive noise. Fair enough, they were cheap.
As to the other claim, about ringing etc. These cheap headphones are non-adaptive. The developer basically measured the transmission loss of the headset, inverted that, and applies that inverted spectrum to the external mic, and mixes that into the audio stream. That's all it does. If you have adaptive filters then you can get weird effects such as ringing, but I don't see why a headphone would need an adaptive solution.
Exactly (n/t)
NT4, W2k, and XP, are all capable of up times of at least a month. The reason I know i s that I run optmisation jobs that run for two weeks at a time, and I would get very cross if the OS crashed in the middle of one.
Still, we've come a long way from Mac 7.5 which would crash twice a day.
sorry.
Sounds like me and Jesus. I'm sure he was a nice bloke, but man, his supporters make me wretch.
I'd have thought megatech or gigatech would be more appropriate for a thing umpteen thousand miles long
It is not in unrestrained orbit. Pitiful really.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica
The Prius engine is about 37% efficient according to Argonne, at its most efficient. When on its optimal demand curve the efficiency is always above 30%.
So far as the other efficiencies in the driveline go, 85% would be a good round number to use. Knock another 5% off around town.
The Prius engine is not all that fancy. It does conventional things well, rather than being strikingly different in design. In fact, for a given efficiency and power to weight ratio a VW turbo diesel is probably a better bet.
So, there is no particualr problem in getting the IC engine into roughly the same ballpark of effiency as your fuel cell. In fact if there was any economic desire to do so efficiencies in excess of 40% are not really very difficult. Oil is so cheap that is not economically viable.
But, a fuel cell car with the same range, passenger space, safety and performance as a Prius or VW Diesel Jetta, will weigh substantially more than those cars, and will be a lot bigger. So its 20% advantage in prime mover efficiency will be used to propel a larger vehicle, leaving you no (or scarcely) better off. If it uses a hydrocarbon reformulator then its efficiency will be no better than the Jetta, and it will cost twice what the simple fuel cell car would, and still be rather large.
Actually my main point was that the waste heat from a fuel cell is at 80 deg C, as the cooling system will have to be substantially larger (again) per kW than that of the IC engine, which rejects heat at around 105 deg C, and the rad size is going to be proportional to the deltaT to the environment, which around here is 35 deg C.
Also the BMW hydrogen car boils off 30% of its hydrogen every day, when it is parked. That would be a bit of a bummer efficiency wise, no?
If you dig around on their site you'll find that the only documented range for their car is 7 km (from memory). That is less than 5 of your Earth miles. They then demonstrate that this can be extrapolated out to several hundred kilometres by multiplying it by a series of numbers. That is pretty funny.
Note that vehicles powered by compressed air have a long history, it has been used in a shunting lococmotive, and many early torpedoes. I am quite sure they have a running vehicle, what they don't have is a useful solution for most people.
"a poorly run mainly US company that doesn't want to pay for someone that can already do the job but instead gets someone cheaper and expects them to learn how to do it." Except that they seem to be making it work. Sure, they had some start-up problems... but they also made some mistakes in the parts they brought over. It seems like it went fairly well overall, to me.
"how can anyone competant outsource anything critical to another country without having someone on staff fluent in the language?"
Hmmmmmmm. Competant? Not in my dictionary.
As Ambrose Bierce defined a cabbage: a vegeatble about the size of a man's head, and as wise.
Sell the car, buy a keyboard without a sticky period key.
As I believe you merkins call it.
Do you understand why the standard chip ran rich at WOT?
No, thought not.
Clue: running rich cools the exhaust valve, turbo, and cat. The OEM had to make sure they would last for 100000 miles. your aftermarket chipper does not.
"but they are pretty damn knowledgable when it comes to engineering and engineering is largely trial and error. You don't get to their level in their fields (each taking on very large clients before doing mythbusters) without acknowledging the scientific method."
Bollocks. Engineering is not 'largely trial and error'. Often some of the complex interactions are fine tuned by designed experiments, but the basic concepts are anlytically derived.
For example when we set up the road springs for a new car we know what ride frequencies we want, we know the moments of inertia, and the mass, and desired ground clearance, so we can work out the spring rates and lengths. Where's the trial and error? Admittedly we'll order in 3 sets of springs around that calculated sweet spot, so the ride and handling guys have something to play with, but typically the final choce will be within 3% of the calculated rate.
I vaguely attempt to keep the vehicle dynamics part of wiki in line with reality. Pop Mechanics is not a terrible reference, but generally is not detailed enough. The problem with car related stuff is that EVERYONE is an expert, and if you are a wanker with a TVR (for example) that apparently means you know everything about cars.
Since there are perfectly good textbooks out there it is not hard to find references, but the cheap books are often wrong or have weird theories and rarely cover the maths properly. The decent books all sound alike, cost about the same ($150), and agree. So, which should I use for references? websites that happen to have the right equation on them, but are likely to vanish, or sensible books that will exist for another 30 years?
"If any intelligent self-directed person without other responsibilities cannot duplicate that performance then in my opinion they are complacent." Or have other priorities, which is fine, but is still their decision.