This suggests that there's a lot to be said for not driving your battery charge down to "zero" (as defined by the battery controllers and the 3V limit). You'll get many more cycles if you avoid the extremes (full charge, full discharge).
And if the nearest station is 20 miles away, it's not bad to know whether you have 19 miles of charge left, or 21. There might be a better place to leave your car stopped than 100 yards short of the exit for the charging station.
but it does not hurt to keep all the other failure modes of mechanical brakes in mind (which may or may not be addressed by this device). These include:
- forgetting to reattach the cable, or deactivate the quick-release after service - cable separates from soldered end - binding nut not tight enough - ice in cable housing makes cable immobile - wet rims - iced rims - melted brake shoes - melted coaster brake - broken chain (on a fixie) - derailed chain (on a fixie) - brake-worn-rim separation - internal hub leaks oil onto a disk brake rotor
And you might think, "oh, but this would never happen (to me)", except that most of these things happened to me at one time or another, though never with serious consequences. And I've done some bicycle maintenance/repair sessions with boy scouts and church groups, and my-oh-my-oh-my. The real world is not an orderly place.
Our uneasiness with the idea of wireless brakes has a lot more to do with illusions of control. That said, bicycle electronics don't get an easy life. The vibration is terrible, and bikes get used in the cold and the wet, and sometimes they get road salt on them.
Same book, contains estimates that at their upper limits puts the New World population pre-Columbus above Europe at the time, so it could be a big deal. You should find a copy and read it, it is very interesting, and might even be true.
We don't know that it was 60% -- that was the upper limit -- and I think a reduction in population, that still farms and maintains cities, is different from the collapse of civilization and the transition to a not-very-agricultural nomadic life.
The one solid interesting thing in TFA is that the CO2 blip and isotopic change is consistent with a whole lot of plants pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. The cause and effect, I don't think we're quite so sure on. Presumably someone is looking at historical records and trapped gas records to see if there are other interesting coincidences out there.
Except that the ice records show something consistent with large scale reforestation, somewhere on the planet. This is interesting. It's also less about the people, and more about the plants, and what land was cleared for new farms for new people in other places.
Except you have to fill in numbers. The book 1491 (mentioned above) suggests that Native American deaths from disease may have been as high as 95%; their civilizations vanished. It's an extraordinary claim, there is support in the book. The upper bound on Black Death mortality (Wikipedia) is a 60% reduction in population, which is pretty darn awful, but civilization did not vanish.
Made one myself with a transformer from a dead answering machine and a good-sized spool of wire from Radio Shack. Just left the wire on the spool, extracting the ends, instant coil. Very helpful. Don't see why the joist couldn't be similarly degaussed in a few minutes; just make a mongo version of the same (longer, to cut the n-cubed dropoff), plug that sucker in, and bring one end of it as close as possible to the offending steel.
Never mind if the magnetism in the steel is strong enough to do squat, do this, and it will be gone anyway.
Been a fanboi since the 128k Mac. Met him once when he was at NeXT in the early days and we were peddling Modula-3, didn't close the deal. Don't recall if he was wearing a black turtleneck, but he was wearing jeans, I am sure of that.
This leaves such a hole.
Re:Thanks for creating the reality distortion fiel
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 1
Safer, narrowly defined to only include harm from car crashes. The lack of exercise from people driving when they could walk or bike kills far more people.
It's not that you count, or not, but that focusing on DD-WRT is (apparently) far for the best choice for the vast majority of people who are ever likely to flash their router, and apparently also (though I did not know this) if you are an open-source purist. Tomato's got a nice UI with relatively well-organized options, OpenWRT has the open-ness. DD-WRT gave the impression of being not as easy to configure/understand.
Understand, this for me is not unlike choosing a cell-phone provider, where you're trying to figure out what the heck the plans actually are, and how will you actually use the phone, and who has service in my area, and which of the available phones are supported by which carrier, etc. You have to read a bunch, ask around a little, and hope for the best, because it's a PITA to actually give each carrier a trial, especially since they want a 1-year commitment.
Or to use an example nearer to my interests, telling someone what's the best bicycle to buy. It depends on a lot of stuff, but broadly, you can be pretty sure that the high-end carbon bike is usually the wrong choice, the $50 craigslist special is the wrong choice unless they really know how to wrench, the 60-lb cargo bike is the wrong choice if they live in a 3rd-floor walkup with no garage or shed, etc. Most people, a cheap 3-speed with a front basket and a dynamo hub for lighting would get the job done. 8 speeds, if there are hills.
I think the reaction is hostile because it's not news, and it's probably not the most appropriate advice for most people. I spent a long time, years ago, looking very hard at the choices for my router (Linksys WRT54G 2.2) and settled on Tomato because that looked like it maximized the feature/hassle quotient. I'm pretty sure it's the right choice for most people who might ever install 3rd party firmware on a router.
As others have noted, smart people have worked on this. Consider that this is for smoothing peak loads, and that a big component in transmission loss is I-squared times R. The cars are close to the loads, so car-to-load transmission costs could be lower, and longer-distance variation is avoided. In particular, they could just use the car to reduce load from just your house -- no transmission costs at all.
Compare losses for a steady current of "1", instead of 0.5 half time and 1.5 half time. 1 x 1-squared = 1, vs 0.5 * 0.25 + 0.5 * 2.25 = 1.25. Steady current has lower losses. You lose a little in charging and discharging a lithium battery, but not a lot.
This also assumes a mere resistive losses cost constraint -- if you hit the limit for your particular corner of the distribution network, the "cost" is much higher. Or if the electric company has to buy peak power on the spot market to cover demand, the cost is much higher.
These are just examples illustrating how it could make sense; I don't know which one matters most, or which are addressed by the patents.
USB key sounds interesting. The reason for the backup is that the (small, old) system disk is is starting to vomit out correctable errors at a good pace. I want to retire it.
I was pretty sure that dd was going to be my best friend, but we could wish for a better best friend. As near as I can tell, I ought to boot single-user off a CD and do it from there. Is that overconservative? No-way-no-how can I just far up dd on the raw device underneath a bunch of partitions, can I?
I would suggest that smaller and lighter vehicles are a more sensible path to pursue. Smaller cars means cheaper batteries, which means that current technologies are affordable after all.
Other thing I find interesting, and unclear from the article, is whether the capacity of the battery is proportional to the lithium in the battery, regardless of anode technology. That means that the use of these batteries would spike demand for lithium both by increasing the popularity of e-cars and by putting more lithium in each of the more numerous e-cars. Again, smaller-cars-better.
I am nearly equally Linux-ignorant, I set up Amahi as a "home cloud" (googling for that is what led me to it). It runs on Fedora by default. It's been mostly easy to install and maintain, and I even managed to install Trac on my own with not too much pain (given that I already have installed Trac on MacOS and Solaris).
phpBB is one of their apps that is in beta, where I suspect it will be for a while (it's volunteer-mostly), but the apps so far are click-and-go. I administer the box with webmin, which in practice means installing software updates from time-to-time, and watching the Smart status on one of my drives indicate that it is dangerously old and in need of replacement. No handy Linux app that I can see yet that replicates the user-friendly behavior of MacOS SuperDuper (sigh).
Your history's a little buggy. Sun switched OSes in the early 90s from Berkeley-based SunOS to AT&T-based Solaris (I was there at the time). Marketing helpfully muddied the waters by renaming SunOS "Solaris 1.0" and the new stuff "Solaris". This was pretty much a done deal by the end of 1994 (Solaris 2.3 shipped in late 1993; I recall there was still grumbling and resistance to the switch). After that came the dot-com boom.
I do agree that in the early years there was a lot of "open" stuff at Sun, including their processor architecture, but there was a big long spell during which they were only kinda-sorta-open yet wildly successful. Schwartz's re-Opening was probably timed too late, but I would not call it too little; again, I was there. I don't have it in my notes, but I recall that it was Our Fearless Ponytailed Leader himself who proposed that every single Sun software product should be open-sourced, unless there was a really compelling reason otherwise (and at least some of the perception was directed at getting the internal opposition to live with the idea that sometimes, "shit happens", e,g., compiler source might leak some details of a future processor). The lateness was the big issue, and I think everyone knew they were late (if this was going to be the strategy), hence the size of the push.
But if lateness was the problem for Sun in 2007, how would HP not be even more stupidly late with an open source strategy begin 4 years later?
I am not sure this is a useful guide to what HP would do. After all, some of Apple's software is also open source; witness the Apache Server bundled with all the stuff on my Mac laptop. You quote numbers which look authoritative, but we don't know how much of consulting and services is attributable to open source and how much is attributable to proprietary, so they don't really make the case for open source.
It's worth noting that Sun under Schwartz had a plan for open source software, it just did not succeed. As related at the time, the goal was to use open source as a lever into Brazil/Russia/India/China and other places, and then sell other stuff. The goal was that almost all software would be open sourced, under the theory that most of Sun's paying customers (not to be confusing with non-paying non-customers) really didn't have a choice to just download their stuff from the net and service it themselves, either because of expertise issues, or regulatory issues, or quirky-customization issues. That is, Schwartz was pretty explicitly buying into the notion that non-paying software users need not represent lost sales, because the bulk of those users would not pay for it under any circumstances (unlike, say, the RIAA, MPAA, or BSA). They were serious about this; they flew a mess of people out to Santa Clara in late 2007 for a several-day open source summit, and I have 60 pages of notes that I took there.
Obviously the plan didn't work, but it was a plan, and it had connectable dots. My thinking is anyone proposing open source to save HP's business, had better be able to outline a plan that is better than Schwartz's outline to us.
I'd like to see the HP train stop wrecking. I have some friends who work there. There's lovely schadenfreude in seeing overpaid board members making stupid mistakes, till you notice that it's not their jobs that are on the line.
Slashdot Mirror
This suggests that there's a lot to be said for not driving your battery charge down to "zero" (as defined by the battery controllers and the 3V limit). You'll get many more cycles if you avoid the extremes (full charge, full discharge).
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries
And if the nearest station is 20 miles away, it's not bad to know whether you have 19 miles of charge left, or 21. There might be a better place to leave your car stopped than 100 yards short of the exit for the charging station.
but it does not hurt to keep all the other failure modes of mechanical brakes in mind (which may or may not be addressed by this device). These include:
- forgetting to reattach the cable, or deactivate the quick-release after service
- cable separates from soldered end
- binding nut not tight enough
- ice in cable housing makes cable immobile
- wet rims
- iced rims
- melted brake shoes
- melted coaster brake
- broken chain (on a fixie)
- derailed chain (on a fixie)
- brake-worn-rim separation
- internal hub leaks oil onto a disk brake rotor
And you might think, "oh, but this would never happen (to me)", except that most of these things happened to me at one time or another, though never with serious consequences. And I've done some bicycle maintenance/repair sessions with boy scouts and church groups, and my-oh-my-oh-my. The real world is not an orderly place.
Our uneasiness with the idea of wireless brakes has a lot more to do with illusions of control.
That said, bicycle electronics don't get an easy life. The vibration is terrible, and bikes get used in the cold and the wet, and sometimes they get road salt on them.
And they take up the WHOLE LANE with their cars.
Same book, contains estimates that at their upper limits puts the New World population pre-Columbus above Europe at the time, so it could be a big deal. You should find a copy and read it, it is very interesting, and might even be true.
We don't know that it was 60% -- that was the upper limit -- and I think a reduction in population, that still farms and maintains cities, is different from the collapse of civilization and the transition to a not-very-agricultural nomadic life.
The one solid interesting thing in TFA is that the CO2 blip and isotopic change is consistent with a whole lot of plants pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. The cause and effect, I don't think we're quite so sure on. Presumably someone is looking at historical records and trapped gas records to see if there are other interesting coincidences out there.
Except that the ice records show something consistent with large scale reforestation, somewhere on the planet. This is interesting. It's also less about the people, and more about the plants, and what land was cleared for new farms for new people in other places.
Except you have to fill in numbers. The book 1491 (mentioned above) suggests that Native American deaths from disease may have been as high as 95%; their civilizations vanished. It's an extraordinary claim, there is support in the book. The upper bound on Black Death mortality (Wikipedia) is a 60% reduction in population, which is pretty darn awful, but civilization did not vanish.
Made one myself with a transformer from a dead answering machine and a good-sized spool of wire from Radio Shack. Just left the wire on the spool, extracting the ends, instant coil. Very helpful. Don't see why the joist couldn't be similarly degaussed in a few minutes; just make a mongo version of the same (longer, to cut the n-cubed dropoff), plug that sucker in, and bring one end of it as close as possible to the offending steel.
Never mind if the magnetism in the steel is strong enough to do squat, do this, and it will be gone anyway.
Could an ambient magnetic field scrag the seek calibration?
Or here (free downloadable PDF, 1995 edition): http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf
Except the two guys I knew were in New England and Texas. Not exactly a geographic cluster.
Been a fanboi since the 128k Mac. Met him once when he was at NeXT in the early days and we were peddling Modula-3, didn't close the deal. Don't recall if he was wearing a black turtleneck, but he was wearing jeans, I am sure of that.
This leaves such a hole.
Cool thing about it is, after a while, it sticks.
Fuck pancreatic cancer, especially. Got a great guy I used to work with, got my graduate advisor.
Safer, narrowly defined to only include harm from car crashes. The lack of exercise from people driving when they could walk or bike kills far more people.
It's not that you count, or not, but that focusing on DD-WRT is (apparently) far for the best choice for the vast majority of people who are ever likely to flash their router, and apparently also (though I did not know this) if you are an open-source purist. Tomato's got a nice UI with relatively well-organized options, OpenWRT has the open-ness. DD-WRT gave the impression of being not as easy to configure/understand.
Understand, this for me is not unlike choosing a cell-phone provider, where you're trying to figure out what the heck the plans actually are, and how will you actually use the phone, and who has service in my area, and which of the available phones are supported by which carrier, etc. You have to read a bunch, ask around a little, and hope for the best, because it's a PITA to actually give each carrier a trial, especially since they want a 1-year commitment.
Or to use an example nearer to my interests, telling someone what's the best bicycle to buy. It depends on a lot of stuff, but broadly, you can be pretty sure that the high-end carbon bike is usually the wrong choice, the $50 craigslist special is the wrong choice unless they really know how to wrench, the 60-lb cargo bike is the wrong choice if they live in a 3rd-floor walkup with no garage or shed, etc. Most people, a cheap 3-speed with a front basket and a dynamo hub for lighting would get the job done. 8 speeds, if there are hills.
I think the reaction is hostile because it's not news, and it's probably not the most appropriate advice for most people. I spent a long time, years ago, looking very hard at the choices for my router (Linksys WRT54G 2.2) and settled on Tomato because that looked like it maximized the feature/hassle quotient. I'm pretty sure it's the right choice for most people who might ever install 3rd party firmware on a router.
As others have noted, smart people have worked on this. Consider that this is for smoothing peak loads, and that a big component in transmission loss is I-squared times R. The cars are close to the loads, so car-to-load transmission costs could be lower, and longer-distance variation is avoided. In particular, they could just use the car to reduce load from just your house -- no transmission costs at all.
Compare losses for a steady current of "1", instead of 0.5 half time and 1.5 half time. 1 x 1-squared = 1, vs 0.5 * 0.25 + 0.5 * 2.25 = 1.25. Steady current has lower losses. You lose a little in charging and discharging a lithium battery, but not a lot.
This also assumes a mere resistive losses cost constraint -- if you hit the limit for your particular corner of the distribution network, the "cost" is much higher. Or if the electric company has to buy peak power on the spot market to cover demand, the cost is much higher.
These are just examples illustrating how it could make sense; I don't know which one matters most, or which are addressed by the patents.
USB key sounds interesting. The reason for the backup is that the (small, old) system disk is is starting to vomit out correctable errors at a good pace. I want to retire it.
I was pretty sure that dd was going to be my best friend, but we could wish for a better best friend. As near as I can tell, I ought to boot single-user off a CD and do it from there. Is that overconservative? No-way-no-how can I just far up dd on the raw device underneath a bunch of partitions, can I?
I would suggest that smaller and lighter vehicles are a more sensible path to pursue. Smaller cars means cheaper batteries, which means that current technologies are affordable after all.
Other thing I find interesting, and unclear from the article, is whether the capacity of the battery is proportional to the lithium in the battery, regardless of anode technology. That means that the use of these batteries would spike demand for lithium both by increasing the popularity of e-cars and by putting more lithium in each of the more numerous e-cars. Again, smaller-cars-better.
I am nearly equally Linux-ignorant, I set up Amahi as a "home cloud" (googling for that is what led me to it). It runs on Fedora by default. It's been mostly easy to install and maintain, and I even managed to install Trac on my own with not too much pain (given that I already have installed Trac on MacOS and Solaris).
phpBB is one of their apps that is in beta, where I suspect it will be for a while (it's volunteer-mostly), but the apps so far are click-and-go. I administer the box with webmin, which in practice means installing software updates from time-to-time, and watching the Smart status on one of my drives indicate that it is dangerously old and in need of replacement. No handy Linux app that I can see yet that replicates the user-friendly behavior of MacOS SuperDuper (sigh).
Your history's a little buggy. Sun switched OSes in the early 90s from Berkeley-based SunOS to AT&T-based Solaris (I was there at the time). Marketing helpfully muddied the waters by renaming SunOS "Solaris 1.0" and the new stuff "Solaris". This was pretty much a done deal by the end of 1994 (Solaris 2.3 shipped in late 1993; I recall there was still grumbling and resistance to the switch). After that came the dot-com boom.
I do agree that in the early years there was a lot of "open" stuff at Sun, including their processor architecture, but there was a big long spell during which they were only kinda-sorta-open yet wildly successful. Schwartz's re-Opening was probably timed too late, but I would not call it too little; again, I was there. I don't have it in my notes, but I recall that it was Our Fearless Ponytailed Leader himself who proposed that every single Sun software product should be open-sourced, unless there was a really compelling reason otherwise (and at least some of the perception was directed at getting the internal opposition to live with the idea that sometimes, "shit happens", e,g., compiler source might leak some details of a future processor). The lateness was the big issue, and I think everyone knew they were late (if this was going to be the strategy), hence the size of the push.
But if lateness was the problem for Sun in 2007, how would HP not be even more stupidly late with an open source strategy begin 4 years later?
I am not sure this is a useful guide to what HP would do. After all, some of Apple's software is also open source; witness the Apache Server bundled with all the stuff on my Mac laptop. You quote numbers which look authoritative, but we don't know how much of consulting and services is attributable to open source and how much is attributable to proprietary, so they don't really make the case for open source.
It's worth noting that Sun under Schwartz had a plan for open source software, it just did not succeed. As related at the time, the goal was to use open source as a lever into Brazil/Russia/India/China and other places, and then sell other stuff. The goal was that almost all software would be open sourced, under the theory that most of Sun's paying customers (not to be confusing with non-paying non-customers) really didn't have a choice to just download their stuff from the net and service it themselves, either because of expertise issues, or regulatory issues, or quirky-customization issues. That is, Schwartz was pretty explicitly buying into the notion that non-paying software users need not represent lost sales, because the bulk of those users would not pay for it under any circumstances (unlike, say, the RIAA, MPAA, or BSA). They were serious about this; they flew a mess of people out to Santa Clara in late 2007 for a several-day open source summit, and I have 60 pages of notes that I took there.
Obviously the plan didn't work, but it was a plan, and it had connectable dots. My thinking is anyone proposing open source to save HP's business, had better be able to outline a plan that is better than Schwartz's outline to us.
I'd like to see the HP train stop wrecking. I have some friends who work there. There's lovely schadenfreude in seeing overpaid board members making stupid mistakes, till you notice that it's not their jobs that are on the line.