another slashdotter who has no idea how cars work
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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· Score: 2
That's bullshit. You're only adding 10% of a *FUEL*. If you added 10% water, and it still ran, you'd expect an approx. 10% loss in efficiency. You could mix in kitchen oil (which will burn) and if you could get it past the injectors, you wouldn't expect a loss anywhere near that.
NO, you're the one full of bullshit. You're operating on the incorrect assumption that the only (or worst) effect a contaminant will have is to not burn. Stoichiometric ratio changes, burn speed (flame front speed) changes, etc.
Ethanol has a completely different stochiometric ratio from gasoline; it's more like 9.7:1 for E85, versus 14:1 for gasoline. That 10% ethanol requires twice as much oxygen to burn than the gasoline it replaced.
Ignition timing is based off a lot of factors to provide ideal burn, because it's a BURN, not an explosion (that's called detonation, and it cracks/blows bits of your engine when it happens.) A flame front travels from the spark plug outwards in a designed way, and it takes time to do that - it's not an insignificant amount of time relative to motion of the engine, especially at higher RPMs. Depending on the mixture, temperature of the gas/fuel mix, engine speed, and more - the engine computer decides when to fire the spark so that the burn is appropriately timed. When the burn is timed can dramatically affect torque generated and the kinds of emissions produced, because the pressure in the combustion chamber is always changing. A fuel mixture burned at one pressure burns differently from another - different temperatures, and thus different kinds of emissions output.
There's more. Rich mixtures burn slower and cooler; lean mixtures burn faster and hotter. Slower burns are less efficient, faster burns moreso. However, lean mixtures tend to blow/melt things, so everyone tries to avoid lean running if at all possible. Flame front speed will be dramatically affected by contaminants and additives.
If you put 10% cooking oil in your car's tank and managed to get them into a homogenous mix, you'd be lucky if the car started at all. If it did, the fouling of the spark plugs, valves, and catalytic converter would take minutes, if that.
Water? Well, aside from the fact that water and gasoline literally don't mix: the water would cause almost instantaneous rusting of the fuel pump, fuel pressure regulator, and fuel injector pintles.
You don't have any idea how fuel injection works
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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· Score: 1
Cold air is denser, and causes the engine to run richer, i.e., inject more fuel into the engine. This gives you a bit more power, but at the expense of fuel efficiency.
This is complete bullshit written by someone who has no idea how engine fuel systems work. Any fuel-injected vehicle sold in the last 20+ years uses a mass airflow sensor which provides the correct amount of fuel, no matter the ambient temperature or pressure. There are various styles, but the most common is a hot-wire based sensor. Porsche and others used a vane/flap-based sensor in the 80s before switching to hot-wire sensors. Mechanical fuel injection systems used a sensor plate linked to a metering valve.
Further, EFI is closed-loop because of the O2 sensors - O2 sensors have been in cars since the 70's. In vehicles made since around the mid 90s there are two; one before the catalytic converter, and one after. The sensor detects the amount of unburned oxygen in the exhaust, and thus the fuel mixture ratio. The engine computer modifies the mixture based on the sensor's output; computers made starting the very early 90's kept track of those measurements to adapt to air leaks and whatnot over time.
We'd be getting jokes about bestiality, tales of practical jokes involving other people's bicycles, lewd comments about hot people at the bar, and oddly-endearingly-angry rants about how the world would be a more peaceful place if everyone smoked pot and got laid once in a while.
Be sure you have enough RAM or you're going to be in for a heck of a surprise. 2GB of dedicated RAM per TB of disk usage is recommended as a rule of thumb. I found this out the hard way when it was new.
It's worse than that. Even with plenty of RAM, I had a ZFS pool of a couple TB and dedupe turned on. Turns out virtually none of the data in the pool was duplicate, and disk access slowed to a near complete crawl because the machine was going through an enormous dedupe table.
Took us months to recover after turning dedupe off - fortunately, the backup software we use periodically re-processes its archives, and in doing so, re-writes them, which removed the data from the dedupe tables.
...which is why there's a soft-metal tab that attaches them to the frame, called a derailleur hanger. It doesn't take much at all to bend them, and the derailleur is also pretty fragile, in general. The more gears you have on the rear cassette, the more precise everything has to be.
Having the chain exposed like that, and using a derailleur/cassette, is pretty stupid. Ask anyone who commutes in the winter; it's all going to clog up and stop working. They should have gone with an internally-geared hub (with suitable oil for the temperatures) and a full chaincase covering the chain.
She's going to have issues with snow and ice getting everywhere, in the cables and more. Won't be much she can do about it, either, at those temperatures.
I don't know how small your library is but if it's large enough to warrant a card catalog then I'd suggest first putting all the books in the correct order and making sure the card catalog is accurate.
Speaking as someone who volunteered for several library projects - that's not how you convert a library over. For your database, you process books as they go through circulation. Ie, book returned? It goes into the "enter and re-shelve" pile. Or, alternatively, you at least initially enter the book when it's checked out so you're tracking it with the new system.
This prioritizes the most popular books, assures the highest & quickest conversion in terms of transaction volume, and thus the quickest efficiency jump (which frees up time for dealing with the other books.) Otherwise, you'll spend years dealing with books mostly not entered into the system.
You can deal with low-circulation-volume books by pulling them shelf-at-a-time. If the library is small enough, simply re-shelve them in a new location. If the library is more than a few shelves, then tag the books in some fashion (the various color dots and whatnot you used to see on books in various libraries were, in fact, how the library was tracking this sort of thing.
You'll thank me in the long run when you're not stuck with a million lenses for a camera you've outgrown.
Uh - all the major mounting systems (Canon, Nikon, four thirds, Leica) are not going away soon. They'll work just fine with newer cameras. There is a little risk with the APS-C lenses (Canon calls them "EF-S", Nikon "DX"), but both companies sell buckets more APS-C cameras than they do pro cameras which have larger sensors. They're not going away any time soon.
What you should NOT do is buy an emerging, unestablished lens mount system, like the Nikon 1. Also, if you have a large collection of old Nikkor AF lenses (or anticipate wanting to collect old, probably overrated and outdated lenses) that need a camera motor drive, some cheap Nikon dSLRs don't have that.
In terms of "outgrowing":
EVF cameras are poor for shooting anything even slightly moving because of lag, and don't have good dynamic range (ie, bright areas blow out, dark areas are hard to see anything.) Even Sony's newest A77, which was lauded by reviewers for having a "great" EVF, is getting complaints about these problems. Driving the EVF also means the sensor is powered up and generating heat all the time, which increases noise.
LCD-panel (no viewfinder) cameras suck even more for anything even slightly moving.
The cheaper dSLR models usually cheap out on controls, and sometimes functionality. Most famously, the _0D series (serious amateur to most working photographers) from Canon had a back thumbwheel and index-finger wheel, whereas the Rebel (the "prosumer" line) had buttons. The thumbwheel usually is used for exposure compensation, which once you get shooting more, you use constantly. The thumbwheel works great; the buttons are a royal pain. Nikon's EV adjustment procedure on some of their cameras REALLY blows; you have to hold a button AND use a wheel.
Don't pay much attention to video abilities. They pretty much all suck in lots of different ways, from rolling shutter issues to lets-protect-our-video-camera-market recording length limits, to crappy codecs, to poor focusing, and so on.
When you start shooting for commercial purposes and your clients are reproducing your work on the sides of buildings, by all means, consider full-frame. Until then, go APS-C/DX like everyone else.
Let's say you live in an area where the power goes out occasionally. You need medical assistance. Or someone is trying to break into your house. Or your house is on fire. Or there's a tree down across your driveway, and it's a 20 minute drive into town. And it's snowing like crazy.
Would you rather have a phone which goes dead and stays dead? Or would you rather have a phone you've been able to keep in the window, off, but charging off the sun, which you can now flip on and make a call with?
You're hiking with a friend. Your cell phone runs out of battery because GPS used a lot more power than you expected trying to find your way to the site.
Your friend falls and breaks their ankle.
Would you rather have that solar panel, and be able to make send a text/make a short phone call to emergency services after a 30 minute stint in the sun? Or would you rather save $5 on the cost of the phone?
An earthquake hits your city. Power is knocked out across the area. You end up at a shelter. You can keep your phone off but charge it in daylight - enough to power it up and make a call or send a text to a loved one saying you're OK.
There are lots of situations where having a solar panel on the back of the phone would be pretty handy.
It also conveniently neglects the fact that most of the internet infrastructure affected by SOPA is run on open source implementations, so the freedom of the software has done NOTHING to prevent governments from trying to abuse it.
Since when did Cisco open-source Cisco IOS? Or Juniper fully release the source for Junos? (it's "partly FreeBSD-based.") Force5 isn't open-source either, nor is Foundry. None of the routers use ASICs and FPGAs for which the code is open source.
I'd be willing to bet that there isn't a single piece of network gear between you and slashdot, or me and slashdot, that is fully under any open-source license (I'll even be generous and exclude proprietary drivers.)
That's the whole fucking point. With many drugs, you don't have any control without (significant) outside interference.
Meanwhile, you destroy your body. Your life falls apart. You hurt people close to you emotionally and physically, sometimes for life (children of alcoholics are a good example.) You commit crimes to pay for drugs. You lose control and inhibitions that keep you from committing violent crime. Ask anyone who lives in rural America right now and has had a meth house open up in their neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the people supplying your drugs are kidnapping people in border towns and slaughtering police and military every step of the way from production to our border. "Make it legal to produce!", you say. Right. So, if you're a violent thug with a mafia and cartel behind you that generates billions in profits...how are you going to react to people producing their own drugs? Sit around and twiddle your thumbs?
Anyway - that adds up to a real cost in terms of quality of life, health, safety, etc. Yes, we need more treatment programs. Yes, we have socioeconomic problems that exacerbate it. But thinking "let's just cut out that chunk of the budget we use for enforcement, and everything will be OK" is childish and naive.
Change will not happen through enforcement either way, but removing enforcement will only make things even worse. Change will happen when society makes drug use of any kind completely unpalatable and unacceptable, instead of simpleton assholes like you saying "hey, let people do what they want, it'll be ok."
"Let people do what they want" is how we've ended up with everything from mass genocide to environmental disasters to dozens of banking scandals and endless government corruption. To be laise-faire and libertarian is to ignore centuries of history and about as naive as socialism.
Hm. As a biker, do you obey all the traffic laws? Complete stop at all stop signs, never go through lights, no riding on sidewalks or using crosswalks or passing slow or stopped traffic on the right in the non-lane between traffic and parked cars or the curb?
If you run a red light, can I shoot you in the head a week later? No?
Anyway - yes, actually, I do follow all my state's laws (okay, you got me, I once gave a lady friend a ride on the back rack of my bike, which is illegal.) Two notes, though:
1)Riding on sidewalks is permitted anywhere in the my state save business districts. However, because it's more dangerous to be out of the traffic flow than part of it, I very rarely do.
2)It is specifically permissible by law in my state for a cyclist to pass vehicles on the right. It's also specifically stated that it is the motorists' responsibility to check their mirror before making a right turn or moving to park.
Also: several states have laws which permit cyclists to travel through stop signs and red lights because legislators recognized that cyclists are somewhat more motivated to judge when it's safe to do so, and they only place themselves at risk when they do so (even a collision with a pedestrian is likely to cause more injury to the cyclist than the pedestrian.) Idaho is one example of such a state - stop signs can be treated as yield signs by bicyclists.
Speaking as a road user who is not in a 4,000lb box - this is the last thing we need. Apps for your car? Seriously?
Hang up the phone. Drink the coffee at your home/work/coffee shop. Stop texting. Stop picking out your favorite song on the playlist.
DRIVE. YOUR. CAR. Please. Your car is not an entertainment system, smartphone, web browser, etc. It's a powerful, heavy, moving object. Capable of inflicting life-altering or mortal injuries and enormous property damage, which must be piloted accurately to within less than a few feet at speeds humans were never designed to travel. Treat it as such, which means PAY ATTENTION and keep BOTH HANDS ON THE WHEEL and your EYES ON THE ROAD. Nowhere else, any time your vehicle is moving.
I'm tired of people telling me, "gosh, bicycle? It's SO DANGEROUS!". Yeah, guess why? It's because the same person who declared it "dangerous" can't for one second take seriously piloting a machine capable of so much death and destruction, and instead is texting someone while sipping a mocha grande while checking out that cute person in the shop window.
You want to know why it's so dangerous to jog or walk or cycle along the road? Look in the mirror., across the table at dinner or a business meeting.
It doesn't help that running over a cyclist or (sometimes) a pedestrian is an almost guaranteed way to get away with murder. 99% of the time, the most the driver gets is a traffic ticket for saying "oh, I was changing radio stations" or "the sun got in my eyes." Hell, one asshole in Colorado recently claimed it was "new car smell" in his Mercedes S-class that caused him to pass out, hit a cyclist, and then drive on without stopping until he was across town, where upon he put the damaged bits of his car in the trunk and called for roadside assistance (not 911) for a tow.
"There's a whole bunch of trust involved. There's a lot of data inside Google, and I'm willing to bet some of it is really valuable. But for me and the people I worked with, it was never worth looking at."
People joke with me that I must be reading their email. I tell them I have enough trouble keeping up with my own email, and besides that, we NEVER read user's mail unless it's specifically necessary to troubleshoot something relating to their account.
What the hell is with Slashdot lately? Did the sysadmin for FSDN piss in everyone's coffee, and that's why the editors have such a hardon for anti-IT-worker stories?
It's not just a "pretty decent plot", it's an awesome plot. There'd be almost a mini-story waiting for you at every terminal. You could view the game as a playable scifi novel of sorts, if you wanted.
The failings were in the maps, which often were disorienting to the point of madness, but some of them were quite clever or unique.
However, that was all forgiven because of multiplayer mode. Some of my fondest memories from high school and college were of either hauling a couple computers to one person's house (the lucky guy who had a multi-port hub) or taking over an empty computer lab and blowing each other to bits for a few hours. There were many good third-party levels available with a lot of fun twists and creative use of the map/physics engine, thanks to a very good map editing program.
With better textures, honest-to-god 3D objects, and even just a few modern GPU effects, the game would be awesome all over again. I'll probably still play it this winter...
Your example is equally typical: Work avoidance, stall and delay, make the job sound harder than it is, hoping the user gives up asking.
When you ask for something with no appreciation for the work involved and demonstrate complete ignorance of storage technology and commonplace best practices (and why they're best practices and commonplace), yeah, we do hope you go away. When your boss comes knocking, we'll patiently explain to them what we told you, and then you'll look like an idiot who tried to tell his surgeon which scalpel to use.
Everything I've listed is based on experience from the decade and a half I've worked in IT. I'm not "pontificating" about drive sizes: this happens all the time, because drive companies don't size their drives to exactly the same bitcount, and if you have a RAID array, you can't replace a larger drive with a smaller drive, even if it's by one block.
Ultra320 is not 'exotic' (did you seriously just call SCSI "exotic"?) Until SAS came along, it was THE storage bus, unless you're talking big SANs or clusters, where you're going to find Infiniband and the like. Now, it's SAS, but at my workplace, we still use U320 for tapes and arrays because it's still as fast as SATA2.
If we have an HP server with a 5 year, onsite parts replacement contract - then yes, we're probably going to buy a replacement HP drive, even if it costs 3x what the Fry's drive did, because HP won't come out at 3 in the morning to replace a drive bought from Fry's.
If your Fry's drive causes the array to become corrupted, HP will happily point to the uncertified drive as the source; could very well be legitimate, as consumer-level drives have firmware which behaves differently from enterprise drives which can seriously impact RAID arrays. And then management screams blue-bloody-murder about how we "cut corners" and cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in contract penalties for not delivering the product on time. And then we're fired.
Screw it, we'll store the builds on our team's own damn machines (which we bought at Fry's out of our own budget) or use Amazon S3 for the next few months until the company rolls out the long-awaited off-shoring of IT support. Thanks for all your help.
And then when your machine dies and we get the panicked phonecall saying "BuildServer2 is down!", we'll tell management you built out your own server, how it took us 2 hours to find whose desk the system was under, then another 4 to find someone who knew a login password, and then we found that the un-mirrored drive died (and because nobody told us of the system, it's not in our backups)...and oh by the way, this is where all the builds for the last 24 months have been stored including the next version of the product, so QA is dead in the water, too.
Enjoy your pink slip. I've been called in to deal with many a mess caused by an under-desk-server admin. 99% of them had no fucking clue what they were doing. That's why I'm paid to administer computers, and you're paid to program code.
Arrogant User : "Our build server just keeps filling up. It's only got 40GB, you know."
IT: Would you please take a look and see if there's anything you can delete first? How about this directory that is for a 5 year old version of the product?
AU: NO. I am a very important person and you should just replace the drive with a bigger one! See, Fry's has them for $100.
IT: So Frys sells Ultra320 SCSI disks for $100?
AU: OMG, you're using SCSI?! SATA is the ROXZORZ.
IT: Yeah, except that your build server takes Ultra320 drives.
AU: GOD, how outdated. Why do we have such a piece of shit? SATA ROXZORS.
IT: Actually, Ultra320 SCSI is as fast as SATA2...but yes, we asked for the budget for a new server 2 years ago, and upper management denied the request, saying that spending thousands of dollars on hardware and a dozen or more man-hours migrating to the new hardware...wasn't justified.
AU: I found one on NewEgg. Install it.
IT: That's nice. If we install it, it a)might not work properly since it hasn't been certified by the vendor and b)the vendor provides us with 4-hour turnaround, 24x7x365 support, but only for authorized parts bought from them. If your drive fails, they won't replace it, and we'll be blamed by management if we can't replace it fast enough and a failure occurs.
AU:.....
IT: Did we mention that if the drive fails in a year or two, it's unlikely we'll find a replacement? The vendor guarantees parts availability for these drives, or compatible parts, for several years.
AU: Uh, I didn't think of that.
IT: You also didn't think that if we can't find the exact replacement, we're rolling the dice, because different manufacturers have slightly different ideas of what "300GB" is. If other drives are smaller than your "300GB" drive by just one block, we can't use it to replace the drive, because it's in a mirror.
AU:......OK, I found one made by Vendorco.
IT: Yeah, that's great, except it's part of a mirrored pair.
AU:.....OK, FINE, two of them.
IT: Great. Are you also going to pay for someone to come in during off-hours and do the swap, and then re-partition the drives? We're talking several hours of someone having to be in the office after-hours. That means overtime.
AU:........
IT: And you're going to justify the downtime to repartition on the build server to management, especially given that there's a release in a few weeks? If the drive swap-out goes badly, will you shoulder the blame for the delay which will strain relationships with our distributors and customers, and screw up profit projections by shifting sales more into the next quarter? And, will you shoulder the blame for 12 developers sitting twiddling their thumbs for 2 days while we rebuild the server?
AU:........
IT: And you're going to fill out the change request forms?
AI: Change request forms? WTF?
IT: Yes, the change request forms your boss demanded we complete after we had an upgrade to your development environment server go badly, causing an unexpected 4 hour outage. Upper management agreed and we now have to document everything, have rollback plans, and get sign-offs from upper management and the manager of affected groups, which includes your manager.
AU: I'll go check for old files that can be deleted.
And it costs a lot less to build and maintain that infrastructure than the boondoggle that HSR is gonna be.
Yes, because of course the government hasn't subsidized the airline industry and airport infrastructure for 75 years...
Here's a fun fact: Amtrak's funding is less than 1% of federal spending on transportation, and many rail lines in the US are privately owned.
High speed trains are electric, and electricity can come from renewable resources or nuclear. They don't require much energy to keep rolling, and they can use regenerative braking (like many public transit lines already do.) You know all those commercials on NPR about how cheap it is to move freight by rail? They're RIGHT.
Airplanes generate enormous amounts of pollution, and they put it in the worst place possible. Remember how nice the weather was for several days after September 11th? Turns out we affected the weather pattern when all air traffic was halted:
Did I mention that airports require huge amounts of space, have to be located outside of cities instead of passing through them, and generate massive amounts of noise and pollution?
Meanwhile, if you stand 2-3 blocks away from a high speed line, all you hear is a whooshing noise.
Did you just cite one person's 23-year-old model as proof that current climate science and measurements are suspect?
It's not just what you say, but how
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It reads like a list of his negative experiences. Especially the bit about parrots.
The document shows an unbelievably narcissistic man-child with grandiosity problems who is a technological dinosaur, has no social skills, and fails to recognize that he is an ambassador, not a king.
It's long since been time that the FSF found a new ambassador - someone who doesn't, for example, consider themselves to be hassled by having dinner with 'more than four people'.
Also, I lose power steering, which could make keeping control of the car much more difficult.
No, it won't. I meant it when I said that at highway speeds, your power steering is doing virtually nothing. Plus: you don't need to do much steering to stop your car.
You actually get MORE feel and control, because the power steering won't be hiding the steering feel. Most modern cars these days can be driven practically with your pinky finger.
"TFA was referring to a loss of some control, which is exactly what happens when you lose power steering/brake assis"
Again: Wrong. Brake assist continues as normal until you've used up the vacuum reservoir, which requires pumping the brakes repeatedly; you could stop your car SEVERAL times from highway speeds based off the vacuum reservoir alone (which, incidentally, is 'charged' from engine vacuum. Guess what happens when you turn off the ignition? You've got a closed throttle and a moving engine, which equals...ENGINE VACUUM.) If you have hydraulic assist (some older Audis and VWs), you have about THIRTY pushes of the brake pedal before you lose brake assist.
Power steering does virtually nothing at highway speeds.
Rosette: Good afternoon. My name is Rosette. What is your name?
You: Hi Rosette, I'm Bob.
Rosette: Hi to you too.
Bzzzzzzzt, fail. I reply to a greeting and name request by reciprocating the greeting and my name. It responds with yet another reciprocation of the greeting, something a human would almost never do.
It's especially hard to call it groundbreaking when it requires a guy standing next to it touching it every few seconds.
I don't think he left it alone for more than about 5 seconds, and the attention was a little unnerving. Is it really that fragile?
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That's bullshit. You're only adding 10% of a *FUEL*. If you added 10% water, and it still ran, you'd expect an approx. 10% loss in efficiency. You could mix in kitchen oil (which will burn) and if you could get it past the injectors, you wouldn't expect a loss anywhere near that.
NO, you're the one full of bullshit. You're operating on the incorrect assumption that the only (or worst) effect a contaminant will have is to not burn. Stoichiometric ratio changes, burn speed (flame front speed) changes, etc.
Ethanol has a completely different stochiometric ratio from gasoline; it's more like 9.7:1 for E85, versus 14:1 for gasoline. That 10% ethanol requires twice as much oxygen to burn than the gasoline it replaced.
Ignition timing is based off a lot of factors to provide ideal burn, because it's a BURN, not an explosion (that's called detonation, and it cracks/blows bits of your engine when it happens.) A flame front travels from the spark plug outwards in a designed way, and it takes time to do that - it's not an insignificant amount of time relative to motion of the engine, especially at higher RPMs. Depending on the mixture, temperature of the gas/fuel mix, engine speed, and more - the engine computer decides when to fire the spark so that the burn is appropriately timed. When the burn is timed can dramatically affect torque generated and the kinds of emissions produced, because the pressure in the combustion chamber is always changing. A fuel mixture burned at one pressure burns differently from another - different temperatures, and thus different kinds of emissions output.
There's more. Rich mixtures burn slower and cooler; lean mixtures burn faster and hotter. Slower burns are less efficient, faster burns moreso. However, lean mixtures tend to blow/melt things, so everyone tries to avoid lean running if at all possible. Flame front speed will be dramatically affected by contaminants and additives.
If you put 10% cooking oil in your car's tank and managed to get them into a homogenous mix, you'd be lucky if the car started at all. If it did, the fouling of the spark plugs, valves, and catalytic converter would take minutes, if that.
Water? Well, aside from the fact that water and gasoline literally don't mix: the water would cause almost instantaneous rusting of the fuel pump, fuel pressure regulator, and fuel injector pintles.
Cold air is denser, and causes the engine to run richer, i.e., inject more fuel into the engine. This gives you a bit more power, but at the expense of fuel efficiency.
This is complete bullshit written by someone who has no idea how engine fuel systems work. Any fuel-injected vehicle sold in the last 20+ years uses a mass airflow sensor which provides the correct amount of fuel, no matter the ambient temperature or pressure. There are various styles, but the most common is a hot-wire based sensor. Porsche and others used a vane/flap-based sensor in the 80s before switching to hot-wire sensors. Mechanical fuel injection systems used a sensor plate linked to a metering valve.
Further, EFI is closed-loop because of the O2 sensors - O2 sensors have been in cars since the 70's. In vehicles made since around the mid 90s there are two; one before the catalytic converter, and one after. The sensor detects the amount of unburned oxygen in the exhaust, and thus the fuel mixture ratio. The engine computer modifies the mixture based on the sensor's output; computers made starting the very early 90's kept track of those measurements to adapt to air leaks and whatnot over time.
We'd be getting jokes about bestiality, tales of practical jokes involving other people's bicycles, lewd comments about hot people at the bar, and oddly-endearingly-angry rants about how the world would be a more peaceful place if everyone smoked pot and got laid once in a while.
Be sure you have enough RAM or you're going to be in for a heck of a surprise. 2GB of dedicated RAM per TB of disk usage is recommended as a rule of thumb. I found this out the hard way when it was new.
It's worse than that. Even with plenty of RAM, I had a ZFS pool of a couple TB and dedupe turned on. Turns out virtually none of the data in the pool was duplicate, and disk access slowed to a near complete crawl because the machine was going through an enormous dedupe table.
Took us months to recover after turning dedupe off - fortunately, the backup software we use periodically re-processes its archives, and in doing so, re-writes them, which removed the data from the dedupe tables.
...which is why there's a soft-metal tab that attaches them to the frame, called a derailleur hanger. It doesn't take much at all to bend them, and the derailleur is also pretty fragile, in general. The more gears you have on the rear cassette, the more precise everything has to be. Having the chain exposed like that, and using a derailleur/cassette, is pretty stupid. Ask anyone who commutes in the winter; it's all going to clog up and stop working. They should have gone with an internally-geared hub (with suitable oil for the temperatures) and a full chaincase covering the chain. She's going to have issues with snow and ice getting everywhere, in the cables and more. Won't be much she can do about it, either, at those temperatures.
I don't know how small your library is but if it's large enough to warrant a card catalog then I'd suggest first putting all the books in the correct order and making sure the card catalog is accurate.
Speaking as someone who volunteered for several library projects - that's not how you convert a library over. For your database, you process books as they go through circulation. Ie, book returned? It goes into the "enter and re-shelve" pile. Or, alternatively, you at least initially enter the book when it's checked out so you're tracking it with the new system.
This prioritizes the most popular books, assures the highest & quickest conversion in terms of transaction volume, and thus the quickest efficiency jump (which frees up time for dealing with the other books.) Otherwise, you'll spend years dealing with books mostly not entered into the system.
You can deal with low-circulation-volume books by pulling them shelf-at-a-time. If the library is small enough, simply re-shelve them in a new location. If the library is more than a few shelves, then tag the books in some fashion (the various color dots and whatnot you used to see on books in various libraries were, in fact, how the library was tracking this sort of thing.
You'll thank me in the long run when you're not stuck with a million lenses for a camera you've outgrown.
Uh - all the major mounting systems (Canon, Nikon, four thirds, Leica) are not going away soon. They'll work just fine with newer cameras. There is a little risk with the APS-C lenses (Canon calls them "EF-S", Nikon "DX"), but both companies sell buckets more APS-C cameras than they do pro cameras which have larger sensors. They're not going away any time soon.
What you should NOT do is buy an emerging, unestablished lens mount system, like the Nikon 1. Also, if you have a large collection of old Nikkor AF lenses (or anticipate wanting to collect old, probably overrated and outdated lenses) that need a camera motor drive, some cheap Nikon dSLRs don't have that.
In terms of "outgrowing":
Let's say you live in an area where the power goes out occasionally. You need medical assistance. Or someone is trying to break into your house. Or your house is on fire. Or there's a tree down across your driveway, and it's a 20 minute drive into town. And it's snowing like crazy.
Would you rather have a phone which goes dead and stays dead? Or would you rather have a phone you've been able to keep in the window, off, but charging off the sun, which you can now flip on and make a call with?
You're hiking with a friend. Your cell phone runs out of battery because GPS used a lot more power than you expected trying to find your way to the site.
Your friend falls and breaks their ankle.
Would you rather have that solar panel, and be able to make send a text/make a short phone call to emergency services after a 30 minute stint in the sun? Or would you rather save $5 on the cost of the phone?
An earthquake hits your city. Power is knocked out across the area. You end up at a shelter. You can keep your phone off but charge it in daylight - enough to power it up and make a call or send a text to a loved one saying you're OK.
There are lots of situations where having a solar panel on the back of the phone would be pretty handy.
It also conveniently neglects the fact that most of the internet infrastructure affected by SOPA is run on open source implementations, so the freedom of the software has done NOTHING to prevent governments from trying to abuse it.
Since when did Cisco open-source Cisco IOS? Or Juniper fully release the source for Junos? (it's "partly FreeBSD-based.") Force5 isn't open-source either, nor is Foundry. None of the routers use ASICs and FPGAs for which the code is open source.
I'd be willing to bet that there isn't a single piece of network gear between you and slashdot, or me and slashdot, that is fully under any open-source license (I'll even be generous and exclude proprietary drivers.)
The right to have control over your own body.
Right. Yeah, see, there's a reason they call it substance dependence .
That's the whole fucking point. With many drugs, you don't have any control without (significant) outside interference.
Meanwhile, you destroy your body. Your life falls apart. You hurt people close to you emotionally and physically, sometimes for life (children of alcoholics are a good example.) You commit crimes to pay for drugs. You lose control and inhibitions that keep you from committing violent crime. Ask anyone who lives in rural America right now and has had a meth house open up in their neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the people supplying your drugs are kidnapping people in border towns and slaughtering police and military every step of the way from production to our border. "Make it legal to produce!", you say. Right. So, if you're a violent thug with a mafia and cartel behind you that generates billions in profits...how are you going to react to people producing their own drugs? Sit around and twiddle your thumbs?
Anyway - that adds up to a real cost in terms of quality of life, health, safety, etc. Yes, we need more treatment programs. Yes, we have socioeconomic problems that exacerbate it. But thinking "let's just cut out that chunk of the budget we use for enforcement, and everything will be OK" is childish and naive.
Change will not happen through enforcement either way, but removing enforcement will only make things even worse. Change will happen when society makes drug use of any kind completely unpalatable and unacceptable, instead of simpleton assholes like you saying "hey, let people do what they want, it'll be ok."
"Let people do what they want" is how we've ended up with everything from mass genocide to environmental disasters to dozens of banking scandals and endless government corruption. To be laise-faire and libertarian is to ignore centuries of history and about as naive as socialism.
Well, getting people's personal data voluntarily (well, okay, via semi-blackmail) is one way to reduce the workload for your legal staff.
Seriously, who would be stupid enough to login to facebook and FURTHER link themselves? This is just asking to be sued.
Grow up...and learn to use Google. http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/drivers-at-fault-in-majority-of-cycling-accidents-28489/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/dec/15/cycling-bike-accidents-study The vast majority of cyclist injuries and fatalities are due to driver error or the driver breaking traffic laws.
Hm. As a biker, do you obey all the traffic laws? Complete stop at all stop signs, never go through lights, no riding on sidewalks or using crosswalks or passing slow or stopped traffic on the right in the non-lane between traffic and parked cars or the curb?
If you run a red light, can I shoot you in the head a week later? No?
Anyway - yes, actually, I do follow all my state's laws (okay, you got me, I once gave a lady friend a ride on the back rack of my bike, which is illegal.) Two notes, though:
1)Riding on sidewalks is permitted anywhere in the my state save business districts. However, because it's more dangerous to be out of the traffic flow than part of it, I very rarely do.
2)It is specifically permissible by law in my state for a cyclist to pass vehicles on the right. It's also specifically stated that it is the motorists' responsibility to check their mirror before making a right turn or moving to park.
Also: several states have laws which permit cyclists to travel through stop signs and red lights because legislators recognized that cyclists are somewhat more motivated to judge when it's safe to do so, and they only place themselves at risk when they do so (even a collision with a pedestrian is likely to cause more injury to the cyclist than the pedestrian.) Idaho is one example of such a state - stop signs can be treated as yield signs by bicyclists.
Grow up.
Speaking as a road user who is not in a 4,000lb box - this is the last thing we need. Apps for your car? Seriously?
Hang up the phone.
Drink the coffee at your home/work/coffee shop.
Stop texting.
Stop picking out your favorite song on the playlist.
DRIVE. YOUR. CAR. Please. Your car is not an entertainment system, smartphone, web browser, etc. It's a powerful, heavy, moving object. Capable of inflicting life-altering or mortal injuries and enormous property damage, which must be piloted accurately to within less than a few feet at speeds humans were never designed to travel. Treat it as such, which means PAY ATTENTION and keep BOTH HANDS ON THE WHEEL and your EYES ON THE ROAD. Nowhere else, any time your vehicle is moving.
I'm tired of people telling me, "gosh, bicycle? It's SO DANGEROUS!". Yeah, guess why? It's because the same person who declared it "dangerous" can't for one second take seriously piloting a machine capable of so much death and destruction, and instead is texting someone while sipping a mocha grande while checking out that cute person in the shop window.
You want to know why it's so dangerous to jog or walk or cycle along the road? Look in the mirror., across the table at dinner or a business meeting.
It doesn't help that running over a cyclist or (sometimes) a pedestrian is an almost guaranteed way to get away with murder. 99% of the time, the most the driver gets is a traffic ticket for saying "oh, I was changing radio stations" or "the sun got in my eyes." Hell, one asshole in Colorado recently claimed it was "new car smell" in his Mercedes S-class that caused him to pass out, hit a cyclist, and then drive on without stopping until he was across town, where upon he put the damaged bits of his car in the trunk and called for roadside assistance (not 911) for a tow.
"There's a whole bunch of trust involved. There's a lot of data inside Google, and I'm willing to bet some of it is really valuable. But for me and the people I worked with, it was never worth looking at."
People joke with me that I must be reading their email. I tell them I have enough trouble keeping up with my own email, and besides that, we NEVER read user's mail unless it's specifically necessary to troubleshoot something relating to their account.
What the hell is with Slashdot lately? Did the sysadmin for FSDN piss in everyone's coffee, and that's why the editors have such a hardon for anti-IT-worker stories?
It's not just a "pretty decent plot", it's an awesome plot. There'd be almost a mini-story waiting for you at every terminal. You could view the game as a playable scifi novel of sorts, if you wanted.
The failings were in the maps, which often were disorienting to the point of madness, but some of them were quite clever or unique.
However, that was all forgiven because of multiplayer mode. Some of my fondest memories from high school and college were of either hauling a couple computers to one person's house (the lucky guy who had a multi-port hub) or taking over an empty computer lab and blowing each other to bits for a few hours. There were many good third-party levels available with a lot of fun twists and creative use of the map/physics engine, thanks to a very good map editing program.
With better textures, honest-to-god 3D objects, and even just a few modern GPU effects, the game would be awesome all over again. I'll probably still play it this winter...
Your example is equally typical: Work avoidance, stall and delay, make the job sound harder than it is, hoping the user gives up asking.
When you ask for something with no appreciation for the work involved and demonstrate complete ignorance of storage technology and commonplace best practices (and why they're best practices and commonplace), yeah, we do hope you go away. When your boss comes knocking, we'll patiently explain to them what we told you, and then you'll look like an idiot who tried to tell his surgeon which scalpel to use.
Everything I've listed is based on experience from the decade and a half I've worked in IT. I'm not "pontificating" about drive sizes: this happens all the time, because drive companies don't size their drives to exactly the same bitcount, and if you have a RAID array, you can't replace a larger drive with a smaller drive, even if it's by one block.
Ultra320 is not 'exotic' (did you seriously just call SCSI "exotic"?) Until SAS came along, it was THE storage bus, unless you're talking big SANs or clusters, where you're going to find Infiniband and the like. Now, it's SAS, but at my workplace, we still use U320 for tapes and arrays because it's still as fast as SATA2.
If we have an HP server with a 5 year, onsite parts replacement contract - then yes, we're probably going to buy a replacement HP drive, even if it costs 3x what the Fry's drive did, because HP won't come out at 3 in the morning to replace a drive bought from Fry's.
If your Fry's drive causes the array to become corrupted, HP will happily point to the uncertified drive as the source; could very well be legitimate, as consumer-level drives have firmware which behaves differently from enterprise drives which can seriously impact RAID arrays. And then management screams blue-bloody-murder about how we "cut corners" and cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in contract penalties for not delivering the product on time. And then we're fired.
Screw it, we'll store the builds on our team's own damn machines (which we bought at Fry's out of our own budget) or use Amazon S3 for the next few months until the company rolls out the long-awaited off-shoring of IT support. Thanks for all your help.
And then when your machine dies and we get the panicked phonecall saying "BuildServer2 is down!", we'll tell management you built out your own server, how it took us 2 hours to find whose desk the system was under, then another 4 to find someone who knew a login password, and then we found that the un-mirrored drive died (and because nobody told us of the system, it's not in our backups)...and oh by the way, this is where all the builds for the last 24 months have been stored including the next version of the product, so QA is dead in the water, too.
Enjoy your pink slip. I've been called in to deal with many a mess caused by an under-desk-server admin. 99% of them had no fucking clue what they were doing. That's why I'm paid to administer computers, and you're paid to program code.
Arrogant User : "Our build server just keeps filling up. It's only got 40GB, you know."
IT: Would you please take a look and see if there's anything you can delete first? How about this directory that is for a 5 year old version of the product?
AU: NO. I am a very important person and you should just replace the drive with a bigger one! See, Fry's has them for $100.
IT: So Frys sells Ultra320 SCSI disks for $100?
AU: OMG, you're using SCSI?! SATA is the ROXZORZ.
IT: Yeah, except that your build server takes Ultra320 drives.
AU: GOD, how outdated. Why do we have such a piece of shit? SATA ROXZORS.
IT: Actually, Ultra320 SCSI is as fast as SATA2...but yes, we asked for the budget for a new server 2 years ago, and upper management denied the request, saying that spending thousands of dollars on hardware and a dozen or more man-hours migrating to the new hardware...wasn't justified.
AU: I found one on NewEgg. Install it.
IT: That's nice. If we install it, it a)might not work properly since it hasn't been certified by the vendor and b)the vendor provides us with 4-hour turnaround, 24x7x365 support, but only for authorized parts bought from them. If your drive fails, they won't replace it, and we'll be blamed by management if we can't replace it fast enough and a failure occurs.
AU: .....
IT: Did we mention that if the drive fails in a year or two, it's unlikely we'll find a replacement? The vendor guarantees parts availability for these drives, or compatible parts, for several years.
AU: Uh, I didn't think of that.
IT: You also didn't think that if we can't find the exact replacement, we're rolling the dice, because different manufacturers have slightly different ideas of what "300GB" is. If other drives are smaller than your "300GB" drive by just one block, we can't use it to replace the drive, because it's in a mirror.
AU: ......OK, I found one made by Vendorco.
IT: Yeah, that's great, except it's part of a mirrored pair.
AU: .....OK, FINE, two of them.
IT: Great. Are you also going to pay for someone to come in during off-hours and do the swap, and then re-partition the drives? We're talking several hours of someone having to be in the office after-hours. That means overtime.
AU: ........
IT: And you're going to justify the downtime to repartition on the build server to management, especially given that there's a release in a few weeks? If the drive swap-out goes badly, will you shoulder the blame for the delay which will strain relationships with our distributors and customers, and screw up profit projections by shifting sales more into the next quarter? And, will you shoulder the blame for 12 developers sitting twiddling their thumbs for 2 days while we rebuild the server?
AU: ........
IT: And you're going to fill out the change request forms?
AI: Change request forms? WTF?
IT: Yes, the change request forms your boss demanded we complete after we had an upgrade to your development environment server go badly, causing an unexpected 4 hour outage. Upper management agreed and we now have to document everything, have rollback plans, and get sign-offs from upper management and the manager of affected groups, which includes your manager.
AU: I'll go check for old files that can be deleted.
IT: Thank you.
And it costs a lot less to build and maintain that infrastructure than the boondoggle that HSR is gonna be.
Yes, because of course the government hasn't subsidized the airline industry and airport infrastructure for 75 years...
Here's a fun fact: Amtrak's funding is less than 1% of federal spending on transportation, and many rail lines in the US are privately owned.
High speed trains are electric, and electricity can come from renewable resources or nuclear. They don't require much energy to keep rolling, and they can use regenerative braking (like many public transit lines already do.) You know all those commercials on NPR about how cheap it is to move freight by rail? They're RIGHT.
Airplanes generate enormous amounts of pollution, and they put it in the worst place possible. Remember how nice the weather was for several days after September 11th? Turns out we affected the weather pattern when all air traffic was halted:
http://articles.cnn.com/2002-08-07/tech/contrails.climate_1_contrails-cirrus-clouds-david-travis?_s=PM:TECH
Did I mention that airports require huge amounts of space, have to be located outside of cities instead of passing through them, and generate massive amounts of noise and pollution?
Meanwhile, if you stand 2-3 blocks away from a high speed line, all you hear is a whooshing noise.
Did you just cite one person's 23-year-old model as proof that current climate science and measurements are suspect?
It reads like a list of his negative experiences. Especially the bit about parrots.
The document shows an unbelievably narcissistic man-child with grandiosity problems who is a technological dinosaur, has no social skills, and fails to recognize that he is an ambassador, not a king.
It's long since been time that the FSF found a new ambassador - someone who doesn't, for example, consider themselves to be hassled by having dinner with 'more than four people'.
Also, I lose power steering, which could make keeping control of the car much more difficult.
No, it won't. I meant it when I said that at highway speeds, your power steering is doing virtually nothing. Plus: you don't need to do much steering to stop your car.
You actually get MORE feel and control, because the power steering won't be hiding the steering feel. Most modern cars these days can be driven practically with your pinky finger.
"TFA was referring to a loss of some control, which is exactly what happens when you lose power steering/brake assis"
Again: Wrong. Brake assist continues as normal until you've used up the vacuum reservoir, which requires pumping the brakes repeatedly; you could stop your car SEVERAL times from highway speeds based off the vacuum reservoir alone (which, incidentally, is 'charged' from engine vacuum. Guess what happens when you turn off the ignition? You've got a closed throttle and a moving engine, which equals...ENGINE VACUUM.) If you have hydraulic assist (some older Audis and VWs), you have about THIRTY pushes of the brake pedal before you lose brake assist.
Power steering does virtually nothing at highway speeds.
Rosette: Good afternoon. My name is Rosette. What is your name?
You: Hi Rosette, I'm Bob.
Rosette: Hi to you too.
Bzzzzzzzt, fail. I reply to a greeting and name request by reciprocating the greeting and my name. It responds with yet another reciprocation of the greeting, something a human would almost never do.
It's especially hard to call it groundbreaking when it requires a guy standing next to it touching it every few seconds. I don't think he left it alone for more than about 5 seconds, and the attention was a little unnerving. Is it really that fragile?