There seriously needs to be a special "+{a lot} Funny" for efforts like yours.
I'm going to work this into an email of a semi-officious nature: Stay tuned/.ers for a future story about a financial instutition wanting on the IEEE's TLAv6 board.
They thought the same about Boeing. It's now in Chicago.
You want to keep the seat of leadership where you have some hope of seeing a benefit. (Consider Bentonville, AR.) They can move anywhere, anytime they want to. And they have the fiduciary responsibility to do so, or will be sued into oblivion by their own shareholders.
"Displacement on Demand" (General Motors) where an 8cyl/6l engine can "shut off" cylinders to become a 6cyl/4l or 4cyl/3l engine is a heck of a trick.
Short answer: You're right, cut off fuel and spark AND close valves. The trapped exhaust gasses from the cylinder's last firing are now a gaseous "spring" being squeezed and released over and over until the cylinder is brought back into service. Other methods kept the intake valve closed and the exhaust valve locked open. And even more exotic methods are explained on Wikipedia.
WRONG. No matter whether closed-loop or open-loop, modern FI always injects the amount of gas most closely matching the volume of air taken in.
Closed-loop (using the oxygen sensor in the exhaust) is totally adaptive, if there's unused O2, add more fuel. Open-loop (no O2 sensor, or 02 sensor not hot enough or not working or...) thet FI computer consults a table based on all the usual factors: Mass-air flow, engine temp, throttle position.
In either case, the opinion that your FI turns off the flow of fuel when you let off the gas is wrong. While the FI can indeed cut the fuel, it does so only under extremely rare conditions. I've actually never been able to make it happen on my car.
Oh, and the reasons? When you shut the fuel off, you run the risk of a lean mixture, which is both damaging to the engine (burning holes thu pistons) and super hi rush of NOx. That's why your throttle plate doesn't snap fully to the idle position, that slight loiter is to allow the system to "balance out" before returning to idle.
I totally agree with the parent. Just because Marketing said it had to be in there, and Engineering figgered out how to wedge in, doesn't mean that it amounts to an enhancement.
And I'm no great fan of "Designers" or Programmers/UI Experts, but when they get it right, it SINGS. And--call it a variation on "Creepy Valley"--a near miss is almost worse than not having the feature at all.
Personally, Samsung does this to me all the time: something about their UI-philosophy I don't get. Oppositely, Motorola must be built in to me somewhere. Those examples are purely my personal weaknesses, but I believe they're legit data points on the broader curve of my argument. (See also, cockpit design philosophies of Airbus v. Boeing, or Raytheon v. (everyone else) and iDrive v. the rest of the automotive informatics.)
Mutant 59 would've already taken place: one of the TWO key plot elements was a sunlight biodegradable plastic that served as the feedstock for the non-dangerous microbe to mutate and become dangerous. (IIRC)
The corn starch laden plastics, and UV-degradable polyethylene have been around for a long time.
Problem for a mutant 59 style bug is that even these are pretty stable, so not much energy for them to live off of. They'd be slow movers, in other words, not the visually dramatic thing needed to sell the plot/books.
But I've thought about that book/plot ever since I read it way back when. Points to you for bringing it up.
PS: Add the final variant of the Andromeda Strain was a plastic-eater.
No comment on DTS, post-dates my involvement. You got me there.
A 18kw lamp weighs about 16.75 pounds IIRC. After dismantling as much of a $1.5 million dollar projector as we could, and losing as much revenue as we were allowed (4 hours), we'd collected about 16.74 pounds. As demonstrated in previous theaters where explosions had occurred, the projector will continue to rain down shards for decades.
You know that while we'd LIKE to get it all, it is "difficult." The fact that you were able to clean up all of your 1.5kW lamp has relevance only in that you know the damage a shard could cause. Sadly, however, you're lamp was around 1/15th the size IIRC.
Finally, if I failed to mention it before, the "lathing" was done on the output side. The offending shard took about 10 minutes to fall out of the sound insulation and lodge in the only perfect spot where it would only scratch to the yellow layer without cutting. I hope without more specific comment on your limited experience--"I've never heard of..."--the reader will understand that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
While I respect and share your desire for quality and professionalism, I resent your calling my team's actions "careless" based on that limited experience.
And I'm really sorry but best-practices after blowing a splice at full-speed in the Imax world was thorough inspection: busting Estar at 6'/sec can shear aluminum teeth off sprockets, bend the cam's arms, and rip the registration pins out of the block. The stories of the damage caused by a break or tail-out are endless, and ugly. 10 minutes? Not even close: lost show, and work fast to see if it's turning into lost day, or even week.
I will apologize in advance for my flame-y-ness, but I'm shocked to think that experience with a regular projector qualifies you to comment on how things MIGHT be done on a larger and radically different machine.
Hmmm.... 1) Nobody keeps spare prints. Profit margins are microscopic, spare prints are not cheap. 2) As the parent poster failed to mention his fix, but typically it is to cut out 5 feet (35mm, 18"/s=3.33sec) and splice the ends together. 3) And a since almost all projection rooms are unmanned now, the amount of film damaged depends on the accuracy of the sensors monitoring the operation. (see #1) 3a) Though not so germane, we're way OT now, but an Imax projector can trash huge amounts of film in the blink of an eye. With the sound track separate, the only solution is to splice in black.
-Lamp explosion--once in 18 years for me--required 2 or three "slugs" of black=.5 secs.
-A splice-failure wrecked >1.5 secs. (6'/sec)
-A later shards from that lamp-explosion later reappeared and destroyed >75% of a $70k print by "lathing" it on the output side.
Jus' sayin' there ain't no spare tire, the quick-and-dirty fix is both (quick and dirty), and there are situations where it is much, much worse.
Oxford Scientific Films (http://www.osf.co.uk/) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Scientific_Films) has been selling these skills for decades, and AFAIK they're still doing quite well. CGI is still shockingly expensive, and remarkably slow for rendering. With huge experience in time-lapse and micro photography, they're happy to show some amazing full-screen effects in a fraction of the time.
OSF is primarily a documentary house, but they've got a LOT of tricks up their sleeves.
Nope, don't work for them, not in that industry anymore, but I thought I'd add my voice to the "old skool" ways. Esp. in a thread about Star Trek.
Try a wrench with a razor-blade handle. (Nice for tight places, hard on the user.)
Actually, nature can only create one idiot per year per production-unit (arbitrarily called "a family"). Organizations (arbitrarilty called "corporations) could invest many orders-of-magnitude more labor in the same calendar period into a UI.*
Sure, the utility company's cheapness-bonus is bad. Loss of training is bad. Lowering wages are bad. But you're committing the same fallacy you criticize Cringley for*, oversimplification.
*Apologies to the Gammar N...uh..."grammarians"** for that sentence, I hope you use it to full benefit.
But would you explain to me how a lo-vis automobile is an increased risk to a bicyclist?
If the problem is the bicyclist hitting an unseen car, isn't that a bicyclist problem? If the problem is the unseen car hitting the bicyclist, isn't that a driver problem? And how do black motorcycles fit in here?
I'm really having a problem understanding the idea of stealthy cars posing any more danger to bicyclists than orange ones festooned with strobes.
I'm blowing my mod points here, and hoping that I'm redundant to other, earlier and wiser comments, but you are clearly too young to know a simple truth.
Greater Speed=More Energy=More Lethal Crashes
It's just this simple, peeps. There is literally no case you can postulate (including "being chased by tyrannosaurs") in which ADDING energy is the best escape strategy. Don't bother: Asteroids? Tanker truck explosion >just starting in the tunnel behind you? There isn't. Simply because the costs of your GUESS ("oh, hockey-mask-clad killer coming up behind me!") if you prove to be wrong, are fatal. Risk requires understanding probabilities and humans do not have a facility for that. We see the hero survive, we envision how it'll work, we "just know" it was the right thing to do, and it simply never is.
And so, we have this public health problem: too many people, driving too fast, making preventable crashes into fatal ones.
Don't get it? Note all the appropriate agencies no longer call them "accidents" they're crashes, and they all have the same root-cause: someone was going too fast for the conditions. The investigators' jobs are reduced to finding out who and how much.
So let's be done with this "speeding is safe" meme. It's crap. I, for one, cannot wait for our automated-car overlords to take over.
I am SO sorry, clearly you've not been there (Chicago & its Metro area) in the last 2 decades. 1) Wheaton, a burb, is a college town. An evangelical college town. It is one of the scariest places I've ever seen. 2) Naperville, a burb, is the largest city in Illinois, physically gigantic, but obviously diffuse. It is almost universally conservative.
You are correct about the mayor, but the distribution of conservative vs. liberal is sadly quite strong the wrong way. The election outcomes tend to depend on who gets out the vote, which depends on so much more than machines, fraud or money. Trust me, the random guy you meet on the street? Don't bet he's a liberal anything, much less a Democrat.
I do not necessarily defend the GP's position, I think the sheriff's motivations are more simplistic, probably self-aggrandizement. But counting on Chicago, Cook County, or the entire metropolitan area as "liberal" is a huge mistake, and one made by liberal politicians at their peril.
Wow, Appleseed seems interesting. With some luck, the mere fact that it's "distributed" might buy SOME privacy improvements. After all, Google standing astride their ocean of data is where the trouble comes in. Re-read, substituting "Facebook" for "Google" and it's still true.
Ok, time to dust off the old (very) SMPTE membership...
First: frame rate. 60 FPS was tried, and it is stunning. Saw the demo show at Chuck E. Cheese's corp ofc in Dallas when they thought they might buy into it. You wouldn't believe it: the improvement is like a 120khz 1080p over a 13" NTSC B&W. Literally life-changing.
Second: film vs. digital. It has almost nothing to do with pixels, it has to do with drop-off. When a scene detail drops below the limit of resolution of a digital imager, it simply disappears. A detail big enough is there, one too small is not. Since most things tend to have bits of both (think wrinkles in cloth or skin) the ultra-sharp drop-off of HD is jarring.
Film, on the other hand, decreases the contrast: tiny details fade to gray. This oddly works better with the human vision system, as we can manage to extract info from the stuff fading in and out. Like how the saccades of your eyes work.
Finally, let's remember that most HDTVs are barely up to the specs of the best CRTs when it comes to all the juicy stuff. They're just bigger, thinner, and right now, cheaper. (A radiologist's CRT will make you cry.)
Oh, and it's a "social virtual reality system" so comparing the EXPERIENCE of a movie to your home theater is also meaningless. There's some aspect of the show--sitting with strangers in the dark--that is important.
"That's all fine and well, but AC is not an option without superconducting cables and you don't want 1000s of KM of superconducting cable."
Wait, Pinky's Brain, I thought we DID. I know, LH2 is a really tough material to handle, store, pump, etc. But I thought there's research afoot to use the "coolant" as yet ANOTHER product of the generation facility. They make volts AND liquid hydrogen. At the "sink" end, we take off both.
Yeah, I know, it'll be a long time before we can pull this trick off, but still, I'd like to put my tiny investments where they'd make a difference. (Micro loans, smart folks working on the hard projects.) And if TARP-scale money were on it, I'd be surprised if we can't advance LH2 handling beyond NASA.
Re:Your preconditions for communism.
on
Houses With Tails
·
· Score: 1
WWOT.
Thanks: interesting post and I'm fresh outta mod points. I might add one factor to your scaling-vector limit. Forgive me, it's not pithy or eloquent yet, I'm still working on it.
Proposed item #4)the information-flow of the community does not permit local advantages/disadvantages. Alternate: 4) The inertia of the information-flow will constrain the community's size.
Intent: when the commune knows of a problem/success UNIFORMLY, the benefits of 1) will be fully realized.
Revisions welcomed; please return to your regularly scheduled topic.
In order to prevent a surge of NOx emissions on deceleration, engines can be fitted with a device that holds the closed throttle open for just a bit, just a little while. This is very common on low and mid market cars, I believe it's getting rare on upmarket makes and models. (They must cope with it by a complex FI map change, a stair-step built into the "closed loop" operation, almost like "open loop.")
I don't get to work on them much, sadly.
In your case, most likely this device is out of adjustment or out of tune, and it is either too abrupt at release, onset or decay.
(BTW: The REALLY old solution to this problem was a simple dashpot mounted where the throttle quadrant came down on the stop.)
Also: Double-clutching is at best a waste of fuel, and most likely (when performed even FRACTIONALLY less than perfectly) bad for your transmission. Let the dogs do their jobs. If your syncros are that trashed, repair the transmission, or replace the car.
The emissions surges when you "goose" the gas between double-clutch moves is antithetical to this thread. If the known-good syncros can't keep up with you, your driving far too hard. Drive to make your grandmother proud, save the hotfoot for track days or the game console.
Traffic is not a race. It's a train.
Get in line, be polite, get there faster, cheaper and less-likely-dead.
Oh for goodness' sakes: A modern fuel-injection system strives to mantain the stochastic mixture AT ALL TIMES.
NOBODY shuts off the fuel injectors, except in the most ridiculous condition. I believe we're talking above 75% of redline. Get a scantool and watch, or look up how to display the FI interval on your dash. (On my car there's a hack that'll put it up on the odometer display)
As long as your oxygen sensors are running, your FI is "closed loop" and it'll put out the right amount of fuel for the air coming in REGARDLESS of the throttle.
SO:if you're engine's displacement is 2.5l, 4cyl, then every 4 revolutions, you'll "inhale" 2.5l of air. Best fuel economy then is taking in as FEW of these "gulps" per mile traveled, since the FI puts fuel into that air NO MATTER WHAT.
And the way you do that is 1) REDUCE your throttle inputs. Drive in cruise control as much (and safely) as possible. Put a block of wood under the gas pedal. WHatever, just don't go deep, and don't stay long. Really: if you NEVER go 100% throttle, you're getting the idea.
2) REDUCE your revs. Force your automatic up, shift your manual earlier. My mfr's manual wants 2k-3k for regular driving. I run 1k-2k all the time, and frequently toodle around at 35mph in 6th. Yep, no torque, but I get about 40% better than EPA ratings for a reason.
3) COAST. Coast. Coast. Do not use engine-braking: motor parts are more expensive than brake parts. And remember, we raise the revs to brake, we gulp more air, and the FI puts more fuel in.
4) The Cartalk boys are right: there is NO car sold in the US market that benefits from PREMIUM gas. Read that again before flaming. The reason's plain: the octane diff of 4% is so tiny, that it disappears in the seasonal formulations. (Premium summer vs Regular winter). So why waste the money? You sure won't get a 4% improvement in performance.
Remember: More tunes, Less throttle.
You're on-throttle surge is a problem, get it fixed. Oh, and when I do decide to be an idiot and shift at or near the 7500 RPM redline? It works just fine.
We're all panicking because some streetlights went out in Hawaii after one test. (Oh look it up!)
I agree, EMP=bad, & solar flares could do darn near the same thing.
BUT let's try to remember: a megaton class weapon exploded at the edge of the atmosphere is the work of a grown-up nu-ku-ler power. The Axis of Eagerness is not likely to generate this threat anytime soon. By that time, we'll have other solutions and problems.
Slashdot Mirror
There seriously needs to be a special "+{a lot} Funny" for efforts like yours.
I'm going to work this into an email of a semi-officious nature: Stay tuned /.ers for a future story about a financial instutition wanting on the IEEE's TLAv6 board.
You forgot the Jedi hand-wave.
If you'd remembered, we wouldn't have had the replies below.
They thought the same about Boeing. It's now in Chicago.
You want to keep the seat of leadership where you have some hope of seeing a benefit. (Consider Bentonville, AR.) They can move anywhere, anytime they want to. And they have the fiduciary responsibility to do so, or will be sued into oblivion by their own shareholders.
Very good question.
"Displacement on Demand" (General Motors) where an 8cyl/6l engine can "shut off" cylinders to become a 6cyl/4l or 4cyl/3l engine is a heck of a trick.
Short answer: You're right, cut off fuel and spark AND close valves. The trapped exhaust gasses from the cylinder's last firing are now a gaseous "spring" being squeezed and released over and over until the cylinder is brought back into service. Other methods kept the intake valve closed and the exhaust valve locked open. And even more exotic methods are explained on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Fuel_Management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_displacement
WRONG.
No matter whether closed-loop or open-loop, modern FI always injects the amount of gas most closely matching the volume of air taken in.
Closed-loop (using the oxygen sensor in the exhaust) is totally adaptive, if there's unused O2, add more fuel. Open-loop (no O2 sensor, or 02 sensor not hot enough or not working or...) thet FI computer consults a table based on all the usual factors: Mass-air flow, engine temp, throttle position.
In either case, the opinion that your FI turns off the flow of fuel when you let off the gas is wrong. While the FI can indeed cut the fuel, it does so only under extremely rare conditions. I've actually never been able to make it happen on my car.
Oh, and the reasons? When you shut the fuel off, you run the risk of a lean mixture, which is both damaging to the engine (burning holes thu pistons) and super hi rush of NOx. That's why your throttle plate doesn't snap fully to the idle position, that slight loiter is to allow the system to "balance out" before returning to idle.
Damn, wasted my mod points to write this.
I totally agree with the parent. Just because Marketing said it had to be in there, and Engineering figgered out how to wedge in, doesn't mean that it amounts to an enhancement.
And I'm no great fan of "Designers" or Programmers/UI Experts, but when they get it right, it SINGS. And--call it a variation on "Creepy Valley"--a near miss is almost worse than not having the feature at all.
Personally, Samsung does this to me all the time: something about their UI-philosophy I don't get. Oppositely, Motorola must be built in to me somewhere. Those examples are purely my personal weaknesses, but I believe they're legit data points on the broader curve of my argument. (See also, cockpit design philosophies of Airbus v. Boeing, or Raytheon v. (everyone else) and iDrive v. the rest of the automotive informatics.)
The parent deserves to be modded up.
Mutant 59 would've already taken place: one of the TWO key plot elements was a sunlight biodegradable plastic that served as the feedstock for the non-dangerous microbe to mutate and become dangerous. (IIRC)
The corn starch laden plastics, and UV-degradable polyethylene have been around for a long time.
Problem for a mutant 59 style bug is that even these are pretty stable, so not much energy for them to live off of. They'd be slow movers, in other words, not the visually dramatic thing needed to sell the plot/books.
But I've thought about that book/plot ever since I read it way back when. Points to you for bringing it up.
PS: Add the final variant of the Andromeda Strain was a plastic-eater.
No comment on DTS, post-dates my involvement. You got me there.
A 18kw lamp weighs about 16.75 pounds IIRC. After dismantling as much of a $1.5 million dollar projector as we could, and losing as much revenue as we were allowed (4 hours), we'd collected about 16.74 pounds. As demonstrated in previous theaters where explosions had occurred, the projector will continue to rain down shards for decades.
You know that while we'd LIKE to get it all, it is "difficult." The fact that you were able to clean up all of your 1.5kW lamp has relevance only in that you know the damage a shard could cause. Sadly, however, you're lamp was around 1/15th the size IIRC.
Finally, if I failed to mention it before, the "lathing" was done on the output side. The offending shard took about 10 minutes to fall out of the sound insulation and lodge in the only perfect spot where it would only scratch to the yellow layer without cutting. I hope without more specific comment on your limited experience--"I've never heard of..."--the reader will understand that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
While I respect and share your desire for quality and professionalism, I resent your calling my team's actions "careless" based on that limited experience.
And I'm really sorry but best-practices after blowing a splice at full-speed in the Imax world was thorough inspection: busting Estar at 6'/sec can shear aluminum teeth off sprockets, bend the cam's arms, and rip the registration pins out of the block. The stories of the damage caused by a break or tail-out are endless, and ugly. 10 minutes? Not even close: lost show, and work fast to see if it's turning into lost day, or even week.
I will apologize in advance for my flame-y-ness, but I'm shocked to think that experience with a regular projector qualifies you to comment on how things MIGHT be done on a larger and radically different machine.
Hmmm....
1) Nobody keeps spare prints. Profit margins are microscopic, spare prints are not cheap.
2) As the parent poster failed to mention his fix, but typically it is to cut out 5 feet (35mm, 18"/s=3.33sec) and splice the ends together.
3) And a since almost all projection rooms are unmanned now, the amount of film damaged depends on the accuracy of the sensors monitoring the operation. (see #1)
3a) Though not so germane, we're way OT now, but an Imax projector can trash huge amounts of film in the blink of an eye. With the sound track separate, the only solution is to splice in black.
-Lamp explosion--once in 18 years for me--required 2 or three "slugs" of black=.5 secs.
-A splice-failure wrecked >1.5 secs. (6'/sec)
-A later shards from that lamp-explosion later reappeared and destroyed >75% of a $70k print by "lathing" it on the output side.
Jus' sayin' there ain't no spare tire, the quick-and-dirty fix is both (quick and dirty), and there are situations where it is much, much worse.
Oxford Scientific Films (http://www.osf.co.uk/) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Scientific_Films) has been selling these skills for decades, and AFAIK they're still doing quite well. CGI is still shockingly expensive, and remarkably slow for rendering. With huge experience in time-lapse and micro photography, they're happy to show some amazing full-screen effects in a fraction of the time.
OSF is primarily a documentary house, but they've got a LOT of tricks up their sleeves.
Nope, don't work for them, not in that industry anymore, but I thought I'd add my voice to the "old skool" ways. Esp. in a thread about Star Trek.
The UI's unimportant? Did I read that right?
Try a wrench with a razor-blade handle. (Nice for tight places, hard on the user.)
Actually, nature can only create one idiot per year per production-unit (arbitrarily called "a family"). Organizations (arbitrarilty called "corporations) could invest many orders-of-magnitude more labor in the same calendar period into a UI.*
Sure, the utility company's cheapness-bonus is bad. Loss of training is bad. Lowering wages are bad. But you're committing the same fallacy you criticize Cringley for*, oversimplification.
*Apologies to the Gammar N...uh..."grammarians"** for that sentence, I hope you use it to full benefit.
**Godwinians, the same for the footnote above.
(All memes covered? Check! Flame on!)
But would you explain to me how a lo-vis automobile is an increased risk to a bicyclist?
If the problem is the bicyclist hitting an unseen car, isn't that a bicyclist problem? If the problem is the unseen car hitting the bicyclist, isn't that a driver problem? And how do black motorcycles fit in here?
I'm really having a problem understanding the idea of stealthy cars posing any more danger to bicyclists than orange ones festooned with strobes.
Please show me what I'm missing...
I'm blowing my mod points here, and hoping that I'm redundant to other, earlier and wiser comments, but you are clearly too young to know a simple truth.
Greater Speed=More Energy=More Lethal Crashes
It's just this simple, peeps. There is literally no case you can postulate (including "being chased by tyrannosaurs") in which ADDING energy is the best escape strategy. Don't bother: Asteroids? Tanker truck explosion >just starting in the tunnel behind you? There isn't. Simply because the costs of your GUESS ("oh, hockey-mask-clad killer coming up behind me!") if you prove to be wrong, are fatal. Risk requires understanding probabilities and humans do not have a facility for that. We see the hero survive, we envision how it'll work, we "just know" it was the right thing to do, and it simply never is.
And so, we have this public health problem: too many people, driving too fast, making preventable crashes into fatal ones.
Don't get it? Note all the appropriate agencies no longer call them "accidents" they're crashes, and they all have the same root-cause: someone was going too fast for the conditions. The investigators' jobs are reduced to finding out who and how much.
So let's be done with this "speeding is safe" meme. It's crap. I, for one, cannot wait for our automated-car overlords to take over.
Less throttle, more tunes.
I am SO sorry, clearly you've not been there (Chicago & its Metro area) in the last 2 decades.
1) Wheaton, a burb, is a college town. An evangelical college town. It is one of the scariest places I've ever seen.
2) Naperville, a burb, is the largest city in Illinois, physically gigantic, but obviously diffuse. It is almost universally conservative.
You are correct about the mayor, but the distribution of conservative vs. liberal is sadly quite strong the wrong way. The election outcomes tend to depend on who gets out the vote, which depends on so much more than machines, fraud or money. Trust me, the random guy you meet on the street? Don't bet he's a liberal anything, much less a Democrat.
I do not necessarily defend the GP's position, I think the sheriff's motivations are more simplistic, probably self-aggrandizement. But counting on Chicago, Cook County, or the entire metropolitan area as "liberal" is a huge mistake, and one made by liberal politicians at their peril.
I'll see your laser, sir, and raise you this:
http://katamari.namco.com/
Wow, Appleseed seems interesting. With some luck, the mere fact that it's "distributed" might buy SOME privacy improvements. After all, Google standing astride their ocean of data is where the trouble comes in. Re-read, substituting "Facebook" for "Google" and it's still true.
By the way, Project Appleseed stalled over a year ago, though perhaps a little slashdotting might help? See http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/theory/future.php for his manifesto.
Ok, time to dust off the old (very) SMPTE membership...
First: frame rate.
60 FPS was tried, and it is stunning. Saw the demo show at Chuck E. Cheese's corp ofc in Dallas when they thought they might buy into it. You wouldn't believe it: the improvement is like a 120khz 1080p over a 13" NTSC B&W. Literally life-changing.
Second: film vs. digital.
It has almost nothing to do with pixels, it has to do with drop-off. When a scene detail drops below the limit of resolution of a digital imager, it simply disappears. A detail big enough is there, one too small is not. Since most things tend to have bits of both (think wrinkles in cloth or skin) the ultra-sharp drop-off of HD is jarring.
Film, on the other hand, decreases the contrast: tiny details fade to gray. This oddly works better with the human vision system, as we can manage to extract info from the stuff fading in and out. Like how the saccades of your eyes work.
Finally, let's remember that most HDTVs are barely up to the specs of the best CRTs when it comes to all the juicy stuff. They're just bigger, thinner, and right now, cheaper. (A radiologist's CRT will make you cry.)
Oh, and it's a "social virtual reality system" so comparing the EXPERIENCE of a movie to your home theater is also meaningless. There's some aspect of the show--sitting with strangers in the dark--that is important.
"That's all fine and well, but AC is not an option without superconducting cables and you don't want 1000s of KM of superconducting cable."
Wait, Pinky's Brain, I thought we DID. I know, LH2 is a really tough material to handle, store, pump, etc. But I thought there's research afoot to use the "coolant" as yet ANOTHER product of the generation facility. They make volts AND liquid hydrogen. At the "sink" end, we take off both.
Yeah, I know, it'll be a long time before we can pull this trick off, but still, I'd like to put my tiny investments where they'd make a difference. (Micro loans, smart folks working on the hard projects.) And if TARP-scale money were on it, I'd be surprised if we can't advance LH2 handling beyond NASA.
I agree with you: time to strike, the iron's hot.
Wait, I thought Jetson wasn't rehired until Act 3... Oh, never mind, we haven't even cycled through the ritual firing in Act 2.
You're HIRED!
WWOT.
Thanks: interesting post and I'm fresh outta mod points. I might add one factor to your scaling-vector limit. Forgive me, it's not pithy or eloquent yet, I'm still working on it.
Proposed item #4)the information-flow of the community does not permit local advantages/disadvantages.
Alternate: 4) The inertia of the information-flow will constrain the community's size.
Intent: when the commune knows of a problem/success UNIFORMLY, the benefits of 1) will be fully realized.
Revisions welcomed; please return to your regularly scheduled topic.
In order to prevent a surge of NOx emissions on deceleration, engines can be fitted with a device that holds the closed throttle open for just a bit, just a little while. This is very common on low and mid market cars, I believe it's getting rare on upmarket makes and models. (They must cope with it by a complex FI map change, a stair-step built into the "closed loop" operation, almost like "open loop.")
I don't get to work on them much, sadly.
In your case, most likely this device is out of adjustment or out of tune, and it is either too abrupt at release, onset or decay.
(BTW: The REALLY old solution to this problem was a simple dashpot mounted where the throttle quadrant came down on the stop.)
Also: Double-clutching is at best a waste of fuel, and most likely (when performed even FRACTIONALLY less than perfectly) bad for your transmission. Let the dogs do their jobs. If your syncros are that trashed, repair the transmission, or replace the car.
The emissions surges when you "goose" the gas between double-clutch moves is antithetical to this thread. If the known-good syncros can't keep up with you, your driving far too hard. Drive to make your grandmother proud, save the hotfoot for track days or the game console.
Traffic is not a race.
It's a train.
Get in line, be polite, get there faster, cheaper and less-likely-dead.
Oh for goodness' sakes:
A modern fuel-injection system strives to mantain the stochastic mixture AT ALL TIMES.
NOBODY shuts off the fuel injectors, except in the most ridiculous condition. I believe we're talking above 75% of redline. Get a scantool and watch, or look up how to display the FI interval on your dash. (On my car there's a hack that'll put it up on the odometer display)
As long as your oxygen sensors are running, your FI is "closed loop" and it'll put out the right amount of fuel for the air coming in REGARDLESS of the throttle.
SO:if you're engine's displacement is 2.5l, 4cyl, then every 4 revolutions, you'll "inhale" 2.5l of air. Best fuel economy then is taking in as FEW of these "gulps" per mile traveled, since the FI puts fuel into that air NO MATTER WHAT.
And the way you do that is
1) REDUCE your throttle inputs. Drive in cruise control as much (and safely) as possible. Put a block of wood under the gas pedal. WHatever, just don't go deep, and don't stay long. Really: if you NEVER go 100% throttle, you're getting the idea.
2) REDUCE your revs. Force your automatic up, shift your manual earlier. My mfr's manual wants 2k-3k for regular driving. I run 1k-2k all the time, and frequently toodle around at 35mph in 6th. Yep, no torque, but I get about 40% better than EPA ratings for a reason.
3) COAST. Coast. Coast. Do not use engine-braking: motor parts are more expensive than brake parts. And remember, we raise the revs to brake, we gulp more air, and the FI puts more fuel in.
4) The Cartalk boys are right: there is NO car sold in the US market that benefits from PREMIUM gas. Read that again before flaming. The reason's plain: the octane diff of 4% is so tiny, that it disappears in the seasonal formulations. (Premium summer vs Regular winter). So why waste the money? You sure won't get a 4% improvement in performance.
Remember:
More tunes,
Less throttle.
You're on-throttle surge is a problem, get it fixed. Oh, and when I do decide to be an idiot and shift at or near the 7500 RPM redline? It works just fine.
We're all panicking because some streetlights went out in Hawaii after one test. (Oh look it up!)
I agree, EMP=bad, & solar flares could do darn near the same thing.
BUT let's try to remember: a megaton class weapon exploded at the edge of the atmosphere is the work of a grown-up nu-ku-ler power. The Axis of Eagerness is not likely to generate this threat anytime soon. By that time, we'll have other solutions and problems.
Let's just try NOT to piss off France, 'k?
Great googly moogly! But wait, they can do no evil!!!
Is this Total Information Awareness outsourced AND making a profit?