Point is that you STILL need practical vehicles. This kiddie car foolishness caters to the government employee who drives from their apartment to their cushy East Coast government pencil-pushing job and back again. Try climbing a hill with an electric car.
And furthermore, since all electrical storage devices self-discharge you eventually waste all the energy used to charge them.
I will be impressed when the power sources are capable of A) moving a currently-manufactered 3000 lb chassis plus payload, B) 300+ miles on a charge, and C) can be charged in 5 minutes. Anything less than that is a stunt. You want people to junk their fossil-fuel vehicles you MUST offer them something that is as good as or better than what they currently have.
Oh, and BTW, replacing a battery pack in a hybrid vehicle costs well over $5000. You think anyone is going to pay that kind of money when they can say "screw it, I'll just run on gas." Guess again.
Besides that, how are you going to transport your six precious little snowflakes and their great dane pooch to and from all the extracurricular activities in a go-kart?
Seriously, wake me when these things can be made on a traditional assembly line by unskilled labor and when they can take the place of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. Anything else is a stunt.
Why is it that we're throwing gobs of government subsidy money to wind and solar in the U.S. when we should be devoting all of those resources to fusion power?
Hopefully that means you can write apps in Qt and hopefully they will be cross-platform with Android so developers don't have an excuse to marginalize one platform.
Well said. Part of SAR training is going where others fear to tread BUT we always travel in groups and we have equipment and food & water for 24 hours. Plus the Sheriff's Office knows when and where we're going.
Iridium would work but it's not for the average beer-drinking camper. It's more for the people who have the $500,000 diesel-pusher motorhomes.
Seems to me that the GPS makers and the map data people would be well served by pooling their resources instead of saying "Not our problem." But that's a Utopian ideal like saying everyone should have whatever healthcare they want and every doctor and drug maker should be nonprofits.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not really for putting up cell towers all over the place but in this day and age it's a little difficult to unplug and run a business.
Yellowstone isn't run by Xanterra. IMHO, Xanterra does a much better job of running things.
As for not complaining about the Forest Service's "limited resources", let's see how you like it when you get called at 2 AM to go rescue somebody because the Forest Service A) refuses to maintain the roads B) won't put up winter closure gates and C) won't even bother to put up a sign stating that winter travel on this road is hazardous and not recommended. Oh, and by the way, we in Search & Rescue don't get paid for our efforts. If we're lucky we get reimbursed for gas money which by the way doesn't come out of the Forest Service coffers. The county has to pay for it.
Here in Arizona, there is no fee to those that we rescue. We're all volunteers with the exception of DPS Ranger. SPOT beacons have saved several people's lives in the last couple of years. The first in the county was a guy who slipped off the edge of a steep trail and broke both ankles. Luke AFB got the first ping in 45 minutes. That's a damn sight better than waiting an unknown number of hours before someone notices that the subject is missing. Cellphones also help us direct ground units to the subject. That being said, SAR teams do not rescue peoples' vehicles and we have gotten into shouting matches with people from Phoenix who got stuck in the snow and are stunned that we will take them to safety but they're going to have to arrange for a paid tow service to get their vehicle out.
That being said, the NPS is somewhat hypocritical about things. First off, in Yellowstone, there is no cellphone service in most of the park despite what the movie 2012 would have you believe. Second, I have witnessed the ancient diesel noisy belching shuttle buses at the Grand Canyon blow right past people on the side of the road who may be injured or in trouble simply because they weren't standing at a designated pick up point.
Furthermore, technology isn't the only thing that can get people into trouble. The US Forest Service often doesn't maintain roads that appear on published maps and GPS databases as good roads so people end up in trouble. And then there are the outdoor magazines. We had a rescue here of a man who read an article that said you should hike up one trail and bushwhack over to another trail to come out. Really really bad idea if you don't know what you're doing.
Way back in the day at the B.U. computer center, the machine room had an extensive Halon fire system with nozzles under the raised flooring and on the ceiling. Pretty big room that housed an IBM mainframe, about a half dozen tape drives, maybe 50 refrigerator-sized disk drives, racks and racks of magnetic tape, a laser printer the size of a small car, networking hardware, etc. etc. One day, the maintenance people were walking through and their two-way radios set off the secondary fire alarm. At that point, you had about 10 seconds to escape. Watching the security camera video afterward was highly entertaining. One moment you saw the operator standing in front of the consoles and the next you saw him bolting out of the double doors.
Portable Ham radios often don't have enough power to get outside of valleys and low-lying areas in otherwise mountainous country. Even with access to repeaters, you still need good line-of-sight to get to them. Our Quad Unit, Dog Teams, and Backcountry ground-pounders all carry 5-watt hand held radios and we usually have to set up a 4x4 unit with a hard mount radio as a relay although more of the Quad guys are getting 50-watt hard mounts for their vehicles. In some areas of the county where we have lousy radio reception even with repeaters, we have a portable repeater made from two 50-watt hard mount radios and that gets taken out in the field to provide signal to the really remote areas. In addition to hard mount and handheld radios, I personally have a cellphone booster. This gadget works pretty darn well but you need to be able to plug it into 12 volts. SPOT beacons are excellent. We've had several rescues in the county with subjects that had these. Basically, the signal gets picked up by the nearest military base who then contacts the county Sheriff's office with the coordinates. And satellite phones solve lots of problems other than cost. Be damn sure you have a GPS and lots of batteries. And be REALLY DAMN sure that you tell people where you are going and when you expect to return. If there is a backcountry log at the trailhead, fill it out. And finally, BE VERY VERY VERY suspicious of magazine articles that tell you to get off the trail. That's total bullshit and incredibly irresponsible on the part of the magazine.
Call me crazy but if cheating is that big of a problem, maybe the teachers aren't being very effective. Case in point: Freshman year General Chemistry first mid-term exam. In a class of over 500 students on a test out of 200 points, the mean was a 60. That's 30% for those of you in Rio Linda. And here's the kicker: the professor was...wait for it...the HEAD of the Chemistry Department!!! Beyond that, IMHO practical application of the knowledge is a far better method of testing. Who cares if you can regurgitate from memory fifty different formula. If you can actually build the device and make it work or write the code and make it work, IMHO you're a far better employment candidate than if you just talk about it. As a teaching fellow for a microprocessors class, there were no 2-hour exams. There were several projects throughout the semester. You built the device and wrote the code for it. Then you demoed it to the fellows. It was immediately clear to us who understood the material and who did not. Granted these opinions are pretty much relevant to science and technology.
Hell, people pay big bucks for tube audio amplifiers. I personally would be interested in a reproduction Enigma machine. My nostalgia for stuff like this has me looking at Altairs and IMSAI 8080 computers on Ebay. There's something cool about switches and lights. It's kinda the same with my appreciation of steampunk.
The Evoluon was a science museum run by the Philips corporation in Eindhoven. Among it's many exhibitions was a speech synthesizer machine that could say the word coffee. It had settings with which you could influence the way it spoke the word, you could speed it up or slow it down, or change the pitch. There was a row of square white lights on it that corresponded with each letter, so you could see the word as well as hear it.
Alas, in 1990 the Evoluon museum was closed because of ever diminishing visitor numbers. It is now a conference centre and all of its exhibits are gone. A number of them were given to other museums around the world. But nobody knows where the coffee machine is now. Last I heard was that it was given to a museum in Canada who since have thrown it away because it was obsolete.
On youtube is a promotional video Philips made about the Evoluon in the sixties. The coffee machine is in it, briefly.
I am not affiliated with the Evoluon, I am just a fan who made a site about the technical museum it once was, when I discovered there wasn't anything to be found about this important part of the history of Philips and Eindhoven.
If I could get a schematic and parts list, I'd build one and most likely post the PCB trace print or make PCBs available. Maybe Sparkfun or Make Magazine would be a good place. This museum had a lot of cool stuff that would be considered trivial knowledge these days. Another really neat one was the thing used to demonstrate connected logic gate systems. It was made of an array of clear tubes at the top that would feed into large AND and OR gate symbols, perhaps other types of gates, I don't recall. You'd flip a bunch of toggle switches to configure which tubes would be fed with a ping-pong ball. Then the gate array would "process" the binary word. The goal was to get a ping-pong ball bit to appear at the one tube at the bottom. Fun stuff.
I recently shopped in a high-end major appliance store and the salesman told me about a frig that has the ability to contact the manufacturer if something goes wrong. The system figures out what parts are needed and sends them to the local repair center so that they are on hand when the repair person comes to your house. While that is pretty slick and efficient the darker side is that information could potentially be used by the nanny state to turn down your frig settings. Thus proving a major axiom: Any piece of technology, law, or concept can simultaneously be used for both good and evil.
Contrary to popular belief, Jobs isn't the only voice in the company. He still has to answer to his board and to the stockholders. He still has to make the company profitable. If Apple stuck with the same product concepts of 15+ years ago, the company would be either dead or just another Dell, HP, Lenovo and certainly wouldn't be able to compete given customer devotion to Windows. Devotion to Flash is idealism. Pitching it in favor of open standards is smart.
These guys just don't understand Apple's business goals. Apple long ago realized that they can't compete as "just another computer company". The paper-thin margins of the PC business preclude that. So to that end, Apple's goal is to reinvent why people want to buy its products. Sure there were tons of MP3 players out there when the iPod came out but iTunes changed the way you get your music. Then the iPhone threw out the gimped phone device business model crammed down our throats by the phone companies. Apple wants to do the same thing with the iPad but with a broader goal. Embracing Flash is counter to that because then the consumer has less motivation to buy an Apple product. At its core, this is about business, not about technological ideology.
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Stux for you!!! Sorry, couldn't resist and resistance is futile. HA!! Thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
Point is that you STILL need practical vehicles. This kiddie car foolishness caters to the government employee who drives from their apartment to their cushy East Coast government pencil-pushing job and back again. Try climbing a hill with an electric car.
And furthermore, since all electrical storage devices self-discharge you eventually waste all the energy used to charge them.
I will be impressed when the power sources are capable of A) moving a currently-manufactered 3000 lb chassis plus payload, B) 300+ miles on a charge, and C) can be charged in 5 minutes. Anything less than that is a stunt. You want people to junk their fossil-fuel vehicles you MUST offer them something that is as good as or better than what they currently have.
Oh, and BTW, replacing a battery pack in a hybrid vehicle costs well over $5000. You think anyone is going to pay that kind of money when they can say "screw it, I'll just run on gas." Guess again.
Try performing any home improvement project with a Smart Car.
http://failblog.org/2009/06/19/swingset-transportation-fail/
Besides that, how are you going to transport your six precious little snowflakes and their great dane pooch to and from all the extracurricular activities in a go-kart?
Seriously, wake me when these things can be made on a traditional assembly line by unskilled labor and when they can take the place of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. Anything else is a stunt.
Why is it that we're throwing gobs of government subsidy money to wind and solar in the U.S. when we should be devoting all of those resources to fusion power?
Sorry, but "golfing" is not a word. One plays golf. One does NOT go "golfing." Dammit.
Hopefully that means you can write apps in Qt and hopefully they will be cross-platform with Android so developers don't have an excuse to marginalize one platform.
Arms at your sides, 90-degree angles. Don't need no pizza, they got food there. Don't bite your lip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py5qAH7wELY
Well said. Part of SAR training is going where others fear to tread BUT we always travel in groups and we have equipment and food & water for 24 hours. Plus the Sheriff's Office knows when and where we're going.
Iridium would work but it's not for the average beer-drinking camper. It's more for the people who have the $500,000 diesel-pusher motorhomes.
Seems to me that the GPS makers and the map data people would be well served by pooling their resources instead of saying "Not our problem." But that's a Utopian ideal like saying everyone should have whatever healthcare they want and every doctor and drug maker should be nonprofits.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not really for putting up cell towers all over the place but in this day and age it's a little difficult to unplug and run a business.
Yellowstone isn't run by Xanterra. IMHO, Xanterra does a much better job of running things.
As for not complaining about the Forest Service's "limited resources", let's see how you like it when you get called at 2 AM to go rescue somebody because the Forest Service A) refuses to maintain the roads B) won't put up winter closure gates and C) won't even bother to put up a sign stating that winter travel on this road is hazardous and not recommended. Oh, and by the way, we in Search & Rescue don't get paid for our efforts. If we're lucky we get reimbursed for gas money which by the way doesn't come out of the Forest Service coffers. The county has to pay for it.
Here in Arizona, there is no fee to those that we rescue. We're all volunteers with the exception of DPS Ranger. SPOT beacons have saved several people's lives in the last couple of years. The first in the county was a guy who slipped off the edge of a steep trail and broke both ankles. Luke AFB got the first ping in 45 minutes. That's a damn sight better than waiting an unknown number of hours before someone notices that the subject is missing. Cellphones also help us direct ground units to the subject. That being said, SAR teams do not rescue peoples' vehicles and we have gotten into shouting matches with people from Phoenix who got stuck in the snow and are stunned that we will take them to safety but they're going to have to arrange for a paid tow service to get their vehicle out.
That being said, the NPS is somewhat hypocritical about things. First off, in Yellowstone, there is no cellphone service in most of the park despite what the movie 2012 would have you believe. Second, I have witnessed the ancient diesel noisy belching shuttle buses at the Grand Canyon blow right past people on the side of the road who may be injured or in trouble simply because they weren't standing at a designated pick up point.
Furthermore, technology isn't the only thing that can get people into trouble. The US Forest Service often doesn't maintain roads that appear on published maps and GPS databases as good roads so people end up in trouble. And then there are the outdoor magazines. We had a rescue here of a man who read an article that said you should hike up one trail and bushwhack over to another trail to come out. Really really bad idea if you don't know what you're doing.
Way back in the day at the B.U. computer center, the machine room had an extensive Halon fire system with nozzles under the raised flooring and on the ceiling. Pretty big room that housed an IBM mainframe, about a half dozen tape drives, maybe 50 refrigerator-sized disk drives, racks and racks of magnetic tape, a laser printer the size of a small car, networking hardware, etc. etc. One day, the maintenance people were walking through and their two-way radios set off the secondary fire alarm. At that point, you had about 10 seconds to escape. Watching the security camera video afterward was highly entertaining. One moment you saw the operator standing in front of the consoles and the next you saw him bolting out of the double doors.
I know a guy who has had an AOL account so long that in the early days it was hard-coded into the software.
Portable Ham radios often don't have enough power to get outside of valleys and low-lying areas in otherwise mountainous country. Even with access to repeaters, you still need good line-of-sight to get to them. Our Quad Unit, Dog Teams, and Backcountry ground-pounders all carry 5-watt hand held radios and we usually have to set up a 4x4 unit with a hard mount radio as a relay although more of the Quad guys are getting 50-watt hard mounts for their vehicles. In some areas of the county where we have lousy radio reception even with repeaters, we have a portable repeater made from two 50-watt hard mount radios and that gets taken out in the field to provide signal to the really remote areas. In addition to hard mount and handheld radios, I personally have a cellphone booster. This gadget works pretty darn well but you need to be able to plug it into 12 volts. SPOT beacons are excellent. We've had several rescues in the county with subjects that had these. Basically, the signal gets picked up by the nearest military base who then contacts the county Sheriff's office with the coordinates. And satellite phones solve lots of problems other than cost. Be damn sure you have a GPS and lots of batteries. And be REALLY DAMN sure that you tell people where you are going and when you expect to return. If there is a backcountry log at the trailhead, fill it out. And finally, BE VERY VERY VERY suspicious of magazine articles that tell you to get off the trail. That's total bullshit and incredibly irresponsible on the part of the magazine.
Call me crazy but if cheating is that big of a problem, maybe the teachers aren't being very effective. Case in point: Freshman year General Chemistry first mid-term exam. In a class of over 500 students on a test out of 200 points, the mean was a 60. That's 30% for those of you in Rio Linda. And here's the kicker: the professor was...wait for it...the HEAD of the Chemistry Department!!! Beyond that, IMHO practical application of the knowledge is a far better method of testing. Who cares if you can regurgitate from memory fifty different formula. If you can actually build the device and make it work or write the code and make it work, IMHO you're a far better employment candidate than if you just talk about it. As a teaching fellow for a microprocessors class, there were no 2-hour exams. There were several projects throughout the semester. You built the device and wrote the code for it. Then you demoed it to the fellows. It was immediately clear to us who understood the material and who did not. Granted these opinions are pretty much relevant to science and technology.
Hell, people pay big bucks for tube audio amplifiers. I personally would be interested in a reproduction Enigma machine. My nostalgia for stuff like this has me looking at Altairs and IMSAI 8080 computers on Ebay. There's something cool about switches and lights. It's kinda the same with my appreciation of steampunk.
Reply from Kees Stravers:
The Evoluon was a science museum run by the Philips corporation in
Eindhoven. Among it's many exhibitions was a speech synthesizer machine
that could say the word coffee. It had settings with which you could
influence the way it spoke the word, you could speed it up or slow it
down, or change the pitch. There was a row of square white lights on it
that corresponded with each letter, so you could see the word as well as
hear it.
Alas, in 1990 the Evoluon museum was closed because of ever diminishing
visitor numbers. It is now a conference centre and all of its exhibits are
gone. A number of them were given to other museums around the world. But
nobody knows where the coffee machine is now. Last I heard was that it was
given to a museum in Canada who since have thrown it away because it was
obsolete.
On youtube is a promotional video Philips made about the Evoluon in the
sixties. The coffee machine is in it, briefly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-_pZV3tDiw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMSdP_jxwC4
I am not affiliated with the Evoluon, I am just a fan who made a site
about the technical museum it once was, when I discovered there wasn't
anything to be found about this important part of the history of Philips
and Eindhoven.
Kees Stravers
www.evoluon.org
That's cool too. IMHO, there's a demand for retro technology for a whole bunch of reasons. E.g. original Altair computers go for big bucks on Ebay.
Interesting...got any more details?
If I could get a schematic and parts list, I'd build one and most likely post the PCB trace print or make PCBs available. Maybe Sparkfun or Make Magazine would be a good place.
This museum had a lot of cool stuff that would be considered trivial knowledge these days. Another really neat one was the thing used to demonstrate connected logic gate systems. It was made of an array of clear tubes at the top that would feed into large AND and OR gate symbols, perhaps other types of gates, I don't recall. You'd flip a bunch of toggle switches to configure which tubes would be fed with a ping-pong ball. Then the gate array would "process" the binary word. The goal was to get a ping-pong ball bit to appear at the one tube at the bottom. Fun stuff.
I recently shopped in a high-end major appliance store and the salesman told me about a frig that has the ability to contact the manufacturer if something goes wrong. The system figures out what parts are needed and sends them to the local repair center so that they are on hand when the repair person comes to your house. While that is pretty slick and efficient the darker side is that information could potentially be used by the nanny state to turn down your frig settings. Thus proving a major axiom: Any piece of technology, law, or concept can simultaneously be used for both good and evil.
Gimped compared to 5-10 years of crappy cellphones that preceded it.
Contrary to popular belief, Jobs isn't the only voice in the company. He still has to answer to his board and to the stockholders. He still has to make the company profitable. If Apple stuck with the same product concepts of 15+ years ago, the company would be either dead or just another Dell, HP, Lenovo and certainly wouldn't be able to compete given customer devotion to Windows. Devotion to Flash is idealism. Pitching it in favor of open standards is smart.
These guys just don't understand Apple's business goals. Apple long ago realized that they can't compete as "just another computer company". The paper-thin margins of the PC business preclude that. So to that end, Apple's goal is to reinvent why people want to buy its products. Sure there were tons of MP3 players out there when the iPod came out but iTunes changed the way you get your music. Then the iPhone threw out the gimped phone device business model crammed down our throats by the phone companies. Apple wants to do the same thing with the iPad but with a broader goal. Embracing Flash is counter to that because then the consumer has less motivation to buy an Apple product. At its core, this is about business, not about technological ideology.