Having worked with CANbus in a recent project I can tell you with some authority that it has some serious problems when the system is not working correctly...
The standard requires that devices retry failed transmissions when one or more devices on the bus fail to read a CANbus frame correctly. This leads to a situation where more error traffic that system traffic appears on the bus. Once this happens the devices on the bus often shutdown, or restart believing that they have suffered a failure. The real issue might be cracked insulation on wet network cabling. This issue can easily cripple a subsystem, and in extreme cases bring down an entire system due to choking on error-retry packets.
It seems likely that the conditions that cascade off the cases raised with Toyota made them realize this would not be a quick patch. They may be recognizing a need to revisit a number of issues with regard to emergency situations in the withdrawn vehicle lines.
This points to the stupidity of the manufacturer and a violation of what is safe to de-energize in a car and what is not. Emergency shutdown on a car used to be simple... Turning off the ignition key did exactly one thing: it shut off the engine. It didn't turn off the lights. It did reduce braking power and steering power, since those were coming from the engine. It didn't change the gearing or state of the transmission significantly either.
Later we got a complication: steering locks... turn the key too far back, and you get a steering lockup.... very bad if you you were trying to recover from a run-away engine.
Now you lose all of it from a button press?!?! WTF! Some managing engineers need to end up with their back against a pockmarked brick-wall, with a complementary last meal, blindfold, and cigarette.
Good point! As automakers redefine the auto, they shouldn't forget the Big Red Button that exists on every piece of heavy equipment that was used to create those cars. It may be that some mandated standard for emergency shutdown is over due.
Human rights are not a universal truth, "2+2=4" is a universal truth, beyond that we really don't have any.
"2+2=4" is only true for nominal values of '2' and '4.' For large values of '2', for example, or small values of '4' it most certainly would not be true.
'Universal truth'? Wha' izzat? When you find one, I'd like to see it.
Did you see the floating unobtanium chunk that Parker (the manager) had on his desk? Same principle scaled up. The background material explains it by saying that unobtanium is a room-temperature superconductor and the mountains float due to the Meissner effect.
Some floppies will survive, purely by accident, and it will be, enough.
Yeah, and those floppies will contain X-Files Mulder/Smoking Man slash-fic, and they'll know everything they need to know about our times: Best left forgotten.
More than likely they would contain early 8-bit GIF nudes of Ms. Anderson.
What I wonder and nobody has brought up. Why cant it die and come back in the spring? IT should be like any computer/robot and easily recover from a total power failure and restoration.
Why not let it sleep all winter and check in the spring when it may have enough solar-juice to come back online?
The core system/batteries need to be kept above a minimum temperature to prevent their destruction due to thermo-mechanical contraction. This requires that the system remain active to a limited degree so that the temperature may be managed. This also requires a minimal power budget. If the panel angle is too far off and/or there is too much dust on the panels, it may not be possible to prevent the system from "freezing to death."
At very low temperatures some semiconductor materials do not behave as expected. This can cause mis-operation and either hard or soft failure of active components.
It may be possible that enough of the components would survive a prolonged out of spec. thermal excursion, but the odds do not favor it. Semiconductor components, by their nature, are dissimilar metal and glass structures there's only so far they can be cooled before they mechanically fail due to internal mechanical stress. This also applies to macro-structures like joints and electrical connectors, lubricants, plastics, and insulation materials. Micro-fractures in semi-conductors leads to their failure to operate when they warm back up. Rivets pop. Insulators crack. Support structures deform and break themselves or other components.
There's also only so far you can design in thermal relief before you compromise mechanical stability at nominal operating conditions.
I'm afraid it doesn't allow more than a single resolution on my screen at once, it just offers a resizable window. Besides which, we're talking about hardware here.
* It can be used to change video hardware mid-frame. This allows the Amiga to change video configuration, including resolution, between scanlines. This allows the Amiga to display different horizontal resolutions, different colour depths, and entirely different frame buffers on the same screen. The AmigaOS graphical user interface allows two programs to operate at different resolutions in different buffers, while both are visible on the screen simultaneously.
So is the Amiga more powerful than both VirtualBox and the Mac? Again, Amiga wins!:P
You can do this today... if you want to run on a VGA monitor... The modern hardware will allow you to switch resolution mid-frame. However you might need to actually write some drivers to support it. Obviously this doesn't work well on LCD panels since they have a fixed resolution and why bother... we have the benefit of much larger/ higher resolution displays now, with no CPU overhead, and no funky video hardware banging.
Some ideas should just stay dead... Mid-frame video changes is one of those ideas. (PS: a lot of systems could support this trick back in the day... including the Apple//,//e,//c and//gs along with many PC ega/vga cards. OH and the Atari VCS did it on every single line of the frame... no choice there.... that was the ONLY way to generate useful video frames.)
Atari ST also ran a version of OS/2 which at the time, was the bees knees... I learned to write posix C on one of those systems when I worked for an Atari subsidiary. They were faster than PCs of the day too. Some of the graphics compression code I wrote in support of a NES game I was being paid to develop could only be run on that ST because it had enough CPU and RAM to get 'er done. None of the 80x86 PCs in '88 could touch it for raw processing power, RAM and HD speed.
Atari TOS/GEM ( And later the open sourced MiNT ) was/is still better! So take that! Seriously tho, see where all that bickering got us? Compartmentalized and marginalized into oblivion as the world of mass produced, consumer oriented mediocrity won in the end.... But I suppose at least we are in the same boat now, going nowhere.. A shame really, as a 'PC' just has no soul.
Gee where have we seen that before? Ummm let's see... Sony Beta v. VHS... IBM PC v. just about anything in the market at the time. There are plenty of examples where 'best of breed' gets its ass handed to it by 'good enough'
If you buy crap you get stuck in a market that will only sell you crap.
it will be nice when we can but a nautical rover in that liquid methane ocean...and not have to pay engineers to kludge their way out every hole, sandy spot, or dusty place. Also be cool if it could use the methane as a fuel source.
That might not work too well... Gonna bring your own oxygen along to burn the methane? Probably the best approach would be a 'Newcler Wessle'
By mass Hydrogen is a fantastic fuel, but by volume (in liquid form) it's terrible. Energy per unit >volume for jet fuel (kerosene) is almost 3 times higher than liquid hydrogen. This impacts the dead mass for fuel storage! Factor oxidizer into the mix and it's no contest. Burning kerosene and free air is way more efficient than hydrogen/oxygen rockets. Maybe what is needed is a different approach where low altitude thrust is generated by high density fuels and high altitude thrust is generated by low density fuels....
Complicates the systems but has the potential to be far more efficient in actual lift-off mass.
I agree, the problem is that nobody ever gets punished if the fault is clearly resting with the officers. Perhaps the incident was filmed and we'll see/hear for ourselves what actually happened.
If the border agents were in the wrong.... don't expect to see a video.... ever.
Oracle was successfully sued for designing their SE positions to exploit their salary designation. I'm not clear on what specific actions Oracle engaged in that led to them losing that fight, but I do know that a number of SEs received considerable compensation out of the suit. Oracle was also required to either change the designation for the position to hourly, or redesign it so it met a more reasonable hours/pr week standard.
Like many republicans have said, this issue WILL resolve itself. What bothers me is that it will likely be in my lifetime, but it will certainly be in my kids lifetime.
Have you trained them to survive in such a world? Do you even know what that might mean?
You really should do some homework in economics. WWII pulled us out of the great depression(which by the way seems to have been caused largely by over confidence in Free Market Deregulation.) The "New Deal" managed kept us from collapsing into abject anarchy. WWII build up is what saved the economy. At the close of WWII Eisenhower set the tax rates very high to pay down the war deficit. By the late 50's the economy was stalled. Kennedy takes over from Eisenhower and struggles with a 2 phase plan to jump start the economy, but Congress isn't buying into it... Heck even Kennedy wasn't really sold on it. Eisenhower had instilled "Fiscal Responsibility" into the peeps, which along with the high taxes was creating too much of a load on the economy.
Heller had this idea that if you give big business tax incentive for capital investment, then a short time later give consumers a big fat tax cut It stimulates production, quickly followed by consumer spending, when the consumer tax break kicks in about a year or two down the road. The core notion was that the Guberment had to expand the economy by investing in it. There are really only two ways to do that.... cut taxes, or to borrow money and spend it. Congress wasn't going to give Kennedy a blank check, so he went for the tax breaks. There were naysayers who wanted Kennedy to cut social programs too, but then some would not get any benefit, maybe too many to allow the defibrillation to take hold. Some even said that it was socially unjust to reduce taxes on the top 2% only 7% while dropping taxes up to 37% on the middle and lower income brackets. But lets face it... the working class stiffs in the lower 80% generate a lot more spending than the top 20% ever could. Worked like a charm once Kennedy figured out how to sell it to Congress. Sad thing is that if he hadn't been assassinated The Revenue Act of 1964 might not have been passed.
What we face today is a throw back to 1929. Same shit.
As for Mr. Fusion? How about some cleaner cheaper fission first. I'd rather see molten salt fission reactors get developed. It's much more likely to result in viable power reactors and generates very little waste, in fact most of the waste from molten salt breeder reactors is the kind of stuff that is useful, once it goes through a short cool down phase. Very little long term waste. Also molten salt reactors use Thorium as a feed stock (which is a wonderfully abundant feed stock). Uranium is only used to start the reactor the first time.... after that the breeder makes slightly more than enough uranium to sustain the reaction, and the little extra can be saved up to start the next reactor. MSRs do not make enough extra for weapon development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
Probably the best short term (5 year) fix for the economy:
If you are too big to fail; then you are too big. Period. Prosecute execs for malfeasance and fine some big offender corps down to a manageable size. Pry regulatory agencies out corporate orbits. Fund education based on teacher performance and education reform at K-12, University reform...
Too much has been left to commercial interests. The real pirates in the developed world wear power ties.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if giving the door panel a good kick would set that off. >:}
Having worked with CANbus in a recent project I can tell you with some authority that it has some serious problems when the system is not working correctly...
The standard requires that devices retry failed transmissions when one or more devices on the bus fail to read a CANbus frame correctly. This leads to a situation where more error traffic that system traffic appears on the bus. Once this happens the devices on the bus often shutdown, or restart believing that they have suffered a failure. The real issue might be cracked insulation on wet network cabling. This issue can easily cripple a subsystem, and in extreme cases bring down an entire system due to choking on error-retry packets.
It seems likely that the conditions that cascade off the cases raised with Toyota made them realize this would not be a quick patch. They may be recognizing a need to revisit a number of issues with regard to emergency situations in the withdrawn vehicle lines.
I think you mean 'car.egine' and 'car.powersteering'.
don't forget car.power_steering that is also dependent on car.engine being instanced.
This points to the stupidity of the manufacturer and a violation of what is safe to de-energize in a car and what is not. Emergency shutdown on a car used to be simple... Turning off the ignition key did exactly one thing: it shut off the engine. It didn't turn off the lights. It did reduce braking power and steering power, since those were coming from the engine. It didn't change the gearing or state of the transmission significantly either.
Later we got a complication: steering locks... turn the key too far back, and you get a steering lockup.... very bad if you you were trying to recover from a run-away engine.
Now you lose all of it from a button press?!?! WTF! Some managing engineers need to end up with their back against a pockmarked brick-wall, with a complementary last meal, blindfold, and cigarette.
Thank you! I snarfed my beer on that one.
Good point! As automakers redefine the auto, they shouldn't forget the Big Red Button that exists on every piece of heavy equipment that was used to create those cars. It may be that some mandated standard for emergency shutdown is over due.
Human rights are not a universal truth, "2+2=4" is a universal truth, beyond that we really don't have any.
"2+2=4" is only true for nominal values of '2' and '4.' For large values of '2', for example, or small values of '4' it most certainly would not be true.
'Universal truth'? Wha' izzat? When you find one, I'd like to see it.
Godwin'd on a sextoy story... Oh Buzz I feel your pain.
Did you see the floating unobtanium chunk that Parker (the manager) had on his desk? Same principle scaled up. The background material explains it by saying that unobtanium is a room-temperature superconductor and the mountains float due to the Meissner effect.
It wasn't Unobtainum. It was Obscurium.
Cameron must have played WoW and saw the Burning Crusade content.
Some floppies will survive, purely by accident, and it will be, enough.
Yeah, and those floppies will contain X-Files Mulder/Smoking Man slash-fic, and they'll know everything they need to know about our times: Best left forgotten.
More than likely they would contain early 8-bit GIF nudes of Ms. Anderson.
What I wonder and nobody has brought up. Why cant it die and come back in the spring? IT should be like any computer/robot and easily recover from a total power failure and restoration.
Why not let it sleep all winter and check in the spring when it may have enough solar-juice to come back online?
The core system/batteries need to be kept above a minimum temperature to prevent their destruction due to thermo-mechanical contraction. This requires that the system remain active to a limited degree so that the temperature may be managed. This also requires a minimal power budget. If the panel angle is too far off and/or there is too much dust on the panels, it may not be possible to prevent the system from "freezing to death."
At very low temperatures some semiconductor materials do not behave as expected. This can cause mis-operation and either hard or soft failure of active components.
It may be possible that enough of the components would survive a prolonged out of spec. thermal excursion, but the odds do not favor it. Semiconductor components, by their nature, are dissimilar metal and glass structures there's only so far they can be cooled before they mechanically fail due to internal mechanical stress. This also applies to macro-structures like joints and electrical connectors, lubricants, plastics, and insulation materials. Micro-fractures in semi-conductors leads to their failure to operate when they warm back up. Rivets pop.
Insulators crack. Support structures deform and break themselves or other components.
There's also only so far you can design in thermal relief before you compromise mechanical stability at nominal operating conditions.
No. My statement was general. If you buy crap. You support crap. And that is what the market will produce to get your consideration.
Yeah. Even your mobile phone has an OS with better memory management and UI functionality than your Amiga 4000.
Gee it's a lot faster too. Fancy that. :)
I'm afraid it doesn't allow more than a single resolution on my screen at once, it just offers a resizable window. Besides which, we're talking about hardware here.
From wikipedia:
Uses of the copper
* It can be used to change video hardware mid-frame. This allows the Amiga to change video configuration, including resolution, between scanlines. This allows the Amiga to display different horizontal resolutions, different colour depths, and entirely different frame buffers on the same screen. The AmigaOS graphical user interface allows two programs to operate at different resolutions in different buffers, while both are visible on the screen simultaneously.
So is the Amiga more powerful than both VirtualBox and the Mac? Again, Amiga wins! :P
You can do this today... if you want to run on a VGA monitor... The modern hardware will allow you to switch resolution mid-frame. However you might need to actually write some drivers to support it. Obviously this doesn't work well on LCD panels since they have a fixed resolution and why bother... we have the benefit of much larger/ higher resolution displays now, with no CPU overhead, and no funky video hardware banging.
Some ideas should just stay dead... Mid-frame video changes is one of those ideas. (PS: a lot of systems could support this trick back in the day... including the Apple //, //e, //c and //gs along with many PC ega/vga cards. OH and the Atari VCS did it on every single line of the frame... no choice there.... that was the ONLY way to generate useful video frames.)
Atari ST also ran a version of OS/2 which at the time, was the bees knees... I learned to write posix C on one of those systems when I worked for an Atari subsidiary. They were faster than PCs of the day too. Some of the graphics compression code I wrote in support of a NES game I was being paid to develop could only be run on that ST because it had enough CPU and RAM to get 'er done. None of the 80x86 PCs in '88 could touch it for raw processing power, RAM and HD speed.
Atari TOS/GEM ( And later the open sourced MiNT ) was/is still better! So take that! Seriously tho, see where all that bickering got us? Compartmentalized and marginalized into oblivion as the world of mass produced, consumer oriented mediocrity won in the end.... But I suppose at least we are in the same boat now, going nowhere.. A shame really, as a 'PC' just has no soul.
Gee where have we seen that before? Ummm let's see... Sony Beta v. VHS... IBM PC v. just about anything in the market at the time.
There are plenty of examples where 'best of breed' gets its ass handed to it by 'good enough'
If you buy crap you get stuck in a market that will only sell you crap.
Learn MacOS, learn Linux, learn Windows. Know what each does best and use where appropriate.
Thank you for that.
it will be nice when we can but a nautical rover in that liquid methane ocean...and not have to pay engineers to kludge their way out every hole, sandy spot, or dusty place. Also be cool if it could use the methane as a fuel source.
That might not work too well... Gonna bring your own oxygen along to burn the methane? Probably the best approach would be a 'Newcler Wessle'
By mass Hydrogen is a fantastic fuel, but by volume (in liquid form) it's terrible. Energy per unit >volume for jet fuel (kerosene) is almost 3 times higher than liquid hydrogen. This impacts the dead mass for fuel storage! Factor oxidizer into the mix and it's no contest. Burning kerosene and free air is way more efficient than hydrogen/oxygen rockets.
Maybe what is needed is a different approach where low altitude thrust is generated by high density fuels and high altitude thrust is generated by low density fuels....
Complicates the systems but has the potential to be far more efficient in actual lift-off mass.
I agree, the problem is that nobody ever gets punished if the fault is clearly resting with the officers. Perhaps the incident was filmed and we'll see/hear for ourselves what actually happened.
If the border agents were in the wrong.... don't expect to see a video.... ever.
Oracle was successfully sued for designing their SE positions to exploit their salary designation. I'm not clear on what specific actions Oracle engaged in that led to them losing that fight, but I do know that a number of SEs received considerable compensation out of the suit. Oracle was also required to either change the designation for the position to hourly, or redesign it so it met a more reasonable hours/pr week standard.
Like many republicans have said, this issue WILL resolve itself. What bothers me is that it will likely be in my lifetime, but it will certainly be in my kids lifetime.
Have you trained them to survive in such a world? Do you even know what that might mean?
You really should do some homework in economics. WWII pulled us out of the great depression(which by the way seems to have been caused largely by over confidence in Free Market Deregulation.) The "New Deal" managed kept us from collapsing into abject anarchy. WWII build up is what saved the economy. At the close of WWII Eisenhower set the tax rates very high to pay down the war deficit. By the late 50's the economy was stalled. Kennedy takes over from Eisenhower and struggles with a 2 phase plan to jump start the economy, but Congress isn't buying into it... Heck even Kennedy wasn't really sold on it. Eisenhower had instilled "Fiscal Responsibility" into the peeps, which along with the high taxes was creating too much of a load on the economy.
Heller had this idea that if you give big business tax incentive for capital investment, then a short time later give consumers a big fat tax cut It stimulates production, quickly followed by consumer spending, when the consumer tax break kicks in about a year or two down the road. The core notion was that the Guberment had to expand the economy by investing in it. There are really only two ways to do that.... cut taxes, or to borrow money and spend it. Congress wasn't going to give Kennedy a blank check, so he went for the tax breaks. There were naysayers who wanted Kennedy to cut social programs too, but then some would not get any benefit, maybe too many to allow the defibrillation to take hold. Some even said that it was socially unjust to reduce taxes on the top 2% only 7% while dropping taxes up to 37% on the middle and lower income brackets. But lets face it... the working class stiffs in the lower 80% generate a lot more spending than the top 20% ever could. Worked like a charm once Kennedy figured out how to sell it to Congress. Sad thing is that if he hadn't been assassinated The Revenue Act of 1964 might not have been passed.
What we face today is a throw back to 1929. Same shit.
As for Mr. Fusion? How about some cleaner cheaper fission first. I'd rather see molten salt fission reactors get developed. It's much more likely to result in viable power reactors and generates very little waste, in fact most of the waste from molten salt breeder reactors is the kind of stuff that is useful, once it goes through a short cool down phase. Very little long term waste. Also molten salt reactors use Thorium as a feed stock (which is a wonderfully abundant feed stock). Uranium is only used to start the reactor the first time.... after that the breeder makes slightly more than enough uranium to sustain the reaction, and the little extra can be saved up to start the next reactor. MSRs do not make enough extra for weapon development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
Maybe by then fusion could be done using z-pinch, which results in a continuous plasma field rather than pulses or insanely complex Tokamak structures. http://www.phys.washington.edu/users/sharpe/486/pasko_f.pdf
Probably the best short term (5 year) fix for the economy:
If you are too big to fail; then you are too big. Period.
Prosecute execs for malfeasance and fine some big offender corps down to a manageable size.
Pry regulatory agencies out corporate orbits.
Fund education based on teacher performance and education reform at K-12, University reform...
Too much has been left to commercial interests. The real pirates in the developed world wear power ties.