Let's put it this way- would you rather have them making a new series? I'd much rather see TOS put back in the spotlight than see another Captain Archer. **shudders** .
While private labs may have dried up, that doesn't necessarily mean that research is coming to a standstill in America. As a PhD engineering student, I see a great number of projects, including my own, that are funded by private companies. While the company may have a very specific goal in mind, but if a professor is smart it accomplishes so much more. The nature of university research combined with the need to publish papers means that fundamental research is being done.
Personally, my group is working with funding from a major corporation to answer some fundamental mechanics questions that they simply don't have the facilities, expertice (and patience, I think) to answer. The result will be a real-world product as well as some serious "pie in the sky" research.
If you want to feel like you are in a corporate lab of yesteryear, get a teaching position at a university and seek funding from a corporation. You may be doing almost the same thing.
God, I can't believe I'm the first one to ask this important question:
Since the airport will now be immune to a direct assult, have they thought of defending it from a small ground force, sent to shut down the shield generator? The only way we're stopping this is by stationing the father of the leader of the attacking force at the airport. The prohibitive amount of intelligence required for this countermeasure will render our airports vulnerable again.
Doesn't this violate most ISP's terms of service? I am sure that mine bars me from sharing freely with others, let alone for financial gain. For this to be perfectly legal, wouldn't you have to buy some sort of commercial-grade access? Are things different over in Europe?
I have a new Macbook pro, and yes, it does get hot. As for the thermal paste, I think it's an issue of it being easier to tell the assemblers to gob it on rather than risk someone not getting enough. As soon as my warrenty expires, you can guarantee I will be in there redoing it myself. On the other hand, I notice that my laptop's fan NEVER comes on, as long as I'm not in the hot sun. It seems that with the aluminum case, they have the luxury of using the back half of the laptop as a giant heat exchanger. Heat radiation is proportional to the difference in temperature between the air and the heatsink, so the high temperatures just mean that Apple has decided that having a quiet laptop was more important than a cool one. My friends all have Dells and Sonys. Yes, they run cooler, but their fans are almost ALWAYS on, and if they run any more than the basics, they start to sound like a leaf blower. Bottom line- with all my past laptops, I have had underclock them in order to keep the fans off, since that seems to be the first component to fail. I can put up with a hot computer, as long as it is quiet and lasts longer. A final note- my processor has a full blown whine, but it is easily quited with the well-known quietMBP program. I hope someone comes up with a more elegant solution.
For single player FPS games, I usually have a lot of fun. When things get tough, I invariably fall back on the following tactics. They depend only on the stupidity of the AI and its inability to learn:
1. Choke point: stupid AI's eventually run through a door, even if there are 20 of them and even if the last 5 guys to walk through the door are laying in a pile suffering from headshots. Can they figure out the pattern here?
2. Distract to higher firepower: you think the AI would wonder why the player is leading 10 enemies towards the gun turret? Probably not.
3. Shoot their legs: some of the slightly smarter AI will hide behind things, but usually leave a foot or hand sticking out. Sure, it takes 20 shots to kill them but they never seem to retract it.
4. Exploit routes: duh. Nearly every NPC follows a path until the player is noticed. Easy picking.
I'm sure there are many more of these, but it comes down to predictability, inability to learn, and inability to understand strong and weak positions within the level. One of my favorite game AI's is FarCry. Sure, they were still vounerable to the above tactics, but it would take a heck of a lot more coercing. Plus, NPCs would work together, always find cover, and try not to attack you from the front.
I'm a new mac owner and am having a really hard time using iTunes due to its lack of.ogg and.wma support. More than 3/4 of my 40gb collection is in.ogg, and no, none of the "workarounds" have worked for me.
For now, I'm using VLC and very well organized folders, but I'd like something with an easily searchable library and nice playlist generation (think winamp). Any thoughts?
I'm assuming that they mean 100 times as much linear force per unit mass. Shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators have been around since the 60's, and they are incredibly powerful. An actuator made from 1mm diameter Nitenol wire can easily lift 10lbs. Their reaction time can be measured in ms if enough heat is applied quickly. So, the claim is not so farfetched.
Of course, there are several caches to using a SMA actuator: First, its operating temperature range is less than 100C, and usually more like 40C, depending on the alloy. Second, the actuator needs to be biased with a spring to return it to its original shape. The spring will have to be pretty hefty- at least 1/3 of the maximum load. If the load is a dead-load, the spring is not needed. Finally, as another poster has mentioned, the initial response can be in the millisecond, but the recovery time can be much longer. This is because of the simple fact that dissipating heat is much more difficult than creating it. If these designers have figured out a way to pump out heat just as fast as they can dump it in, my hat is off to them.
I cannot speak to their efficiency, since it is highly dependent on the design of the device. If *only* enough heat is added to actuate the device, they could be very efficient, but this is rarely the case.
I had this problem on a Gigabyte motherboard 2 years ago. You have two options I can think of:
1. Find someone with the same model and do the BIOS hot swap trick, as mentioned on an earlier comment. 2. Hope that your computer stores the bios settings in volatile memory- take out the CMOS battery for a few minutes and you should erase them, restoring the board to its default state. This was my solution, and it worked like a charm.
Aaaah, yes the memory footprint. I have investigated and confirmed that Azereus uses upwards of 40mb of memory at any given time. This isn't much of an issue when you have 1Gb of ram, but it's certainly more than it should be using. I tried out uTorrent and found that it offers most of the features with only 2mb of ram. I have since switched, since 38mb is still 38mb!
Thanks to slashdotters for pointing people in new directions- I trust people in comments much more than Cnet reviewers. The comments, especially in "review" articles, are 3x more valuable than the article itself.
Does anyone find it annoying that every program gets only 4 or 4.5 stars? What is the point of reviewing 5 different programs if they all get essentially the same score? Azereus is by far the better client, yet it only gets an extra.5 stars for this distinction. Its features and usability are far beyond the others I've tried, and it's open source/java to boot.
My dell latitude pp01s is basically a clone of the sony you were talking about. It, or its inspiron equivalent, are on ebay for pretty cheap. Mine is a 700mhz P3 but I underclock it to 500 to keep the fan from coming on. With a new battery, it'll stay on for a good 3 hours. The screen is small (11") but clear, and the keyboard has good travel for such a small machine. It doesn't have an onboard CD-ROM, but the external one has a special interface that lets you boot from it with no problems.
In case anyone didn't know, the true reason for yet another record-breaking win comes down to a single factor: solar array power. The Nuna cars, ever since 2001, have all had first quality satellite grade solar arrays. They have also been the only car with a sponsor (ESA) that could afford these incredibly expensive cells, which have a list price on the order of 2 million dollars. Every other team has settled for "factory second" solar cells with 25-40% less power at less than 1/10th the cost. While Nuna's array power is likely in excess of 2500 watts, the rest of the top 3 have less than 1900W. Nuna has yet to innovate in aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics, or construction techniques.
This is just another example of a good business plan and the right contacts prevailing over true engineering excellence. Nuna has done a great job in getting their whole country behind them with tremendous media coverage. To see some excellent designs, check out the next top 3 teams: Aurora, Michigan, and TIGA.
Aurora has placed 2nd in the last 3 challenges, usually only an hour behind Nuna but with 30% less array power. They boast an incredibly light car, very good aerodynamics, and a unique carbon fiber tubular suspension/frame that is truly unique.
Tiga is the top Japanese team and is the best solar car around a closed track. At under 550lbs (with driver) they are the lightest car in the race. The car handles like a BMW and runs just as fast.
Michigan is the top American car and boasts arguably the best aerodynamics of all the cars. Their car is only 10" thick at the midsection and uses sweeping wheel covers to sail through crosswinds. They were also the 3rd best car on the track during the race qualifier, an engineering feat in itself, as a thin car presents a number of suspension/frame and dynamic challenges.
The biggest rules limiting design are the following:
Car size: 1.8x5m, 2m high. The size limit is for obvious reasons- without it, they cars would get huge.
driver position: eye height 0.7m, head behind and above knees, ground visibility 8m ahead. Purely safety- the driver can't see what's going on if he's 2" off the pavement, and a headfirst seating position is incredibly dangerous in any crash.
Other than that, all of the rules just say that your car has to be electrically and mechanically safe, with battery monitoring and a full roll cage. The officials encourage innovation, as long as the end result is still a safe car.
As far as your question about ride height, it is mostly determined by the size of the tires and the eye height requirement. Yes, lower is better, but get too low and your wheels are coming through your array and your driver's cockpit stick out 2 feet! If you look at the top 5 cars in the field, they are engineering marvels, both in aerodynamics and weight reduction. Believe me, nothing goes on these cars without a very good reason.
These motors are not, by any means, conventional DC motors. They're actually better described as a brushless 3-phase axial flux motor, also known as a "pancake" design. The DC power, 60-120V, is first fed through a fairly advanced motor controller that outputs a trapezoidal wave to each of the 3 phases. Each phase, in turn, pulls 12 rare-earth magnets, glued to the rotor, around the axle. The chief design limitation these motors get around is that they can provide 11hp while fitting nearly inside a 3-inch wide wheel. As for efficiency, the motors are around 95%. Almost any other motor, AC included, either can't supply enough torque or doesn't fit within the tight aerodynamic package that these cars require. At $20,000 a piece, this motor is still the cheapest option for most teams, as better motors can cost twice as much.
What's to stop someone from purchasing the access and then sharing it with everyone on the plane through an ad-hoc wireless bridge? (except for those pesky regulations)
A few years back I interned at the Clorox R&D labs. In their industry, as in many others, most of their tests were industry standards that would be very difficult to tweak. They were very concerned that their results be repeatable and therefore verifiable, lest they have a few lawsuits on their hands. Of course, the problem with the computer business now is that there are so many tests and not one agreeable "standard," which is what you get when a product is used for so many different tasks. The difference is that a computer is so complex that it cannot be described by a simple quantitative rubric. Until a product becomes more like a commodity, it will always have this "truth" problem.
As a builder of 2 solar racers and having competed against Toronto twice I can say that no matter what sort of solar car you build, an accident such as this one is almost impossible to design around. The Toronto car I remember (maybe a previous generation) was an aluminum space frame, as are many solar cars. These frames are designed well, and even though they weigh less than 30 lbs they can take quite an impact. What injurs drivers is not so much a weak structure but a strong structure- no crush space and a rigid frame can transfer most of the crash's energy to the driver's body. Without airbags and a specified crush space, there is no way a 600lb car can survive a head-on at highway speeds. No way.
That said, these are experimental vehicles that are built to strict safety guidelines. See the actual rules this car was built by at
http://www.americansolarchallenge.org/event/asc200 5/tech/asc2005Nov03.pdf
Event organizers go to every length to keep the cars out of accidents, requiring chase and lead vehicles (already mentioned), crash tests, rollbars, body crush space, helmets, minimum visibility, and safety training.
My heart goes out to the Toronto team, and I hope that a tragedy like this one does not destroy their team or its message.
This fall, I visited a modern wind farm on the southern coast of Australia. The farm has been in operation for only a few years and has yet to kill any birds.
These new turbines are huge- the blades are as long as a city bus. Their blades can change their pitch so that they always spin at a constant 19rpm, plenty slow for birds and ensuring optimal efficiency. It has one of the world's best up-times, at over 70%. The wind farm at Altimont's greatest fault is being obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's put it this way- would you rather have them making a new series? I'd much rather see TOS put back in the spotlight than see another Captain Archer. **shudders**
.
While private labs may have dried up, that doesn't necessarily mean that research is coming to a standstill in America. As a PhD engineering student, I see a great number of projects, including my own, that are funded by private companies. While the company may have a very specific goal in mind, but if a professor is smart it accomplishes so much more. The nature of university research combined with the need to publish papers means that fundamental research is being done. Personally, my group is working with funding from a major corporation to answer some fundamental mechanics questions that they simply don't have the facilities, expertice (and patience, I think) to answer. The result will be a real-world product as well as some serious "pie in the sky" research. If you want to feel like you are in a corporate lab of yesteryear, get a teaching position at a university and seek funding from a corporation. You may be doing almost the same thing.
God, I can't believe I'm the first one to ask this important question:
Since the airport will now be immune to a direct assult, have they thought of defending it from a small ground force, sent to shut down the shield generator? The only way we're stopping this is by stationing the father of the leader of the attacking force at the airport. The prohibitive amount of intelligence required for this countermeasure will render our airports vulnerable again.
Doesn't this violate most ISP's terms of service? I am sure that mine bars me from sharing freely with others, let alone for financial gain. For this to be perfectly legal, wouldn't you have to buy some sort of commercial-grade access? Are things different over in Europe?
There is one available- the Plextor PX716-SA. I have had it for a year now and it works beautifully.
I have a new Macbook pro, and yes, it does get hot. As for the thermal paste, I think it's an issue of it being easier to tell the assemblers to gob it on rather than risk someone not getting enough. As soon as my warrenty expires, you can guarantee I will be in there redoing it myself.
On the other hand, I notice that my laptop's fan NEVER comes on, as long as I'm not in the hot sun. It seems that with the aluminum case, they have the luxury of using the back half of the laptop as a giant heat exchanger. Heat radiation is proportional to the difference in temperature between the air and the heatsink, so the high temperatures just mean that Apple has decided that having a quiet laptop was more important than a cool one.
My friends all have Dells and Sonys. Yes, they run cooler, but their fans are almost ALWAYS on, and if they run any more than the basics, they start to sound like a leaf blower.
Bottom line- with all my past laptops, I have had underclock them in order to keep the fans off, since that seems to be the first component to fail. I can put up with a hot computer, as long as it is quiet and lasts longer.
A final note- my processor has a full blown whine, but it is easily quited with the well-known quietMBP program. I hope someone comes up with a more elegant solution.
For single player FPS games, I usually have a lot of fun. When things get tough, I invariably fall back on the following tactics. They depend only on the stupidity of the AI and its inability to learn:
1. Choke point: stupid AI's eventually run through a door, even if there are 20 of them and even if the last 5 guys to walk through the door are laying in a pile suffering from headshots. Can they figure out the pattern here?
2. Distract to higher firepower: you think the AI would wonder why the player is leading 10 enemies towards the gun turret? Probably not.
3. Shoot their legs: some of the slightly smarter AI will hide behind things, but usually leave a foot or hand sticking out. Sure, it takes 20 shots to kill them but they never seem to retract it.
4. Exploit routes: duh. Nearly every NPC follows a path until the player is noticed. Easy picking.
I'm sure there are many more of these, but it comes down to predictability, inability to learn, and inability to understand strong and weak positions within the level. One of my favorite game AI's is FarCry. Sure, they were still vounerable to the above tactics, but it would take a heck of a lot more coercing. Plus, NPCs would work together, always find cover, and try not to attack you from the front.
I'm a new mac owner and am having a really hard time using iTunes due to its lack of .ogg and .wma support. More than 3/4 of my 40gb collection is in .ogg, and no, none of the "workarounds" have worked for me.
For now, I'm using VLC and very well organized folders, but I'd like something with an easily searchable library and nice playlist generation (think winamp). Any thoughts?
Oh man, this would be cool! Can they have a young Adama character? All they have to do is put a moustache on him like it was a flashback!
I'm assuming that they mean 100 times as much linear force per unit mass. Shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators have been around since the 60's, and they are incredibly powerful. An actuator made from 1mm diameter Nitenol wire can easily lift 10lbs. Their reaction time can be measured in ms if enough heat is applied quickly. So, the claim is not so farfetched.
Of course, there are several caches to using a SMA actuator: First, its operating temperature range is less than 100C, and usually more like 40C, depending on the alloy. Second, the actuator needs to be biased with a spring to return it to its original shape. The spring will have to be pretty hefty- at least 1/3 of the maximum load. If the load is a dead-load, the spring is not needed. Finally, as another poster has mentioned, the initial response can be in the millisecond, but the recovery time can be much longer. This is because of the simple fact that dissipating heat is much more difficult than creating it. If these designers have figured out a way to pump out heat just as fast as they can dump it in, my hat is off to them.
I cannot speak to their efficiency, since it is highly dependent on the design of the device. If *only* enough heat is added to actuate the device, they could be very efficient, but this is rarely the case.
I had this problem on a Gigabyte motherboard 2 years ago. You have two options I can think of:
1. Find someone with the same model and do the BIOS hot swap trick, as mentioned on an earlier comment.
2. Hope that your computer stores the bios settings in volatile memory- take out the CMOS battery for a few minutes and you should erase them, restoring the board to its default state. This was my solution, and it worked like a charm.
Of course I RTFA, but I was questioning the logic of having a rating system where every product gets the same score.
I give your reply 4 out of 5 stars.
Aaaah, yes the memory footprint. I have investigated and confirmed that Azereus uses upwards of 40mb of memory at any given time. This isn't much of an issue when you have 1Gb of ram, but it's certainly more than it should be using. I tried out uTorrent and found that it offers most of the features with only 2mb of ram. I have since switched, since 38mb is still 38mb!
Thanks to slashdotters for pointing people in new directions- I trust people in comments much more than Cnet reviewers. The comments, especially in "review" articles, are 3x more valuable than the article itself.
Does anyone find it annoying that every program gets only 4 or 4.5 stars? What is the point of reviewing 5 different programs if they all get essentially the same score? Azereus is by far the better client, yet it only gets an extra .5 stars for this distinction. Its features and usability are far beyond the others I've tried, and it's open source/java to boot.
How much do you think Sony will compensate the artists for these millions of downloads? I'll place my bet on a big fat $0.00.
My dell latitude pp01s is basically a clone of the sony you were talking about. It, or its inspiron equivalent, are on ebay for pretty cheap. Mine is a 700mhz P3 but I underclock it to 500 to keep the fan from coming on. With a new battery, it'll stay on for a good 3 hours. The screen is small (11") but clear, and the keyboard has good travel for such a small machine. It doesn't have an onboard CD-ROM, but the external one has a special interface that lets you boot from it with no problems.
It seems to break in Firefox but works on Safari. The website is just non-compliant, not slashdotted.
In case anyone didn't know, the true reason for yet another record-breaking win comes down to a single factor: solar array power. The Nuna cars, ever since 2001, have all had first quality satellite grade solar arrays. They have also been the only car with a sponsor (ESA) that could afford these incredibly expensive cells, which have a list price on the order of 2 million dollars. Every other team has settled for "factory second" solar cells with 25-40% less power at less than 1/10th the cost. While Nuna's array power is likely in excess of 2500 watts, the rest of the top 3 have less than 1900W. Nuna has yet to innovate in aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics, or construction techniques. This is just another example of a good business plan and the right contacts prevailing over true engineering excellence. Nuna has done a great job in getting their whole country behind them with tremendous media coverage. To see some excellent designs, check out the next top 3 teams: Aurora, Michigan, and TIGA. Aurora has placed 2nd in the last 3 challenges, usually only an hour behind Nuna but with 30% less array power. They boast an incredibly light car, very good aerodynamics, and a unique carbon fiber tubular suspension/frame that is truly unique. Tiga is the top Japanese team and is the best solar car around a closed track. At under 550lbs (with driver) they are the lightest car in the race. The car handles like a BMW and runs just as fast. Michigan is the top American car and boasts arguably the best aerodynamics of all the cars. Their car is only 10" thick at the midsection and uses sweeping wheel covers to sail through crosswinds. They were also the 3rd best car on the track during the race qualifier, an engineering feat in itself, as a thin car presents a number of suspension/frame and dynamic challenges.
Maybe it wasn't the best idea to link 2 Hexus articles in a matter of hours... I doubt anyone will read this article until tomorrow.
first post!?
The biggest rules limiting design are the following: Car size: 1.8x5m, 2m high. The size limit is for obvious reasons- without it, they cars would get huge. driver position: eye height 0.7m, head behind and above knees, ground visibility 8m ahead. Purely safety- the driver can't see what's going on if he's 2" off the pavement, and a headfirst seating position is incredibly dangerous in any crash. Other than that, all of the rules just say that your car has to be electrically and mechanically safe, with battery monitoring and a full roll cage. The officials encourage innovation, as long as the end result is still a safe car. As far as your question about ride height, it is mostly determined by the size of the tires and the eye height requirement. Yes, lower is better, but get too low and your wheels are coming through your array and your driver's cockpit stick out 2 feet! If you look at the top 5 cars in the field, they are engineering marvels, both in aerodynamics and weight reduction. Believe me, nothing goes on these cars without a very good reason.
These motors are not, by any means, conventional DC motors. They're actually better described as a brushless 3-phase axial flux motor, also known as a "pancake" design. The DC power, 60-120V, is first fed through a fairly advanced motor controller that outputs a trapezoidal wave to each of the 3 phases. Each phase, in turn, pulls 12 rare-earth magnets, glued to the rotor, around the axle.
The chief design limitation these motors get around is that they can provide 11hp while fitting nearly inside a 3-inch wide wheel. As for efficiency, the motors are around 95%. Almost any other motor, AC included, either can't supply enough torque or doesn't fit within the tight aerodynamic package that these cars require. At $20,000 a piece, this motor is still the cheapest option for most teams, as better motors can cost twice as much.
What's to stop someone from purchasing the access and then sharing it with everyone on the plane through an ad-hoc wireless bridge? (except for those pesky regulations)
A few years back I interned at the Clorox R&D labs. In their industry, as in many others, most of their tests were industry standards that would be very difficult to tweak. They were very concerned that their results be repeatable and therefore verifiable, lest they have a few lawsuits on their hands.
Of course, the problem with the computer business now is that there are so many tests and not one agreeable "standard," which is what you get when a product is used for so many different tasks.
The difference is that a computer is so complex that it cannot be described by a simple quantitative rubric. Until a product becomes more like a commodity, it will always have this "truth" problem.
As a builder of 2 solar racers and having competed against Toronto twice I can say that no matter what sort of solar car you build, an accident such as this one is almost impossible to design around. The Toronto car I remember (maybe a previous generation) was an aluminum space frame, as are many solar cars. These frames are designed well, and even though they weigh less than 30 lbs they can take quite an impact. What injurs drivers is not so much a weak structure but a strong structure- no crush space and a rigid frame can transfer most of the crash's energy to the driver's body. Without airbags and a specified crush space, there is no way a 600lb car can survive a head-on at highway speeds. No way. That said, these are experimental vehicles that are built to strict safety guidelines. See the actual rules this car was built by at http://www.americansolarchallenge.org/event/asc200 5/tech/asc2005Nov03.pdf
Event organizers go to every length to keep the cars out of accidents, requiring chase and lead vehicles (already mentioned), crash tests, rollbars, body crush space, helmets, minimum visibility, and safety training.
My heart goes out to the Toronto team, and I hope that a tragedy like this one does not destroy their team or its message.
This fall, I visited a modern wind farm on the southern coast of Australia. The farm has been in operation for only a few years and has yet to kill any birds. These new turbines are huge- the blades are as long as a city bus. Their blades can change their pitch so that they always spin at a constant 19rpm, plenty slow for birds and ensuring optimal efficiency. It has one of the world's best up-times, at over 70%. The wind farm at Altimont's greatest fault is being obsolete.