It's taken as read that the energy density problem is yet to be solved. That's why we are discussing hybrids and not pure electric vehicles. So given that you start with a tank of volatile petrochemicals as your primary energy store, what's the best way to maximise *overall* efficiency? Answer - convert to electric power as early as possible in the energy transfer chain and throw as little away as possible from then on. That means:
a) Use the most efficient thermal engine you can to drive a generator - right now that's a diesel optimised to run at a particular constant speed. Maybe something else might come along more efficient - Stirling maybe, if it has the same degree of research put into it that diesels have received in the past century.
b) Use motors at 80-90% constant efficiency for mechanical motive power with no further losses due to transmission (motor-in-wheel for example).
c) Recover as much energy as you can from braking. Since the energy cannot be converted back to petrochemical form, you need some form of charge storage.
d) Save as much weight as possible and make the vehicle as aerodynamic as possible within the constraints of it having to actually be useful, i.e. carry human beings and some cargo.
However, why isn't more effort put into continuously/infinitely variable transmissions
The car/truck industry has attempted to make these work for decades with varying degrees of success. The fundamental issue is why you *need* a transmission at all. That tells me that there's something basically wrong with the internal combustion engine as a source of motive power. Indeed there is - it is just not really suitable because of the 'impedance mismatch' between the mechanical power it produces and that needed for a car in ordinary use. Therefore you need a clutch to overcome the fact that it cannot run at 0rpm, and gives barely any torque at all at idle speed, and it needs gears to overcome the limited speed range. It's also a one-way energy conversion system, so once it has converted to mechanical motion, it's gone - when you brake you simply throw the excess energy away (what's left after the transmission has thrown another third away before it even gets to the wheels). Looked at this way the I/C engine powered car is as wasteful as it gets. An electric motor on the other hand, has none of these problems. It gives plenty of torque at 0rpm (no clutch required) and a wide speed range (no gears required) and is a bidirectional converter (no brakes required, or at least most of the energy embodied in the moving vehicle can be recovered). Electric motors do away with the whole question of infinitely variable transmission, and all that weight saved translates into a potentially much lighter vehicle too.
I believe the short/medium term future for hybrid vehicles is an all-electric drive system using enough on-board battery (or supercapacitor) storage for a typical commute, plug-in-able, with an efficient fixed speed diesel-electric generator system to supply the power for longer trips. Current approaches such as the Prius are a joke - a mere tiptoe in the water - still far too complicated and hampered by the mechanical connection of the I/C component to the wheels. Trouble is most of the big car manufacturers are too wedded to their traditional mechanical thinking so far to make the leap, but there are signs that things are moving that way: the QED Mini, the Lightning GT and even the Chevy Volt. This car is actually thinking along the right lines, my only beef is with the Stirling-electric generator, which might look efficient on paper but I'm sceptical that it can be made to work in real life. At least a diesel is tried-and-tested, with loads of accumulated experience out there that can be tapped. If something better comes along then it could be swapped in without having to redesign the rest of the vehicle.
Why don't the inventors of these various electric cars do some basic sums? If you're going to have any sort of hydrocarbon fuel involved then use the most efficient conversion possible to electric power given the space constraint of a practical vehicle. Right now that's a fixed-speed diesel engine at approaching 50%. All these 'exotic' heat engines like Stirling etc. are dead in the water when it comes to basic thermodynamic efficiency. If you don't start with a reasonably efficient conversion you are not going to end up with a vehicle that is even slightly practical.
Downloading music is just teenagers getting their kicks. There was a time you knew something about that, apparently. A good heart really *is* hard to find.
If you really installed them, you would know for a fact to conserve battery life, they have a long check-in interval for monitored sensors. By the time I opened the door and brought in my tool caddy, etc, I would have had plenty of time to find valuables, disconnect the main box, and leave.
I'm not sure what the state of the art is now, and I suspect that a low-cost system would be pretty poor and you'd be right about the above. However, it need not be the case. In 1987/88 I worked on designing a system that used periodic check-in (or supervisory, which was the term we used) as they all did, but a complete transmission took 110mS including all the preamble and error correction coding in the bitstream. We used 1800 baud MPSK which was considered fast for its time and the bandwidth available to us. The supervisory signal was transmitted every 28 seconds, so duty cycle was 1/256. The quiescent draw of the sensor chip was under 10uA (a very hard figure to achieve, just possible with custom silicon at that time) and I think the transmitter draw was about 40mA when keyed. So the overall current draw was getting on for ~30uA on average. Using a certain 3v lithium cell our battery life was predicted at almost 7 years, though since the project ultimately never saw the light of day, this was never tested in the field. Even requiring several missed supervisories to trigger the alarm (which we did) would mean you still would only have a minute and a half to carry out the burglary - though we used other means to detect deliberate jamming as well which would kick in sooner. It's quite easy to discriminate between a deliberate blocking signal and random short-term interference. Spoofing was also really hard to do because you not only had to spoof a sensor known to the system, but do so with precise timing and correct data format, etc while knocking out the real sensor. Really the purpose of supervisory messages was to detect a sensor going offline for some reason (such as a dead battery, though it would have sent low battery reports for months in advance of that event) rather than detecting jamming. I forget all the details but you could program the response to a missing supervisory anyway - perimeter sensors would trigger an alarm but internal ones typically wouldn't.
While that particular system didn't make it into production, I know that similar ones did, but since my career went in another direction not long after that, I didn't keep up with the industry. I don't know what is common today. I'll say this though, one reason we developed the system was because of the shockingly poor quality of existing radio technology that we'd initially bought in from the US (we were a British company). These systems used an 11 baud (!) data rate in a transmission taking well over a second, with several repeats "just to make sure" (i.e. the redundancy in the bits sent was accomplished by simply sending the message several times rather than using any form of error correction). The modulation was on-off keying so the transmitters had to have incredibly low power to pass any sort of type approval, at least in the UK. The receiver was also a joke - a bandwidth as wide as a barn door, using a super-regenerative design for low cost. Deaf as a post and jammable with the crudest of techniques. If low cost systems today still use anything like this system, I'd say that any security they provide is purely imaginary. Our receiver was deliberately and carefully designed to be very selective, so any jamming signal had to be dead-on frequency or else very, very powerful to overwhelm the front-end. It was also very sensitive so the low power of the sensors was less of a handicap (we were limited to maximum 10mW ERP by law). There again, careful design of the transmitters for low spurious emissions and an efficient modulation scheme and a proper antenna design meant that we could actually put out close to that power and still not cause interference problems ourselves.
No doubt ours was a relatively expensive design but on
Wireless = a burglar could disable them remotely?
Either by jamming or by spoofing.
Or trigger them often enough remotely so that they eventually get disabled;).?br>
I used to design radio-based alarm systems in the 1980s. These were the first things we'd make sure couldn't easily happen. In those days we only had one narrow-band channel to work with (allowed by law) so anti-jamming was basically a case of a loss of signal from the sensors and/or a blocking signal present at the receiver would trigger an alarm, which meant that (3) was a definite possibility. The 'loss of signal' detection implies that the sensors transmit continuously - they don't, but they do send a brief 'check-in' at periodic intervals. The check-in period was a pseudo-random sequence to prevent different sensors checking-in on top of each other (since they couldn't 'listen out') and as a result the receiver could very quickly determine whether a sensor had missed its checkin. Later spread-spectrum techniques got around most kinds of dumb jamming attempts - it would still be possible to spoof the system in theory but only using relatively sophisticated bogus transmissions. And spoofing is reasonably easy to prevent in the decode software. I assume most modern systems today will use much better techniques than we had at our disposal twenty years ago.
I'd say this though, as a former alarm engineer - if you really have something to protect, the best security is physical, not an alarm. If you can't secure your own building go to someone who can, e.g. safe deposit boxes. Alarms are pants, whether they use wireless or not.
f you had paid attention you would remember Bush referencing the Axis of Evil. He did exactly what he said he would do. It wasn't a con job. He told everyone from the start what he was gonna do. Iraq, having been under a previous cease fire agreement that they repeatedly violated, was just the easiest to start sumthin wit, after Afghanistan of course. Sadaam was one of if not the largest supporter of terrorism back when he ruled Iraq. Now it's Iran. If Bush had balls, he'd take on Iran before leaving office.
What the fuck gives the USA the right to go and invade a foreign nation? There is no "Axis of evil", it's just rhetoric, standing for "people we don't and won't understand". I don't particularly like the regime in North Korea, but that gives me no right whatsoever to invade/attack it or even threaten to. The USA only goes around acting this way because it has so much military hardware at its disposal that everyone is afraid to stop them. That about sums up any playground bully. The USA is so incredibly fetishistic about having all the guns and weapons that it borders on some sort of collective insanity.
Also, this sort of sentiment is coming at you from all your friends - western allies and ardent admirers of the US in many other areas. When even your friends start worrying about you in this way, surely you have to take notice? Or is the collective insanity actually too far gone already? No? Who's going to do something about it?
Re:Funny how times change. . .
on
James Bond Gadgets
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The hell with Bond. I can't believe we were all so damned naive in the Sixties and Seventies. Dr. No and all those other metaphors for power-lunacy were either working for the government or the government was working for them. No difference at the top. And we, the plebes, were eating that garbage up like candy.
You have a point, but consider this. In 1960 WW2 had only been over 15 years, and that *was* all about defeating a megalomaniac bent on world domination. It's no coincidence that for the next twenty or more years so many films (Star Wars for example) followed a similar theme, as did children's cartoons - how many times did "Speed Buggy" defeat a german-sounding professor intent on ruling the world? This is how our parents' generation dealt with very real nightmare they lived through - you could argue that these films and other productions were a channeling of their collective traumas.
Errm, if you're going to claim I said something, why not, you know, actually check what I wrote. It's right there:
I didn't bother speeding up too much (maybe to 80km/h) or changing lanes (because the lane I was in was the one we'd all be in in 2km)
I didn't state that I "couldn't be bothered to change lanes" as you have quoted me as saying (claiming they were my "exact words". They weren't). I didn't change lanes because we were all about to be funnelled back into the one I was already in, as clearly stated, and other traffic made it unsafe to do so before I did.
Fuck off, you weren't there. The only dangerous driver in the area was the guy behind me, and exceptionally impatient with it. I was also travelling at the posted speed limit which was in force for the roadworks. I couldn't pull out of his way safely before I did so due to heavy traffic in adjacent lanes, and it gained him precisely one place in the queue, which he didn't even need, since he then turned off. Time gained? Oh, about 0.1 seconds. Only he seemed to be having a problem - everyone else was just taking it easy in the obviously temporary gap between roadwork sections. If he hadn't been there at all my driving would not have caused any problem to anyone else and certainly would not have led to the very near accident. Unlike him, I was anticipating the overall conditions and the fact that the roadworks continued ahead, something that had been clearly signed for several kilometres. I'm sorry but his behaviour was solely at fault and quite indefensible.
We've all seen cunts like that, it's not a rare occurrence. How many times do you see traffic jams occur where three lanes go down to two because the selfish cunts are all steaming up the outside trying to gain as many places as they can, then jamming themselves in at the last moment? If everyone merged smoothly and in a timely fashion these jams wouldn't even occur, saving everyone loads of time. But it never happens, because it only takes one selfish arse and unfortunately that's probably >50% of road users in my experience.
For the record, I'm actually very diligent about using the correct lane on motorways, etc and not baulking traffic, but sometimes there are other considerations, as in this case. Everyone's a fucking expert when they are not actually in the situation, aren't they?
I'm with you. One time in Germany I was crawling through roadworks which caused a lot of delay as everyone was forced into one lane. Once the first set of roadworks ended and we were back to three lanes but I could see it was only going to be for about 2km before another set of roadworks, so I didn't bother speeding up too much (maybe to 80km/h) or changing lanes (because the lane I was in was the one we'd all be in in 2km). Of course the bozo behind in a (what else) BMW 735i was 2 inches off my bumper flashing his headlights and tooting his horn. He got the finger repeatedly. I was in a UK-registered car, right hand drive, and with GB plate, so that probably wound him up even more. I feared for his heart as he was clearly going purple with rage. Eventually, fearing a ramming, I let him past. He accelerated excessively past me, expending a great deal of effort and attention on gesticulating at me. He didn't notice the traffic was slowing down again and was stopped up ahead, but realised just in time and just about managed to stop. Llucky he had ABS. I tucked in behind him and followed him for another 10km at a slow crawl through the roadworks. As they ended, he pulled off into a Rasthof as I tootled past... You have to wonder why he felt it so necessary to get in front of me for no good reason (except it *was* a BMW, so that does go with the territory). Maybe his pa was shot down in the war and couldn't stand a British car in front. He was extremely lucky he didn't cause an accident.
We all know that the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom.
So, unless Wikipedia adds a huge DON'T PANIC header to their website, I won't be using it.
Who buys those high-end Windows machines? Nobody with any sense.
Yet they are manufactured. Thus someone thought they did make sense business-wise. Perhaps, not everyone just buys the cheapest, and actually buy things that offer better quality, fit or finish?
Actually I suspect what we used was 1,1,1-Tricloroethene but I don't recall in detail. It's all banned now anyway - wonder what they use these days? I know at the same company I developed atopic dermatitis while working on the PCB production line which still troubles me to this day.
Similar thing happened to me once. I am very much a UFO skeptic (at least skeptical of the 'alien' explanation anyway), but one day I was driving along around dusk and saw what looked like a classic UFO in the sky - cigar shaped, silvery, glowing. It was hovering rather than moving at high speed but its position did change slowly. As I was moving myself and the object held its nominal position, it could only be something large at a distance. I could only get glimpses due to terrain, but I *HAD* to know what it was...
It took a while before I could turn off the motorway I was on, and then figure out how to get closer to it. It was hard because I didn't have clear sight of it, but luckily it didn't suddenly zoom away as I half expected it to! Eventually I got it - I turned into a gateway to find... a large illuminated blimp attending some sort of sports event.
Quite a few posters have said this is a write-off without even seeing the state of the kit in question. That's pretty pessimistic! Here's a tale that should give hope:
Many years ago I worked in the service department of an electronics OEM repairing stuff returned from the field. The OEM built two-way radios. One time we were sent a portable radio that had been recovered from the sea-bed having been dropped from an oil-rig in the North Sea six months previously. The unit had a die-cast zinc/aluminium chassis and case and standard double-sided PCBs with mostly discrete components and a few ICs. It was extremely corroded, covered in salty deposits, and naturally didn't work. I was written off immediately but as a 17yo with time on his hands I took it as a challenge. I cleaned up the unit by passing it through the tanks of hot trichloroethylene that were used for cleaning newly assembled boards. This removed most of the surface corrosion on the PCBs and chassis. An open-framed rotary switch for channel selection was replaced as it was too far gone.I ran the boards through the normal service/setup procedure. The receiver came up no problem with basic retuning. The transmitter was dead but only needed a new final stage transistor and a retune. It passed spec. It was returned to the customer along with a new replacement unit. They were astonished and very pleased with the customer service received beyond the call of duty or expectation. Whether it was connected I don't know but they placed a huge order with us several months afterwards...
The kit here was immersed in fresh water for much less time. While component densities are much higher in modern kit, I think there's a good chance it will work after careful cleaning and drying. Worth a shot anyway - what have you got to lose?
Actually having a Macbook somewhere in public and running the risk of some Apple-loving jackass try to talk to me about it isn't worth it.
Don't flatter yourself. Even if I am a Mac user seeing another one in the street doesn't automatically mean I expect to have anything else in common. This whole "Mac fanboy" stereotype is a myth, I'm pretty sure. And it's getting very, very old to boot.
A bit low-key for one of these events. Steve seemed to expect woots and clapping at a few places that never came. Jonny Ive looked uncomfortable and a bit nervous and wearing a jacket three sizes too small; the other guy was a dull speaker. The hall was only half full and overall it was a pretty slow event.
On the other hand, the faster graphics chipsets are a relief - I'm developing some software that needs every ounce of GPU performance it can give!
Is your tale of woe because you have a Mac, or because you are attempting to get something done in Portugal? In my experience, you can't get *anything* done in Portugal.
Apple themselves have put up a barrier to that. In order to actually develop programs for Macs, you have to pay them quite a bit of money just to get the basic dev tools, and even more in order to make higher end programs.
ROFL! Do you ever actually, you know, check facts or anything before posting, or just spout stuff you assume to be true or heard off the bloke down the pub?
Apple ship the entire development suite with every single installation disk of OS X free of charge. That means every Mac buyer has the dev tools, which include the IDE, Xcode, Interface Builder, a version of the GCC compiler, Instruments (dtrace) and many other more minor tools. These are not demo versions or crippled versions, they are all the full blown 100% working professional versions. It also includes comprehensive built-in developer documentation for all of the APIs and technologies. You can code in C, Objective-C, C++, Pascal, Python, Ruby... whatever really, it's all built-in. (Objective-C being the most useful "native" language however). Free updates for the dev tools are downloadable from the web. (Apple Developer Site)
If you want to sign up as an Apple developer, they have three levels of subscription. The lowest level is free - just sign up on the web. The middle and top level subcriptions cost money. For that you get access to developer technical support and pre-release copies of upcoming OS releases. However there are mailing lists that you can make use of even if you have no subscription at all and they are very helpful and staffed by Apple engineers voluntarily as well as other knowledgable developers.
The barrier to entry as a Mac (or iPhone too) developer is nothing at all - install the tools and dive right in. In your case the barrier to entry would appear to be your own ignorance.
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Next, he'll be changing his name to 'squiggle' and carving 'Slave' on his face. That usually works.
It's taken as read that the energy density problem is yet to be solved. That's why we are discussing hybrids and not pure electric vehicles. So given that you start with a tank of volatile petrochemicals as your primary energy store, what's the best way to maximise *overall* efficiency? Answer - convert to electric power as early as possible in the energy transfer chain and throw as little away as possible from then on. That means:
a) Use the most efficient thermal engine you can to drive a generator - right now that's a diesel optimised to run at a particular constant speed. Maybe something else might come along more efficient - Stirling maybe, if it has the same degree of research put into it that diesels have received in the past century.
b) Use motors at 80-90% constant efficiency for mechanical motive power with no further losses due to transmission (motor-in-wheel for example).
c) Recover as much energy as you can from braking. Since the energy cannot be converted back to petrochemical form, you need some form of charge storage.
d) Save as much weight as possible and make the vehicle as aerodynamic as possible within the constraints of it having to actually be useful, i.e. carry human beings and some cargo.
However, why isn't more effort put into continuously/infinitely variable transmissions
The car/truck industry has attempted to make these work for decades with varying degrees of success. The fundamental issue is why you *need* a transmission at all. That tells me that there's something basically wrong with the internal combustion engine as a source of motive power. Indeed there is - it is just not really suitable because of the 'impedance mismatch' between the mechanical power it produces and that needed for a car in ordinary use. Therefore you need a clutch to overcome the fact that it cannot run at 0rpm, and gives barely any torque at all at idle speed, and it needs gears to overcome the limited speed range. It's also a one-way energy conversion system, so once it has converted to mechanical motion, it's gone - when you brake you simply throw the excess energy away (what's left after the transmission has thrown another third away before it even gets to the wheels). Looked at this way the I/C engine powered car is as wasteful as it gets. An electric motor on the other hand, has none of these problems. It gives plenty of torque at 0rpm (no clutch required) and a wide speed range (no gears required) and is a bidirectional converter (no brakes required, or at least most of the energy embodied in the moving vehicle can be recovered). Electric motors do away with the whole question of infinitely variable transmission, and all that weight saved translates into a potentially much lighter vehicle too.
I believe the short/medium term future for hybrid vehicles is an all-electric drive system using enough on-board battery (or supercapacitor) storage for a typical commute, plug-in-able, with an efficient fixed speed diesel-electric generator system to supply the power for longer trips. Current approaches such as the Prius are a joke - a mere tiptoe in the water - still far too complicated and hampered by the mechanical connection of the I/C component to the wheels. Trouble is most of the big car manufacturers are too wedded to their traditional mechanical thinking so far to make the leap, but there are signs that things are moving that way: the QED Mini, the Lightning GT and even the Chevy Volt. This car is actually thinking along the right lines, my only beef is with the Stirling-electric generator, which might look efficient on paper but I'm sceptical that it can be made to work in real life. At least a diesel is tried-and-tested, with loads of accumulated experience out there that can be tapped. If something better comes along then it could be swapped in without having to redesign the rest of the vehicle.
Why don't the inventors of these various electric cars do some basic sums? If you're going to have any sort of hydrocarbon fuel involved then use the most efficient conversion possible to electric power given the space constraint of a practical vehicle. Right now that's a fixed-speed diesel engine at approaching 50%. All these 'exotic' heat engines like Stirling etc. are dead in the water when it comes to basic thermodynamic efficiency. If you don't start with a reasonably efficient conversion you are not going to end up with a vehicle that is even slightly practical.
If you use QT, or GTK, or WX you can still have it on OSX as well as others.
Yes, but if he *wants* it on a Mac, primarily, it will look like crap.
Downloading music is just teenagers getting their kicks. There was a time you knew something about that, apparently. A good heart really *is* hard to find.
If you really installed them, you would know for a fact to conserve battery life, they have a long check-in interval for monitored sensors. By the time I opened the door and brought in my tool caddy, etc, I would have had plenty of time to find valuables, disconnect the main box, and leave.
I'm not sure what the state of the art is now, and I suspect that a low-cost system would be pretty poor and you'd be right about the above. However, it need not be the case. In 1987/88 I worked on designing a system that used periodic check-in (or supervisory, which was the term we used) as they all did, but a complete transmission took 110mS including all the preamble and error correction coding in the bitstream. We used 1800 baud MPSK which was considered fast for its time and the bandwidth available to us. The supervisory signal was transmitted every 28 seconds, so duty cycle was 1/256. The quiescent draw of the sensor chip was under 10uA (a very hard figure to achieve, just possible with custom silicon at that time) and I think the transmitter draw was about 40mA when keyed. So the overall current draw was getting on for ~30uA on average. Using a certain 3v lithium cell our battery life was predicted at almost 7 years, though since the project ultimately never saw the light of day, this was never tested in the field. Even requiring several missed supervisories to trigger the alarm (which we did) would mean you still would only have a minute and a half to carry out the burglary - though we used other means to detect deliberate jamming as well which would kick in sooner. It's quite easy to discriminate between a deliberate blocking signal and random short-term interference. Spoofing was also really hard to do because you not only had to spoof a sensor known to the system, but do so with precise timing and correct data format, etc while knocking out the real sensor. Really the purpose of supervisory messages was to detect a sensor going offline for some reason (such as a dead battery, though it would have sent low battery reports for months in advance of that event) rather than detecting jamming. I forget all the details but you could program the response to a missing supervisory anyway - perimeter sensors would trigger an alarm but internal ones typically wouldn't.
While that particular system didn't make it into production, I know that similar ones did, but since my career went in another direction not long after that, I didn't keep up with the industry. I don't know what is common today. I'll say this though, one reason we developed the system was because of the shockingly poor quality of existing radio technology that we'd initially bought in from the US (we were a British company). These systems used an 11 baud (!) data rate in a transmission taking well over a second, with several repeats "just to make sure" (i.e. the redundancy in the bits sent was accomplished by simply sending the message several times rather than using any form of error correction). The modulation was on-off keying so the transmitters had to have incredibly low power to pass any sort of type approval, at least in the UK. The receiver was also a joke - a bandwidth as wide as a barn door, using a super-regenerative design for low cost. Deaf as a post and jammable with the crudest of techniques. If low cost systems today still use anything like this system, I'd say that any security they provide is purely imaginary. Our receiver was deliberately and carefully designed to be very selective, so any jamming signal had to be dead-on frequency or else very, very powerful to overwhelm the front-end. It was also very sensitive so the low power of the sensors was less of a handicap (we were limited to maximum 10mW ERP by law). There again, careful design of the transmitters for low spurious emissions and an efficient modulation scheme and a proper antenna design meant that we could actually put out close to that power and still not cause interference problems ourselves.
No doubt ours was a relatively expensive design but on
Wireless = a burglar could disable them remotely? ;).?br>
Either by jamming or by spoofing.
Or trigger them often enough remotely so that they eventually get disabled
I used to design radio-based alarm systems in the 1980s. These were the first things we'd make sure couldn't easily happen. In those days we only had one narrow-band channel to work with (allowed by law) so anti-jamming was basically a case of a loss of signal from the sensors and/or a blocking signal present at the receiver would trigger an alarm, which meant that (3) was a definite possibility. The 'loss of signal' detection implies that the sensors transmit continuously - they don't, but they do send a brief 'check-in' at periodic intervals. The check-in period was a pseudo-random sequence to prevent different sensors checking-in on top of each other (since they couldn't 'listen out') and as a result the receiver could very quickly determine whether a sensor had missed its checkin. Later spread-spectrum techniques got around most kinds of dumb jamming attempts - it would still be possible to spoof the system in theory but only using relatively sophisticated bogus transmissions. And spoofing is reasonably easy to prevent in the decode software. I assume most modern systems today will use much better techniques than we had at our disposal twenty years ago.
I'd say this though, as a former alarm engineer - if you really have something to protect, the best security is physical, not an alarm. If you can't secure your own building go to someone who can, e.g. safe deposit boxes. Alarms are pants, whether they use wireless or not.
f you had paid attention you would remember Bush referencing the Axis of Evil. He did exactly what he said he would do. It wasn't a con job. He told everyone from the start what he was gonna do. Iraq, having been under a previous cease fire agreement that they repeatedly violated, was just the easiest to start sumthin wit, after Afghanistan of course. Sadaam was one of if not the largest supporter of terrorism back when he ruled Iraq. Now it's Iran. If Bush had balls, he'd take on Iran before leaving office.
What the fuck gives the USA the right to go and invade a foreign nation? There is no "Axis of evil", it's just rhetoric, standing for "people we don't and won't understand". I don't particularly like the regime in North Korea, but that gives me no right whatsoever to invade/attack it or even threaten to. The USA only goes around acting this way because it has so much military hardware at its disposal that everyone is afraid to stop them. That about sums up any playground bully. The USA is so incredibly fetishistic about having all the guns and weapons that it borders on some sort of collective insanity.
Also, this sort of sentiment is coming at you from all your friends - western allies and ardent admirers of the US in many other areas. When even your friends start worrying about you in this way, surely you have to take notice? Or is the collective insanity actually too far gone already? No? Who's going to do something about it?
The hell with Bond. I can't believe we were all so damned naive in the Sixties and Seventies. Dr. No and all those other metaphors for power-lunacy were either working for the government or the government was working for them. No difference at the top. And we, the plebes, were eating that garbage up like candy.
You have a point, but consider this. In 1960 WW2 had only been over 15 years, and that *was* all about defeating a megalomaniac bent on world domination. It's no coincidence that for the next twenty or more years so many films (Star Wars for example) followed a similar theme, as did children's cartoons - how many times did "Speed Buggy" defeat a german-sounding professor intent on ruling the world? This is how our parents' generation dealt with very real nightmare they lived through - you could argue that these films and other productions were a channeling of their collective traumas.
I didn't state that I "couldn't be bothered to change lanes" as you have quoted me as saying (claiming they were my "exact words". They weren't). I didn't change lanes because we were all about to be funnelled back into the one I was already in, as clearly stated, and other traffic made it unsafe to do so before I did.
Fuck off, you weren't there. The only dangerous driver in the area was the guy behind me, and exceptionally impatient with it. I was also travelling at the posted speed limit which was in force for the roadworks. I couldn't pull out of his way safely before I did so due to heavy traffic in adjacent lanes, and it gained him precisely one place in the queue, which he didn't even need, since he then turned off. Time gained? Oh, about 0.1 seconds. Only he seemed to be having a problem - everyone else was just taking it easy in the obviously temporary gap between roadwork sections. If he hadn't been there at all my driving would not have caused any problem to anyone else and certainly would not have led to the very near accident. Unlike him, I was anticipating the overall conditions and the fact that the roadworks continued ahead, something that had been clearly signed for several kilometres. I'm sorry but his behaviour was solely at fault and quite indefensible.
We've all seen cunts like that, it's not a rare occurrence. How many times do you see traffic jams occur where three lanes go down to two because the selfish cunts are all steaming up the outside trying to gain as many places as they can, then jamming themselves in at the last moment? If everyone merged smoothly and in a timely fashion these jams wouldn't even occur, saving everyone loads of time. But it never happens, because it only takes one selfish arse and unfortunately that's probably >50% of road users in my experience.
For the record, I'm actually very diligent about using the correct lane on motorways, etc and not baulking traffic, but sometimes there are other considerations, as in this case. Everyone's a fucking expert when they are not actually in the situation, aren't they?
I'm with you. One time in Germany I was crawling through roadworks which caused a lot of delay as everyone was forced into one lane. Once the first set of roadworks ended and we were back to three lanes but I could see it was only going to be for about 2km before another set of roadworks, so I didn't bother speeding up too much (maybe to 80km/h) or changing lanes (because the lane I was in was the one we'd all be in in 2km). Of course the bozo behind in a (what else) BMW 735i was 2 inches off my bumper flashing his headlights and tooting his horn. He got the finger repeatedly. I was in a UK-registered car, right hand drive, and with GB plate, so that probably wound him up even more. I feared for his heart as he was clearly going purple with rage. Eventually, fearing a ramming, I let him past. He accelerated excessively past me, expending a great deal of effort and attention on gesticulating at me. He didn't notice the traffic was slowing down again and was stopped up ahead, but realised just in time and just about managed to stop. Llucky he had ABS. I tucked in behind him and followed him for another 10km at a slow crawl through the roadworks. As they ended, he pulled off into a Rasthof as I tootled past... You have to wonder why he felt it so necessary to get in front of me for no good reason (except it *was* a BMW, so that does go with the territory). Maybe his pa was shot down in the war and couldn't stand a British car in front. He was extremely lucky he didn't cause an accident.
We all know that the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom.
So, unless Wikipedia adds a huge DON'T PANIC header to their website, I won't be using it.
You mean like this:
H2G2.com
I find it hard to imagine a single intellectual amongst them.
Who buys those high-end Windows machines? Nobody with any sense.
Yet they are manufactured. Thus someone thought they did make sense business-wise. Perhaps, not everyone just buys the cheapest, and actually buy things that offer better quality, fit or finish?
All engineered to standards that don't even exist yet.
Even as a Mac user/developer this makes me cringe. Ewww...
Mmm, chloroform....
Actually I suspect what we used was 1,1,1-Tricloroethene but I don't recall in detail. It's all banned now anyway - wonder what they use these days? I know at the same company I developed atopic dermatitis while working on the PCB production line which still troubles me to this day.
Similar thing happened to me once. I am very much a UFO skeptic (at least skeptical of the 'alien' explanation anyway), but one day I was driving along around dusk and saw what looked like a classic UFO in the sky - cigar shaped, silvery, glowing. It was hovering rather than moving at high speed but its position did change slowly. As I was moving myself and the object held its nominal position, it could only be something large at a distance. I could only get glimpses due to terrain, but I *HAD* to know what it was...
It took a while before I could turn off the motorway I was on, and then figure out how to get closer to it. It was hard because I didn't have clear sight of it, but luckily it didn't suddenly zoom away as I half expected it to! Eventually I got it - I turned into a gateway to find... a large illuminated blimp attending some sort of sports event.
Quite a few posters have said this is a write-off without even seeing the state of the kit in question. That's pretty pessimistic! Here's a tale that should give hope:
Many years ago I worked in the service department of an electronics OEM repairing stuff returned from the field. The OEM built two-way radios. One time we were sent a portable radio that had been recovered from the sea-bed having been dropped from an oil-rig in the North Sea six months previously. The unit had a die-cast zinc/aluminium chassis and case and standard double-sided PCBs with mostly discrete components and a few ICs. It was extremely corroded, covered in salty deposits, and naturally didn't work. I was written off immediately but as a 17yo with time on his hands I took it as a challenge. I cleaned up the unit by passing it through the tanks of hot trichloroethylene that were used for cleaning newly assembled boards. This removed most of the surface corrosion on the PCBs and chassis. An open-framed rotary switch for channel selection was replaced as it was too far gone.I ran the boards through the normal service/setup procedure. The receiver came up no problem with basic retuning. The transmitter was dead but only needed a new final stage transistor and a retune. It passed spec. It was returned to the customer along with a new replacement unit. They were astonished and very pleased with the customer service received beyond the call of duty or expectation. Whether it was connected I don't know but they placed a huge order with us several months afterwards...
The kit here was immersed in fresh water for much less time. While component densities are much higher in modern kit, I think there's a good chance it will work after careful cleaning and drying. Worth a shot anyway - what have you got to lose?
Actually having a Macbook somewhere in public and running the risk of some Apple-loving jackass try to talk to me about it isn't worth it.
Don't flatter yourself. Even if I am a Mac user seeing another one in the street doesn't automatically mean I expect to have anything else in common. This whole "Mac fanboy" stereotype is a myth, I'm pretty sure. And it's getting very, very old to boot.
A bit low-key for one of these events. Steve seemed to expect woots and clapping at a few places that never came. Jonny Ive looked uncomfortable and a bit nervous and wearing a jacket three sizes too small; the other guy was a dull speaker. The hall was only half full and overall it was a pretty slow event.
On the other hand, the faster graphics chipsets are a relief - I'm developing some software that needs every ounce of GPU performance it can give!
Is your tale of woe because you have a Mac, or because you are attempting to get something done in Portugal? In my experience, you can't get *anything* done in Portugal.
Apple themselves have put up a barrier to that. In order to actually develop programs for Macs, you have to pay them quite a bit of money just to get the basic dev tools, and even more in order to make higher end programs.
ROFL! Do you ever actually, you know, check facts or anything before posting, or just spout stuff you assume to be true or heard off the bloke down the pub?
Apple ship the entire development suite with every single installation disk of OS X free of charge. That means every Mac buyer has the dev tools, which include the IDE, Xcode, Interface Builder, a version of the GCC compiler, Instruments (dtrace) and many other more minor tools. These are not demo versions or crippled versions, they are all the full blown 100% working professional versions. It also includes comprehensive built-in developer documentation for all of the APIs and technologies. You can code in C, Objective-C, C++, Pascal, Python, Ruby... whatever really, it's all built-in. (Objective-C being the most useful "native" language however). Free updates for the dev tools are downloadable from the web. (Apple Developer Site)
If you want to sign up as an Apple developer, they have three levels of subscription. The lowest level is free - just sign up on the web. The middle and top level subcriptions cost money. For that you get access to developer technical support and pre-release copies of upcoming OS releases. However there are mailing lists that you can make use of even if you have no subscription at all and they are very helpful and staffed by Apple engineers voluntarily as well as other knowledgable developers.
The barrier to entry as a Mac (or iPhone too) developer is nothing at all - install the tools and dive right in. In your case the barrier to entry would appear to be your own ignorance.
an English accent is--a grotesque hybrid of Received Pronunciation and Cockney.
Yep, that's sounds about right.