Here is the thing: hybrids do not provide substantial fuel economy and environmental impact gains for people driving long highway commutes. It works very well in a frequent stop-and-go driving situation. While Toyota put the Prius on the market, GM spent their time developing a 2-mode hybrid bus providing both a boost in efficiency and comfort. When the bus leaves a stop, it relies on the electric motor while slowly ramping up the natural gas diesel engine. These buses have replace the fleet of tour buses at Yosemite National Park, where tour guides have reported seeing more wildlife on tours as these buses do not produce as much noise as previous buses, hence not scaring the animals away.
FYI, in GMC's booth at the NAIAS today is the 2-mode hybrid Yukon. This is due out in 2008.
Toyota may have beaten Detroit to the consumer hybrid table, but their days of dominance in this field is numbered. GM alone will, as of 2008, have a hybrid sedan (Aura Green Line), hybrid crossover SUV (Vue Green Line), and full size truck SUV (hybrid Tahoe/Yukon/Silverado/Sierra). That means you can drive a hybrid that actually looks like a regular car (imagine that!) instead of a poorly executed fashion statement.
Dude, we got a Dell, a Precision 670n to be specific...
Red Hat Enterprise 9 installed with the computer. All the hardware works, and I've had no complaints. I guess it isn't a truly free distro but at least it's Linux.
While multiphase flow has existed for quite some time, this is quite an interesting development. The article was thin on details of their experimental setup, but I would be interested to see their cfd code (if they wrote their own) or if they used a commercial code. Also, I am curious as to their meshing strategy. Lastly, how did they verify their results? My best guess would be to let the simulation run in a transient state until it reached a steady state point and then correlate that to a measurement in quality of the fluid over time, and then compare progressions? My experience is with mainly single-phase flows, but eventually I will need to look into this area.
So Gran Turismo 4 (released March 05) does not make this list? I think this game was extremely well done and should be considered at least on par if not better than Forza. Maybe this game was on the 04 or 03 list and I missed it (release delays).
Canon has had this out for a couple months... They modified a 20D specifically for astrophotography. One of the main features is to use the LCD as the viewfinder with zoom (for framing stars). It costs about as much as the 20D did when it was new. Link
As a DSLR owner, I have to ask why this feature would be desired? When shooting, especially when the subject is moving fast, the easiest way to capture an image is by using the optics. Delays and ghosting on an LCD would just kill the shot composition. Also, how would this camera acknowledge the auto-focus points? Would it have a grid pattern similar to what is seen in the traditional viewfinder, or could you choose from several arrays from which the camera could choose to focus (which would be kind of neat).
I still won't buy this or anything Sony for that matter.
Content, Content, Content... And a little help for the search engines such as ALT tags and relevant TITLE tags. When setting up pages, I often look at the page in Lynx to see what the crawler should see. After all, it is a little hard for the search engine to describe an image without any tag data. Unless, of course, you are amazon and you have a turk at your disposal. Amazon's Mechanical Turk
This would actually be a practical use of this paint. In racing, when a team needs to quickly diagnose an engine problem clearly as a result of a bad cylinder (bad spark plug), they will put chalk streaks on the headers and see which one melts the slowest, thus pointing to the problem. If they could create a powder coat with the same properties and paint even a small part of the headers, one could visually inspect for misfiring cylinders and, if controlled well enough, could quantify cylinder-to-cylinder variations visually.
Seriously though... I work in a lab with no heat, no a/c, and only a door to allow air in. We just got some intel boxes which I have christened "Space Heater 1" and "Space Heater 2" because they are just that... space heaters. A colleague complained that the air coming off the back of the computers was like "someone waving a hairdryer over your head". It got to the point where one day he was profusely sweating, so we "modded" the biggest offender (a xeon box) with cardboard ductwork to get the hot air away. This winter, I plan on just running huge overnight CFD jobs on these computers overnight if I need it to be nice and toasty in the lab.
I have 2 machines on my desk for computational stuff. The Itanium2 box is used for my "set up and run overnight" jobs. It seems to run just as fast as the other box, a Dell Xeon box, but can run more jobs at the same time. Both systems have similar spec otherwise (4 gb ram, SCSI RAID, RHEL). The other major issue I have with the Itanium is software support. My processor program's vendor (CFD) has an optimized version for the Itanium, whereas no similar version of the pre-processor exists. So I mesh on the Xeon, run on the Itanium. I wonder if this chip is still a viable solution for heavy computation or if another architecture is superior?
It's either Cummins, Detroit Diesel, or International (depending on who built the bus). Honda, while having great fuel economy, has very little development in the diesel world. Aside from that, the diesel is much better suited to a school bus than a conventional SI engine is. The reason is that CI (diesel) engines operate better in low-speed, high torque situations. SI engines are great for your little honda because they are better at high speeds and low torque. Diesels have a much higher compression ratio and operate at much higher in-cylinder pressures, preventing them from achieving high-rpm's.
I believe the benefits of diesel are best seen when a turbocharger is used. Efficiency increases greatly when boosted. You also achieve better combustion in the cylinder. Remaining emissions (soot and particulate matter) can be filtered out with scrubbers.
Diesel engine companies and turbocharger manufacturers take fuel efficiency very seriously. Due to their use in tractor trailers, heavy machinery, and public transportation, I would say the best 0-60mph or highest hp is not as important as saving gas.
Depending on the final name of the new company, I'd say that they'd either change it to Sprint Cup (dumb idea IMO) or they would incorporate the name into the chase at the end of the season. Perhaps instead of the chase they'll call it the "Sprint to the Cup".
Good point.. I should have mentioned that the train system is sufficient for most of the long distance hauling. Problem is, at least for SoCal, the geography of the region is such that light rail on top of the current infrastructure would cost much more than simply adding lanes. There are people who commute an hour to get to LA from the inland areas. And this is an hour at freeway speeds. The Metro helps out for only the people who live in the South Bay, Downtown, South LA, and Pasadena. Metrolink also helps out. The geography outside of LA makes it terrible to use this as a substitute. One rail line connects Los Angeles to San Francisco along the coastline. That line is used to transport quite a bit or goods and people. When the landslide occured in La Conchita a month ago, it completely crippled the rail lines in the area. The geography inhibits the building of more rail (not to mention the coastal commission). Believe me, I would love to take the train in place of driving 4 hours. But twice the price and twice the time (8-10 hours), forget it.
I live and drive long distances in California frequently. The vehicles that do more damage to these freeways are not even registered here. San Pedro/Long Beach is one of the two busiest ports in the country. So everything that comes from china, etc. to be stocked at Wal-Mart or wherever comes through by means of a)train and b) SEMI-TRUCK. Trucks hurt the freeways more than anything because they are almost always loaded just below the maximum allowed for a vehicle traveling on the road (reason for weigh stations) and in the case of trucks with an open bed or hopper, debris loss is frequent. I have seen many a windsheild broken because of this. And no trucking company would be insane as to register their trucks in California. Why? Because the government has painted themselves into a corner charging confiscatory rates for commercial vehicles plus the fact that these trucks rarely stay in the state for the majority of their life. Will California require them to place these transponders in their trucks to pay when they fill up at the truck stops throughout the state? I can't see how this would work. Even if they tried, the trucking companies (especially the independents) would revolt. Ideas like this make me think that this state needs to split. I'm not trolling, just reacting to the sentiment amongst my colleagues.
Over the last summer I was managing an adwords campaign for a small art gallery. When we noticed that entering in our gallery name came up with an adwords ad for a competing gallery whom we had never heard of, I was tasked with finding out how to fix this. We considered suing the other gallery, suing whoever else we could (this was in LA, mind you), or my solution: have Google fix it. I emailed the Google support folks and they responded saying basically that we should just deal with it ourselves and they can't do anything to take those ads away. So, I wrote a nice email to the competing gallery explaining my issue. The next day, no more ad! Since this is small-time compared to the big companies involved here, I don't know if this situation applies, but who knows... Maybe I should have sued Google so I can pay off my college bills:)
Re:Offline games require online reporting = BOGUS
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 0
This is the most insane thing about Steam: When I can't reach Steam - either because it's down, or because I happen to be in a location with no network access
Um... hm. I recall a thing called "connect in offline mode". I used it to play HL2 on an airline flight to Detroit after watching Battle Royale... Seemed to work fine. And no, I do not have a disc either, a friend bought it for me off of Steam for my birthday. Just a thought.
Yes, but the problem was that if you got close enough to the changing station, it would charge you, in the form of 40000000 kajillion volts.
I read this and immediately began reminiscing about summer days as a kid reinforcing my Soviet base with Tesla coils in C&C Red Alert. I always felt a sense of accomplishment when a horde of soldiers came to my base to get charged up...
My Canon 10D has had 2 firmware upgrades since purchase. Most, if not all, Canon SLR's have had firmware upgrades. In fact, there was a hack for the Digital Rebel (300D) that enabled some features that made it a "virtual 10D" instead of the stock rebel, IIRC it increased the buffer limit and allowed some color temperature variations or something like that. Of course firmware won't stop me from laughing at someone who paid $1000 for a piece of plastic with some 10D guts.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the thing: hybrids do not provide substantial fuel economy and environmental impact gains for people driving long highway commutes. It works very well in a frequent stop-and-go driving situation. While Toyota put the Prius on the market, GM spent their time developing a 2-mode hybrid bus providing both a boost in efficiency and comfort. When the bus leaves a stop, it relies on the electric motor while slowly ramping up the natural gas diesel engine. These buses have replace the fleet of tour buses at Yosemite National Park, where tour guides have reported seeing more wildlife on tours as these buses do not produce as much noise as previous buses, hence not scaring the animals away.
FYI, in GMC's booth at the NAIAS today is the 2-mode hybrid Yukon. This is due out in 2008.
Toyota may have beaten Detroit to the consumer hybrid table, but their days of dominance in this field is numbered. GM alone will, as of 2008, have a hybrid sedan (Aura Green Line), hybrid crossover SUV (Vue Green Line), and full size truck SUV (hybrid Tahoe/Yukon/Silverado/Sierra). That means you can drive a hybrid that actually looks like a regular car (imagine that!) instead of a poorly executed fashion statement.
My friends and I always considered this to be "Half Life: The Movie"...
Half-Life
Dude, we got a Dell, a Precision 670n to be specific...
Red Hat Enterprise 9 installed with the computer. All the hardware works, and I've had no complaints. I guess it isn't a truly free distro but at least it's Linux.
While multiphase flow has existed for quite some time, this is quite an interesting development. The article was thin on details of their experimental setup, but I would be interested to see their cfd code (if they wrote their own) or if they used a commercial code. Also, I am curious as to their meshing strategy. Lastly, how did they verify their results? My best guess would be to let the simulation run in a transient state until it reached a steady state point and then correlate that to a measurement in quality of the fluid over time, and then compare progressions? My experience is with mainly single-phase flows, but eventually I will need to look into this area.
I've been using this... for like a couple weeks.
/. and weather plugins are very nice.
The
So Gran Turismo 4 (released March 05) does not make this list? I think this game was extremely well done and should be considered at least on par if not better than Forza. Maybe this game was on the 04 or 03 list and I missed it (release delays).
Canon has had this out for a couple months... They modified a 20D specifically for astrophotography. One of the main features is to use the LCD as the viewfinder with zoom (for framing stars). It costs about as much as the 20D did when it was new. Link
As a DSLR owner, I have to ask why this feature would be desired? When shooting, especially when the subject is moving fast, the easiest way to capture an image is by using the optics. Delays and ghosting on an LCD would just kill the shot composition. Also, how would this camera acknowledge the auto-focus points? Would it have a grid pattern similar to what is seen in the traditional viewfinder, or could you choose from several arrays from which the camera could choose to focus (which would be kind of neat).
I still won't buy this or anything Sony for that matter.
Content, Content, Content... And a little help for the search engines such as ALT tags and relevant TITLE tags. When setting up pages, I often look at the page in Lynx to see what the crawler should see. After all, it is a little hard for the search engine to describe an image without any tag data. Unless, of course, you are amazon and you have a turk at your disposal. Amazon's Mechanical Turk
DuPont sells it also as Chromalusion. Saleen offers it as a paint option on new Mustangs (I have seen one, it is a beautiful thing).
This would actually be a practical use of this paint. In racing, when a team needs to quickly diagnose an engine problem clearly as a result of a bad cylinder (bad spark plug), they will put chalk streaks on the headers and see which one melts the slowest, thus pointing to the problem. If they could create a powder coat with the same properties and paint even a small part of the headers, one could visually inspect for misfiring cylinders and, if controlled well enough, could quantify cylinder-to-cylinder variations visually.
Couple of friends of mine are on the Poly Cubesat project (I go there as well, but work across the street). Congrats to them.
Seriously though... I work in a lab with no heat, no a/c, and only a door to allow air in. We just got some intel boxes which I have christened "Space Heater 1" and "Space Heater 2" because they are just that... space heaters. A colleague complained that the air coming off the back of the computers was like "someone waving a hairdryer over your head". It got to the point where one day he was profusely sweating, so we "modded" the biggest offender (a xeon box) with cardboard ductwork to get the hot air away. This winter, I plan on just running huge overnight CFD jobs on these computers overnight if I need it to be nice and toasty in the lab.
I have 2 machines on my desk for computational stuff. The Itanium2 box is used for my "set up and run overnight" jobs. It seems to run just as fast as the other box, a Dell Xeon box, but can run more jobs at the same time. Both systems have similar spec otherwise (4 gb ram, SCSI RAID, RHEL). The other major issue I have with the Itanium is software support. My processor program's vendor (CFD) has an optimized version for the Itanium, whereas no similar version of the pre-processor exists. So I mesh on the Xeon, run on the Itanium. I wonder if this chip is still a viable solution for heavy computation or if another architecture is superior?
Elian.... ELIAN!!!
It's either Cummins, Detroit Diesel, or International (depending on who built the bus). Honda, while having great fuel economy, has very little development in the diesel world. Aside from that, the diesel is much better suited to a school bus than a conventional SI engine is. The reason is that CI (diesel) engines operate better in low-speed, high torque situations. SI engines are great for your little honda because they are better at high speeds and low torque. Diesels have a much higher compression ratio and operate at much higher in-cylinder pressures, preventing them from achieving high-rpm's.
I believe the benefits of diesel are best seen when a turbocharger is used. Efficiency increases greatly when boosted. You also achieve better combustion in the cylinder. Remaining emissions (soot and particulate matter) can be filtered out with scrubbers.
Diesel engine companies and turbocharger manufacturers take fuel efficiency very seriously. Due to their use in tractor trailers, heavy machinery, and public transportation, I would say the best 0-60mph or highest hp is not as important as saving gas.
Depending on the final name of the new company, I'd say that they'd either change it to Sprint Cup (dumb idea IMO) or they would incorporate the name into the chase at the end of the season. Perhaps instead of the chase they'll call it the "Sprint to the Cup".
that one of the sex offenders is located close to the "Catholic University of America"... i dunno, just pointing it out.
Good point.. I should have mentioned that the train system is sufficient for most of the long distance hauling. Problem is, at least for SoCal, the geography of the region is such that light rail on top of the current infrastructure would cost much more than simply adding lanes. There are people who commute an hour to get to LA from the inland areas. And this is an hour at freeway speeds. The Metro helps out for only the people who live in the South Bay, Downtown, South LA, and Pasadena. Metrolink also helps out. The geography outside of LA makes it terrible to use this as a substitute. One rail line connects Los Angeles to San Francisco along the coastline. That line is used to transport quite a bit or goods and people. When the landslide occured in La Conchita a month ago, it completely crippled the rail lines in the area. The geography inhibits the building of more rail (not to mention the coastal commission). Believe me, I would love to take the train in place of driving 4 hours. But twice the price and twice the time (8-10 hours), forget it.
I live and drive long distances in California frequently. The vehicles that do more damage to these freeways are not even registered here. San Pedro/Long Beach is one of the two busiest ports in the country. So everything that comes from china, etc. to be stocked at Wal-Mart or wherever comes through by means of a)train and b) SEMI-TRUCK. Trucks hurt the freeways more than anything because they are almost always loaded just below the maximum allowed for a vehicle traveling on the road (reason for weigh stations) and in the case of trucks with an open bed or hopper, debris loss is frequent. I have seen many a windsheild broken because of this. And no trucking company would be insane as to register their trucks in California. Why? Because the government has painted themselves into a corner charging confiscatory rates for commercial vehicles plus the fact that these trucks rarely stay in the state for the majority of their life. Will California require them to place these transponders in their trucks to pay when they fill up at the truck stops throughout the state? I can't see how this would work. Even if they tried, the trucking companies (especially the independents) would revolt. Ideas like this make me think that this state needs to split. I'm not trolling, just reacting to the sentiment amongst my colleagues.
Over the last summer I was managing an adwords campaign for a small art gallery. When we noticed that entering in our gallery name came up with an adwords ad for a competing gallery whom we had never heard of, I was tasked with finding out how to fix this. We considered suing the other gallery, suing whoever else we could (this was in LA, mind you), or my solution: have Google fix it. I emailed the Google support folks and they responded saying basically that we should just deal with it ourselves and they can't do anything to take those ads away. So, I wrote a nice email to the competing gallery explaining my issue. The next day, no more ad! Since this is small-time compared to the big companies involved here, I don't know if this situation applies, but who knows... Maybe I should have sued Google so I can pay off my college bills :)
This is the most insane thing about Steam: When I can't reach Steam - either because it's down, or because I happen to be in a location with no network access
Um... hm. I recall a thing called "connect in offline mode". I used it to play HL2 on an airline flight to Detroit after watching Battle Royale... Seemed to work fine. And no, I do not have a disc either, a friend bought it for me off of Steam for my birthday. Just a thought.
Yes, but the problem was that if you got close enough to the changing station, it would charge you, in the form of 40000000 kajillion volts.
I read this and immediately began reminiscing about summer days as a kid reinforcing my Soviet base with Tesla coils in C&C Red Alert. I always felt a sense of accomplishment when a horde of soldiers came to my base to get charged up...
My Canon 10D has had 2 firmware upgrades since purchase. Most, if not all, Canon SLR's have had firmware upgrades. In fact, there was a hack for the Digital Rebel (300D) that enabled some features that made it a "virtual 10D" instead of the stock rebel, IIRC it increased the buffer limit and allowed some color temperature variations or something like that. Of course firmware won't stop me from laughing at someone who paid $1000 for a piece of plastic with some 10D guts.