basically a set of permanent magnets that are rotated inside a wire framework. When the magnets complete one full revolution, no less than 6 rectified pulses are produced. Just by turning it at a few thousand RPM, I get 45 amps out at 14 volts - that's nearly a horsepower.
What's more, it's easy to operate. I just have it on a bracket on my car engine and spin it up with a simple little rubber belt. Mind you, the Mk 1 has a few problems to iron out - I need to find a way of enabling it to keep running when the engine stops, at the moment it stops when the engine does and I think this might be the braking effect of the drive belt. Anyone got any ideas, or know where to get in touch with Mr. Bosch whose name is on the side of it?
Current methods of washing and waste disposal are extremely wasteful, and there are technical solutions that could reduce domestic water use with no adverse impact. We could also reduce domestic energy use enormously without adverse impact on our lives just with better insulation and more sensible behavior (who really needs patio heaters, surely the most stupid device ever invented?). But as the article makes clear, this is about irrigation water, compared to which domestic use is a trickle.
To reduce the demand for irrigation requires a whole lot of technologies, some cheap and some not, but the situation is far from hopeless. This is not about environmentalists, it's about politicians finding the political will to do something concerted and practical. In the US, bioethanol is largely a porkbarrel project. In Europe and Brazil, it's about energy cost and so more practical. Growing the wrong crops in the wrong places and spending a fortune on irrigation is stupid. Moving the US economy to dry States and then irrigating golf courses is stupid. And your post is stupid.
On the other hand, working out a plan to find the best places to grow biofuels and then, say, providing tax breaks to make it happen might be a sensible option. What is clear is that politicians need to be talking to scientists and economists on the whole energy and water issue, not to lobbyists.
Some posters are groping towards what I think this is, in fact, all about. Television is currently a mass medium. It's mainly used to pump out lowest common denominator ads for LCD products. At the other end of the scale you have the hugely up-market direct mail companies that will, say, identify all the male, 30-45 bankers who just got really big annual bonuses in your catchment area, and send them your beautifully printed coffee table hardback of Ferrari pictures along with the offer of a test drive. It all derives from Lord Lever's (think Unilever)dictum "Half of what I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half." In fact, a 50% failure rate would be incredibly good in mass marketing. Google wants to commoditise targeted marketing wherever it happens, and to make targetable the marketing that is currently not targetable.
The thing is, at what point does this tip up into evil? I think there is a fairly fine line between sending me unsolicited information about something which profiling says I will be interested in, and psychological manipulation. Even paid for information - say motoring magazines - in which one would hope to find a measure of objectivity, in practice seem to say anything that will keep the advertisers happy. I am beginning to think that the downside to the Internet and mass media is that while, in theory more information is available about everything, in practice it is harder and harder to find objective information. The signal to noise ratio is actually growing smaller.
I'm particularly conscious of this because I have been trying to do something of an engineering nature recently. I won't bore you with the details, but as I have done my research I have gradually discovered that all the most readily available sources of information are, basically, lying for commercial reasons. In the end I got down to two sources of reasonably objective information.(I was eventually able to verify this by applying the actual engineering formulae to what they told me, which was how I know.) Neither publishes information (other than a contact address) on the net.
I can see that very soon we are going to need a subnet - some way of basing a network on socially arranged groups of trusted people - to provide reliable information about things. We used to have one (it was called universities) but they seem now to be overly subject to commercial forces.
I realise that looking for candidates who have measurable IQs means it's significantly different from Big Brother, but this is one to incite deep suspicion.
Actually, wouldn't it be more interesting and useful simply to send all the executives of Endemol ( and a few TV channels, plus Fox News) on a trip to Mars to see how they got on? Then, depending on the outcome, we could decide whether to send sentient beings the next time.
Archaeologists have plenty of equipment that would detect where the soil has been disturbed in the last few years and identify possible sites. I even got to try one out back in the 60s, and I am sure the state of the art is much advanced since then. My guess is that this is just AOL repeating the shock and awe tactics that have recently worked so well in Iraq and Lebanon - do not resist us or we will wreck your lives to the maximum extent.
This probably is flamebait, and it is unfair to categorise conservatives as evil (neocons, who aren't conservatives at all, that's different; but would a real conservative not be worried about global warming or drive an SUV? They'd be living a low impact lifestyle, rejecting GMOs and refusing to allow mobile phones until the health effect on society as a whole had been thoroughly investigated) but the problem stated is very real. If God exists, (s)he allows evil. If God does not exist, worshippers are wreaking havoc as a result of their own flawed and disordered personalities. But there is no prima facie evidence that atheists and agnostics do any better.
The Conservative position in the US is confused because so many of the early settlers were members of religious minorities who were trying to leave behind persecution. The tone of American society was set by aristocratic settlers who were of the Whig persuasion - they were sceptical, agnostic, and the US began with a separation of Church and State. Unfortunately, the members of the religious minorities tended to be poorly educated (and were, for instance, ignorant of the Biblical languages) while the lack of "mainstream" European religious thought meant there was little middle ground. I think this has come back to bite us, with the US rather polarised between believers from intellectually backward religious traditions on the one hand, and an educated elite that despises religion on the other. The Episcopalians, mainstream in outlook compared to Europe, are a minority Church.
I'm not in the business of suggesting that Bush senior had the sense not to pursue Saddam Hussein because he was an educated Episcopalian, while his son supports a much less intellectually rigorous brand of Christianity. That is simplistic. But I do think the US needs to take a long hard look at why it so often identifies as Conservatives people who espouse an anti-intellectual brand of Christinaity which is based on a lack of scholarship, especially in the original texts of the Bible, while complaining about the obscurantism and backwardness of Islamic fundamentalists. I think the US was a better place when its politicians were educated agnostics, who saw one of their jobs as preventing the fundamentalists from asserting their (fundamentally anti-democratic) power.
Islam is now the dominant religion in many very poor, badly run countries. People who seek power can always gain power in poor countries if they offer a message of hope, preferably one that says you have permission from God to improve your lot by attacking somebody else. That's just another factor in the explosive mix that is human culture. If Christianity was the dominant religion in poor countries and not the final development of the State religion of the Roman empire, I am sure we would have Christian suicide bombers ("martyrs" is after all a Graeco-Christian derivation) taking on the might of the Western Iuppiter-worshippers, or whatever.
Buddhists are not an extremely small minority, far from it, but Buddhists cultures adapt to local needs just like Christianity, e.g. Zen Buddhism in Japan was adapted to allow for Bushido, thus making it an option for the samurai (I am oversimplifying, perhaps) while in Thailand Buddhism and the military coexist by, for instance, allowing the execution of criminals by machine-gunning them through a sheet so the gunner is not directly aiming at another human being.
And yes, I am agreeing with you. The UK was actually _right_ when it barred Roman Catholics from participation in politics. I would prefer my politicians purely secular, able to distinguish fact from fiction, and uanble to tell themselves the lie that, if they start wars and kill people, these people will be really OK because they will have their reward in Heaven. Neocons are all traceable back to the Bishop of Beziers ("Kill them all, God will know his own"). (I would also like my politicians to have lots of much loved children and grandchildren so they have a real incentive to fix the world's problems.)
As I recall it had a 16 bit ALU. As a result fixed point multiply and divide were bottlenecks. It had 32 bit data registers and address registers, but this does not make it a 32 bit microprocessor. (In the same way, the RCA 1800 series had 16 bit registers but an 8-bit ALU, and nobody would ever call that a 16 bit processor).
I know this is heresy, but IMHO the 68000 was actually a dead end, which is why it was ultimately abandoned by Apple. The 86 instruction set forced Intel to redesign the processor below the assembler level, the Power architecture was nice from the beginning, but the 68000 was neither one thing nor another. In comparative tests, our National Semi 32016 evaluation machine absolutely chewed a similarly specced Motorola workstation on a technical workload back in the 80s.
In the late 70s/early 80s I worked with a number of 16 bit architectures - TMS9900, 8086, 68000, F101, PDP-11. The great thing about the X86 was that it was extremely easy to use for the migrating 8-bit programmer and it was easy to teach. Not so easy for me, I began on 16 bit and then in later years had to do embedded work with 8 bit processors which I hated!
In fact all the early processors had their architectural horrors. The 9900 had an absurd system in which the bit order of IO was reverse numbered with respect to the bus and we actually got an I/O board into production before we realised this owing to the poor documentation. The 68000 constantly caught out assembly programmers because of its word alignment issues, resulting in one occasion in a programmer going near berserk and having a screaming fit in the lab, fortunately when the boss was out at a meeting. And don't talk to me about the F100/L except to say that Ferranti did not get as much pain as they deserved for creating it. Not that it would ever have become mainstream...
It's easy to be clever with hindsight, but the Power architecture came later and too late. After, as I recall, the NS32032 which, despite some performance issues, was a processor I really liked.
Announces that us liberal left wingers just don't get it on terrorism. Judges refusing to convict without evidence, evidence which they are not allowed to see because those lefty judges are themselves security risks. Ridiculous human rights legislation that prevents him from simply locking up anybody he feels like. Over-zealous government agencies that want to investigate how the police came to shoot an unarmed man sitting harmlessly in a train and then spread FUD about it afterwards. The same idiot left wing liberals who think that perhaps if we had a more even handed and rational policy in the Middle East we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
At the risk of being accused of covert racism, it's perhaps worth pointing out just how much of the UK government is controlled by Scots, from the Prime Minister down. The Scots have something of a reputation for violence and aggression, and if you want to point out that the Rt Hon Anthony Blair, MA, Barrister-at-Law is an upper class Scottish lawyer, it was just such an upper class Scottish lawyer that organised the Glencoe massacre, for his own advantage.
Actually, I think our police and security services on the whole do a pretty good job, especially outside London (where there is a lot of institutional corruption.) But they deserve better politicians.
I can assure you that telephone wiring systems, and similarly designed marine DC wiring systems, are not oversized. This is simply because the thermal limitation is heat transfer through the outside of the wire and this increases only as the diameter, while the wire mass of course increases as the square of the diameter. It is unfortunately not very practical to make large hollow multistrand conductors. In some cases flat solid busbars can be used that maximise surface area, but most modern systems just do not have enough space.
It also really is very important in SELV (safety extra low voltage) applications to minimise volt drop by reducing resistance as far as possible. When I started designing equipment which used 12V and 5V DC buses (back in the 80s!) it was hard to get wiremen to use sufficiently heavy gauge wire because they did not appreciate that, for instance, the tolerance on commercial TTL was from 4.75 to 5.25V. Dropping even a quarter volt down the bus could mean that, with circuit board losses, many components were on out of tolerance voltage. It really was necessary to wire point to point to every board independently or use very heavy gauge wires for buses.
The problem is particularly severe with 12 and 24V systems with battery back up. Ten years ago a lot of these systems were designed with an allowed 10% volt drop for the most remote component. Now 3% is considered desirable. If you find it hard to see why, guess which is the most expensive: to increase the size of your generator/alternator by 7% and increase the number of batteries in your UPS (since lower voltage will mean higher current or longer running is needed), or to use thicker wire in the bus?
DC buses have been used in military and industrial equipment since DC/DC converters were invented. (In fact, other former Cambridge undergraduates may remember the old 200V DC bus in the Cavendish labs, exposed contacts to the motors and all. Nostalgia...)
You can also store DC whereas you cannot store AC, meaning UPS always need an AC-DC followed by a DC-AC stage. Since we have had large FET power transistors it has been possible to make DC/DC conversion very efficient - especially since, if you were beginning again, you would not choose 50 or 60 Hz for best efficiency.
In fact, already the PC is using a DC bus to power small peripherals (USB) and it works surprisingly well.
I may be wrong about this, but it was Edison who accused DC power of being more dangerous ("Westinghoused") only to have AC adopted for the pleasant US custom of humanely frying criminals.
Years ago when Punch was a humorous magazine, Alan Coren published a spoof of 1984 based around UK reality. Winston Smith goes to the police to complain that Big Brother's camera has broken down and is no longer watching him, to discover that the entire state apparatus has broken down through good old British incompetence (and yes, I am English, you insensitive clod.) And this is the biggest risk in all such schemes. It isn't even bent policemen selling off the data or bent Civil Servants using searches for blackmail, it is all the people who would be penalised because the data are wrong and who would, in this country, find it almost impossible to get redress. Computer Weekly and the MP Geoffrey Bacon have put a lot of effort into exposing the utter incompetence of Government IT, with seemingly not the slightest effect.
In the last 9 years I have gone from supporting the Labour party (because the previous incumbents were wallowing in corruption) to wanting to see them wiped out at the next election, provided only that the Conservatives have actually walked the walk and got rid of their worst members and worst policies.
Please, when Bush retires and Tony goes to make sure his boots are properly licked to a shine every morning, could the US extradite most of the Labour Cabinet (under the one sided extradition treaty they agreed to) without prima facie evidence, and lock them up in Texas somewhere?
Oh yes, I evaluate document management systems from time to time and, like you, I find myself wondering why people just cannot be bothered to organise the storage. Sadly, Laptop Road Warrior is the biggest obstacle - especially when he complains that his HDD takes forever to sync because of all the rubbish powerpoint he has created in 20 versions because he is so scared of losing his creative changes. But this is not primarily a Windows versus FOSS isue, this is a "how the hell did we let ourselves get into this mess" issue.
As for what these document management systems DO, mostly it is organise the "marketing collateral". Which could probably be better done using the old IBM buzzword sentence generator rather than Sharepoint.
You will only be supporting Server 2000. Or Server 2003. Or some custom locked down corporate environment. Or W2000 desktop. Or XP. Or XP SP1 (still having problems migrating to SP2.) Or SP2. With different flavors of IIS. And SQL Server 2000. Or SQL Server 2005. Or we have to use MSDE for this application because we only have SQL Server 2005 available and it won't connect to it.
Quite right. Microsoft has a huge advantage in terms of consistency and lack of complexity, provided of course that you just want to run Office on the desktop. Oh yes, which version of Office?
It's funny that we keep trying to eliminate just about everything unpleasant from our immediate environment when the world is full of bacteria laden soil and water, rocks containing toxic heavy metals and radioactive gases, and background radiation. Agreed, our present longevity (at least in the developed world) is largely due to working out what not to eat, breathe, drink and rub on ourselves, but the principal driver of lead free solder seems to have been our unwillingness or inability to teach people to dispose of things properly. It's utterly bizarre that we worry about a few grammes of lead in solder but drive around in cars containing huge lead filled batteries, all of which are of course disposed of responsibly, aren't they? We pay for expensive granite kitchen worktops that contain, among other things, uranium. We eat "low sodium" salt that contains radioactive potassium. Rather than banning everything in sight, perhaps we need to have a basic toxicology course in all art training of the "don't lick the paintbrush, idiots" variety.
Look up Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth is trying to avoid exactly the pitfalls of Red Hat, and now Novell/SuSE, i.e. keeping a clear separation between the community developed Ubuntu environment and the paid-for support and corporate development side. In fact, this very clarity should help reassure corporate types.
Interestingly, I got an off-topic for the gp post, though agreed I invited it. But none of the respondents got an OT. Somewhere is a dim mod fanboy with no sense of humor. Let's give him another chance in case he is still looking for opportunities. The first book, is in my probably insufficiently humble opinion, a very well written adventure novel with some interesting ideas, though what a pity so many American SF writers are obsessed with aristocracies and empires as their themes. Over-compensation? The other books contain (in my probably equally dubious opinion) poorly written meanderings on religion, politics and philosophy which would cause you to fail a degree course in any of those subjects. Leto wittering on about being the ultimate predator? Scope of history? Believe me, there is more and deeper religious and political theorising, better presented, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books than in the Dune series or Lord of the Rings.
It's in Dune. Shields result in a form of fighting in which the object is to make way for a slow knife atatck that will go through the shield. Off-topic, it's a pity that Herbert didn't stop at the first book because the rest were so poor by comparison. He used up a lifetime of good ideas in one book and couldn't think of any others. Sad...a friend once suggested that the only titles missing from the series were Dune Buggy and Dune ot forsake me oh my darling.
See my other post in reply. Your definition of "explode" is deficient. What does "sudden" mean? It is not a term in physics that I recognise. The difference between an explosion and controlled flame propagation is not the subject of debate in IC engineering - at least, not since the 1920s - and was exhaustively explained by Sir Harry Ricardo before WW2. Please refer me to a real engineering textbook that uses the word "detonation" to describe the normal combustion process in an IC engine.
But this is surely the silliest. Back in the days of paper encyclopaedias, scientists and engineers got pissed off arguing with the people who had read the encyclopaedia definition of something and didn't really understand it. Now the problem is Wikipedia. It's a good idea, but I stopped using it after discovering that articles on the three subjects I actually know enough about to have been paid for doing them all seem to be wrong or misleading in many places. I'm thinking of formulating a new rule: anyone who links to Wikipedia on Slashdot probably doesn't understand the subject. From your post, you have obviously read a bit about IC engines, but you don't know enough to have held down a job in automotive R&D. I have.
Neither you nor the other respondents seem to understand the difference, in IC terms, between a controlled burn and an uncontrolled explosion. The core problem is that you don't really have an in-depth knowledge of what goes on in the combustion space, you are just parroting and trying to make paper points.
Anyway, to recap: detonation is an explosion in the cylinder head with excessive and uncontrolled rate of temperature rise, usually caused by hot spots (exhaust valve, carbon deposits.) It can occur after the spark in engines with early ignition; the symptom is an initial controlled pressure rise with a sudden spike, as fuel remote from the flame propagating from the spark gap suddenly explodes. What you are referring to is pre-ignition. The use of either of the low MW alcohols - methanol and ethanol - have significant benefits in reduction of carbonisation and reduction of tendency to detonation. That happens to be true.
I can't resist it...Diesel does not explode in the engine! It burns. Lots of research has gone into developing injectors that spray the fuel into the hot compressed air in the right way, so it burns steadily without producing too high a pressure peak or burning too slowly to give good thermal efficiency. As soon as you stop injecting, combustion stops and that is how you regulate the power produced.
Now the next useless fact: Gasoline does not explode in the engine either. If it does it is called detonation or knock and will eventually wreck the engine. Although it burns much faster than Diesel (hence gasoline engines running at much higher rpm) it is flame not explosion.
Finally, (and this perhaps needs to be posted all over this thread because a lot of people do not understand it) ethanol has a higher octane rating than standard gasolines and has more charge cooling. As a result it can be made to burn more efficiently in an engine because the compression ratio can be raised. A modified Atkinson cycle (compression ratio lower than expansion ratio) ethanol engine can have quite reasonable efficiency, not as good as Diesel but better than lead free gasoline. And it should lose less power in the catalytic converter.
Although the fuel tank needs to be bigger than that for a gasoline engine, because of the lower energy density, this has little to do with cost per Joule which is the important thing. It does not matter if I need 6l/100Km versus the 5 used by my Diesel engine if the cost per Joule is comparable.
And finally finally, ethanol fires can be put out with water and reduced in intensity very quickly with water mist. It is comparable in safety to Diesel, as is recognised by the experts - marine safety agencies. The main problem with ethanol is that it doesn't really mix that well with gasoline, but this is the only way to introduce it gradually.
Berlusconi kicked and screamed but was unable to overturn the election result, and now they are coming for him. And Pinochet hasn't exactly had an easy life since he was removed from power.
The real nightmare for people like the current President and some of his friends must be that to be safe, they must find a way to hold onto power for a long time. This has been the problem that has led to gerontocracies in places like fascist Spain, China and parts of the Middle East. But the US is not a dictatorship, it is a pluralist federation, and the possibility exists that in the revolution of the political cycle the time will come when a US government will indict a member of the present Administration for war crimes. Of course it could never happen...but the British and the French both once executed a monarch and the British allowed the deposition of another in what they called the Glorious Revolution. Perhaps, just as Putin has clawed back Russian oil from the kleptarchs, one day a US Government strapped for cash will start to go after the plutarchs.
A British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,once famously said that three weeks was a long time in politics. I'm not sure that the present generation of politicians are thinking as far ahead as that.
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What's more, it's easy to operate. I just have it on a bracket on my car engine and spin it up with a simple little rubber belt. Mind you, the Mk 1 has a few problems to iron out - I need to find a way of enabling it to keep running when the engine stops, at the moment it stops when the engine does and I think this might be the braking effect of the drive belt. Anyone got any ideas, or know where to get in touch with Mr. Bosch whose name is on the side of it?
To reduce the demand for irrigation requires a whole lot of technologies, some cheap and some not, but the situation is far from hopeless. This is not about environmentalists, it's about politicians finding the political will to do something concerted and practical. In the US, bioethanol is largely a porkbarrel project. In Europe and Brazil, it's about energy cost and so more practical. Growing the wrong crops in the wrong places and spending a fortune on irrigation is stupid. Moving the US economy to dry States and then irrigating golf courses is stupid. And your post is stupid.
On the other hand, working out a plan to find the best places to grow biofuels and then, say, providing tax breaks to make it happen might be a sensible option. What is clear is that politicians need to be talking to scientists and economists on the whole energy and water issue, not to lobbyists.
Some posters are groping towards what I think this is, in fact, all about. Television is currently a mass medium. It's mainly used to pump out lowest common denominator ads for LCD products. At the other end of the scale you have the hugely up-market direct mail companies that will, say, identify all the male, 30-45 bankers who just got really big annual bonuses in your catchment area, and send them your beautifully printed coffee table hardback of Ferrari pictures along with the offer of a test drive. It all derives from Lord Lever's (think Unilever)dictum "Half of what I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half." In fact, a 50% failure rate would be incredibly good in mass marketing. Google wants to commoditise targeted marketing wherever it happens, and to make targetable the marketing that is currently not targetable.
The thing is, at what point does this tip up into evil? I think there is a fairly fine line between sending me unsolicited information about something which profiling says I will be interested in, and psychological manipulation. Even paid for information - say motoring magazines - in which one would hope to find a measure of objectivity, in practice seem to say anything that will keep the advertisers happy. I am beginning to think that the downside to the Internet and mass media is that while, in theory more information is available about everything, in practice it is harder and harder to find objective information. The signal to noise ratio is actually growing smaller.
I'm particularly conscious of this because I have been trying to do something of an engineering nature recently. I won't bore you with the details, but as I have done my research I have gradually discovered that all the most readily available sources of information are, basically, lying for commercial reasons. In the end I got down to two sources of reasonably objective information.(I was eventually able to verify this by applying the actual engineering formulae to what they told me, which was how I know.) Neither publishes information (other than a contact address) on the net.
I can see that very soon we are going to need a subnet - some way of basing a network on socially arranged groups of trusted people - to provide reliable information about things. We used to have one (it was called universities) but they seem now to be overly subject to commercial forces.
Actually, wouldn't it be more interesting and useful simply to send all the executives of Endemol ( and a few TV channels, plus Fox News) on a trip to Mars to see how they got on? Then, depending on the outcome, we could decide whether to send sentient beings the next time.
Archaeologists have plenty of equipment that would detect where the soil has been disturbed in the last few years and identify possible sites. I even got to try one out back in the 60s, and I am sure the state of the art is much advanced since then. My guess is that this is just AOL repeating the shock and awe tactics that have recently worked so well in Iraq and Lebanon - do not resist us or we will wreck your lives to the maximum extent.
The Conservative position in the US is confused because so many of the early settlers were members of religious minorities who were trying to leave behind persecution. The tone of American society was set by aristocratic settlers who were of the Whig persuasion - they were sceptical, agnostic, and the US began with a separation of Church and State. Unfortunately, the members of the religious minorities tended to be poorly educated (and were, for instance, ignorant of the Biblical languages) while the lack of "mainstream" European religious thought meant there was little middle ground. I think this has come back to bite us, with the US rather polarised between believers from intellectually backward religious traditions on the one hand, and an educated elite that despises religion on the other. The Episcopalians, mainstream in outlook compared to Europe, are a minority Church.
I'm not in the business of suggesting that Bush senior had the sense not to pursue Saddam Hussein because he was an educated Episcopalian, while his son supports a much less intellectually rigorous brand of Christianity. That is simplistic. But I do think the US needs to take a long hard look at why it so often identifies as Conservatives people who espouse an anti-intellectual brand of Christinaity which is based on a lack of scholarship, especially in the original texts of the Bible, while complaining about the obscurantism and backwardness of Islamic fundamentalists. I think the US was a better place when its politicians were educated agnostics, who saw one of their jobs as preventing the fundamentalists from asserting their (fundamentally anti-democratic) power.
Before long these guys are going to be moving in on the CPU cooler business.
Buddhists are not an extremely small minority, far from it, but Buddhists cultures adapt to local needs just like Christianity, e.g. Zen Buddhism in Japan was adapted to allow for Bushido, thus making it an option for the samurai (I am oversimplifying, perhaps) while in Thailand Buddhism and the military coexist by, for instance, allowing the execution of criminals by machine-gunning them through a sheet so the gunner is not directly aiming at another human being.
And yes, I am agreeing with you. The UK was actually _right_ when it barred Roman Catholics from participation in politics. I would prefer my politicians purely secular, able to distinguish fact from fiction, and uanble to tell themselves the lie that, if they start wars and kill people, these people will be really OK because they will have their reward in Heaven. Neocons are all traceable back to the Bishop of Beziers ("Kill them all, God will know his own"). (I would also like my politicians to have lots of much loved children and grandchildren so they have a real incentive to fix the world's problems.)
I know this is heresy, but IMHO the 68000 was actually a dead end, which is why it was ultimately abandoned by Apple. The 86 instruction set forced Intel to redesign the processor below the assembler level, the Power architecture was nice from the beginning, but the 68000 was neither one thing nor another. In comparative tests, our National Semi 32016 evaluation machine absolutely chewed a similarly specced Motorola workstation on a technical workload back in the 80s.
In fact all the early processors had their architectural horrors. The 9900 had an absurd system in which the bit order of IO was reverse numbered with respect to the bus and we actually got an I/O board into production before we realised this owing to the poor documentation. The 68000 constantly caught out assembly programmers because of its word alignment issues, resulting in one occasion in a programmer going near berserk and having a screaming fit in the lab, fortunately when the boss was out at a meeting. And don't talk to me about the F100/L except to say that Ferranti did not get as much pain as they deserved for creating it. Not that it would ever have become mainstream...
It's easy to be clever with hindsight, but the Power architecture came later and too late. After, as I recall, the NS32032 which, despite some performance issues, was a processor I really liked.
At the risk of being accused of covert racism, it's perhaps worth pointing out just how much of the UK government is controlled by Scots, from the Prime Minister down. The Scots have something of a reputation for violence and aggression, and if you want to point out that the Rt Hon Anthony Blair, MA, Barrister-at-Law is an upper class Scottish lawyer, it was just such an upper class Scottish lawyer that organised the Glencoe massacre, for his own advantage.
Actually, I think our police and security services on the whole do a pretty good job, especially outside London (where there is a lot of institutional corruption.) But they deserve better politicians.
In some cases flat solid busbars can be used that maximise surface area, but most modern systems just do not have enough space.
It also really is very important in SELV (safety extra low voltage) applications to minimise volt drop by reducing resistance as far as possible. When I started designing equipment which used 12V and 5V DC buses (back in the 80s!) it was hard to get wiremen to use sufficiently heavy gauge wire because they did not appreciate that, for instance, the tolerance on commercial TTL was from 4.75 to 5.25V. Dropping even a quarter volt down the bus could mean that, with circuit board losses, many components were on out of tolerance voltage. It really was necessary to wire point to point to every board independently or use very heavy gauge wires for buses.
The problem is particularly severe with 12 and 24V systems with battery back up. Ten years ago a lot of these systems were designed with an allowed 10% volt drop for the most remote component. Now 3% is considered desirable. If you find it hard to see why, guess which is the most expensive: to increase the size of your generator/alternator by 7% and increase the number of batteries in your UPS (since lower voltage will mean higher current or longer running is needed), or to use thicker wire in the bus?
You can also store DC whereas you cannot store AC, meaning UPS always need an AC-DC followed by a DC-AC stage. Since we have had large FET power transistors it has been possible to make DC/DC conversion very efficient - especially since, if you were beginning again, you would not choose 50 or 60 Hz for best efficiency.
In fact, already the PC is using a DC bus to power small peripherals (USB) and it works surprisingly well.
I may be wrong about this, but it was Edison who accused DC power of being more dangerous ("Westinghoused") only to have AC adopted for the pleasant US custom of humanely frying criminals.
- AC induction heating
- jewellery materials
- Girls
Probably in that order, since research into the second item might help with research into the third item.In the last 9 years I have gone from supporting the Labour party (because the previous incumbents were wallowing in corruption) to wanting to see them wiped out at the next election, provided only that the Conservatives have actually walked the walk and got rid of their worst members and worst policies.
Please, when Bush retires and Tony goes to make sure his boots are properly licked to a shine every morning, could the US extradite most of the Labour Cabinet (under the one sided extradition treaty they agreed to) without prima facie evidence, and lock them up in Texas somewhere?
As for what these document management systems DO, mostly it is organise the "marketing collateral". Which could probably be better done using the old IBM buzzword sentence generator rather than Sharepoint.
Quite right. Microsoft has a huge advantage in terms of consistency and lack of complexity, provided of course that you just want to run Office on the desktop. Oh yes, which version of Office?
It's funny that we keep trying to eliminate just about everything unpleasant from our immediate environment when the world is full of bacteria laden soil and water, rocks containing toxic heavy metals and radioactive gases, and background radiation. Agreed, our present longevity (at least in the developed world) is largely due to working out what not to eat, breathe, drink and rub on ourselves, but the principal driver of lead free solder seems to have been our unwillingness or inability to teach people to dispose of things properly. It's utterly bizarre that we worry about a few grammes of lead in solder but drive around in cars containing huge lead filled batteries, all of which are of course disposed of responsibly, aren't they? We pay for expensive granite kitchen worktops that contain, among other things, uranium. We eat "low sodium" salt that contains radioactive potassium. Rather than banning everything in sight, perhaps we need to have a basic toxicology course in all art training of the "don't lick the paintbrush, idiots" variety.
Look up Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth is trying to avoid exactly the pitfalls of Red Hat, and now Novell/SuSE, i.e. keeping a clear separation between the community developed Ubuntu environment and the paid-for support and corporate development side. In fact, this very clarity should help reassure corporate types.
Interestingly, I got an off-topic for the gp post, though agreed I invited it. But none of the respondents got an OT. Somewhere is a dim mod fanboy with no sense of humor.
Let's give him another chance in case he is still looking for opportunities.
The first book, is in my probably insufficiently humble opinion, a very well written adventure novel with some interesting ideas, though what a pity so many American SF writers are obsessed with aristocracies and empires as their themes. Over-compensation? The other books contain (in my probably equally dubious opinion) poorly written meanderings on religion, politics and philosophy which would cause you to fail a degree course in any of those subjects. Leto wittering on about being the ultimate predator? Scope of history? Believe me, there is more and deeper religious and political theorising, better presented, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books than in the Dune series or Lord of the Rings.
It's in Dune. Shields result in a form of fighting in which the object is to make way for a slow knife atatck that will go through the shield. Off-topic, it's a pity that Herbert didn't stop at the first book because the rest were so poor by comparison. He used up a lifetime of good ideas in one book and couldn't think of any others. Sad...a friend once suggested that the only titles missing from the series were Dune Buggy and Dune ot forsake me oh my darling.
See my other post in reply. Your definition of "explode" is deficient. What does "sudden" mean? It is not a term in physics that I recognise. The difference between an explosion and controlled flame propagation is not the subject of debate in IC engineering - at least, not since the 1920s - and was exhaustively explained by Sir Harry Ricardo before WW2. Please refer me to a real engineering textbook that uses the word "detonation" to describe the normal combustion process in an IC engine.
Neither you nor the other respondents seem to understand the difference, in IC terms, between a controlled burn and an uncontrolled explosion. The core problem is that you don't really have an in-depth knowledge of what goes on in the combustion space, you are just parroting and trying to make paper points.
Anyway, to recap: detonation is an explosion in the cylinder head with excessive and uncontrolled rate of temperature rise, usually caused by hot spots (exhaust valve, carbon deposits.) It can occur after the spark in engines with early ignition; the symptom is an initial controlled pressure rise with a sudden spike, as fuel remote from the flame propagating from the spark gap suddenly explodes. What you are referring to is pre-ignition. The use of either of the low MW alcohols - methanol and ethanol - have significant benefits in reduction of carbonisation and reduction of tendency to detonation. That happens to be true.
Now the next useless fact: Gasoline does not explode in the engine either. If it does it is called detonation or knock and will eventually wreck the engine. Although it burns much faster than Diesel (hence gasoline engines running at much higher rpm) it is flame not explosion.
Finally, (and this perhaps needs to be posted all over this thread because a lot of people do not understand it) ethanol has a higher octane rating than standard gasolines and has more charge cooling. As a result it can be made to burn more efficiently in an engine because the compression ratio can be raised. A modified Atkinson cycle (compression ratio lower than expansion ratio) ethanol engine can have quite reasonable efficiency, not as good as Diesel but better than lead free gasoline. And it should lose less power in the catalytic converter.
Although the fuel tank needs to be bigger than that for a gasoline engine, because of the lower energy density, this has little to do with cost per Joule which is the important thing. It does not matter if I need 6l/100Km versus the 5 used by my Diesel engine if the cost per Joule is comparable.
And finally finally, ethanol fires can be put out with water and reduced in intensity very quickly with water mist. It is comparable in safety to Diesel, as is recognised by the experts - marine safety agencies. The main problem with ethanol is that it doesn't really mix that well with gasoline, but this is the only way to introduce it gradually.
The real nightmare for people like the current President and some of his friends must be that to be safe, they must find a way to hold onto power for a long time. This has been the problem that has led to gerontocracies in places like fascist Spain, China and parts of the Middle East. But the US is not a dictatorship, it is a pluralist federation, and the possibility exists that in the revolution of the political cycle the time will come when a US government will indict a member of the present Administration for war crimes. Of course it could never happen...but the British and the French both once executed a monarch and the British allowed the deposition of another in what they called the Glorious Revolution. Perhaps, just as Putin has clawed back Russian oil from the kleptarchs, one day a US Government strapped for cash will start to go after the plutarchs.
A British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,once famously said that three weeks was a long time in politics. I'm not sure that the present generation of politicians are thinking as far ahead as that.