The turbine drove a gearbox and the wheels. This mod simply provides thrust.
As for the attitude of the rest of British industry, I'm reminded of the memo that went out around British Aerospace to the effect that nobody was to have anything to do with that madman Richard Noble.
_that_ Richard Noble. He of Thrusts 1 and 2, not apparently heard of by people who post on Slashdot.
I worked for a while in the 80s for one of the companies that were involved in the original Merlin development. I believe there has been more than one Meteor powered car (I really wouldn't want a full Merlin which would make the jet powered VW look pretty wimpy.) Our R&D people were involved in tractor racing, and one of the competitors had a Merlin powered tractor. We, on the other hand, had a turbocharged Diesel. They came back from one weekend somewhat elated having beaten the Merlin. Apparently the Diesel had been running at 5.8 atmospheres boost - that's about 85PSI.
So I am afraid this jet car is actually a bit pathetic. It's no more powerful than the (street legal, normally drivable) VW Bugatti, which costs about the same, and it is less powerful than a suitable modded tractor engine.
What I took away from that company was an in-dept knowledge of how to produce a hardened engine management system, and a lifelong passion for Diesels. As our Technical Director used to say, and history has proved him right, with the exception of power to weight ratio there is absolutely no measure on which a Diesel cannot be made to out-perform every other type of combustion engine.
A number of nitro compounds have an almond like smell. It's a long time since I did organic chemistry but if I recall right, nitrotoluene has just such a smell. Someone better informed please confirm/deny.
Because it is efficient to make small batteries by laying the plates together and rolling them into a coil. Same with capacitors. For large batteries (automotive) it is cost effective to make them with layers of plates, but even so traction batteries are often wound construction.
You can make thin flat batteries (e.g. the ones in Polaroid film, if you can remember the last century), but they are fragile and only really suitable for use built into something.
Engelbert Humperdinck's real name is Engelbert Humperdinck! And it is not a silly sounding name, not in his native country. He was good enough to teach Wagner's son music (no, dummkopf, that's the real Wagner, not some actor.). Hansel und Gretel is his best known work, and it's widely available; in fact, I went to a live UK performance a few years back. Good enough to have been recorded by Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic.
There was some failed pop musician who stole the name...only a source as dubious as Wikipedia would even bother with reporting the fact. I doubt anybody will be selling his recordings over 80 years after he's dead.
Read TFAP (the fine academic paper) and you will see they already tested it with refrigerants and millimetre-sized drops. The big question is how they would get sufficiently good thermal transfer from the hot surface, given there is a vapour layer involved. Steam developing in your liquid to liquid heat exchanger is bad news (he says having spent the morning fixing a leak in one).
However, all the liquid cooling kits I have seen for PCs have been so horribly engineered - and use water, which is basically the wrong stuff when you are trying to cool something to only a couple of degrees over max ambient - that I would hesitate to suggest that something like this could not be developed.
You don't understand the case. It is the EU's competition department that is bringing the case against Microsoft, not Tridge et al. The contention is that Microsoft has abused its monopoly.
Well, FWIW, I know one of the "smooth suited professionals" that Microsoft employs. And his opinion? That the arguments that Microsoft wanted deployed in court were, in summary "We are so important and so essential to the IT world that you must allow us to do whatever we want." Unfortunately, judges do not take warmly to this kind of argument. Judges like John Cooke have a clue about things like Firefox (and now knows a lot more about how kernels work and that Windows Embedded means that the Microsoft kernel need not be monolithic). They are also used to academic expert witnesses, and European academics can be very unusual indeed. I don't know what the outcome will be, but it is far from clear that the FOSS movement will lose, at least in the Eurozone.
In fact European Competition Law is derived to a considerable degree from US law. (Well, when the EU was founded, what other example of a democratic federalised state did they have to work with?) It is entirely reasonable that a court should be informed that a litigant has been convicted of a similar offence in another jurisdiction. Furthermore, Microsoft has been trying to go behind the back of the EU courts by trying to get information disclosed in the US. The US courts have (very properly) refused under the comity principle.
It's actually good to see that Europe and the US can be sensible in this way about trade law.
There is a single cylinder Diesel of around 600cc designed, I believe, on behalf of the British MOD by Cranfield. It's relativelylight and efficient, but I suspect the British economy killer - the fact that we invent things for military purpose and never produce them efficiently in volume for the civil market - will come into play. I've often had the feeling that British designers want to be small volume and exclusive - doing a VW would be selling out.
Unfortunately conventional small Diesels are heavy because the market is gensets and marine use where low vibration and low noise are important. The car market really only gets started at 1.4 litres and averages around 1.9, which is far too big. As an example of a high quality small engine, the lovely little turbocharged 32HP Bukh still weighs around 500-600lb all up.
I have small hands and I hate Nokia phones, though I have to use them. The device won't succeed as a replacement for anything with better ergonomics. iPod has excellent ergonomics, my digital camera has excellent ergonomics, my phone sucks and there is no way I would ever consider using it as a replacement.
"Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's director of design strategy, sometimes begins the day by diving into a Finnish lake still partly covered in ice," says the article. Well, I once dropped my anchor overboard and forgot to hold onto the rope, but I don't boast about it in Business Week.
I took one of my own postings and got a score of 11%. And it was something I had actually written myself, a piece of reasonable length about a subject on which I have first hand experience.
I then tried an article from Scientific American and it scored 24% - sorry, guys, time for me to cancel the subscription, you are full of it. Alternatively, of course, it is the University of Indiana School of Informatics that's full of it and the air is thick with over-hype. It would be interesting for someone with the time and energy to feed in some papers on string theory and some articles on astrology and compare the results.
You partly make my case. On the one hand, propaganda from the Chinese embassy, parroted by the BBC and mostly anecdotal. On the other, detailed criticism of Indian government and business affairs from within India. Autocracy versus civil society, I think.
It isn't about bundling the media player: it is about the prospect of close coupling it to DRM so that the only content that can ever be played is what the OS supplier permits. The opportunity to extort - sorry, licence - access to your monopoly system is then quite amazing. The difference between the EU Competition Commission and the US one is that the EU is better technically informed.
There is a case that governments should rule that no college which receives any kind of taxpayer funding should be allowed to mandate the use of a product from one particular company to its students, but don't hold your breath waiting.
Worked fine in the days of embedded systems when all memory was static (and usually only 16 bits wide), also when it was easy to wire an interrupt line so when the add-on had finished you could read the results. Nowadays much more difficult because of the need to integrate with DRAM controllers and timing, absence of convenient interrupts ( so need to poll a location to see when it completed). Whereas Hypertransport is designed to do the job and do it efficiently.
Another nice approach was the "swinging gate" RAM method in which you had two blocks of physical RAM in the same memory space. The main CPU filled one block with data, then flicked the switch so the co-processor could read that data while the CPU read the results from the other block, then put in new data for processing in the next cycle. Very easy to implement, much cheaper than FIFOs. It meant you could use a cheap DSP (from TI) in a system using a cheaper 8086 series processor for which you could get cheap tools and an embedded OS.
At the moment software is frequently a tax that poor countries pay to rich countries to be allowed to participate. Poor countries often have weak currencies, but the local cost of goods and services is much lower than you would expect from the exchange rate. It's like living at the top of an economic inverted gravity well; moving around the local maximum is not too hard, but bringing things in from outside is difficult. Any goods that have to be bought in the West are relatively speaking very expensive. Since the major desktop and server OS is produced in a small corner of the US, this represents a tax on international trade, applied to the Third World and with the proceeds going to Redmond.
FOSS means that work, whether localisation or support, can be done in the local region at local prices. It therefore levels the playing field, helping to achieve the (supposed) objectives of the WTO. And, in reality, it doesn't reduce Microsoft's profits as much as you might think because, in many cases, the alternative is actually piracy.
On the other hand, it creates middle class jobs (jobs relying on literacy, professional skills etc.). The biggest problem of many Third World countries is the lack of a middle class. Between the very poor (exploited) and the very rick (exploiters) there is no buffer of people to create a civil society. In China the very concept of civil society is still alien while it has emerged rapidly in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. India has a rapidly increasing middle class and is the world's biggest democracy.
So, I know this may seem over the top: but FOSS provides support to fair trade, emerging democracy and free markets. And it does it while expending very little energy, so it contributes little to climate change.
The UK has an amazing law which allows its citizens - (sorry, subjects of Her Gracious Majesty Elizabeth II von Battenberg Saxe Coburg Gotha usw) to be rendered to the US at the request of the US authorities without their having to present any evidence that a crime has been committed. Imagine the fun of this one. I host a site in the UK without the flag, which is viewed by an American. As a result, the US Govt. decides to extradite me to the US as a result of an action beyond my control, i.e. the decision of a US ISP to permit relaying of an illegal website to a US citizen. And my heroic Government will do nothing to intervene. Of course, if the website is hosted in, say, France, the US authorities will simply have to interpret French legal expressions like "Merde alors".
The whole concept that broadcasting should be funded by advertising is what has brought about this ludicrous war. In the good old days specialist magazines carried loads of ads, and this was one of the things you bought them for: being able to find the manufacturer of the widget you needed.
Then Google came along and now you could look for stuff you really wanted or needed. Broadcasting advertising is mostly for stuff you wouldn't want and for which someone is trying to create a demand. So you resist watching it. So to preserve the business model you must be forced to watch it.
Conclusion: no matter how many lawyers are paid to argue about freedom of speech, or "commercial speech" ("Have a nice day"?) it's a bad business model. We the people find ways to avoid the ads: broadcasters and advertisers in collusion try to find ways to project them on our retinas, because this means they don't have to pay for high quality creative content, whether for the ads or for products that don't suck. Eventually they will become so annoying that even Walmart Joe will start boycotting the products for really annoying ads.
Then they will have to go back to the idea of producing ads so well designed and clever (think the Honda mechanical sculpture ad) that people rate them higher than the programmes. Which will create competition for the artistic talent, which is in much shorter supply than would be Big Brothers. And so it will cycle as the manufacturers try to cut costs and the broadcasters try to find ways to get their dollars.
...anybody who trusts Wikipedia is asking for trouble. It's often like a vast collection of every urban myth known to man, with a geek slant. However, I still don't understand how the NaOH can be catalytic, at least on the definition I grew up with (something that pushes the reaction equilibrium in a particular direction but is not itself a reaction component). The O and H in the final NaOH are different atoms from the ones you started with (to the limits permitted by quantum mechanics, yada yada), unlike the platinum in catalytic converters, or the amino acids in enzymes. My chemistry teacher used to argue about whether the vanadium pentoxide in the SO2-SO3 process could properly be called a catalyst, and that's closer to that classical definition than the NaOH. Perhaps I'm being overly pedantic, but as industrial chemistry paid for my house and pension fund, perhaps I have a point.
How many times must I post this? In the US, it is date of invention that matters not date of filing. The rest of the world understands the problem with this approach, which was fine when distance and slow transport isolated communities, but is now hopelessly out of date. Only in the US can you have submarine patents. This is the most broken thing in the entire system. Without that, even properly reviewed software patents might be tolerable. Prior art is hard to prove in a country where someone has sat on an invention for ages in a notebook witnessed by an attorney and stored in a safe.
Years ago at the U of Cambridge there was a woman researcher (I'm sorry, I have forgotten her name) who was working on improved strains of rape. She took great delight, when visiting dignitaries asked her what she was working on, in just replyng "Rape".
100 mpg carburettor? Rest assured, if there was indeed a carburettor which, just by bolting on, caused a heat engine to violate the laws of thermodynamics, the Government would have taken it over by now. And if it was a patent, the text would be in the public domain. As for batteries, if you knew any chemistry you would know that the problem with batteries is that their energy densities are already pushing the theoretical limits. It's just that, because we insist on travelling around at ridiculous speeds, the energy storage needed for our vehicles is enormous.
However, it's clearly a demonstration of the problems of the patent system that someone as ignorant of basic physics and chemistry as this can get a patent.
Yes, I am in a bad mood today. Totally ignorant postings and moderations on science and technology always have that effect on me.
This is a joke, and somebody who doesn't know organic chemistry from his ass thought it was a troll. Dear idiot, the sodium hydroxide combines with the added alcohol to form sodium methoxide, which then reacts with the oil. The NaOH is not in fact a catalyst, it is an intermediate reaction component. And yes, it is corrosive.
Don't they teach kids ANY organic chemistry nowadays? How are we to produce the next generation of recreational drug designers and home-made explosives producers that made the West what it is today?
Standards are made by expert committees with input from all kinds of people from universities through to businesses. Governments rarely adopt them into legislation, but when they do there is usually good cause. They are a convenient way of, for instance, mandating that your electrician does not leave bare live wires around your house, or that your pipes will not burst the first time there is a little over pressure on your water main (safety standards or codes). They are also a convenient way of preventing vendor lock in. You don't get paranoid about the government because of NPT pipe threads or ANSI standards, do you? You don't worry about the creeping influence of UL preventing you from your God-given right to buy an unsafe Chinese electrical appliance?
It's amazing, though perhaps it shouldn't be, just how many people posting on Slashdot do not seem to understand that anti-trust cases are not limited to Microsoft, that before the present Administration there have been plenty of interventions in monopolies (and when they are history there will doubtless be more) and that the new pressure for Open Source and Open Formats is just a repeat of what has happened in every branch of engineering there has ever been. Once a technology starts to get mature, playing fields must be leveled, standards must be established. Hardware is now mature, with standards like SATA and PCI replacing earlier ones as hardware is commoditised, yet cheaper and more reliable. Governments are faced with huge wastage in software procurement and systems operations, but such is the proliferation of incompatible architectures and tools that they find it hard to get a grip on the problem. Standards help with that process; they help governments to waste less.
Years ago I was at a meeting where the possibility of European software standards was discussed, and a senior expert suggested that the software industry was too cowboy and immature to be able to do it (he said that on a scale of 0 to 10, heavy industry scored 8, light industry 6, and the software industry wouldn't even be able to make a mark on the paper, to be exact.) It's thirteen years on from there, and things are changing.
One other thing: don't confuse governments with politicians. Politicians are a mix of honest people who want to improve things along with shifty crooks and everything in between. Government departments are a mixture of shifty crooks with honest people who want to improve things. You can see they are exact opposites. The trick is to unite the honest people on both sides, whereupon things can happen with remarkable speed.
The rate of increase of external debt. The CIA factbook makes it clear that the total debt of the mainland European economies was about half that of the US and its UK satellite combined.
You mean the one that's absorbing former Communist countries, that makes Japanese cars more efficiently than they can in Japan, that hosts backward companies like AMD and Airbus, and that isn't trillions in debt? Thank God I live in a decaying economy rather than a dynamic one that's exporting all its added value to China.
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As for the attitude of the rest of British industry, I'm reminded of the memo that went out around British Aerospace to the effect that nobody was to have anything to do with that madman Richard Noble.
_that_ Richard Noble. He of Thrusts 1 and 2, not apparently heard of by people who post on Slashdot.
So I am afraid this jet car is actually a bit pathetic. It's no more powerful than the (street legal, normally drivable) VW Bugatti, which costs about the same, and it is less powerful than a suitable modded tractor engine.
What I took away from that company was an in-dept knowledge of how to produce a hardened engine management system, and a lifelong passion for Diesels. As our Technical Director used to say, and history has proved him right, with the exception of power to weight ratio there is absolutely no measure on which a Diesel cannot be made to out-perform every other type of combustion engine.
A number of nitro compounds have an almond like smell. It's a long time since I did organic chemistry but if I recall right, nitrotoluene has just such a smell. Someone better informed please confirm/deny.
You can make thin flat batteries (e.g. the ones in Polaroid film, if you can remember the last century), but they are fragile and only really suitable for use built into something.
There was some failed pop musician who stole the name...only a source as dubious as Wikipedia would even bother with reporting the fact. I doubt anybody will be selling his recordings over 80 years after he's dead.
However, all the liquid cooling kits I have seen for PCs have been so horribly engineered - and use water, which is basically the wrong stuff when you are trying to cool something to only a couple of degrees over max ambient - that I would hesitate to suggest that something like this could not be developed.
Well, FWIW, I know one of the "smooth suited professionals" that Microsoft employs. And his opinion? That the arguments that Microsoft wanted deployed in court were, in summary "We are so important and so essential to the IT world that you must allow us to do whatever we want." Unfortunately, judges do not take warmly to this kind of argument. Judges like John Cooke have a clue about things like Firefox (and now knows a lot more about how kernels work and that Windows Embedded means that the Microsoft kernel need not be monolithic). They are also used to academic expert witnesses, and European academics can be very unusual indeed. I don't know what the outcome will be, but it is far from clear that the FOSS movement will lose, at least in the Eurozone.
It's actually good to see that Europe and the US can be sensible in this way about trade law.
Unfortunately conventional small Diesels are heavy because the market is gensets and marine use where low vibration and low noise are important. The car market really only gets started at 1.4 litres and averages around 1.9, which is far too big. As an example of a high quality small engine, the lovely little turbocharged 32HP Bukh still weighs around 500-600lb all up.
"Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's director of design strategy, sometimes begins the day by diving into a Finnish lake still partly covered in ice," says the article. Well, I once dropped my anchor overboard and forgot to hold onto the rope, but I don't boast about it in Business Week.
I then tried an article from Scientific American and it scored 24% - sorry, guys, time for me to cancel the subscription, you are full of it. Alternatively, of course, it is the University of Indiana School of Informatics that's full of it and the air is thick with over-hype. It would be interesting for someone with the time and energy to feed in some papers on string theory and some articles on astrology and compare the results.
You partly make my case. On the one hand, propaganda from the Chinese embassy, parroted by the BBC and mostly anecdotal. On the other, detailed criticism of Indian government and business affairs from within India. Autocracy versus civil society, I think.
There is a case that governments should rule that no college which receives any kind of taxpayer funding should be allowed to mandate the use of a product from one particular company to its students, but don't hold your breath waiting.
Another nice approach was the "swinging gate" RAM method in which you had two blocks of physical RAM in the same memory space. The main CPU filled one block with data, then flicked the switch so the co-processor could read that data while the CPU read the results from the other block, then put in new data for processing in the next cycle. Very easy to implement, much cheaper than FIFOs. It meant you could use a cheap DSP (from TI) in a system using a cheaper 8086 series processor for which you could get cheap tools and an embedded OS.
FOSS means that work, whether localisation or support, can be done in the local region at local prices. It therefore levels the playing field, helping to achieve the (supposed) objectives of the WTO. And, in reality, it doesn't reduce Microsoft's profits as much as you might think because, in many cases, the alternative is actually piracy.
On the other hand, it creates middle class jobs (jobs relying on literacy, professional skills etc.). The biggest problem of many Third World countries is the lack of a middle class. Between the very poor (exploited) and the very rick (exploiters) there is no buffer of people to create a civil society. In China the very concept of civil society is still alien while it has emerged rapidly in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. India has a rapidly increasing middle class and is the world's biggest democracy.
So, I know this may seem over the top: but FOSS provides support to fair trade, emerging democracy and free markets. And it does it while expending very little energy, so it contributes little to climate change.
The UK has an amazing law which allows its citizens - (sorry, subjects of Her Gracious Majesty Elizabeth II von Battenberg Saxe Coburg Gotha usw) to be rendered to the US at the request of the US authorities without their having to present any evidence that a crime has been committed. Imagine the fun of this one. I host a site in the UK without the flag, which is viewed by an American. As a result, the US Govt. decides to extradite me to the US as a result of an action beyond my control, i.e. the decision of a US ISP to permit relaying of an illegal website to a US citizen. And my heroic Government will do nothing to intervene. Of course, if the website is hosted in, say, France, the US authorities will simply have to interpret French legal expressions like "Merde alors".
Then Google came along and now you could look for stuff you really wanted or needed. Broadcasting advertising is mostly for stuff you wouldn't want and for which someone is trying to create a demand. So you resist watching it. So to preserve the business model you must be forced to watch it.
Conclusion: no matter how many lawyers are paid to argue about freedom of speech, or "commercial speech" ("Have a nice day"?) it's a bad business model. We the people find ways to avoid the ads: broadcasters and advertisers in collusion try to find ways to project them on our retinas, because this means they don't have to pay for high quality creative content, whether for the ads or for products that don't suck. Eventually they will become so annoying that even Walmart Joe will start boycotting the products for really annoying ads.
Then they will have to go back to the idea of producing ads so well designed and clever (think the Honda mechanical sculpture ad) that people rate them higher than the programmes. Which will create competition for the artistic talent, which is in much shorter supply than would be Big Brothers. And so it will cycle as the manufacturers try to cut costs and the broadcasters try to find ways to get their dollars.
...anybody who trusts Wikipedia is asking for trouble. It's often like a vast collection of every urban myth known to man, with a geek slant. However, I still don't understand how the NaOH can be catalytic, at least on the definition I grew up with (something that pushes the reaction equilibrium in a particular direction but is not itself a reaction component). The O and H in the final NaOH are different atoms from the ones you started with (to the limits permitted by quantum mechanics, yada yada), unlike the platinum in catalytic converters, or the amino acids in enzymes. My chemistry teacher used to argue about whether the vanadium pentoxide in the SO2-SO3 process could properly be called a catalyst, and that's closer to that classical definition than the NaOH. Perhaps I'm being overly pedantic, but as industrial chemistry paid for my house and pension fund, perhaps I have a point.
How many times must I post this? In the US, it is date of invention that matters not date of filing. The rest of the world understands the problem with this approach, which was fine when distance and slow transport isolated communities, but is now hopelessly out of date. Only in the US can you have submarine patents. This is the most broken thing in the entire system. Without that, even properly reviewed software patents might be tolerable. Prior art is hard to prove in a country where someone has sat on an invention for ages in a notebook witnessed by an attorney and stored in a safe.
Years ago at the U of Cambridge there was a woman researcher (I'm sorry, I have forgotten her name) who was working on improved strains of rape. She took great delight, when visiting dignitaries asked her what she was working on, in just replyng "Rape".
However, it's clearly a demonstration of the problems of the patent system that someone as ignorant of basic physics and chemistry as this can get a patent.
Yes, I am in a bad mood today. Totally ignorant postings and moderations on science and technology always have that effect on me.
Don't they teach kids ANY organic chemistry nowadays? How are we to produce the next generation of recreational drug designers and home-made explosives producers that made the West what it is today?
It's amazing, though perhaps it shouldn't be, just how many people posting on Slashdot do not seem to understand that anti-trust cases are not limited to Microsoft, that before the present Administration there have been plenty of interventions in monopolies (and when they are history there will doubtless be more) and that the new pressure for Open Source and Open Formats is just a repeat of what has happened in every branch of engineering there has ever been. Once a technology starts to get mature, playing fields must be leveled, standards must be established. Hardware is now mature, with standards like SATA and PCI replacing earlier ones as hardware is commoditised, yet cheaper and more reliable. Governments are faced with huge wastage in software procurement and systems operations, but such is the proliferation of incompatible architectures and tools that they find it hard to get a grip on the problem. Standards help with that process; they help governments to waste less.
Years ago I was at a meeting where the possibility of European software standards was discussed, and a senior expert suggested that the software industry was too cowboy and immature to be able to do it (he said that on a scale of 0 to 10, heavy industry scored 8, light industry 6, and the software industry wouldn't even be able to make a mark on the paper, to be exact.) It's thirteen years on from there, and things are changing.
One other thing: don't confuse governments with politicians. Politicians are a mix of honest people who want to improve things along with shifty crooks and everything in between. Government departments are a mixture of shifty crooks with honest people who want to improve things. You can see they are exact opposites. The trick is to unite the honest people on both sides, whereupon things can happen with remarkable speed.
The rate of increase of external debt. The CIA factbook makes it clear that the total debt of the mainland European economies was about half that of the US and its UK satellite combined.
You mean the one that's absorbing former Communist countries, that makes Japanese cars more efficiently than they can in Japan, that hosts backward companies like AMD and Airbus, and that isn't trillions in debt? Thank God I live in a decaying economy rather than a dynamic one that's exporting all its added value to China.