The russian army has/had a "ground effect" plane, usable on open ocean on waves up to 2m high. Its speed was in the hundreds of miles per hour, and it could haul about 2000 men ready for battle.
Anyway, at waves 2m tall, this is just for good weather on the ocean
While towed by a similar ship, the towing line will have the ends level - and with all the tension, will sag pretty much. When towed by a tug, the end of the line on the tug will be much nearer the water level, as tugs are small
A sail ship can advance - let's say - 45 degrees into the wind. In this way, by zig zagging (or tacking), it can go straight against the wind making small legs that are just a bit against the wind.
You don't really need a keel - as ships are long and narrow, they will resist much more to lateral moving than to forward moving. A keel will help in moving forward (and not sideways as wind will push you), but is not an absolute necessity.
The power a sail make increases with the increase in wind speed. So, a slow moving ship will have a more efficient sail than a fast moving one (all else being equal).
But the Gulf Stream (which would be the biggest current to use) is slowing and thinning. Meanwhile, the winds are stronger and stronger (hurricane scale).
Water currents are very very slow.
This is the best possible situation. Most of the time, the winds slow at night. Also, you can't use any kind of wind. The wind isn't steady enough to use it always, and sometime is so slow you wouldn't get an advantage. Also, you need a big kite for the normal speed winds - if the winds are too strong, you can't use it.
You can't use the kite in crowded waters with other ships using kites (even if most of the way is out of this kind of waters).
Yes, the opportunity to save fuel is there, and a japanese coastal tanker got a fuel reduction of 15% in fuel use during a year of sailing (or motoring) using some kind of mast-mounted sail. Just that wind power is not so useful for 7200 hours a year.
There are other problems too - if a heavy rain starts with little wind, you will have to recover the kite from under water... just hope it won't go thru the screws.
I went downhill once at about 65km/h (40mph) on a good road. I don't know about race bikes, but on mountain bikes the handlebar starts to harden, and you have to force it one side or the other in order to steer.
You won't develop big muscles while cycling - even if you look at Lance Armstrong. Biking won't make you some gorilla arms or chest. Even the leg muscles won't develop very much in size - just in strength, and all your body in capacity for long effort.
There was a project to fly a human-powered aircraft (in Greece) on the way Icarus and Daedalus flew from the minotaurus' labirinth. They made it, but the plane crashed on the beach at destination
There are certain start and end places of a trip, for which you must drive more with a car that you must ride a bycicle. To go 20m up a street, I need to drive down, change the direction using an underground crossing, go up to a round intersection, and go down again some 200m. With bike? 20m up, on the pedestrian way.
I get to work in 25+ minutes by foot, in some 15 with the bike (not quite 5km round trip), and close to 10 minutes by car. If I take into account extra time to warm engine, some traffic, finding a parking space at work, driving the car is about as fast.
As for going from work to home, you really don't care you are sweaty when you reach home. As for sudden weather changes, they don't happen so sudden, and usually you are prepared. Also, some of my colleagues come by foot, and they won't be much less wet. If worst came to worst, I have an umbrella with me:D
If your needs are very very particular, a coprocessor might give you a huge speed advantage. For the moment, the only successful coprocessor technology in PC is the GPU. A GPU's work would humble even a quad dual cores (meanwhile, a budget CPU could humble the biggest and baddest GPU in most other benchmarks).
If AMD would have stayed with single channel DDR, the socket 754 would be the only socket used in a loooong while. The previous change of socket (from Socket A, with some 462 pins, to Socket 754) was needed in order to accomodate the pinout used for accessing memory.
Yes, current (new technology) DDR2 is higher latency than current (old technology optimised to hell) DDR1. However, even now things are going for the better with DDR2 (latencies of 3-3-3 already possible at DDR2-800)
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The russian army has/had a "ground effect" plane, usable on open ocean on waves up to 2m high. Its speed was in the hundreds of miles per hour, and it could haul about 2000 men ready for battle. Anyway, at waves 2m tall, this is just for good weather on the ocean
While towed by a similar ship, the towing line will have the ends level - and with all the tension, will sag pretty much. When towed by a tug, the end of the line on the tug will be much nearer the water level, as tugs are small
A sail ship can advance - let's say - 45 degrees into the wind. In this way, by zig zagging (or tacking), it can go straight against the wind making small legs that are just a bit against the wind. You don't really need a keel - as ships are long and narrow, they will resist much more to lateral moving than to forward moving. A keel will help in moving forward (and not sideways as wind will push you), but is not an absolute necessity.
The power a sail make increases with the increase in wind speed. So, a slow moving ship will have a more efficient sail than a fast moving one (all else being equal).
No, they don't. Supertankers weigh 300,000 tons and more.
But the Gulf Stream (which would be the biggest current to use) is slowing and thinning. Meanwhile, the winds are stronger and stronger (hurricane scale). Water currents are very very slow.
This is the best possible situation. Most of the time, the winds slow at night. Also, you can't use any kind of wind. The wind isn't steady enough to use it always, and sometime is so slow you wouldn't get an advantage. Also, you need a big kite for the normal speed winds - if the winds are too strong, you can't use it. You can't use the kite in crowded waters with other ships using kites (even if most of the way is out of this kind of waters). Yes, the opportunity to save fuel is there, and a japanese coastal tanker got a fuel reduction of 15% in fuel use during a year of sailing (or motoring) using some kind of mast-mounted sail. Just that wind power is not so useful for 7200 hours a year. There are other problems too - if a heavy rain starts with little wind, you will have to recover the kite from under water... just hope it won't go thru the screws.
I went downhill once at about 65km/h (40mph) on a good road. I don't know about race bikes, but on mountain bikes the handlebar starts to harden, and you have to force it one side or the other in order to steer.
You won't develop big muscles while cycling - even if you look at Lance Armstrong. Biking won't make you some gorilla arms or chest. Even the leg muscles won't develop very much in size - just in strength, and all your body in capacity for long effort.
There was a project to fly a human-powered aircraft (in Greece) on the way Icarus and Daedalus flew from the minotaurus' labirinth. They made it, but the plane crashed on the beach at destination
It works for many people - just not in USA
There are certain start and end places of a trip, for which you must drive more with a car that you must ride a bycicle. To go 20m up a street, I need to drive down, change the direction using an underground crossing, go up to a round intersection, and go down again some 200m. With bike? 20m up, on the pedestrian way. I get to work in 25+ minutes by foot, in some 15 with the bike (not quite 5km round trip), and close to 10 minutes by car. If I take into account extra time to warm engine, some traffic, finding a parking space at work, driving the car is about as fast. As for going from work to home, you really don't care you are sweaty when you reach home. As for sudden weather changes, they don't happen so sudden, and usually you are prepared. Also, some of my colleagues come by foot, and they won't be much less wet. If worst came to worst, I have an umbrella with me :D
If your needs are very very particular, a coprocessor might give you a huge speed advantage. For the moment, the only successful coprocessor technology in PC is the GPU. A GPU's work would humble even a quad dual cores (meanwhile, a budget CPU could humble the biggest and baddest GPU in most other benchmarks).
If AMD would have stayed with single channel DDR, the socket 754 would be the only socket used in a loooong while. The previous change of socket (from Socket A, with some 462 pins, to Socket 754) was needed in order to accomodate the pinout used for accessing memory.
Yes, current (new technology) DDR2 is higher latency than current (old technology optimised to hell) DDR1. However, even now things are going for the better with DDR2 (latencies of 3-3-3 already possible at DDR2-800)
This is (mostly) doubling the number of transistors that can be packed on a chip the same size (or reducing chip size in half)