Excellent! Now we have to figure out how to entangle all the information the NSA, CIA, FBI, Dept. of Homeland Security and local police forces have gathered on unsuspecting people and we can have an unlimited source of power. I love it when a plan comes together.
I think the problem lies with the way its presented and taught. Sure we need math for some of the things you mentioned but honestly, very very few will ever sit there with a piece of paper and calculator to figure out their mortgage payments or credit card bills. Most will just look at the bill and pay what they can.
I faild pre-calc several times in university. As embarassing as it was it simply never clicked. Then I had a teacher who didnt stand there and drone on or stick with a rigorous rote learning method. He simply presented the theory, broke down example problems and only highlighted the important parts. during exams you were allowed one page of notes. Why? Because its useless to force a student to memorize sin theta = opp/hyp and tan theta =opp/adj or that the quadratic equation is (-b+/- SQRT(a^2-4ac)/2a. I cant tell you how many time I fucked up a sign, formula or some other trivial thing that completely ruined an answer. His method was much more practical and actually made math interesting. You actually got around to solving problems instead of memorizing shit that in reality would be looked up on the internet or a book. He would rather you had a cheat sheet which removed the stupid mistakes many people make. You actually used your knowledge to solve the problems and had a guide to help you. Just because a student has a copy of the quadratic equation on hand during a test doesnt mean he/she can solve for x. But it eliminates the problem of the student forgot there is a - sign in front of b or that its a^2-4ac and not a^2+4ac. Plus he gave partial credit for a problem where he saw you knew the math but made a dumb mistake like misplacing a decimal point or somehow plugging in the wrong number. And the best part? he would allow you to re-take a failed exam on your time during his office hours (i never had to retake an exam but a few did). How good is that? I aced that class with an A+ and I never heard a single student complain that the work was too hard. I was much more prepared for the harder calc stuff. I struggled with calc and calc 2, never got anywhere near an A+ but I had a sturdy foundation and passed thanks to my pre-calc teacher.
We need more teachers that focus on actual application of mathematics and not rote learning. If the student understands the process then memorizing the formulas and rules are moot. Understanding the quadratic formula, what a polynomial is and how to use the two is more important than remembering the actual formula. For students not entering math intensive scientific, medical or engineering curriculum's, its pointless to force a rote learning process that punishes the most minute of mistakes.
It is kind of funny watching the Death Metal musicians "sing" about violence when they'd get their asses kicked were they ever in a street fight.
Nice cheap shot. Im sure only musicians with the physical ability to street fight should be allowed to sing such lyrics. Hell plenty of rap lyrics featured gun violence which any pussy with a semi functional brain and trigger finger can wield. Bottom line is who the fuck cares? You sound like one of those over amped machismo hardcore fans who's goal it is to disfigure as many people in the mosh pit as possible while wearing a tank top. Chill out.
Its a question that has been kicking around in my head for some time but with x86 already pretty reliable, fast and cheap as hell, why is Itanium still around? I understand its pretty much limited to big iron systems where up time is critical for customers like banks and military but what is so special about its design?
Is there any technical advantage to the Itanium architecture that enables it to run more reliably than a Xeon or Opteron? The only feature I can recall is the ability to run two CPU's in lock-step for high reliability but I don't see why they couldn't introduce this feature in x86. Why hasn't x86 replaced it in big iron systems?
I remember when the Alpha architecture once looked to be a promising alternative to x86. It had tons of OS support including Windows, BSD and Linux and there were ATX motherboards available. Benchmarks showed it beat the piss out of any x86 processor in terms of floating point performance (yet integer lagged slightly). Once the remains of DEC were bought by Compaq, Compaq didn't need another CPU arch and sold the Alpha IP to Intel who effectively killed it.
But the core Alpha team went to work for AMD and together with the K6 and K7 team created the Athlon which was for a while an Intel killer. So while AMD is still an x86 house, much of their success was thanks to the Alpha team.
I have had with cats and dogs my whole life. I find both to be equally interesting and I would love to know how a dog thinks. We had a mixed German Sheppard guard dog at our business named Lucky. He had a voracious appetite and would try to eat everything he could (amazingly he didn't eat his own feces, it wasn't good enough for him). That dog lived for food and escaping to find more food. He was also an individual, he was lovable and loyal but never wanted to really listen to anyone. Sometimes when we called all the dogs inside they came right inside. He would walk to the door with them, get to the door and just walk away as if he was saying "fuck you, im not ready to come in." We had to drag him in sometimes. He wasn't completely disobedient he did listen to commands but it was selective. My grandfather said that if he was a person you would hate him. He was a bit of an ass hole, always watching you while you ate to see if you were going to turn your back so he could swipe something. I nicknamed him Houdini as he could escape the property without anyone noticing. The other dogs were very obedient and always listened to commands, very typical behavior. That dog taught me that there is more then just simple instinct at work, a thought process existed in his little dog brain and it made him and individual.
Few stories: The burger snatch: I got a few burgers from burger king for me and the other workers. I had one burger left and without thinking I left it on a table within reach of the dogs. I was sitting behind some shelving and I watched as Lucky slowly walked toward the table and sniffed the air a bit. He knew there was food up there so I watched as he actually checked to see if anyone was watching. He looked left for a second and then right, he didn't see me so he quickly jumped up and grabbed the burger. At that moment I realized dogs do possess a basic form of thought. He knew to check to see if anyone was looking. Why else would he look around? If he simply wanted the food he would just grab it.
The second was the Houdini: We have a beach house in a gated community. Along the side of the house is a wooden walkway from the front deck to the rear deck. I had to go there with my brother for some maintenance and I took our dogs, Lucky was one. We had to dog proof the yard to make sure they couldn't get out, along the side of the deck is open to the front so I built a wall using some lawn chairs and a broom. It was sturdy so I let the dogs out. Lucky immediately scouted the perimeter, sniffing along the fence from on end to the other. I knew what he wanted to do but I made sure all the gates were closed and locked, he wasn't getting out. After an hour we noticed Lucky was not around, the other dog was with us. I went in the yard to check up on him and he was gone. Puzzled I went looking for him and found him sitting on the front deck watching the activity of the neighborhood. How the hell did he get out? So we brought him back into the yard and watched him from a window. He walked around until he figured he wasn't being watched, walked into an opening under the deck and then pushed out of an access door just ahead of my makeshift dog wall. Again I was amazed, he had a goal to escape and then actually set about finding a way out. He found and exploited a hole in the perimeter and escaped.
One of his usual escapades was to escape and cross the street to the shopping mall parking lot and look for food. One year after thanksgiving someone dumped a whole pile of ham and turkey in the mall parking lot, I found him at the pile snapping up as much as he could before I grabbed him. He hit the jackpot. Plenty of other stories about him but those two really showed that he possessed a thought process. I was sad to see him go but he lasted a long time for a big dog, made it past 16. I miss that little jerk, smartest dog I have ever seen.
There is no viable alternative, By what measure, that there is already 80,000 stations selling hydrogen on every street corner for $1.22 a gallon?
What are you talking about, where are these 80,000 hydrogen stations? $1.22 a gallon? GALLON? Where are you getting these ridiculous numbers and units? Where can I buy a Hydrogen car right now? Maybe your thinking of Iceland but even there they do not have 80k stations nor do they sell H2 by the "gallon".
That you dont already have your home covered in solar?
So you're saying that we can fuel our planes, ships and trucks at these corner hydrogen stations and cover them with solar panels? Did you read your parent post in its entirety?
You really need a reality check if you think replacing fossil fuels is a simple task. We can CUT our use for things like transportation of people via hybrid/electric buses and cars as well as supplementing our electric use with solar. But the bottom line is the lifeblood of our economy is the transportation of goods which is almost entirely fueled by Kerosene, diesel and bunker oil. One they become more and more scarce the cost of transportation will skyrocket unless an alternative comes along. And power stations run on coal, oil and natural gas as well. After the Fukushima disaster I doubt anyone will even want to hear about Nuclear power (fission) for a decade or more (if they ever think about it again). Wind and solar can supplement our demand but it would be costly and difficult to generate enough power for the big industrial consumers who require tens to hundreds of megawatts continuously.
Where I work we just had a 55kw solar system installed using utility and government aid. It only cost us $10,000(USD) and the system cost total was $255,000. Not a bad investment but it only supplies around (on a sunny day) 15% of our daily power needs and covers more than half of the buildings roof. So industrial demand cant be met by solar. So what about home use? Most electronics and efficient lighting can run off a few kW array, nothing big. But homes need to be heated in the winter and forget about telling people in hotter climates to turn their AC units off. Cooking on gas or electric stoves is a high energy demand. So even homes need to be grid tied to utility energy to supplement solar.
People living off the grid are a different breed (usually environmentalists, minimalists or "outdoorsmen"). Any they in no way represent a majority of the first world population in terms of living standards, they are the extreme minority. So forget about them.
The only practical alternative to drilling for fossil fuels is to synthesize them using the Fischerâ"Tropsch process. Essentially it takes a feed gas consisting of hydrogen and carbon monoxide and reacts them over a metal catalyst(iron, cobalt, ruthenium) plus heat. Depending on the temperature and a few other factors you get anything from methane to diesel and possibly heavier hydrocarbons. The CO can be obtained from partial combustion of coal or organic matter such as plant and wood scraps (wood gas). So a power station that processes bio diesel from plants can convert the waste plant matter into CO and feed it into a reactor to turn it into more fuels. A perfect setup to me would be a coal burning power station with an on site FT reactor heated by the waste turbine steam or boiler steam. Plant steam could be used to steam reform water into hydrogen. Plant steam can also drive other processes such as bio diesel production so you now have a power station/fuel refinery rolled into one. Such large stations already have rail access so bio matter can easily be reclaimed from afar in an efficient manner. So the problem of fuel oils is taken care of and the ships, planes and trucks can keep rolling. Not a perfect method but better than shooting from the hip about hydrogen and solar for personal use without thinking of commercial and industrial consumption.
I know this is late but the neutral wire to the meter is only 14-12 AWG. If you read my post carefully I said that there are 5 wires to the meter, two hot legs from the street and two to the panel box. The 5th wire which is the neutral wire, runs to the neutral bus bar. The actual neutral line was not ran into his house, only the meter neutral line. Maybe I should have been more specific.
Back in the early days of trucking, there were no spring brakes or maxi brakes. So if you parked a loaded tractor trailer on a hill the only thing keeping it from rolling was the "drum in hat" style parking brake on the transmission or carrier (differential). It was nothing more than a drum brake that was mounted to the drive shaft. and they held around 80,000 pounds (36,000kg) on a hill IF they were adjusted properly. Those guys carried and used chocks.
You still find those parking brakes on medium duty trucks without air brakes. Many of the medium duty transmissions sold today (mainly by Allison) do in fact have a parking pawl. And they hold up to whatever they are designed to hold, sometimes up to 33,000+ pounds (15,000+ kg).
Smart meters do not use the old electro-mechanical method to measure power consumption. They are solid state and have no moving parts or coils that can be tampered with by a magnetic field.
Little story: Back in high school I took electrical installation, basically you were taught to become an electrician for residential, commercial and industrial. We had an amazing teacher, a master electrician who told us how he cheated the meter to cut his bill down. Basically most older electric meters were "5-jaw" meaning that they had 5 contacts, two incoming hot legs from the street, one neutral and two outgoing hot legs to your panel box. If you cut the neutral leg the meter stopped spinning. So he "obtained" a forged matching utility seal (the numbered plastic thing that seals the meter to detect tampering) and ran two wires stealthily into the meter pan. Instead of the neutral leg of the meter going strait to the main neutral bus bar, it first went into his home to a timer switch hidden in a closet and back to the meter pans neutral bus bar. He said if you looked in the pan and didn't poke around, you would never see that the wires were diverted. So over the period of a few years he finally got it to the point where he would only pay 20-30 dollars a month in electricity because he lowered it very very slowly over time. If you suddenly half your electric bill the uitility's billing software would flag you and send an investigation team out who will pull your meter and take it to a lab for diagnosis and inspect your meter pan. Well he was sitting pretty paying next to nothing while running air conditioners and pool filters but one day the timer burnt out completely shutting the meter off. He didnt notice and said it could have been that way for well over a month. The utility came to his house on a day when he happened to be home and pulled the meter. The lights went out and he decided to look out the window and saw the utility truck in front of his house. He ran out and with some quick thinking started screaming at the utility workers "What the fuck are you doing! My wife was carrying laundry down the stairs and she fell. I think she broke her leg. Im calling 911, and im going to sue your asses!" before he could get back in the house the utility crew plugged the meter back in and ran. He then removed his modifications and covered his trail. The next day an inspector came and rang his bell informing him they had to remove the meter for inspection and that they were sorry for any problems the previous crew caused. Well they took his old mechanical meter and installed an electronic meter that had a clock and a light sensor (from his description). It was a "4-jaw" meter (no neutral) and could not be disabled without physically unplugging it. He never heard back from the utility as he covered his tracks and they couldn't prove he tampered with the meter since he replaced the seal with one of the same serial number. He never tried to tamper with the meter again.
Goes to show you how easy it was to cheat the electric bill with a little skill, resources and patience.
I did have chocks but I don't trust them on hills. Best thing is to just leave the wheel turned toward the curb and hope whatever parking mechanism you have is enough. 17k was well within the GCW for the towing vehicle and the transmission parking brake held up just fine. I would have used the chocks of I had to rely on the cable actuated parking brake.
I can imagine that an aluminum cased transmission would be more "forgiving" to such a situation. The steel pawl becomes a cutting head and just bores out the grooves in the case. That or the pawl itself is mashed depending what is it made of. If it was all steel than the outcome would have been nasty. Cracked case or snapped output shaft come to mind.
That is only useful for parking on a reasonably level surface. There was a time when big trucks had all mechanical diesel engines and drivers would practice this. And I have heard of more than a few trucks mysteriously starting themselves up and running away. Turns out the drivers never set any mechanical brake, did not leave the engine stop lever in the stop position (which cuts fuel) and parked on a slight incline or hill. The trucks weight would overcome the friction of the drive line, begin to roll and crank the engine causing it to fire up and run away.
I was victim to this thinking when I first started driving big trucks. It was an old GMC that had no clutch interlock and I had a bad habit of starting it from outside the truck while standing on the ground. Another driver was old-school and parked it using the gear lever, I never noticed it. It started and thankfully there was another vehicle parked next to it and the wheel was turned all the way to the right. It surged to the right and crashed into the vehicle next to it. It dented the fender and step, nothing major. If the wheel was pointed strait or in my direction the outcome would have been bad. I admit that I should have been in the cab, foot on the clutch and checked to see if the transmission was in gear. I just never expected the mechanical brake to be off and transmission in gear, it was a practice I was unaware of. Boss was pissed at me but even more pissed that someone left the truck in gear with no parking brake on. We both had our asses chewed. You learn from mistakes.
Using the gear lever to park any vehicle is not nor has it ever been an acceptable method of parking. Its more a last resort for a worm or maladjusted parking brake.
It's not a parking brake, never was. It's an emergency brake.
If you have a stick shift (aka manual or standard) transmission, the emergency/parking brake lever is what you use to park your vehicle and as a backup mechanical brake if for some reason your normal hydraulic brakes completely fail. So yes it is a parking brake in addition to being a last resort mechanical brake. They are still present on all(?) automatic cars as a safety feature. Before the parking pawl it was the only way to park your vehicle so it has and always will be an emergency/parking brake. After a while it became commonplace to just call it a parking brake, maybe the word "emergency" made people feel uncomfortable. Who knows.
When automatic transmissions first came around, the "parking pawl" was not always present so a lever or handle was necessary to mechanically lock the vehicles brakes to prevent it from rolling, like a manual. Then the parking pawl was standardized (in the US around 1965) to give drivers a more safe and reliable parking mechanism. It can not be used as a brake mechanism, its a gear like ring on a splined shaft which when engaged, slides into a grooved recess of the transmission case. This locks the output shaft which in turn locks the entire drive line. Engaging that at highway speeds would mean catastrophic transmission and/or drive line failure.
I bet most people in the U.S. never bother setting it when the car is parked, heck, many of them I'm sure wouldn't know where it is or how to use it in an emergency. There's a "P" setting on the shifter, that's good enough:/
What was the point of making that statement? To be a snobby jerk off and put down Americans when ever you can? Is it fashionable where you come from? The parking pawl is more reliable than a mechanical cable activated parking brake. One the ring locks the drive shaft it is not rolling anywhere. A cable actuated emergency/parking brake can come out of adjustment and also suffer from a failed cable. It is not necessary to use on an automatic. I happen to use it on hills as a backup to prevent the weight of the vehicle from binding the parking pawl.
And an example: I purchased a forklift that weighed 8000 lbs. I hauled it on a 3000lb trailer and towed it with a ~6000 lb automatic vehicle. All together it weighed around 17,000 pounds or 7,700 kg. I stopped at a friends house and decided to stay the night, problem was his house was on a hill and I could not fit the rig into his driveway. I set the parking brake and tested to see if it would hold, it didn't. 7700kg on a steep hill was just too much for it, it crept forward little by little. I put the automatic transmission in park and it held perfectly.
Never said that it was the right way, you just made that assumption and put words in my mouth.
Its the history of the world, shit happened and we moved on. We had to endure those hardships but with them they bought about a lot of technical advancements and massively stimulated industry. WW2 alone stimulated the growth of aviation, space travel, computers, communications and medicine. It was a terrible time in history but it was part of western technical and industrial growth. And before WW2, WW1 and earlier wars played part in the growth of the west. I don't think it was the right way, war sucks but it happened and it bought about a lot of change. and WW2 was just a small period in the history of the industrialized world, there were many other innovations that came about without needing war to stimulate its growth.
Like it or not what China is doing to its currency exchange rate, lax environmental laws, lax labor laws and sheer numbers willing to work for peanuts is almost a war. Not a hot war but an economic one.
If you think every American not being able to buy three Starbucks Latte's a day more of a sin than having hundreds of kids starve to death, maybe you should look long and hard in the mirror before deciding what is evil and what is not.
Before we go any further, are you seriously going to pull a "think of the children" argument on/.? What does the above quoted text mean exactly? Are you saying we should do all we can to save China's population from itself by buying as many Chinese goods we can while sacrificing our standard of living?
I don't think I am evil when I say I will not keep me up at night if millions starve in China, they bought it upon themselves. If you outpace your ability to sustain a civilization then you fucked up, its not the fault of someone in another country who wanted cheaper goods and 3 lattes, they didn't make the rules. China is trying to become a successful global economy via short-cuts and cheating. Nations like Germany, Japan and the USA spent a century or two and a few major wars getting where they are. If China's economy turns out to be a house of cards and it collapses then too bad, they tried to cheat the system and lost.
If millions starve it will be sad, but its not going to keep me up at night thinking about how I could have bought more iPads and computers from Chinese manufactures so they could feed their families.
Dear god, have you actually read into diesel emissions in the USA? US Diesels are CLEANER than European diesel engines.
If you did you would have found that EPA2010 regulations require more stringent emissions than the current Euro5 diesel emissions (Euro6 comes into play around 2013/14 I believe and will bring Europe down to or past US diesel emissions). EPA2007 required less soot which was taken care of by diesel particulate filters and in EPA2002 EGR was required. So over the past 10 years diesel has become MUCH more clean. The smoke belching diesels are a thing of the past. The ones you still see running around are pre 2007 emission trucks or trucks with a big engine problem.
No one was lobbying for anything. Please stop spreading misinformation.
If it was a Trucker I highly doubt it was a "curious" kid. Rather a Trucker who is looking to cheat his/her companies GPS tracking system. Google Qualcomm, a very popular system used in North America. If you ever see a semi with a white roundish antenna (best described as two salad bowls stuck together) its a Qualcomm. It also acts as a Tachograph, a device that records the number of hours a driver has logged on the road. This is to enforce "Hours of Service" rules to prevent truckers from driving long stints and becoming exhausted behind the wheel (a major cause of accidents are sleepy truckers nodding off behind the wheel). Trucks without tachographs must have log books to indicate hours and drivers regularly fudge them to get more hours on the road and less at rest (a resting truck doesn't make money). It also offers two way communication and email for drivers to communicate with the dispatcher. In Europe just about every semi truck has a tachograph. I don't think the tachograph is GPS equipped but I am sure there are versions that might have it or have GPS tracking added by the company.
Bottom line, the trucker just wanted to rid himself/herself of the big brother tracking system installed in the truck. Some companies become fuel misers and every extra km or mile traveled has to be answered for by the driver. Maybe they just wanted to take a more scenic route, stop off at a favorite eating spot or just go their own damn route. That or they were trying to cheat the HOS rules, which wouldn't surprise me if that was the primary use of GPS jamming in trucks.
I just woke up and decided to read./. And to my surprise someone was making a SPARC based tablet running KDE, AWESOME! Then I read the summary. Gets Coffee...
Its interesting to see a new bright and fast x-ray source for study. The short pulses of the atomic x-ray are useful for micro/nanoscopic imaging as you emit a pure, ultra bright yet short pulse of x-rays that penetrate the subject without frying it. Think of it as a camera flash that allows you to see through things without cooking/vaporizing them and is fast enough to capture things happening in a quadrillionth of a second. I only wish a light source such as the NSLS2 were capable of pumping the x-ray lasers from their beam lines. It looks like this system will have to be built from scratch to implement it at existing research centers.
Currently, bright x-rays are created by synchrotron emission which is caused by bending an electron beam to emit photons in a specific wavelength (Also called a "free electron laser" or FEL). They further tune the spectrum using a crystal monochromator that is composed of two silicon mirrors that are rotated and change the angle of incident which selects a specific wavelength(but not a perfect single wavelength). Believe it or not, its the distance between atoms in the crystal structure of the silicon that is within the physical wavelength of the x-rays. The angle changes the aperture between the silicon atoms filtering out only the wavelength that fits between and reflects off them (interesting fact: gamma rays, which lie just above x-rays in the electromagnetic spectrum, cannot be filtered. There is no known substance with a crystal structure small enough to refract the 1 picometer wavelength). The only drawback is the light is continuous wave and not chromatically pure. This atomic x-ray laser is capable of an ultra fast pulsed single wavelength. I believe they currently use shutter systems to control x-ray exposure of synchrotrons. Awesome stuff, I have toured the NSLS twice and have a friend who works there in the machine shop building fixtures, vacuum chambers and other vacuum apparatus.
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Excellent! Now we have to figure out how to entangle all the information the NSA, CIA, FBI, Dept. of Homeland Security and local police forces have gathered on unsuspecting people and we can have an unlimited source of power. I love it when a plan comes together.
I think the problem lies with the way its presented and taught. Sure we need math for some of the things you mentioned but honestly, very very few will ever sit there with a piece of paper and calculator to figure out their mortgage payments or credit card bills. Most will just look at the bill and pay what they can.
I faild pre-calc several times in university. As embarassing as it was it simply never clicked. Then I had a teacher who didnt stand there and drone on or stick with a rigorous rote learning method. He simply presented the theory, broke down example problems and only highlighted the important parts. during exams you were allowed one page of notes. Why? Because its useless to force a student to memorize sin theta = opp/hyp and tan theta =opp/adj or that the quadratic equation is (-b+/- SQRT(a^2-4ac)/2a. I cant tell you how many time I fucked up a sign, formula or some other trivial thing that completely ruined an answer. His method was much more practical and actually made math interesting. You actually got around to solving problems instead of memorizing shit that in reality would be looked up on the internet or a book. He would rather you had a cheat sheet which removed the stupid mistakes many people make. You actually used your knowledge to solve the problems and had a guide to help you. Just because a student has a copy of the quadratic equation on hand during a test doesnt mean he/she can solve for x. But it eliminates the problem of the student forgot there is a - sign in front of b or that its a^2-4ac and not a^2+4ac. Plus he gave partial credit for a problem where he saw you knew the math but made a dumb mistake like misplacing a decimal point or somehow plugging in the wrong number. And the best part? he would allow you to re-take a failed exam on your time during his office hours (i never had to retake an exam but a few did). How good is that? I aced that class with an A+ and I never heard a single student complain that the work was too hard. I was much more prepared for the harder calc stuff. I struggled with calc and calc 2, never got anywhere near an A+ but I had a sturdy foundation and passed thanks to my pre-calc teacher.
We need more teachers that focus on actual application of mathematics and not rote learning. If the student understands the process then memorizing the formulas and rules are moot. Understanding the quadratic formula, what a polynomial is and how to use the two is more important than remembering the actual formula. For students not entering math intensive scientific, medical or engineering curriculum's, its pointless to force a rote learning process that punishes the most minute of mistakes.
It is kind of funny watching the Death Metal musicians "sing" about violence when they'd get their asses kicked were they ever in a street fight.
Nice cheap shot. Im sure only musicians with the physical ability to street fight should be allowed to sing such lyrics. Hell plenty of rap lyrics featured gun violence which any pussy with a semi functional brain and trigger finger can wield. Bottom line is who the fuck cares? You sound like one of those over amped machismo hardcore fans who's goal it is to disfigure as many people in the mosh pit as possible while wearing a tank top. Chill out.
Its a question that has been kicking around in my head for some time but with x86 already pretty reliable, fast and cheap as hell, why is Itanium still around? I understand its pretty much limited to big iron systems where up time is critical for customers like banks and military but what is so special about its design?
Is there any technical advantage to the Itanium architecture that enables it to run more reliably than a Xeon or Opteron? The only feature I can recall is the ability to run two CPU's in lock-step for high reliability but I don't see why they couldn't introduce this feature in x86. Why hasn't x86 replaced it in big iron systems?
I remember when the Alpha architecture once looked to be a promising alternative to x86. It had tons of OS support including Windows, BSD and Linux and there were ATX motherboards available. Benchmarks showed it beat the piss out of any x86 processor in terms of floating point performance (yet integer lagged slightly). Once the remains of DEC were bought by Compaq, Compaq didn't need another CPU arch and sold the Alpha IP to Intel who effectively killed it.
But the core Alpha team went to work for AMD and together with the K6 and K7 team created the Athlon which was for a while an Intel killer. So while AMD is still an x86 house, much of their success was thanks to the Alpha team.
I have had with cats and dogs my whole life. I find both to be equally interesting and I would love to know how a dog thinks. We had a mixed German Sheppard guard dog at our business named Lucky. He had a voracious appetite and would try to eat everything he could (amazingly he didn't eat his own feces, it wasn't good enough for him). That dog lived for food and escaping to find more food. He was also an individual, he was lovable and loyal but never wanted to really listen to anyone. Sometimes when we called all the dogs inside they came right inside. He would walk to the door with them, get to the door and just walk away as if he was saying "fuck you, im not ready to come in." We had to drag him in sometimes. He wasn't completely disobedient he did listen to commands but it was selective. My grandfather said that if he was a person you would hate him. He was a bit of an ass hole, always watching you while you ate to see if you were going to turn your back so he could swipe something. I nicknamed him Houdini as he could escape the property without anyone noticing. The other dogs were very obedient and always listened to commands, very typical behavior. That dog taught me that there is more then just simple instinct at work, a thought process existed in his little dog brain and it made him and individual.
Few stories:
The burger snatch: I got a few burgers from burger king for me and the other workers. I had one burger left and without thinking I left it on a table within reach of the dogs. I was sitting behind some shelving and I watched as Lucky slowly walked toward the table and sniffed the air a bit. He knew there was food up there so I watched as he actually checked to see if anyone was watching. He looked left for a second and then right, he didn't see me so he quickly jumped up and grabbed the burger. At that moment I realized dogs do possess a basic form of thought. He knew to check to see if anyone was looking. Why else would he look around? If he simply wanted the food he would just grab it.
The second was the Houdini: We have a beach house in a gated community. Along the side of the house is a wooden walkway from the front deck to the rear deck. I had to go there with my brother for some maintenance and I took our dogs, Lucky was one. We had to dog proof the yard to make sure they couldn't get out, along the side of the deck is open to the front so I built a wall using some lawn chairs and a broom. It was sturdy so I let the dogs out. Lucky immediately scouted the perimeter, sniffing along the fence from on end to the other. I knew what he wanted to do but I made sure all the gates were closed and locked, he wasn't getting out. After an hour we noticed Lucky was not around, the other dog was with us. I went in the yard to check up on him and he was gone. Puzzled I went looking for him and found him sitting on the front deck watching the activity of the neighborhood. How the hell did he get out? So we brought him back into the yard and watched him from a window. He walked around until he figured he wasn't being watched, walked into an opening under the deck and then pushed out of an access door just ahead of my makeshift dog wall. Again I was amazed, he had a goal to escape and then actually set about finding a way out. He found and exploited a hole in the perimeter and escaped.
One of his usual escapades was to escape and cross the street to the shopping mall parking lot and look for food. One year after thanksgiving someone dumped a whole pile of ham and turkey in the mall parking lot, I found him at the pile snapping up as much as he could before I grabbed him. He hit the jackpot. Plenty of other stories about him but those two really showed that he possessed a thought process. I was sad to see him go but he lasted a long time for a big dog, made it past 16. I miss that little jerk, smartest dog I have ever seen.
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There is no viable alternative, By what measure, that there is already 80,000 stations selling hydrogen on every street corner for $1.22 a gallon?
What are you talking about, where are these 80,000 hydrogen stations? $1.22 a gallon? GALLON? Where are you getting these ridiculous numbers and units? Where can I buy a Hydrogen car right now? Maybe your thinking of Iceland but even there they do not have 80k stations nor do they sell H2 by the "gallon".
That you dont already have your home covered in solar?
So you're saying that we can fuel our planes, ships and trucks at these corner hydrogen stations and cover them with solar panels? Did you read your parent post in its entirety?
You really need a reality check if you think replacing fossil fuels is a simple task. We can CUT our use for things like transportation of people via hybrid/electric buses and cars as well as supplementing our electric use with solar. But the bottom line is the lifeblood of our economy is the transportation of goods which is almost entirely fueled by Kerosene, diesel and bunker oil. One they become more and more scarce the cost of transportation will skyrocket unless an alternative comes along. And power stations run on coal, oil and natural gas as well. After the Fukushima disaster I doubt anyone will even want to hear about Nuclear power (fission) for a decade or more (if they ever think about it again). Wind and solar can supplement our demand but it would be costly and difficult to generate enough power for the big industrial consumers who require tens to hundreds of megawatts continuously.
Where I work we just had a 55kw solar system installed using utility and government aid. It only cost us $10,000(USD) and the system cost total was $255,000. Not a bad investment but it only supplies around (on a sunny day) 15% of our daily power needs and covers more than half of the buildings roof. So industrial demand cant be met by solar. So what about home use? Most electronics and efficient lighting can run off a few kW array, nothing big. But homes need to be heated in the winter and forget about telling people in hotter climates to turn their AC units off. Cooking on gas or electric stoves is a high energy demand. So even homes need to be grid tied to utility energy to supplement solar.
People living off the grid are a different breed (usually environmentalists, minimalists or "outdoorsmen"). Any they in no way represent a majority of the first world population in terms of living standards, they are the extreme minority. So forget about them.
The only practical alternative to drilling for fossil fuels is to synthesize them using the Fischerâ"Tropsch process. Essentially it takes a feed gas consisting of hydrogen and carbon monoxide and reacts them over a metal catalyst(iron, cobalt, ruthenium) plus heat. Depending on the temperature and a few other factors you get anything from methane to diesel and possibly heavier hydrocarbons. The CO can be obtained from partial combustion of coal or organic matter such as plant and wood scraps (wood gas). So a power station that processes bio diesel from plants can convert the waste plant matter into CO and feed it into a reactor to turn it into more fuels. A perfect setup to me would be a coal burning power station with an on site FT reactor heated by the waste turbine steam or boiler steam. Plant steam could be used to steam reform water into hydrogen. Plant steam can also drive other processes such as bio diesel production so you now have a power station/fuel refinery rolled into one. Such large stations already have rail access so bio matter can easily be reclaimed from afar in an efficient manner. So the problem of fuel oils is taken care of and the ships, planes and trucks can keep rolling. Not a perfect method but better than shooting from the hip about hydrogen and solar for personal use without thinking of commercial and industrial consumption.
Because either way its a still a job.
I know this is late but the neutral wire to the meter is only 14-12 AWG. If you read my post carefully I said that there are 5 wires to the meter, two hot legs from the street and two to the panel box. The 5th wire which is the neutral wire, runs to the neutral bus bar. The actual neutral line was not ran into his house, only the meter neutral line. Maybe I should have been more specific.
What the fuck is a 'phone booth?'
A bathroom.
Know whats even more scary?
Back in the early days of trucking, there were no spring brakes or maxi brakes. So if you parked a loaded tractor trailer on a hill the only thing keeping it from rolling was the "drum in hat" style parking brake on the transmission or carrier (differential). It was nothing more than a drum brake that was mounted to the drive shaft. and they held around 80,000 pounds (36,000kg) on a hill IF they were adjusted properly. Those guys carried and used chocks.
You still find those parking brakes on medium duty trucks without air brakes. Many of the medium duty transmissions sold today (mainly by Allison) do in fact have a parking pawl. And they hold up to whatever they are designed to hold, sometimes up to 33,000+ pounds (15,000+ kg).
Smart meters do not use the old electro-mechanical method to measure power consumption. They are solid state and have no moving parts or coils that can be tampered with by a magnetic field.
Little story:
Back in high school I took electrical installation, basically you were taught to become an electrician for residential, commercial and industrial. We had an amazing teacher, a master electrician who told us how he cheated the meter to cut his bill down. Basically most older electric meters were "5-jaw" meaning that they had 5 contacts, two incoming hot legs from the street, one neutral and two outgoing hot legs to your panel box. If you cut the neutral leg the meter stopped spinning. So he "obtained" a forged matching utility seal (the numbered plastic thing that seals the meter to detect tampering) and ran two wires stealthily into the meter pan. Instead of the neutral leg of the meter going strait to the main neutral bus bar, it first went into his home to a timer switch hidden in a closet and back to the meter pans neutral bus bar. He said if you looked in the pan and didn't poke around, you would never see that the wires were diverted.
So over the period of a few years he finally got it to the point where he would only pay 20-30 dollars a month in electricity because he lowered it very very slowly over time. If you suddenly half your electric bill the uitility's billing software would flag you and send an investigation team out who will pull your meter and take it to a lab for diagnosis and inspect your meter pan. Well he was sitting pretty paying next to nothing while running air conditioners and pool filters but one day the timer burnt out completely shutting the meter off. He didnt notice and said it could have been that way for well over a month. The utility came to his house on a day when he happened to be home and pulled the meter. The lights went out and he decided to look out the window and saw the utility truck in front of his house. He ran out and with some quick thinking started screaming at the utility workers "What the fuck are you doing! My wife was carrying laundry down the stairs and she fell. I think she broke her leg. Im calling 911, and im going to sue your asses!" before he could get back in the house the utility crew plugged the meter back in and ran. He then removed his modifications and covered his trail. The next day an inspector came and rang his bell informing him they had to remove the meter for inspection and that they were sorry for any problems the previous crew caused. Well they took his old mechanical meter and installed an electronic meter that had a clock and a light sensor (from his description). It was a "4-jaw" meter (no neutral) and could not be disabled without physically unplugging it. He never heard back from the utility as he covered his tracks and they couldn't prove he tampered with the meter since he replaced the seal with one of the same serial number. He never tried to tamper with the meter again.
Goes to show you how easy it was to cheat the electric bill with a little skill, resources and patience.
- Maleware displays a huge kitty on the HUD. First malware caused traffic accident with casualties.
I think goatse would do a better job at causing casualties than a high speed collision.
I did have chocks but I don't trust them on hills. Best thing is to just leave the wheel turned toward the curb and hope whatever parking mechanism you have is enough. 17k was well within the GCW for the towing vehicle and the transmission parking brake held up just fine. I would have used the chocks of I had to rely on the cable actuated parking brake.
I can imagine that an aluminum cased transmission would be more "forgiving" to such a situation. The steel pawl becomes a cutting head and just bores out the grooves in the case. That or the pawl itself is mashed depending what is it made of. If it was all steel than the outcome would have been nasty. Cracked case or snapped output shaft come to mind.
That is only useful for parking on a reasonably level surface. There was a time when big trucks had all mechanical diesel engines and drivers would practice this. And I have heard of more than a few trucks mysteriously starting themselves up and running away. Turns out the drivers never set any mechanical brake, did not leave the engine stop lever in the stop position (which cuts fuel) and parked on a slight incline or hill. The trucks weight would overcome the friction of the drive line, begin to roll and crank the engine causing it to fire up and run away.
I was victim to this thinking when I first started driving big trucks. It was an old GMC that had no clutch interlock and I had a bad habit of starting it from outside the truck while standing on the ground. Another driver was old-school and parked it using the gear lever, I never noticed it. It started and thankfully there was another vehicle parked next to it and the wheel was turned all the way to the right. It surged to the right and crashed into the vehicle next to it. It dented the fender and step, nothing major. If the wheel was pointed strait or in my direction the outcome would have been bad. I admit that I should have been in the cab, foot on the clutch and checked to see if the transmission was in gear. I just never expected the mechanical brake to be off and transmission in gear, it was a practice I was unaware of. Boss was pissed at me but even more pissed that someone left the truck in gear with no parking brake on. We both had our asses chewed. You learn from mistakes.
Using the gear lever to park any vehicle is not nor has it ever been an acceptable method of parking. Its more a last resort for a worm or maladjusted parking brake.
I know I'm feeding the trolls but:
It's not a parking brake, never was. It's an emergency brake.
If you have a stick shift (aka manual or standard) transmission, the emergency/parking brake lever is what you use to park your vehicle and as a backup mechanical brake if for some reason your normal hydraulic brakes completely fail. So yes it is a parking brake in addition to being a last resort mechanical brake. They are still present on all(?) automatic cars as a safety feature. Before the parking pawl it was the only way to park your vehicle so it has and always will be an emergency/parking brake. After a while it became commonplace to just call it a parking brake, maybe the word "emergency" made people feel uncomfortable. Who knows.
When automatic transmissions first came around, the "parking pawl" was not always present so a lever or handle was necessary to mechanically lock the vehicles brakes to prevent it from rolling, like a manual. Then the parking pawl was standardized (in the US around 1965) to give drivers a more safe and reliable parking mechanism. It can not be used as a brake mechanism, its a gear like ring on a splined shaft which when engaged, slides into a grooved recess of the transmission case. This locks the output shaft which in turn locks the entire drive line. Engaging that at highway speeds would mean catastrophic transmission and/or drive line failure.
I bet most people in the U.S. never bother setting it when the car is parked, heck, many of them I'm sure wouldn't know where it is or how to use it in an emergency. There's a "P" setting on the shifter, that's good enough :/
What was the point of making that statement? To be a snobby jerk off and put down Americans when ever you can? Is it fashionable where you come from? The parking pawl is more reliable than a mechanical cable activated parking brake. One the ring locks the drive shaft it is not rolling anywhere. A cable actuated emergency/parking brake can come out of adjustment and also suffer from a failed cable. It is not necessary to use on an automatic. I happen to use it on hills as a backup to prevent the weight of the vehicle from binding the parking pawl.
And an example: I purchased a forklift that weighed 8000 lbs. I hauled it on a 3000lb trailer and towed it with a ~6000 lb automatic vehicle. All together it weighed around 17,000 pounds or 7,700 kg. I stopped at a friends house and decided to stay the night, problem was his house was on a hill and I could not fit the rig into his driveway. I set the parking brake and tested to see if it would hold, it didn't. 7700kg on a steep hill was just too much for it, it crept forward little by little. I put the automatic transmission in park and it held perfectly.
Never said that it was the right way, you just made that assumption and put words in my mouth.
Its the history of the world, shit happened and we moved on. We had to endure those hardships but with them they bought about a lot of technical advancements and massively stimulated industry. WW2 alone stimulated the growth of aviation, space travel, computers, communications and medicine. It was a terrible time in history but it was part of western technical and industrial growth. And before WW2, WW1 and earlier wars played part in the growth of the west. I don't think it was the right way, war sucks but it happened and it bought about a lot of change. and WW2 was just a small period in the history of the industrialized world, there were many other innovations that came about without needing war to stimulate its growth.
Like it or not what China is doing to its currency exchange rate, lax environmental laws, lax labor laws and sheer numbers willing to work for peanuts is almost a war. Not a hot war but an economic one.
If you think every American not being able to buy three Starbucks Latte's a day more of a sin than having hundreds of kids starve to death, maybe you should look long and hard in the mirror before deciding what is evil and what is not.
Before we go any further, are you seriously going to pull a "think of the children" argument on /.? What does the above quoted text mean exactly? Are you saying we should do all we can to save China's population from itself by buying as many Chinese goods we can while sacrificing our standard of living?
I don't think I am evil when I say I will not keep me up at night if millions starve in China, they bought it upon themselves. If you outpace your ability to sustain a civilization then you fucked up, its not the fault of someone in another country who wanted cheaper goods and 3 lattes, they didn't make the rules. China is trying to become a successful global economy via short-cuts and cheating. Nations like Germany, Japan and the USA spent a century or two and a few major wars getting where they are. If China's economy turns out to be a house of cards and it collapses then too bad, they tried to cheat the system and lost.
If millions starve it will be sad, but its not going to keep me up at night thinking about how I could have bought more iPads and computers from Chinese manufactures so they could feed their families.
Dear god, have you actually read into diesel emissions in the USA? US Diesels are CLEANER than European diesel engines.
If you did you would have found that EPA2010 regulations require more stringent emissions than the current Euro5 diesel emissions (Euro6 comes into play around 2013/14 I believe and will bring Europe down to or past US diesel emissions). EPA2007 required less soot which was taken care of by diesel particulate filters and in EPA2002 EGR was required. So over the past 10 years diesel has become MUCH more clean. The smoke belching diesels are a thing of the past. The ones you still see running around are pre 2007 emission trucks or trucks with a big engine problem.
No one was lobbying for anything. Please stop spreading misinformation.
If it was a Trucker I highly doubt it was a "curious" kid. Rather a Trucker who is looking to cheat his/her companies GPS tracking system. Google Qualcomm, a very popular system used in North America. If you ever see a semi with a white roundish antenna (best described as two salad bowls stuck together) its a Qualcomm. It also acts as a Tachograph, a device that records the number of hours a driver has logged on the road. This is to enforce "Hours of Service" rules to prevent truckers from driving long stints and becoming exhausted behind the wheel (a major cause of accidents are sleepy truckers nodding off behind the wheel). Trucks without tachographs must have log books to indicate hours and drivers regularly fudge them to get more hours on the road and less at rest (a resting truck doesn't make money). It also offers two way communication and email for drivers to communicate with the dispatcher. In Europe just about every semi truck has a tachograph. I don't think the tachograph is GPS equipped but I am sure there are versions that might have it or have GPS tracking added by the company.
Bottom line, the trucker just wanted to rid himself/herself of the big brother tracking system installed in the truck. Some companies become fuel misers and every extra km or mile traveled has to be answered for by the driver. Maybe they just wanted to take a more scenic route, stop off at a favorite eating spot or just go their own damn route. That or they were trying to cheat the HOS rules, which wouldn't surprise me if that was the primary use of GPS jamming in trucks.
I think he means:
I just woke up and decided to read ./. And to my surprise someone was making a SPARC based tablet running KDE, AWESOME! Then I read the summary. Gets Coffee...
At first I thought they were talking about a nuclear pumped laser.
Its interesting to see a new bright and fast x-ray source for study. The short pulses of the atomic x-ray are useful for micro/nanoscopic imaging as you emit a pure, ultra bright yet short pulse of x-rays that penetrate the subject without frying it. Think of it as a camera flash that allows you to see through things without cooking/vaporizing them and is fast enough to capture things happening in a quadrillionth of a second. I only wish a light source such as the NSLS2 were capable of pumping the x-ray lasers from their beam lines. It looks like this system will have to be built from scratch to implement it at existing research centers.
Currently, bright x-rays are created by synchrotron emission which is caused by bending an electron beam to emit photons in a specific wavelength (Also called a "free electron laser" or FEL). They further tune the spectrum using a crystal monochromator that is composed of two silicon mirrors that are rotated and change the angle of incident which selects a specific wavelength(but not a perfect single wavelength). Believe it or not, its the distance between atoms in the crystal structure of the silicon that is within the physical wavelength of the x-rays. The angle changes the aperture between the silicon atoms filtering out only the wavelength that fits between and reflects off them (interesting fact: gamma rays, which lie just above x-rays in the electromagnetic spectrum, cannot be filtered. There is no known substance with a crystal structure small enough to refract the 1 picometer wavelength). The only drawback is the light is continuous wave and not chromatically pure. This atomic x-ray laser is capable of an ultra fast pulsed single wavelength. I believe they currently use shutter systems to control x-ray exposure of synchrotrons. Awesome stuff, I have toured the NSLS twice and have a friend who works there in the machine shop building fixtures, vacuum chambers and other vacuum apparatus.