Posts by Clive Harris
73 posts • joined Tuesday 1st May 2007 13:36 GMT
"Australia needs a good dose of Margaret Thatcher"
Some 13 years ago I applied for our family to emigrate to Australia (driven out of the UK by "Red Dawn" Primerola's IR35 pogrom). The doctor who did our immigration medicals had just returned to the UK from Australia, so I asked him why he had decided to come back. He was reluctant to say anything at first, but eventually blurted out his reason: "Australia is OK but it needs a good dose of Margaret Thatcher".
Having arrived in Australia, I found the solution to one mystery - what had happened to all the union bosses driven out by Thatcher? Answer, they'd all settled in Australia! For many years afterwards I kept hearing those familiar Northern England accents on the news, announcing the latest bout of industrial action.
" Each of the five engines fired for just 165 seconds"
I think you'll find it was 155 seconds (2 minutes, 35 seconds). As schoolboys in that era we memorised such figures by heart. The first stage engines had a combined thrust of 7500000 lbs and burned propellant at 1000 tons/minute (no metrication in those days), meaning that the first stage got through more than 2500 tons of fuel before separating.
The real "Daleks" are the squidgy things inside the pepperpots
Just to be pedantic - the "Daleks" or "Dalek people" (as they were called when first introduced) are not the pepperpots themselves, but the shapeless squidgy things inside them. The story varies but, according to a very early episode, they were reduced to this state by a nuclear accident. The pepperpots are simply motorised wheelchairs to enable them to get around. Since the accident also left them very bad-tempered, they had their wheelchairs fitted with death-rays, armour plating and various similar useful accessories.
The Tardis itself was an ingenious way of getting by on a very restricted budget. They couldn't afford to get a realistic-looking spaceship (timeship?) made up, so they made do with whatever they could find in the props store, and then adapted the story around it. They found the wooden 'phone box in there, so they made up a story about a ship that changed its appearance to blend with the surroundings - except that the appearance-changing mechanism had broken and was stuck in 1960's England. Sometimes, an inadequate budget, together with a lot of ingenuity, can actually improve the story, as well as making it more durable.
Bufferbloat?
That sounds like "bufferbloat" - something Robert Cringely has been writing about for years.
See:
http://www.cringely.com/2011-predictions-one-word-bufferbloat-or-is-that-two-words-2286/
http://www.cringely.com/2011-prediction-4-bufferbloat-may-be-terrible-but-your-cable-isp-wont-fix-it-2318/
http://www.cringely.com/beginning-of-the-end-for-bufferbloat-4087/
etc. etc
My own experience...
This is a repeat of a message I posted a couple of years ago on the same topic, but I think it's still relevant.
...taking my daughter for a ride in a light aircraft and waiting for take-off clearance at a busy airport.
Me: "Control Tower. Piper Cherokee Papa Delta Echo is ready for take-off"
Tower: "Papa Delta Echo you are BEEPBEEPBEEP BUZZBUZZ CRACKLE WHIRR"
Me: "Control tower, Papa Delta Echo. Say again"
Tower (distinctly annoyed): "Papa Delta BEEPBEEP BUZZBUZZBUZZ, please expedite."
At that point, I glanced at my daughter in the passenger seat, to see her having a vital "heart-to-heart" conversation with her boyfriend on her mobile. I shouted to her to stow the darn thing.
Me: "Control tower, Papa Delta Echo. Sorry, getting interference. Say again".
Tower (extremely annoyed): "Papa Delta Echo BEEP BUZZZZZZZZ ... for immediate, repeat immediate take-off."
Me: "OK I think that's a clearance". Takes off.
It could have been worse.
William Herschel, who discovered the planet, wanted to name it after the king of England (to secure his pension, I suppose). It could have ended up as planet "George".
Posted in Help-desk hell
Re: "My computer is possessed by the Devil"
Yes, I know what you mean. It looked like the J. R. "Bob" Dobbs image from Slackware. I think Read Hat had swiped it from them. Basically, Xflame allowed you to include an image and would then show it burning in a fireplace. Originally I think it was intended to include a Yule log or similar, but then people got creative.
Posted in Help-desk hell
"My computer is possessed by the Devil"
About ten years ago I had a frantic phone call from a woman saying that her computer had been "possessed by the Devil". Could I come round immediately, preferably with a priest?
The machine was running Red Hat linux. When I got there (alone - where are priests when you need them in a hurry?), the computer was sitting on its own in a darkened room - the woman was too frightened to go near it. I started it up and waited. After about ten minutes, the screen went blank and then slowly filled with an image of flames. A large grinning head slowly rose up out of the flames - it was smoking a pipe, but I didn't notice at the time. It gave me quite a start in that darkened room.
It was, of course, the Xflame screensaver in its default configuration. I removed Xflame and several other "problematic" screensavers, and assured her that the computer had been thoroughly exorcised. I decided not to mention anything about the daemons and zombies that were still infesting the machine.
Re: Polish Enigma mechine
There may be something in this. My father once told me how he had the job of preparing engineering drawings for a Polish Engima machine, based on a sample smuggled out of Poland. He was a 16-year-old apprentice draughtsman at the time. It was a top secret project at a secret location, there were armed guards at the door all the time he was working there, and he was forbidden to ever talk about it on pain of death.
Getting spares for Dyson products
Are you able to get spare parts for Dyson products? I'm told that over here in Australia they have a policy of refusing to supply spares to customers. I don't have any Dyson products myself, but one of my colleagues experienced this problem recently. This is done on the spurious grounds that "only a licenced electrician is allowed to repair a vacuum cleaner". That may possibly be true in some states - there are some rather crazy laws around here - but Australians are not renowned for being law-abiding (That's why most of us are here!). It's more likely an excuse to jack up the cost of repairs. If spares are freely available in the UK then there probably a good "grey market" opportunity for some enterprising UK person to supply parts to Australian users.
Err.. Wasn't that the one that fell down?
.. according to the excruciating poetry of William McGonnagall.
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
etc..etc..
(it get even worse later)
Posted in Hot nine-incher pulled by Dick
No joke - it nearly killed a child
A young child was badly burned when one of these blew up in her face.
See here: http://www.theage.com.au/national/exploding-dvd-player-leaves-threeyearold-with-severe-burns-20120801-23ec1.html
Do nuclear physicists only have daughters?
It's a common observation that RF engineers father a much higher proportion of girls to boys. Reading this I wonder if that's true of nuclear physicists as well. It's quite likely that both would be exposed to strange forms of radiation at work, so there could be a connection. I don't work with RF or other radiation now, but I certainly did in my younger days, back when safety rules were more relaxed. I frequently stood in the near fields of transmitters, I once stood on top of a nuclear reactor (the Dounreay PFR), and I can honestly say that I once held a (very small) piece of plutonium in my hand. That could explain my two daughters and no sons. Have any statistical surveys been done at CERN?
(Nuclear fireball because it seems appropriate)
Wartime story
Reminds me of a story my father once told me about his wartime experiences. He was a young draughtsman, fresh out of college, doing "secret stuff" for the govennment. One day he was told to collect his draughting tools and accompany a soldier to a secret location. Then he was ushered into a room with armed guards at the door, and told to make full engineering drawings of the "thing" in the room. After finishing, he had to hand the drawings to one of the guards and then forget that the incident had ever occurred (on pain of death).
He described the "thing" to me as being a bit like a typewriter, but incorporating a series of numbered wheels. Even in the 1980's he was nervous about talking about it.
Smart meter safety in Australia
They're rolling out (compulsary) smart electricity meters here in Australia and they keep catching fire due to dodgy installation. Now that's definitely harmful to your health!
Map and compass!
Learn to navigate with a map and compass. They never break down and could save your life one day.
I went off GPS after a bad experience flying a light aircraft to a small island off the coast of Australia. About 30 miles out to sea the (aircraft-grade) GPS packed up on me without warning. The ADF (radio-nav) had already died and radar cover is virtually useless in those parts, so I was left with just a map and the aircraft's compass, surrounded by an awfully big ocean. Fortunately I knew how to use them, and found the island, and its airfield, without difficulty.
Don't rely on modern gadgets. You never know when they'll let you down.
Dr Haywood Floyd had a newspad
If you read the book, which came out soon after the movie, there's an episode where Dr Floyd (the scientist who gives the talk on the moonbase) is reading his newspad whilst on the shuttle flight to the moon. He is described as subscribing to many of the news services, so he's having to pay to see the content.
He has my sympathy
I was caught in a similar situation at Heathrow a couple of years ago. I'd had too many cups of coffee while waiting to board and then, after boarding, the aeroplane got stuck in a very long queue waiting to take off (nearly 45 minutes).
Fortunately, my seat was next to the toilets. I unfastened my seatbelt, dashed to the cubicle and locked the door before the stewardess could react. Within a minute I was back in my seat, buckled in and feeling relieved but rather embarrassed (everyone was watching me). The aeroplane had moved forward about 10 feet in the meantime.
The stewardess gave me a dirty look but decided not to make a fuss. That was Qantas. Perhaps they expect that sort of thing from Australians.
Plural of "Prius"
It's at times like this when you need to know the plural of "Prius". Apparently, it's "Priori".
Posted in IATA: this iPad could BRING DOWN A PLANE
"Swiss Cheese" model
Aircraft safety is managed through a "Swiss Cheese" model. You accept that every layer of safety, however carefully implemented, will have holes in it, like a slice of Swiss cheese. You can't catch them all, so you add layer after layer, making the cheese thicker, to minimise the chance of any of the holes going right through.
There are procedures in place to minimise the use of mobile phones (one layer), systems to (hopefully) shield the aircraft systems from the mobile phones (another layer), backup procedures in case an aircraft system fails (another layer) and so on. Removing one layer will not necessarily cause a disaster - it just eats into the safety margin. However, if one of the other layers is already compromised (a tired technician forgot to secure some shielding, or a sleepy pilot didn't respond to an alarm), then you've got the makings of an accident.
Captain goes down with the ship.
Sad, but true. That's how it should be, and it's what they teach (or should teach) at flying school. In an emergency, the commander is always the last one off, and, if that means "going down with the ship", then so be it. If he'd jumped, then, firstly, it's possible that some of the passengers might not have had time to get out. Secondly, the burning wreckage could have travelled a lot further before coming down. As it was, it came down in a field, with no other loss of life.
Having said that, it still takes a lot of courage to do what's required when the crunch comes. We should salute a hero who did his duty to the end. "Greater love has no man ...etc etc". You know the rest.
Posted in IATA: this iPad could BRING DOWN A PLANE
My own experience...
...taking my daughter for a ride in a light aircraft and waiting for take-off clearance at a busy airport.
Me: "Control Tower. Piper Cherokee Papa Delta Echo is ready for take-off"
Tower: "Papa Delta Echo you are BEEPBEEPBEEP BUZZBUZZ CRACKLE WHIRR"
Me: "Control tower, Papa Delta Echo. Say again"
Tower (distinctly annoyed): "Papa Delta BEEPBEEP BUZZBUZZBUZZ, please expedite."
At that point, I glanced at my daughter in the passenger seat, to see her having a vital "heart-to-heart" conversation with her boyfriend on her mobile. I shouted to her to stow the darn thing.
Me: "Control tower, Papa Delta Echo. Sorry, getting interference. Say again".
Tower (extremely annoyed): "Papa Delta Echo BEEP BUZZZZZZZZ ... for immediate, repeat immediate take-off."
Me: "OK I think that's a clearance". Takes off.
Posted in Desktop Linux: the final frontier
Modelsim
The interesting thing is that demo copies of the cheap windows version of Modelsim (Modelsim PE) and, (so I'm told) cracked versions, work perfectly on Linux using Wine or Codeweavers. It actually runs a lot faster than under windows. Apparently the only part which doesn't work is the licence manager.
This probably explains their unwillingness to release an official Linux version. It would run almost as fast as the Windows version of their very expensive flagship product Modelsim SE, thereby undercutting its market.
Posted in Desktop Linux: the final frontier
Linux penetration in the office
Perhaps my like of work is not typical (electronic design), but the Linux penetration where I currently work is around 20%-25%. At my last job I would estimate it around 10% to 15%.
Linux usage seems to be concentrated mostly amongst the software people, probably because a lot of the hardware design tools are still difficult or expensive to run in anything except windows. For example, the cheapest Linux version of Modelsim (an FPGA design tool) is about three times the price of the cheapest Windows version (but about 10 times faster). There doesn't seem to be a Linux version of Altium yet (a circuit design tool that I use a lot). This is a pity, because Altium tends to be quite brutal in the way it treats the computer, crashing several times a day when driven hard, and usually bringing Windows down with it. I think it would run much better under a decent "industrial-strength" OS like Linux. I'm currently trying to persuade my boss to let me try it in a Virtual Machine under Ubuntu, so only the VM goes down and I don't waste half the morning trying to recover the lost work from the latest crash.
It's crazy
I first arrived in Australia about 11 years ago, having just sold a very nice house in leafy Surrey (a victim of IR35), and started looking for somewhere to live in Australia. It turned out that, since I was buying my first house in Australia, I qualified for a " first home buyer's grant". Around $7000 in those days, although it later went up to $14000. If I'd been smarter, I could have got a second grant for my father, who emigrated with us.
Last year, to combat the recession, the government gave all taxpayers a $900 handout to spend as we chose. Most people got an imported plasma TV with it, which probably helped the economies of Taiwan and Korea a lot.
All this probably explains our 48% income tax rate.
Posted in Honda Jazz Hybrid
@Graham Bartlett
Yes, I agree with all you said. The engineering challenge is enormous, with a lot of complex, subtle problems. It reminds me a bit of the early development of the jet engine - simple in concept, but fiendishly difficult to get right, yet with the bonus that, when you have got it right, you end up with a massive improvement over the earlier technology. I'm told that the first prototype Prius, when first demonstrated to the Toyota top brass, rolled about 100 yards and then locked solid! The algorithm which balanced power flow between the two electric motors went into some sort of loop, something which the computer simulations hadn't predicted.
There is also the fear of, and resistance to, anything new and unfamiliar. I was told that the first Japanese-spec Prius had to have significant changes made for the USA market to give it more familiar-sounding engine noises, with some resulting loss of efficiency. Americans didn't like an engine whose revs were computer-controlled and bore little relationship to the actual road speed. A lot of work was put into making it sound like a "normal" car. (Something which an engineer probably wouldn't think of).
That hybrid explorer sounds a bit like the Lexus RX400H which my wife recently bought (second-hand). Basically an uprated Prius powertrain with an extra 90HP electric motor bolted onto the rear axle. It's a neat way of getting 4WD without needing a prop shaft or any sort of front/rear drive splitter. It basically works as front-wheel-drive at light loads and then engages the rear axle when needed. She won't let me drive it, but she seems to like it. I doubt if she'll ever take it off-road, but it looks reasonably capable if she did. Also, apparently Top Gear hated it, so it must be good!
Posted in Honda Jazz Hybrid
Not really
Ok, but it's still more complicated than a conventional transmission, and a lot more complicated than the Toyota system.
I think that the thing about the Toyota system is that, although it's mechanically simple, it's difficult to get it right. Apparently Toyota spend an enormous amount of time and money in doing that - and then patented it to the hilt (Understandably, to stop anyone else freeloading off their hard work). That's probably part of the reason Toyota's hybrids have a price premium (although it's starting to come down now) - they want to cover their R&D costs.
One criticism of the Toyota system is that the driving experience is unfamiliar, until you get used to it, which frightens off some people. (Things like engine sound, throttle response etc). The latest Prius seems to have been fitted with a fake "gearstick" to make things look more familiar (a bit silly, in my opinion).
I've heard about Honda's battery problems, but I don't think the use of Lithium Ion will solve them. This technology has an inherently short life, with wearout issues which are very difficult to overcome (they decay even when they're not being used). The alkaline technology used by Toyota is basically an environmentally-friendly development of the old NiFe/NiCd cell system (without the cadmium). These batteries last almost indefinitely when treated properly. I've had thirty-year-old NiFe cells still working OK. A big part of Toyota's work was getting that bit right, so the batteries could achieve their required lifetime. I'm hearing reports of batteries still going strong at 500000km and failure rates below 0.01%, so they seem to have succeeded there.
I've heard stories that some American company has a patent on environmentally-friendly alkaline batteries above 10 amp-hour. Apparently they're refusing to make any, or to licence anyone else to make them (an example of the broken US patent system). If it's true, it could help expain the preference for Lithium Ion, in spite of its problems.
Posted in Honda Jazz Hybrid
Toyota hybrid system complex?
I keep hearing this quoted, but I don't see how you come up with the idea that Toyota's hybrid system is complex. Sure, it's difficult to understand how it works, but, mechanically, it's just about the simplest transmission of any car currently made. It consists of a simple epicyclic gear mechanism (essentially a basic differential) plus two brushless electric motors, and that's about it. The clever bit is in the electronics that controls it. It doesn't actually have a "gearbox" as such, so all the complex and wear-prone bits like clutches, gear selectors, brake bands, etc are omitted. (Reverse is selected by cross-phasing the two motors) It also swallows up the functions of the alternator and starter motor, so that's another two bits you don't need to worry about.
This Honda system seems to be an electric motor bolted onto a conventional transmission, which must make it more complicated, with a lot more bits to go wrong.
Posted in Official: Booze prevents senile dementia
I once managed to get Guinness on prescription
It was about 30 years ago and I was in hospital recovering from a bad road accident (ironically caused by a drunk driver). I needed a "high-calorie, high-carbohydrate, high-iron, high-calcium" diet to build up body mass and get the bones to set quickly. They also needed to get my guts working again. I was prescribed Guinness and cheesecake on the NHS. I doubt if they do that sort of thing nowadays.
Posted in When one oligopoly screws another
Tesla Roadster for Australia (at twice the US price)
And in a breaking piece of news, it's just been announced that the Tesla Roadster electric supercar is about to be launched in Australia. It's quoted at $206000 plus on-the-road costs. That's about twice the price of the US model. Part of that is the "luxury car" tax, and part of it is the cost of modifying it to meet the peculiar Australian type approval requirements. But a 100% markup???
http://theage.drive.com.au/motor-news/its-electric-from-0-to-100-kmh-in-4-seconds-20110110-19l4i.html
Posted in When one oligopoly screws another
Markups by "official importers"
From what I've heard, the "official importers" are a large part of the problem. I've had this discussion several times with shopkeepers who sell mostly imported goods. The story is that they are forced to buy through these "official" sources who charge a massive markup for their services.
In one case, on a visit to England, I bought a pair of reasonably good handmade shoes for 80 pounds (around AU$125) - not cheap, but not exorbitant. A few months later, I took them to my local specialist shoe shop in Melbourne to get the heels fixed. He immediately remarked on my "$500 shoes", and asked where I had got them from. When I told him what I'd paid, he almost cried. He was paying much more than that wholesale. I immediately asked him why he didn't bypass the wholesaler and buy direct - he'd make a good profit even if he paid retail prices. His reply was that he wasn't allowed to. He'd be put out of business if he got caught, and so would the supplier who sold to him. Apparently, the manufacturers appoint a legally-enforcible "official distribution channel" for each country they export to, which must be used.
I had a similar experience with engine spares. I needed a new magneto for a small American-made agricultural engine (Briggs & Stratton). The best price I could get here was around $200. I got the part from an American online supplier for $30 plus $30 shipping. I then went back to my local shop to ask why they didn't use this supplier, and I got the same story. If they were caught, they'd be stripped of their dealership rights and forbidden to sell anything carrying the Briggs & Stratton logo (basically, just about all Australian agricultural equipment). The risk was too great.
This is not the only problem. In many cases Australia imposes stringent type-approval rules, which are deliberately kept out of step with the rest of the world (mostly to protect the local manufacturers - who are largely non-existent). This partly explains why imported cars in Australia are so late arriving and so expensive - it's not worth the manufacturers' efforts to make a special "Australian" version of everything.
However, I think a start could be made by outlawing the draconian practices of the manufacturers with their "official importer" rules, and their penalties for trying to bypass them.
Taking wads of fake cash across the border. Legally!
Reminds me of an incident early in my career - late 70's or early 80's - when a colleague had to explain to French customs why he was carrying a suitcase full of fake banknotes into Orly Airport.
We were working for a company making banknote sorting machines (DeLaRue), and the machines were marketed on their ability to detect fakes.
The Bank of England keeps stocks of banknotes in most of the world's currencies, both genuine and forged, for reference purposes, and the company had an arrangement with them to borrow these for calibration purposes.
We had just sold a machine to a French bank and the engineer was flying over to commission it. As per our usual arrangements, he called in to the BoE to collect the mixture of real and fake banknotes kept for this purpose. He then phoned his contact in Paris to arrange a lift from the airport.
Unfortunately, the call was overheard and reported to the French police. As a result, he was arrested as soon as he landed. The customs officer asked him what was in the suitcase and he replies, quite truthfully "Forged banknotes".
He spent a couple of days in the cells before it was all sorted out and they managed to convince the police that, in this case, it was actually quite legal to be carrying forged money around!
Linux kernel port?
I'm sure we could port the Linux kernel to it with a bit of effort.
Posted in US law to neuter libel tourism
How do you prove slander?
How could I prove it? Two people contacted me after receiving these calls, but neither wanted to get involved. In the end, the two solicitors (mine and the agency's) just exchanged a few nasty letters, ran up some big bills and then called it quits.
I suppose, if I wanted to be nasty, I could name the agency, seeing as I'm now safely out of reach of UK libel laws, but it seems a bit pointless after all this time. Besides, I doubt if they're still in business, if that's how they treated their customers. I know my client company (who received one of their phone calls) stopped doing business with them after that.
Posted in US law to neuter libel tourism
As a victim of...
As a victim of a frivolous libel suit, I'm all in favour of anything which weakens these stupid laws. The case never stood a chance, but it still cost me a lot of time, money and worry to defend myself.
The case itself? Well, a job agency offered me a contract extension, which I turned down (for various reasons). They retaliated by phoning everyone I might want to work for, spreading rumours about me in an attempt to make me unemployable. When I found out and complained, they declared my complaint letter to be libellous and sent their lawyers after me. (Apparently, their phone calls were not libellous, because they were not written down).
That was ten years ago, but I still have painful memories.
It's your fault, you're just not cool enough
http://www.ubersoft.net/comic/hd/2010/06/wait-clique
A fatal 38°C?
If you think that's fatal, you'd better not visit Australia. I don't think those police officers would last long here in Melbourne, Last summer I recorded 48°C one afternoon, and it was in the high 30's all week.. Now that's HOT. By the way, we didn't have air con in our house (Air con is for wimps).
Flames because... well, if you've experienced an Australian summer, you'd understand.
"Do not join with the circuits of life"
I saw the above warning on a Chinese-made generator a while ago. I thought it was very poetic, something Confucius might have said.
The best safety warning I ever saw was in England, on an electricity sub-station:-
"Danger, medium voltage"
Darwin award?
Well, someone's got to ask!
Did he do enough damage to himself to qualify for a Darwin award?
(i.e.did he remove himself from the gene pool?)
Re. So, look...
<< isn't this what every private light-aircraft pilot is trained to do, even if only informally -- look for an open stretch of highway? >>
I'm not sure what they teach where you come from, but, over here in Australia that's the last place you'd try to land. Virtually all highways here are surrounded by overhead power and telephone lines. You (usually) won't survive hitting one of those.
I was taught to NEVER try landing on a highway. Much better a field, park, golf course or even a large backyard. You'll bend the aeroplane, but you've a fair chance of walking (or staggering) away. I've even heard of people surviving landing in a tree!
Posted in Plug-in Prius production plan posted
Re: Battery life and replacement cost please
The current Prius battery carries an 8-year warranty, which was recently back-dated to cars bought earlier, and is expected to last much longer than that. According to my local Toyota dealer, no-one has yet succeded in wearing one out - even in laboratory tests.
They wanted to call it Loathsome Longhorn...
but Microsoft beat them to it!
Engine + Avionics for $20K?
They're allowing $20K for the engine and avionics! That's a bit optimistic. It wouldn't even cover the 1000hr overhaul for a standard Lycoming aero-engine. Last year someone at our flying club dinged the prop of a Cherokee in a heavy landing. The engine repairs alone came to $28K.
(Black helicopter because their engines are even more expensive!)
Prius transmission
>>The Prius is horribly compromised and over complicated.<<
Sounds like someone doesn't have a clue how the Prius transmission actually works.
Do a Google on "Hybrid Synergy" if you want to get the details, but it's actually extremely simple and efficient - far simpler than the simplest manual gearbox in fact. That's probably what accounts for its legendary reliability and durability.
It has no clutch or torque converter. The gears are constantly meshed, so there are no brake bands, synchromesh or any other gear-changing mechanism. In fact there's no actual gearbox as such, unless you regard a differential as being a gearbox (in which case a normal car has two gear boxes).
The hybrid synergy transmission just consists of a simple differential mechanism surrounded by some very clever electronics. It an example of brilliant engineering - simple but very effective, with very little to go wrong. It combines the efficiency of a mechanical gearbox at high speeds with the high torque and continuously variable characteristics of an electric transmission at low speeds.
Also, can we stop the nonsense about battery durability. Toyota have just retrospectively increased the battery warranty to 8 years/160000KM. (I had a letter from them about it last week). How many other major car components have a warranty like that?
Hoax theory - I don't think so
A few years ago I worked with a colleague who had been in the team at one of the Australian tracking stations. When I put the "Hoax theory" to him, he remarked that he had been responsible for aiming the dish himself. They pointed the dish in the right direction and received the expected data.
They picked up signals all the way to the moon, and they picked up signals all the way back again. Also, for several months afterwards, they also picked up signals from the stuff they left on the moon. His conclusion was that SOMETHING definitely went to the moon, SOMETHING definitely came back again and SOMETHING definitely stayed there. He commented that faking what he saw would have been a lot more expensive and difficult than doing it for real.
By the way, the Parkes dish is absolutely HUGE. I've stood next to it. You could build a small housing estate on it. I shouldn't think they would have had much trouble picking up a signal from the moon with that thing.
Of course, my colleague could just be part of the big conspiracy. Then again, so could I!
"My computer is posessed by the Devil"
A few years back I had a frantic phone call from a lady . Her computer had become "possessed by the Devil" and could I come round right away, preferably with a priest. When I got there (without a priest), she demonstrated the problem. It was running Red Hat (version 8, I think) and the machine was in a darkened room with only the screen for illumination. About 10 minutes after switching it on, the screen suddenly darkened and then slowly lit up again with a display of flames. Slowly a large evil-looking head arose from the flames, with a sinister grin (it was also smoking a pipe, but I didn't notice that till later).
It was, of course, the "xflame" screen saver, but it gave me quite a shock, particularly in that darkened room. I can well understand an inexperienced and superstitious user assuming the worst. The exorcism consisted of deleting xflame from the list of screensavers. I decided not to worry her with stories about the daemons and zombies that habitually inhabit Linux/Unix boxes. After that, I removed xflame on all the linux boxes I commissioned, to prevent further callouts.
On a different note, a few weeks ago my daughter called me to say that "the internet was broken" and her mouse had "gone retarded". It eventually turned out she had let her pet rabbit loose in the room and it had acquired a taste for PVC. The ethernet cable was bitten clean through and the mouse cable had a series of tooth marks in it. I made her pay for the new mouse.
Xflames, of course
TMS9900's and PDP11's
I can remember designing for the TMS9900 around 1980 - it was my first job out of university. I had to design both the hardware and the software - in those days, you were expected to be competent in both. The equipment we were designing was an industrial control system. Originally it was powered by a Texas 990 mini-computer, but we built out own CPU boards as soon as we could get hold of the 9900 chips - a big, expensive 64-pin chip in a white ceramic package.
They had a totally eccentric architecture, apparently deliberately designed to make them totally incompatible with everyone else's products. Once you started down the TI path, it was extremely difficult to switch to anything else. The address bus was numbered back-to-front (or was it the data bus - I can't remember now) and the peripheral chips would only work with the TI CPU's. They had the weird feature of keeping all the registers in RAM, apart from a single pointer register, so you could do a "context switch" (jumping to a different program), simply by changing that register. The theory was, apparently, that the speed of RAM was increasing so fast that the external RAM-based registers would soon be faster than internal ones. Later on we went to the cheaper TMS9981 and then the 9995, which was, I think, the end of the line for that range. The 9995 was a good processor, but it's non-standard architecture counted against it and it never really caught on.
Later, we designed a system which had two PDP11's working as intelligent disk drives (coupled to the infamous 300Mb disk packs) and a rack full of AMD bit-slice processors doing all the number-crunching - all controlled by a 6809! It was a data compression system using discrete-cosine transforms and was used by a big publishing house (Time-Life, I think), to send their pages by satellite to all the different printing presses. I think the FBI later bought one for storing fingerprints!
Happy days! Electronics isn't nearly such fun now.
Prius Batteries
Actually the Prius battery comprises 168 cells, not 228 (that was the old Mk1 Prius). They're 1.2V Nickel-Metal-Hydride cells, arranged as 28 separate 6-cell batteries. The idea was that they could be re-furbished by replacing individual batteries, although, in practice, the batteries proved so reliable that no-one bothers to do it. The battery has a maximum current output of around 250A and is about the size of a slab of beer. (For non-Aussies, a "slab" is a standard shrink-wrapped pack of beer cans, containing about enough beer to keep an Australian going for one footy match, i.e. 24 cans)
A Lithium-Ion cell would have a much higher voltage than Nickel-Metal Hydride, so the battery would have fewer cells. However, I doubt whether they could attain the required durability and reliability. Alkaline-type rechargeable batteries (i.e. Nickel-Iron, Nickel-Cadmium, Nickel-Metal-Hydride etc) are renowned for durability if they're well looked-after - I've seem some 30-year-old batteries still going strong. I've never managed to get more than 3-4 years out of Lithium-ion batteries, though.
Well, I'm happy
I've just got my Prius back from the repair yard, where it was being fixed after some moron ran into the back of me (he didn't see the road works).
So, no more waiting for slow, overcrowded, over-priced trains. No more being ferried around in the obsolete motorised dinosaurs that everyone else is driving. Even the sight of that disgusting Renault abortion doesn't spoil my happiness.
Posted in Chrysler intros electric trio
Can anyone name a sports car with FWD?
Mini Cooper?
I mean the real 1960's Cooper, not the more recent ersatz German one.
Pretty impressive in its day.
