danjayh

This is why the founders of the US intentionally tried to design the country to severely restrict the power of the federal government / allow the states to handle many issues that aren't explicitly national matters. I'm not talking about things like education or marriage, which you might [i]think[/i] should be national issues, but rather things like interstate roads and national defense, which are interstate issues by their very nature.

The federal power creep that we've been experiencing for the last several decades has done a lot to create a system that is ripe for abuse.

Totally agree. The current congress welcomes Obama's use of (likely illegal) executive orders to accomplish things, because it means they can avoid responsibility and accountability. They don't fight to retain their constitutionally granted powers, because all they really want it somebody else to do the dirty work -- end result is they allow unprecedented levels of executive control to go basically unchecked ... and whether or not you agree with what's being done with it now, it's a slippery slope, because each president is different, but they'll all have this precedent to point back to as justification.

Also the medical industry is phasing out the use of 2 year (Associate's RN) and LPNs, which makes the problem worse. They do not like to hire new grad nurses, which makes the problem worse. They haven't given significant raises, which makes the problem worse. 100% of the behavior of nursing employers leads me to believe that there is not actually a shortage, and that everybody just likes to claim that one exists.

My wife is currently in nursing school and is planning on working an unpaid internship for the better part of a year because otherwise when you graduate ... you can't get a job.

This article stinks.

Problem is, many of the anti-combustion folks are also anti-dam, because of the habitat the reservoir destroys.

I also conserve where I can - I heat my home with renewable fuel, for instance, installed a whole-house energy monitor to reduce consumption, upgraded to a 95% efficient backup furnace (most alt fuel heat is not as reliable as lpgas, unfortunately), and I'm going to pull the trigger on solar probably in 4-5 years (waiting a couple more tech generations). So in no way interpret the following to mean that I'm not for conservation where possible.

Having said that, like you, I think that people get extremely hung up on global warming without pragmatically looking at the environmental cost will be if it keeps going for another 50 years. Warming over the last 18 years has been minimal, and if we have similar warming for another 50 years, that would provide enough time for solar to become economical and efficient without pushing the second and third world back into poverty -- because let's face it: at this point in history, limiting carbon generation also limits the productive capacity of an economy, and lowers the standard of living for everyone involved.

Yes, we might have to move our farmland a bit north, lose a bit of coastal land area, and reduce biodiversity a bit. If this is the price to save millions of human lives through better nutrition, better medical care, better transportation, better housing, etc ... then in the short term, I think we need to proceed with any far-reaching carbon regulation with extreme caution.

Right now, I think that the most pragmatic and practical thing to do is research, improve, and build out nuclear power. Unfortunately, many of the same people who are staunchly anti-combustion (I can't say 'anti-fuel', since technically radioactive material is also fuel) are also anti-nuclear. To those people, living in this world, with the primitive energy storage tech that we have today -- without a hard dose of pragmatism you'd be living in the cold and dark during a Michigan winter, and I can tell you that -10f is COLD :( (we don't get a lot of sun and wind here during this time of the year)

Renewable energy will have its time, when it is ready -- and that time is coming. By 'ready', I mean 'when it is cost competitive with other technologies'. I recently read that one Chinese solar manufacturer has achieved < $0.50/watt cost for PV module production, and it hasn't bottomed out yet. At the current rate of declining equipment prices, it doesn't matter how cheap oil is, eventually solar will be cheaper ... and when that happens, we will be living in a solar-first world faster than anyone can imagine.

The next question is how to deal with troughs in production due to the weather, and for that I really do hope we get back in the business of reactor innovation, because nuclear is the only option that provides the reliability of fuel-based power with 0 carbon output.

Depends on the building. We bought a house from the 40's on the small side (1500sf) that needed plumbing, electric service, all flooring surfaces replaced, kitchen guttend/replaced, both baths guttened/replaced, all appliances, and significant mechanical (furnace, water softener+filter), addition of closets, replaced deck, and probably stuff that I'm forgetting. Had a good roof, which was critical, because water damage would have sunk it (har har har). We did a lot of the work ourselves, saves a bundle. Contracted for about $40k of it up front to get it livable quickly.

Somewhat related to the story - I bought a pellet boiler off craigslist for $2800 and did 100% of the installation myself (electrical, plumbing [heat + water heater], control) all-in was about $3900, and I'm already in the black on it after 3 years use (vs. propane). I decided to burn lpg this year because it was 'only' $1.70/gal, and it turns out that even at that low price (compared to the last three years) I'd probably have been better off on pellets, but probably not better off enough to make up for all of the labor that it takes.

I set it up to automatically switch between the propane furnace and the boiler (I have a water/air hx) based on the boiler's temperature to make it seamless for my wife to use :). It's a Central Boiler Maxim M175 ... cranked all the way up, it might be able to heat his school (just barely) -- I run it at its lowest setting. Burns very clean, no smoke, happy neighbors.

Renovation can be done for a reasonable financial cost with an investment of time. Our house isn't super-luxury now, but it's perfectly serviceable and now we have a house on 11 acres that we couldn't have touched if it hadn't been a dump when we bought it.

I think the key point that he's missing is that the chinese manufacturers are now manufacturing to the market's demand, and this is why China is growing rich. In the old system, the state may have ordered the (state owned) pen manufacturer to make a top-quality pen. The manufacturer would have done its best to comply, but ultimately, would have made a product that nobody wanted. In the new system, the administration at the pen factory can look at the data on what sells, and produce that to provide maximum profit to the company and maximum utility to consumers within the constraints of the factory's capabilities -- in this case, that means cheap, crappy pens. Importantly, these pens sell well, turn a profit for the factory, and provide the income needed to feed, cloth, and house all of its workers.

Where I work, we turn around releases of software that runs on airplanes faster than that, and trust me, every company that writes safety-critical software for airplanes a gigantic and also a bureaucracy. Six months for a ticketing system is a joke.

Fun harsh environment: I reviewed software a few weeks ago that ran on one of our boards while it was irradiated by a neutron source (I work in aerospace). Radiation has interesting effects on electronics :).

Prior to the current (Tier 4) standards, the Tier 3 standards had already reduced NOx and particulate emissions to the the point that it's misleading to characterize those engines as "filling the air with pollution". Now that CO2 has been declared as pollution, the improved thermal efficiency of diesels over gasoline engines probably means that they were already "better" than gas under some operating conditions. Even ignoring their superior thermal efficiency, Tier 3 diesels achieved similar results to gasoline engines when both were operated at high load (Say, running down the highway at 80mph). This was accomplished with technologies that, while they added complexity and cost to the engine (such as direct injection, EGR, DOC, VVT, advanced FIE, improved combustion chamber design, increased compression ratio, advances in turbochargers), did not compromise the utility and safety of the device using the engine.

As you have suggested, many manufacturers will probably move back to gasoline engines in some of the smaller applications ... but they will moved to air-cooled V-Twins for many of these, which fall into the same power range as the diesels they replace (~20-40HP). Air-cooled gasoline engines are not clean beasts, and this move will probably actually end up being a net environmental loss.

Have a look at the chart on page 2 of this: http://www.mtu-online.com/uploads/tx_templavoila/WhitePaper_...

The additional NOx reductions achieved by tier 4 are extremely small compared to the cost & trouble caused by the technologies used to achieve them ... the previous tech (up to Tier 3) was fairly reliable & had already achieved most of that was had in the overall journey from unregulated -> Tier 4.

Also, almost none of the garden tractors sold are diesel, because in that application it doesn't make sense - those engines aren't run at high load for long periods of time. However, for a compact tractor that may well be run all day long in high heat with a demanding attachment, a diesel actually does make a lot of sense - there is a large environmental cost to dumping a machine with 5-600 hours on it because the engine gave out prematurely (which happens to entirely too many of the garbage lawn & garden tractors sold at box stores, despite their relatively easy lives).

FWIW, I let my lawn die in the summer and probably mow it fewer times in an entire season than many folks do in a month ... living in the sticks with nobody to judge me has its benefits :) You did get reasonably close on the size, though. My dad and I live close enough together to share a tractor, and we have 26 acres, a goat, five horses, and sundry other critters between the two of us (and our wives, of course).

> At what point does it become economical to just run gasoline instead of diesel then (that is, manufacturers selling gasoline models)? If we are talking about diesel still being economical instead of gasoline, but just not as economical as when it was allowed to be more polluting, I'm not sure I can muster much sympathy (but I'm fairly uneducated on the subject, so it may just a matter of not knowing enough).

People run diesels due to durability. They run at lower RPM than similarly designed gas engines, and last longer between rebuilds. They also make more low-end torque, for the same reasons. Both of these factors are extremely important to the types of equipment that you see diesels in, probably even moreso than the problems caused by diesels. For many years, Diesel fuel was more expensive than gas, but people kept running them anyway in the applications for which they were most appropriate. For cars, yeah, we'll probably just see the death of diesel in that space.

> Did the EPA make rules that required that, or did manufacturers mess up in their attempt to offer the same features as before? Did the EPA dictate this solution, or did the market respond with a poor solution to an EPA requirement on emissions?

The market responded with the only solutions it could come up with. The EPA made standards that are impossible to meet using any available technology without causing some or all of the problems I mentioned.

That's about the only good thing about the salt (aside from not dying on an ice patch :) ). My wife's 2005 Pontiac G6 with 120k on it is already starting to rust. I dumped my last car at ~9 years old with ~130k because it was starting to rust.

OTOH, I have a '96 Camaro that I only drive during the summer that doesn't have a speck of rust on it (driving an RWD car in a northern state during the winter is a good way to end up in an accident). It's amazing how big a difference the salt makes ... and dirt roads -- I think they kill cars even faster than salt. We are lucky enough to live on a paved road, so I don't have to worry about that particular problem.

Very true - regulation undeniably accelerates technological advancement for emissions technology ... I think that the key is just striking the right balance. I was just trying to express that in the case of Diesels, the EPA may have done too much too fast.

As an aside, even when the technology matures and goes from "sucks"->"unquestionably better", all of this is not without cost. New car prices have significantly outpaced inflation in the past few decades. For instance, 50 years ago the base model mustang would have cost ~$18k in today's dollars, and the 2015 base model mustang is ~$24k. To many people a forced 33% increase in the cost of a base model vehicle is not trivial -- this is something that disproportionately effects low-income folks. Since the USA is so spread out, in many areas where population density is low it's basically impossible to get by without a car. (I chose the Mustang because somebody else already did the legwork - source: http://fortune.com/2014/10/17/ford-mustang-cost/ )

In my home state of Michigan, we don't have mandatory emissions testing, which I personally see as a good thing. Cars don't last much longer than ~15, maybe 20 years here anyway due to the extensive use of salt on the roads during the winter, so they get replaced quickly enough with newer/better/cleaner models by virtue of the fact that they rust away. I see a lot of people with cars who couldn't afford it if they weren't allowed to drive beaters. As you may have guessed from my post on shopping for tractors, I happen to live in an area where public transport isn't practical for much of the suburban/metro area (Grand Rapids/Holland), although we do have it (to some extent) in the more densely populated sections of town.

Interestingly, with the revitalization of downtown that's been happening around here, many poor people are being pushed into areas where public transportation is either inadequate, not available, or completely and totally unfeasible (if the houses are 200-500+ feet apart, or the small town has a population of 1,000, it just doesn't make sense).

While I'm certainly not making excuses for VW cheating, I think that maybe the EPA needs to revisit its diesel emission standards. The EPA standard is the strictest in the world, and they have successfully ruined many diesel powered devices. Examples:

1) I was recently looking at compact tractors. To meet the standards, new tractors are fitted with Diesel Particulate Filters. Even if they don't flat-out fail (which happens too often, and costs thousands of dollars to fix), these filters require "regeneration", which is code for "a light comes on on the dashboard, your tractor stops moving, and runs wide-open throttle for 20 minutes while you stare in bewilderment". Google Kubota B3350 Regeneration if you want lots of fun horror stories.

2) Diesel commercial trucks. My uncle drives a large cube van over the road. When his truck goes into regen mode, it doesn't require wide-open throttle like a compact tractor, but it does lose power and tops out at 40-50MPH. If you are on a freeway where the flow of traffice is at 80MPH, this is dangerous and a major problem.

3) Diesel pickup trucks: Many trucks, in an effort to avoid additional hardware above and beyond the DPF, have taken to injecting fuel during the exhaust stroke. The idea is to have the unburned fuel get pumped through the engine and on to the DPF, where it burns and increases the temperature to the point that the carbon burns out of the DPF. Problem is, when you inject fuel into an engine during the exhaust stroke, it dilutes the oil in the cylinder, reduces lubrication, and causes premature wear/engine failure.

In the two cases I am familiar with, diesel motorhomes and diesel compact tractors, the value of used vehicles has increased quite a bit in response to the fact that all of the new ones suck. My Dad owns a gravel pit, and he (along with everyone else in the industry) buys and re-builds existing vehicles from the frame-up to avoid having to purchase new products, which are unreliable, sometimes dangerous, and uneconomical to maintain. Google "glider truck kits" -- it's basically the idea of purchasing all the parts of a new vehicle (except the powertrain), and then manually taking the powertrain from a worn-out truck, re-building it, and installing it into the glider kit. This is often done at an expense that is similar to that of purchasing an entirely new vehicle.

Many equally horrible solutions to this problem are employed. Some designs incorporate a fuel burner directly into the exhaust design. Others require a separate tank of catalytic fluid that must be filled regularly. One thing that all of the designs have in common is poor performance and piss-poor fuel economy. Many vehicles from multiple manufacturers have had trouble with catching on fire due to emissions control systems.

If the EPA wants to make tough rules that will force manufacturers to produce products with the best available technology and encourage development of new technologies, that's one thing. When the EPA makes rules that result in dangerous and/or non-functional product designs, I think it's time to back off just a bit until the technology has come closer to being able to reasonably achieve the regulated cleanliness levels. It's completely insane to make a truck that will force you to slow to 40mph while you're driving it, or to make a tractor that will force a farmer to take an unplanned break in the middle of the day (remember -- farmers work all day long, and daylight is a limited, precious commodity to them).

EDIT: To be completely clear, if you are doing work with the tractor that can be done at full RPM, you don't necessarily need to park it. However, if you're doing something that requires lower RPM (using a PTO attachment that needs low RPM like a post-hole digger, or a spreader, etc ... or doing low-speed work on a tractor with a geared transmission), then it's time to go get some coffee. Personally, the two major things I want to do with a tractor are run a large snowblower and maintain our horse pasture. For the horse pasture it's not a big deal, but if I need to clear the driveway before leaving for work in the morning, an unplanned 20 minute wait is completely unacceptable.

Thought I was going to like the ad-free, but it turns out I actually like the 'before' shots better. Maybe there's a happy medium?

Truth on the kernel. I'm used to working in an environment where we own the OS, the board design, and the design of many of the chips ... which means we can make it do whatever we need (downside is, you have to maintain it all too). However, our needs are unique enough to justify it -- computing is hard in an environment where atmospheric radiation can flip random bits for you (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_event_upset).

OK. So the issue is the GPU then. That same scenario with data that could use virtual memory would be a non-issue, since you could mash the available fragmented phsyical ram together into whatever size blocks were needed using the MMU.

you actually get 4 gigs per process, so you could have 64 spaces of 4 gigs each, with the 256mb of physical ram mapped into those spaces as needed.

Perhaps, but it's possible that it was actually the other way around since Virtual Memory and multicore came at about the same time. By running everything in a single process, they probably avoided forcing clean interfaces and dependencies between their functions, which might have actually hurt their ability to utilize the CPU efficiently.

Also of note is that fragmentation of physical RAM is completely irrelevant, aside from locality issues. They can map random physical pages into one nice, contiguous virtual space, and the only thing that matters is fragmentation in the virtual space. Since a each process gets its own entire 4GB virtual address space on a 32bit system, fragmentation nearly becomes a non-issue.

This is also why I suspect that they were mapping their virtual address space using block translation instead of a page table - if they had a page table, even in one process, it shouldn't have been a big issue since the virtual address space is many times larger than the available physical ram on the 360/PS3/Wii. The other possibility is that much of their RAM needs to be accessible by the GPU, for which fragmentation is an issue.

Not suggesting that everything go in separate regions, but let's say they have N major functions (where N < 10) .. maybe physics, AI, render, network, etc. that would each run in their own address space. If N were even, say, 20 this still only comes out to 20 * 4KB (PPC page size) = 80KB, which I would classify as trivial.

OK. Maybe I just don't understand game development very well, but I don't get why some of the problems they had in the post-MMU era even existed.

1) Memory Fragmentation - why? This seems like it would only be a problem if they ran their entire game in the same virtual address space.

2) Subsystem A corrupting Subsystem B's RAM - once again, wouldn't one run the sim code in one address space, the rendering in another, etc. and have strategically shared pages for them to transfer data back and forth?

It really seems to me like the idea is 'yeah, we had virtual memory, and it was great, but we didn't really use it'... Granted, they put guard pages on some allocations, but that's akin to using supercomputer to solve your family budget. Lots of power available, but using it in a trivial way.

I acknowledge that there's some cost to a context switch, and that the 2005 generation used PowerPC with its fairly cache-inefficient hashed pagetable (poor locality), but the benefits of having a hard wall in memory between major system functions is immeasurable (I'm guessing that on PPC, they just set up a few Block Address Translation registers and called it 'good enough').

Then again, I come from a safety critical background .. we make aerospace code, so it's developed using the methods described in the article about 'the right stuff' that was up a day or two ago. We're really fond of having really hard walls between every resource we can (memory, CPU time, I/O bandwidth, FS bandwidth ... you name it) for major system functions. I realize that in game programming most of those walls aren't practical (due to performance impact) or necessary, but the memory one is fairly cheap and incredibly helpful.

PS - if you're wondering, we prevent memory leak problems by just disabling dynamic allocation post-boot, which happens on the ground. Our stack utilization is also required to be statically analyzable, which means that you can't do things like recursion. These limitations make the design of some algorithms extremely painful, but what other software have you ever heard of that can truthfully claim 0 memory leaks, guaranteed. We also do 100% code coverage (at the machine language level), 100% decision coverage, static and dynamic worst-case timing analysis, etc. etc. etc. Look up 'DO-178B' or 'DO-178C' if you're curious about what's done and why safety critical stuff is insanely expensive. More recently we're throwing in fuzzing for good measure, but fuzzing doesn't turn up a whole lot in extremely thoroughly tested code that's been reviewed line-by-line by dozens of engineers (and is subject to strict design limitations).

Funny thing is, Microsoft did almost the same thing with Windows NT. However, unlike Netscape, they had the resources to keep iterating their old junk while they worked on the totally new version.

Looks like he's an employee at Pearson now, according to Linkedin.

That is not a picture of the actual device. That's an example of something else he had laying around. Here's what he actually brought to school:

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/10BF6/production/...

If you watch the video that pic was taken from, you will find that that is a device 'like' the one taken to the school. Here's an actual pic:

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/10BF6/production/...

I don't think it was even that. From the pics, it looks like he liberated a commercial clock from its housing and put it in a different case. Unless it had battery backup, he may have soldered in a 9V battery connector, but since it still has a power cord I kind of doubt it.

Anyone have any actual technical details on what Mohamed built? Judging from the pics I've seen, it's clearly a commercial PCB. I'm wondering if maybe he worked out a power supply or display driver himself or if he simply re-homed a commercial clock into a cooler case... I don't expect that anyone in the 'news' actually cares enough to go into detail.

Thanks! I was curious about this, because having volunteered for FIRST robotics, I can tell you that the number of HS students in the US with the skills to design and build a digital clock is pretty much 0. Looking at the picture, I think that maybe he re-homed a commercial clock into a different case and added some leads to run it off a battery ... which is still beyond the capabilities of 99% of US HS students.

Either way, congrats to Mohamed for being curious about how things work, shame on his teachers for not doing due diligence (maybe asking the electronics teacher to take a look before calling the police?), and I wish there were more information available about exactly what Mohamed had done, because I find that to be the interesting part of the story.

Not that the response was appropriate, but I'm pretty sure that if I'd taken a similarly looking device into my very WASP-y suburban school, even though I'm white as a sheet, my school administration would have had a similar response. People are really paranoid these days, and right or wrong, we all have to deal with it.