jackhack

>>Software does not need to be this complicated. >>Design a damned airframe that's airworthy without needing stabilization hacks.

In effect you are stating that you understand better than the hundreds of engineers involved with this project why these design trade-offs were made. Careful with that line of thinking. You're nearly guaranteed to be wrong.

There are a host of reasons for the design in place: Efficiency, ease of implementation, familiarity with the components/technology, reliabilty of subsystems, availability of components, cost, maintenance complexity, etc. etc. etc.

And, don't forget, efficiency standards. As the whole world freaks out about CO2 and global climate change/cooling/warming, and the insta-crowd 'air travel shames' those who use these magnificent machines, it's important to realize that some of these design decisions maximizing efficiency are the hereditary descendants of cultural pressures, too.

Not to excuse any engineering f-ups, but there's a lot more to it than just 'build a simple tube with wings and an engine.'

>Apple IIs were popular but largely limited to proprietary products.

Could you please expand on this thought? I'm genuinely curious as to what you mean by proprietary.

I cut my teeth on an Apple ][ with integer BASIC one would load from a tape. (Later, a ][+ with built-in Applesoft Basic and a floppy drive.) I'm puzzled what you mean when you refer to proprietary prouducts. I had an Epson dot-matrix printer, a 110/300 baud Hayes modem, and later AppleCat modem (1200 baud, full duplex, oh yeah!), a time/calendar card. A few different no-name joysticks, etc. The Apple ][s expansion bus slots actively encouraged aftermarket support. Anyone could create a peripherial.

Software came from magazines, commericial sellers (back of Nibble or Popular Computing magazines), shareware, my own imagination, BBS downloads, etc.

I think in more ways than not, the experience with the Apple ][ was in common with Commodore 64/128 users. The industry was blossoming, and competing by offering wildly different solutions with a common core.

Ah, a high-efficiency version of the simple soda can version. Yes, it's of great interest to me. Thank you!

It's actually remarkable how much heat a simple "soda can solar panel" or "downspout solar panel" can inject into a room. Add a photovoltaic panel to run a 12v brushless 100CFM fan to stir the air and inject the hot air into the room, and you have a "free" source of 120F air to heat a few hundred square feet. Add a south-facing window shining sunlight onto a dark grey slate tile floor (which acts like heat sink) and the floor will release that heat well into the night. So with two very simple passive elements, one can, to a large degree, supplement a traditional heat source (heat pump, gas furnace, etc.). I've seen this approach work with vacation cabins in the mountains, and RVs, a well as the traditional house-on-the-cul-de-sac.

These heat collectors are cheap and simple to make (<$500), and should be quite reliable, giving a +50 degree F delta with almost zero maintenance and no utility consumption. The only moving part is the inexpensive and reliable fan.

* https://www.pinterest.com/jayhike/soda-can-solar-heater/ and https://lifehacker.com/build-your-own-soda-can-solar-heater-...

nothing like having a molecular coating on one's clothing storing large amounts of energy, and releasing it as heat. What could go wrong?

However, this type of storage might have promise as a power source for an external combustion engine like the Sterling? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_combustion_engine

Indeed. Considering that the "problems that one deals with at present" were generally calculations of ballistic trajectory for war materiel, this was an entirely accurate statement. As the cost and complexity increase rather rapidly as storage increases, there was inverse incentive to build a system bigger than one "needs". Like building a pedestrian bridge that could support 50 tonnes of weight. But yes, judged by today's standards it's an amusing scale, similar to reading newspaper articles about the menace of early automobiles "hurtling down the roadway at dizzying speeds" of 50 miles per hour. In a hundred years, people will have the same chuckle at our "TB of data" and "high-res images" -- What? No volumetric full-color holograms?

Also sickening is the understanding that the massive horror of the famine (in large part a result of the policies of confiscation of goods) was seized upon as an opportunity to punish the suffering peasants and diminish the authority of the Orthodox Church. I'm troubled there wasn't there an ounce of humanity among leaders, those who would rather grab power than alleviate the suffering. But then, to admit the scale of the suffering and/or to ask for international aid is to admit that the central planning model is inefficient, and the embarrassment of the food aid provided by the United States must have deepened the insult to the (well fed) leadership. A disgusting low-point in human history, for certain.

It's being proposed that one could have this battery swapped out "at the supermarket." I barely trust them to not put the soup cans on top of the bread, or break the eggs. I don't think I'm ready for them to tinker with my car. And I've personally witnessed more than one profound mistake at the oil-change centers where presumably trained people have overfilled the crankcase (which blew out the engine seals, ruining a Porsche Turbo 911) or neglecting to tighten the oil drain plug, which fell out onto the highway while driving home (ruining a friend's 3 month old Toyota).

>>how to make the 2 ton battery pack a stressed member

Where did the article say anything about the battery weighing 2 tons? That is outrageously heavy, exceeding the GVW of most cars on the road by 40%, alone! Surely this cannot be accurate.

A triangle shape, or multiple smaller packs could help with the issue or structural rigidity. If they can build around a big aluminum engine block, radiator, etc, a battery pack is do-able.

But I've another bone to pick with this article, and it may be a simple matter of the UK vs US norms. It states the average driver travels about 7900 miles/year. That's less than half the average in the US. Also, it says the UK driver of a "small hatchback" spends around 12p per mile for petrol and this battery tech could drop that to 9p per mile. That's not competitive with current hybrid technology (and the Toyota Prius is a mid-sized car, as well) with a 700 mile per 10 gallon imperial tank. Turbo diesels are nearly as efficient. Why would one change?

The technology just doesn't sound competitive to me, overall.

Some people stopped worrying about not understanding compilers. They're not working on drivers, realtime (esp where low lag & jitter are concerned such as motion control), or high performance software of all stripes, trying to squeeze the most out of the available hardware. It's all about choosing the right tool for the job, and there is no right tool for every job. A guy generating sales reports has very, very different needs from the lady writing a rendering engine.

Michael Abrash (graphics programmer extraordinaire) said it best, and I'll paraphrase: the best optimizing compiler is between your ears. The right algorithm beats the pants off the most optimized wrong algorithm. Or, as i like to say "there is nothing faster than nothing" -- finding a way to avoid a computation is the ultimate optimization.

And managed memory is wonderful, almost all the time. That is, just until the GC decides to do a big disposal and compaction right in the middle of a time-sensitive loop causing that thing that "always works" to break, unpredictably, due to a trigger based on memory pressure. Been there, done that. If it's a business report or a ETL, big deal. If it's a motor-control loop running equipment, your data or machinery is now trash.

For most of the programming world, and I count myself in this group, the highly abstracted stuff is great. Right up until the moment where something unexpected doesn't work then it turns in to a cargo cult performance because it's nearly all black-box below. Turtles, all the way down.

There is value in understanding the whole stack, even today.

"vacaracted" = homophone for "Baker Act'ed"? referring to the Baker Act of 1971: Florida law for involuntary examination and potential commitment for treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Mental_Health_Act

arrested for "not cooperating". Perhaps that's against the law there and one can be compelled to cooperate in a general way.

I'm more curious about how they paid rent for a decade, without contact with the outside world (e.g. a job-->salary). And how did this man pay for his five beers?

There's an interesting story here, but to my American mind I don't see evidence of a crime unless some were being held against their will.

This has been my experience with German cars (Mercedes, BMW) precisely : They are great to drive, but terrible to own.

sorry I was unclear. I meant "same column" in the colloquial sense, "the same group."

for the same reason that airline pilots build their own experimental aircraft, long-haul drivers jump on a Harley and cruise around town, and machinists who make neat things at their home workshop -- freedom, excitement, the joy of exploration, the joy of working with the stripped-down essence of their expertise. TIS-100 really is different enough to be challenging and enjoyable, plus there's a neat story within.

Curiously, but I suppose not surprisingly, another element in the same column -- chromium -- has been shown to yield similar positive effects against depression. In the US, this is available over the counter as chromium picolinate. https://www.cell.com/trends/pharmacological-sciences/fulltex... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12559660

It could be a result of autocomplete. Entered/pasted once, auto-complete forever. In this anonymous person's defense, he might not know how to turn it off or change it. (With most browsers, it's buried down in a menu.) Meanwhile, just add KMart.com to your blocked domain list. that's 50% of the problem solved.

speaking of using others' numbers, I use 867-5309* for the shopper-loyalty-card number at every retailer that asks for one (in exchange for discounts). I think that dozens of others must use this number as well, as the supermarket receipt sometimes shows totals of $10,000-20,000 per week for "my" account.

*For those born after the 1980s, the song "Jenny (867-5309)" was a hit for the band Tommy TuTone and received significant airplay. It was a catchy tune, and the phone number was the chorus. As such, it's an easy number to remember.

tipping point, indeed... and not in a good way:

let's take 100,000 vehicles with (I'm conservatively guessing) a 100 kWh battery each, that's a 100,000,000 kWh load each night! 100,000 Mega watt-hours is roughly the output of about 10 nuclear power plants in a 24H period.

Unless a lot of new capacity comes online, it could easily overwhelm the existing electrical grid's capacity.

Let's hope this is a gradual transition.

I feel compelled to say thank you for this especially insightful comment. As one who escaped Appalachia and moved from blue collar work to a white collar career, everything you've said here rings true. You've captured the underlying reasoning in the social classes, the underlying insecurity and fear that makes us turn against one-another, and the cynical way that's utilized by a wannabe elite/ruling class, as I've experienced and observed it.

More than just strange, it's a glaring omission -- MIT Prof. Rod Brooks paved these roads nearly 3 decades ago and arrived at these ideas through deduction and experimentation.

He made the argument that embodiment is an essential component of AI in his paper "Intelligence Without Reason" ( https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/AIM-1293.pdf ) COG was his groups' attempt to build a humanoid robot: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/o... (see "Why not simulate it?") but he and his grad-student researchers devoted considerable effort to exploring the importance of embodiment, especially in humanoids: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/index...

The Mobile Robots Lab built biologically inspired robots that were remarkably capable and able to function to dynamic events in the real world (rather than carefully controlled lab environments).

If you mean the jet airplane is the simpler of the two, I would agree. The famous Roche Biochemical Pathways chart of just those mecahnisms that are understood illustrates this perfectly: http://www.expasy.ch/cgi-bin/show_thumbnails.pl

Well, you can do what you like but when it comes to complex medical issues my winning strategy is to wait for a Hollywood actor, famous musician, or a daytime TV host to tell me what to think.

How far we've drifted as a nation.

People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system and their policy of deliberate inflation has eroded purchasing power 97+% (50% reduction since just 1970!). Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold, like most other things in that document it is ignored.

Private ownership of gold was decreed to be illegal just 20 years later -- Presidental Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States" was designed to prevent an internation run on our (drastically less valuable) dollar. Silver was removed from the coin in 1965, completing the transition to fiat money.

President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard. He was assassinated soon after. His Vice President, who assumed the Presidency, wasn't so foolish as to express support for that idea.

Now it seems to be a spending free-for-all, as if there is no concern whatsoever for the peril that debt (national or private) presents.

What a dangerous time we live in. "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" Who, then, was Glenda, the Good Witch meant to represent?

This is appropriate: https://www.askamathematician.com/2012/04/q-can-you-poke-som...

Have we learned nothing from Wikileaks? Quite the contrary! People with power rely on private/secret communications. And, without power, what is there to communicate, for what you say likely has no value.

I am reminded of Napoleon's dictum: "the secret of war lies in the communications". Sun Tzu would disagree as well, having well documented the value of secrets and spies.

"(private) knowledge is power."

>>Most old people don't learn as many new things as younger ones

Most old people don't need to learn as many new things. It's called "experience."

Which, ironically, is precisely what Cable TV first promised in the 1970s -- an "ad-free" experience! They could offer this unique experience because you were paying the cable company for the costs of carrying the content. Then they realized they could double-dip by charging you for the content, and sell ads too.

It shouldn't be surprising to see the same behavior patterns repeated with this new crop of wireless cable companies. I'm sure the irony is lost on them though. We become the thing we try to escape. Stare long enough into the abyss...

Write "not deliverable" and drop it back into the "outbound mail" slot? Or get a stamp with the same for even-less-work version.

How curious that there's a reference to Jef Raskin on the facing page (p.205). Raskin, of course, was a visionary at Apple who would go on to advocate for a version of Macintosh quite different from what Steve Jobs envisioned (but which later appeared as the Cannon Cat). (a standalone system, but also an Apple ][ expansion card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat )

And yes, Wozniak is one of the great engineers of our time. I cut my teeth on an Apple ][, and it was both amazing and mysterious to me then, as a child. Now, with 40 years of professional programming experience, the mystery is largely gone but my appreciation for the elegance of his design is only amplified.

On the off-chance he'll see this:

Mr. Wozniak, thank you for creating something that has give me a career and a lifetime of joy.

Correct. 200,000 years dying at an early age from easily-preventable infections, among them cholera and dysentery which are easily spread from --yep, you guessed it-- not washing after using the toilet.

And people wonder why I refuse to take part in "potluck" lunches, or eat others' foods. I need to save the URL to this discussion.

I, too, cannot believe someone who does not use soap does not smell like a wild animal. It is surely a case of adaptation. Hoarders who live with hundreds of animals and urine/feces littering the floor claim they cannot smell the ammonia. They have adapted.

People of hackernews, wash your filthy hands with hot water and soap. (that's not an insult, it's an trivially-proven factual assertion: unwashed hands are filthy.)

I usually put it this way: "Name one company that was better after a merger."

I've yet to find any affirmative answer.

It's good to have hope, but it's not good to be unrealistic.