Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast
That’s not what “lame duck” means.
A lame duck is a politician who is currently in office but is not eligible for re-election due to term limits. A second-term president is the classic example. Being in power and yet guaranteed to soon not be alters the power dynamic and priorities of said politician.
Donald Trump is a lame duck; in his second of two terms.
Pilot here. I’m afraid of running rotors and propellers because they can fucking mince you. I worked on Rotax 912-powered aircraft for awhile, they have twin carburetors that have to be balanced, ie the throttle valves have to open the same amount or one side of the engine is trying to run harder than the other. This has to be done with the engine running. If I had to get from one side of the engine compartment to the other, I’d walk around the tail.
Because that kit would cost around what a new Civic would cost, and you’re going to get a 16 year old car made worse.
EV components don’t really swap into the spots that ICE components do. An engine is relatively large, a motor is relatively small. A gas tank is relatively small, a battery is relatively large. Most ICEs designed from the ground up use a “skateboard”-like chassis with the battery taking up basically all the volume below the floor. The motor can be tucked away somewhere, and then the body built on top. You don’t need the volume in the nose for the engine so you get a frunk. a 15 year old ICE car didn’t portion out the room for the batteries, so you’ve got some of the area under the trunk occupied by the gas tank. That’s about the volume that the batteries in a golf cart take up.
Anyone who’s capable of designing and manufacturing that kit might as well go into production of new cars.
Saturation divers. Something I didn’t realize, they haul the pressure vessel to the surface at the end of every shift, they don’t live at the bottom, but they’re under pressure.
The closest to that I can think of is the Tesla Roadster. Which IIRC was basically an electric Lotus Elise, rather than a Mazda Miata. I wonder how popular electric Miatas would actually be, without a manual transmission.
The most “normal car that happens to be electric” I can think of is the Slate. With the exception of the powertrain and complete lack of a radio, the controls and mechanisms look like they’re from 20 years ago. The more I look at it though the more I think that car is DOA.
I think there’s also a problem with the kinds of EVs everyone tried to sell.
Tesla has seen legitimate success in making EVs a desirable luxury item. The Prius became something of a fashion statement among kale chip eating Californians in the 2000s because of its alleged economy, but it was still an economy car. It wasn’t that nice or luxurious. Tesla made cars people wanted to drive and be seen driving, with an all-electric powertrain.
Pretty much everyone tried to copy that business model, making excessively fast luxury sport sedanover blobs with price tags that make car shoppers start muttering the word “depreciation.”
Meanwhile, EVs tend to be the breeding ground for shit features everybody hates, like touch screen HVAC controls. Nobody wants to make a normal car that happens to be electric, which is what a lot of the buying public wants, but can’t find.
I ripped my DVD collection a couple years ago, and I watched that change over time happen.
The earlier DVDs in my collection came in bespoke packaging designed specifically for the film, they had properly interactive menus complete with easter eggs, commentary tracks, alternate angles, remember when DVD player remotes had an “Angle” button? DVD was a prestige format, it was actually as cool as LaserDisc was supposed to be.
There was the early mass market phase when older movies, or lower budget current releases were put out on double sided discs that had widescreen on one side and “fullscreen” 4:3 on the other, in those half plastic half cardboard cases, remember those? Higher end stuff would be released in what I think of as the standard plastic DVD case. How much plastic was wasted selling them in packaging other than CD jewel cases?
Later on, you got the cases that had the recycling logo cut out of them, the discs got cheaper, features started disappearing, because it was now the budget option. “It’s just on DVD.” DVDs were cheap to make, everybody had a player for them, Blu-Ray now had the prestige releases. The Direct To Bargain Bin releases weren’t exactly the high point of the format but there’s still fun to be had there.
DVD still staggers on, they’re not dead the way VHS is, but it didn’t make it as long. DVDs could do things VHS couldn’t, like TV shows. The advent of binge watching happened on DVD; complete TV series on VHS wasn’t feasible but it works great on DVD. On the other hand, because VHS was the only widely adopted vdieo format for most of its run, you can find weird stuff on VHS that never got pressed onto DVD.
I could argue that VHS was a superior format to both Beta and Laserdisc because it offered a better blend of features.
Laserdisc offered cinemaphile farkles like perfect pause and frame by frame, additional audio tracks etc. but a movie required at least three sides of a disc, and thus two discs with at least two changes. Laserdisc was read-only and thus useless for timeshifting and camcorders. The tape-based formats were slightly worse in quality but could hold an entire movie in one go.
VHS was superior for timeshift and camcorder use than Beta because of the longer run time. There was a mini cassette for miniature VHS camcorders which could be played back on a standard deck with an adapter, Beta never got there AFAIK and insetad Sony went to Hi 8, which never really took off as a home video format the way it frankly should have. VHS was better than Beta at movie distribution because a longer film could fit on an SP VHS cassette, often with room to spare for some commercials at the beginning which helped subsidize the cost.
VHS was at least capable of everything.
DVD didn’t fully kill VHS; It unceremoniously killed LaserDisc and shouldered VHS aside a little. Through most of the 2000s VHS was still going strong, DVD-RAM is surprisingly old but wasn’t adopted that widely. Hard drive based DVRs and smart phone based video recording finally did VHS in.
And that weird place was a stencil store.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for over ten years now: It has gotten to the point where the only major hurdle is kernel-level anti-cheat. Which does work in Linux, but the developer has to enable it to work in Linux, and most don’t. This is only a factor in competitive multiplayer games. I’m not into those so basically I haven’t noticed, I want to run a game, it runs.
What the FUCK was that first paragraph?
Yep. Izzy sleeps next to my pillow. Sometimes I wake up with a handful of furry face. Cats are goofy.
If I understand it correctly, the ship’s built-in systems run a Linux-based RTOS, the dumbfuckery is happening on an off the shelf Surface tablet.
They’re still making Microsoft look like a million monkeys fucking a million footballs.
The AGC had 2048 words of erasable core storage, what we’d now call RAM, and 36,864 words of read only core rope memory. So a total of 38,912 words. Each word is 15 bits plus a parity bit, so that’d work out to 75,776 bytes or 72,168 bytes depending on whether you count parity or not, and then kilobytes, kibibytes…it’s closer to 64k than 32 or 128.
Miss Chiff is 8 pounds and 9 years old. She’s got her favorite toy in that shot.
I thank you kindly, the night stand is for my father, actually. He had a tray table next to the bed so I built him this pillar stand in cherry.
“Let’s get out of here before one of those things kills Guy!”
Building PCs.
I’m perfectly capable of it, I built the PC I’m typing this on. It’s just…the world’s gone to hell in a Depends Adult Diaper.
Huh, sure enough. Isn’t that amazing.