Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Classic $Politician (Score 4, Insightful) 211

Obama seems to be the first mainstream US presidential candidate in a long time to "talk the talk" to the kind of people who read Slashdot. The others have been spouting ignorant crap or simply ignoring the topics that most Slashdotters care about. Therefore Obama is the first president that we can be disappointed in -- the others were known bad before they became presidents.

Comment Re:You don't know... (Score 2) 65

File system drivers in general are not properly security vetted. You can do interesting stuff to a Linux box if you put ext4 on a fake device and start messing with what is on the disk while it is being read. Many device drivers have similar problems; you could find a Linux device driver with a problem and make a fake piece of hardware resembling the real thing while exploiting the bug.

This is pretty much unfixable. While most core OS code is of a high quality these days, there is just too much driver code around. A proper audit is infeasible.

Besides, Thunderbolt makes it pointless. With Thunderbolt, you do not need to exploit anything, the bus provides you with unlimited access.

It is a sad state of affairs really.

Comment Re:What a great idea! (Score 1) 230

Right, so your assumption is that petrol engines are more efficient at partial load than diesel engines. This assumption is wrong, diesel suffers less from partial load.

Gearing for 1500-2000RPM means that each gear is 4/3 as high as the previous, which means that a 6-speed box with a first-gear speed of 10km/h at 750RPM will hit 110km/h at 2000RPM. Add an seventh and you are golden; once you hit 150km/h you will need to go beyond 2000RPM to have enough power anyway.

Typical parallel hybrids have continuously variable transmissions. They always run at the most efficient RPM for the needed power, just like serial hybrids.

Comment Re:What a great idea! (Score 1) 230

You are still trying to talk around the fact that diesel engines in traditional cars are not even 50% more efficient than petrol engines, combined with the fact that diesel engines benefit less from hybrid drive than petrol engines. Therefore diesel hybrids will not be 50% more efficient than petrol hybrids.

Serial hybrids look decidedly pitiful so far, the BMW i3 does something like 7l/100km on petrol.

Comment Re:Good and bad... (Score 2) 231

init IS supposed to know whether services are running and restart them if they fail or exit. It used to do that way back when; you would edit /etc/inittab to specify what runs at which runlevel. Unfortunately /etc/inittab was sufficiently crap that all sorts of things were pushed into shell scripts instead, which lost the the ability to recover from failed services. Then you could install Monit and edit those shell scripts to get that ability back, but every time you upgrade you have to check whether your edits survived. Not nice.

A replacement for init was sorely needed.

Comment Re:What a great idea! (Score 1) 230

Fair enough. Wikipedia provides no citations for that number, and I have had zero luck finding actual published studies, which is actually a bit weird.

However, conventional diesel cars are nowhere near twice as efficient as petrol cars. I do not understand why that changes with the addition of a hybrid drive system -- the hybrid drive system should improve the efficiency of a petrol car comparatively more. E.g. look at spritmonitor.de, top diesel performer (after the special models VW Lupo 3L and Audi A2 3L which do not have equivalent petrol cars) is the Citroen C1: 4.2 l/100km on diesel, 5.2 l/100km on petrol. Less than 25% improvement, and half of that is just because diesel is heavier.

Anyway, I will be convinced when someone builds a small diesel range extender. I won't be holding my breath.

Slashdot Top Deals

An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.

Working...