Month: March 2013

The newest shirt from the Andy Unlimited crew is now available for those of you who have continued to collect these over the years. This release is called “Mountain View Mashers,” a baseball-inspired tee to take us into Spring training and the 2013 baseball season. And as you can see from the logo, a little dig has also been taken at our friends down in Cupertino to keep this once heated rivalry alive.

As always, the shirt is American Apparel 100% cotton, an Asphalt grey color, and printed with soft-hand ink. The quality, should be as good as ever. If you haven’t owned an American Apparel cotton tee, you are missing out. They are the best. 

Buy. ($17.00)

from Droid Life

Filed under: Truck, Technology, Work, Diesel

Cummins and Peterbilt have created a new demonstration tractor trailer that boasts a 54-percent increase in fuel economy over current trucks. This particular Class 8 Peterbilt 587 uses a high-efficiency Cummins ISX15 engine and managed to average 9.9 miles per gallon over 11 runs over the 312-mile route between Fort Worth and Vernon, TX with a gross combined weight of 65,000 pounds. For comparison’s sake, most modern trucks manage between 5.5 and 6.5 mpg. For most long-haul truck drivers, an increase in fuel economy of 54 percent would equate to a savings of around $25,000 per year at current diesel prices.

The SuperTruck uses lightweight materials, an efficient engine and aerodynamic improvements to net its fuel economy increase. Peterbilt also worked with Eaton to develop a special driveline with fewer parasitic losses and better gearing, and the truck manufacturer says many of the features demonstrated on this particular truck may show up on production models in the near future. Check out the full press release below for more information.

Continue reading SuperTruck semi achieves 54-percent increase in fuel economy

SuperTruck semi achieves 54-percent increase in fuel economy originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Autoblog

In this morning’s GTC 2013 keynote, one of the items briefly mentioned by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was Kayla, an NVIDIA project combining a Tegra 3 processor and an unnamed GPU on a mini-ITX like board. While NVIDIA is still withholding some of the details of Kayla, we finally have some more details on just what Kayla is for.

The long and short of matters is that Kayla will be an early development platform for running CUDA on ARM. NVIDIA’s first CUDA-capable ARM SoC will not arrive until 2014 with Logan, but NVIDIA wants to get developers started early. By creating a separate development platform this will give interested developers a chance to take an early look at CUDA on ARM in preparation for Logan and other NVIDIA products using ARM CPUs, and start developing their wares now.

As it stands Kayla is a platform whose specifications are set by NVIDIA, with ARM PC providers building the final systems. The CPU is a Tegra 3 processor – picked for its PCI-Express bus needed to attach a dGPU – while the GPU is a Kepler family GPU that NVIDIA is declining to name at this time. Given the goals of the platform and NVIDIA’s refusal to name the GPU, we suspect this is a new ultra low end 1 SMX (192 CUDA core) Kepler GPU, but this is merely speculation on our part. There will be 2GB of RAM for the Tegra 3, while the GPU will come with a further 1GB for itself.

Update: PCGamesHardware has a picture of a slide from a GTC session listing Kayla’s GPU as having 2 SMXes. It’s definitely not GK107, so perhaps a GK107 refresh?

The Kayla board being displayed today is one configuration, utilizing an MXM slot to attach the dGPU to the platform. Other vendors will be going with PCIe, using mini-ITX boards. The platform on the whole is in the 10s of watts – but of course NVIDIA is quick to point out that Logan itself will be an order of magnitude less, thanks in part to the advantages conferred by being an SoC.

NVIDIA was quick to note that Kayla is a development platform for ARM on CUDA as opposed to calling it a development platform for Logan; though at the same it unquestionably serves as a sneak-peak for Logan. This is in big part due to the fact that the CPU will not match what’s on Logan – Tegra 4 already is beyond Tegra 3 with its A15 CPU cores – and it’s unlikely that the GPU is an exact match either. Hence the focus on early developers, who are going to be more interested in making it work than the specific performance the platform provides.

It’s interesting to note that NVIDIA is not only touting Kayla’s CUDA capabilities, but also the platform’s OpenGL 4.3 capabilities. Because Kayla and Logan are Kepler based, the GPU will be well ahead of OpenGL ES 3.0 with regards to functionality. Tessellation, compute shaders, and geometry shaders are present in OpenGL 4.3, among other things, reflecting the fact that OpenGL ES is a far more limited API than full OpenGL. This means that NVIDIA is shooting right past OpenGL ES 3.0, going from OpenGL ES 2.0 with Tegra 4 to OpenGL 4.3 with Logan/Kayla. This may also mean NVIDIA intends to use OpenGL 4.3 as a competitive advantage with Logan, attracting developers and users looking for a more feature-filled SoC than what current OpenGL ES 3.0 SoCs are slated to provide.

Wrapping things up, Kayla will be made available in the spring of this year. NVIDIA isn’t releasing any further details on the platform, but interested developers can go sign up to receive updates over at NVIDIA’s Developer Zone webpage.

On a lighter note, for anyone playing NVIDIA codename bingo, we’ve figured out why the platform is called Kayla. Jen-Hsun called Kayla “Logan’s girlfriend”, and it turns out he was being literal. So in keeping with their SoC naming this is another superhero-related name.

from AnandTech

We’ve all got refrigerators to keep our leftovers not-rotten, but compared to National Institute of Standards and Technology’s latest creation, our hulking cooling boxes hardly compare. This tiny quantum prototype, no bigger than a few inches, packs as much power as a window air conditioner the size of the Lincoln Memorial. More »

from Gizmodo

View of Hurricane Isabel from the International Space Station.

NASA

Almost every major storm is now accompanied by a climate change discussion. Everybody wants to ask whether human impacts on the climate system “caused” the storm. Unless framed carefully, it’s kind of a lousy question. We can’t say for sure that an individual storm wouldn’t have occurred if we hadn’t warmed the planet by roughly 1°C—climate is, by definition, statistical. So we use analogies like the climate loading the dice (or juicing its hits like a steroid-assisted major leaguer). What we do know is that every storm now takes place in a world that’s notably warmer than it was a century ago.

Perhaps no type of storm draws as much attention in the US as hurricanes, but the science of these storms has been dissatisfyingly uncertain. Some studies have projected more hurricanes in the future, but others have projected fewer. The best information available today points to decreasing frequency but increasing strength, but it comes with significant uncertainties.

One challenge is that global climate models used to make projections for the future have a hard time effectively simulating the fine-scale processes within hurricanes, which has contributed to the present uncertainty. Modern hurricane observations are also much better than they were in the past, so it’s difficult to identify historical trends in any of these details.

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from Ars Technica

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from Ars Technica

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from Ars Technica