Um, no not really. The gearbox only exists because the engine can only go so fast. The tyres can spin way faster than the engine. For example, you could take your foot entirely off the throttle and still drive 70 in sixth gear while the engine essentially idles. On the other side of the spectrum, the slowest the car can go, while having full contact with the gearbox would be 8 kmh, give or take. So, in the middle of the spectrum you could drive about 30kmh with 3rd gear fully clutched in and the engine on idle. Slower is also possible, naturally. Most cities choose 30 kilometres an hour because that’s when road deaths sharply increase. The reason for this is complex, but one of the main reasons is the field of view. The faster a car goes, the smaller your field of vision becomes. You can clearly see the pavement on your side, the other side of the road, and even some of the pavement of the opposite side. When driving 50, however, you can basically only see your own pavement and some of the opposite road. When doing 130 you can essentially only see your own lane well, with rudimentary details in the other adjacent lanes.

It does not. It would violate simple physics.

If I understood correctly, it’s free software anyway, so why the discussion?

Yeah, this is still a problem. It’s being fixed however. It’s going to take until 2040, plus minus. Thanks to the EU standardising the gauge, the platform height, the electrification system, and most importantly, the protection system, it’s all really coming together. But rolling all of this infrastructure out takes time. Europe always was a fractured continent. Then the EU came and made life better. Problem is, due to the car mania in the 70s and the privatisation mania in the 90s, railway was neglected. In Austria, there were even discussions of privatising the national railway operator. And look at what good that has done Britain. Luckily it didn’t go through and the public perception really has changed about that. On the side of technological innovations, there are now many locomotives which are certified for multiple countries, which have all the necessary bits and bops for their protection system to drive in other countries. And when 2040 rolls around, all of that additional baggage is going to be obsolete anyway, thanks to everything being harmonised to ETCS and (mostly) 25kV 50Hz. Then most of the problems will disappear. And that may sound expensive and cumbersome, but all of that infrastructure has a finite usage duration anyway. So 2040 because everyone is essentially replacing the old stuff on the fly with the new harmonised stuff. And from there on out, it’s really going to be smooth sailing, technology-wise anyway.

That’s interesting, but do you think, is it because lorries are so heavily subsidised compared to trains? Because think of, for example, the Brenner-based tunnel in the EU. When that thing is finished, it’s going to be one of the longest tunnels in the world. That thing would bring unprecedented transport capacity through the Alps. And while 8 billion € may sound much for a single building, said building is going to be used for 200 years.

I’m curious, do you still think that if lorries had to reimburse the actual cost of transport that it would still be competitive under these conditions?

Crazy idea, but what if we were to use a wire? Like such that it doesn’t have any sort of contact with anything else. Then how about we, like, couple more of them together, meaning less congestion and less traffic jamming? Okay, and this is the least feasible part of my proposal, I know, but then What if we make it go on steel? So the wheel is steel and the floor, the wheel rests on, is steel as well. But because of the optimised friction, we can now make the contact surface super small. I think these improvements could really bring a massive benefit to the transportation industry.

No sarcasm though: Why do goods get delivered over long distances by a lorry? It doesn’t make sense financially and from an economy of scale perspective. It asks for trouble. The infrastructure gets used up super quickly, thanks to them being absurdly heavy, compared to the surface and what it can withstand. Plus, because it may seem like all of these lorries are going the same way, no they absolutely aren’t, they come from a thousand different directions and go through a thousand different directions. They only go through the same bottleneck, aka the pinnacle of inefficiency. It is way easier to transfer it from goods terminal A in city A to goods terminal B in city B and everyone just goes to the goods terminal and picks it up from there. It’s faster, more reliable and does not clog up the infrastructure. It’s good for the businesses providing the service because easier service means more money, customers benefit from it as well naturally because they get the goods faster and more reliably, and the taxpayer benefits most of all. Since they do not need to subsidise a motorway that breaks within 10 years anyway. On the other hand, we have a few megacorporations that make good money selling cars, so I can answer myself, why trains are a thorn in the eye of some infrastructure ministries around the world.

Tldr: No. Look at Britain right now. It’s finally flourishing.

!/s

I mainly use my workstation for Image editing (raw development and VFX), 3d animation and video editing. Then there’s occasional ML inference for image generation or text generation. And lastly, some video games.

About video games: the 1st gen threadripper platform gained a bad reputation for gaming thanks to windows. I used to use Windows for so long and once I switched to GNU Linux it was like I got a new CPU for free. The reason is, Windows doesn’t know how to properly do multi-threading, adding to that, my 1st gen Threadripper is basically 4 CPU dies glued together and for low latency applications like games the performance on windows will be trash and oh boy, it was. But on GNU Linux its fine. But compared to all cores on one die, it will be worse for games, yes.

A few of my applications are bound by memory performance. My idea is that, because DDR standards are only published every 5 years or so, it will have better longevity before technical obsolescence. When in its life cycle, will a DDR platform become cheaper?

Edit: typo.