Simple observation quickly shows many people are clueless to the effect of their driving styles on their fuel economy as well. Full throttle rush towards the next red light, slam on brakes, stop....repeat. Highway driving? Absolutely positive HAVE to achieve that 10 foot gain on the guy beside you, even if it means changing lanes and mashing on the accelerator only to inevitably end up following another car and having to slow down. Again, repeat....over and over and over again.
Simple driving style changes can yield the average driver a HUGE increase in fuel mileage, but until the "I'm more important than everybody else, I need to be in front of you and get there as fast as humanly possible, screw you all" attitude of many of todays drivers change, all the technology advances in the world won't help if the idiots behind the wheel just continue to operate the vehicles in a basically inefficient fashion.
Some people have forgotten that driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right.
Accordingly, if you do something stupid, you damn well deserve to be held accountable for it. The "OMG ONOZ THE INSURANCE COMPANIES SEE MY PRIVATE BLACK BOX DATA!!" freakouts shouldn't fly with anyone who has a basic sense of respect for the privilege.
That would have been my suggestion as well. A carefully placed old iPhone 3G hardwired into the electrical system (to ensure it stays charged) with Find My iPhone enabled would do the trick, and be quite slick at that - you could track it on anything from a desktop computer, another iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, or heck, basically anything with a web browser.
Yes, there's a recurring monthly fee associated with that for the underlying cellular service, but I don't think that there's many options for this sort of system that won't carry a fee of one sort or another.
Not to come across as a tree hugger or anything, but is this landfill safe, since, ya know, a lot of it will eventually end up there in areas where recycling programs are not on place.
That presents another question - will it play havoc with the recycling process itself?
Polymer note lifespan is widely accepted to be about 5 years.
Given I just found a coin in my jeans from 1957 which is still in regular circulation, I think your suggestion that the two even remote compare in overall longevity remains flawed. Plenty of original 1987 $1.00 "Loonies" are still in circulation - at at 23+ years old. To replace the $1.00 and $2.00 coins with polymer would still mean that they would have been replaced at least 4 times over that same span of time, and every 5 years after that you add another replacement cycle.
To equate it to my 1957 coin in my jeans, a polymer equivalent would have had to have been replaced more than 20 times already.
Coins can easily last decades under regular circulation, and centuries with light circulation. Polymer will never match that no matter how hard you try.
Agreed. I was excited to find a BBS a few months ago that was still running the same software I used when I was a SysOp myself in the late 80's. After about 15 minutes online the nostalgia effect quickly gave way to the reality that, well...it just sucked. +++ATH0
I own a CurrentCost ENVI. The current cost units do have basic device-level drivers for OSX but the interface software required to upload the data to Google Powermeter is (sadly) Windows only. It's one of the biggest gripes in the CurrentCost message forums but the developers appear complacent on the subject.
As such I've been forced to run Windows 24/7 via Parallels with the sole task of running the Google Powermeter application in Windows instead of OSX. Frustrating.
Frustration aside, I do like the unit, but I discovered shortly after my purchase that it only partially supports tiered pricing - it does support two tiers (day and night) with selectable rates and times, but our local utility uses three tiers with each coming into effect at various times of day - off peak, mid peak, and full peak. The ENVI has no ability to be programmed to support this - what I did was program it for the "average" price between mid=peak and on-peak so that it is at least relatively close on the price display.
I'm hoping eventually GPM will also add more options - it supports only *one* tarrif rate, making it even less useful for calculating pricing. It does graph the information nicely though.
Here in Canada we pay a huge levy on blank CD media, MP3 players, and virtually any other media capable of holding music. This "goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying. ", as per the Cnet article here http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html
Therefore, this shutdown is infringing on my legal right to download music.
Meh, there's always ISOhunt, or like everyone else has already said, plenty of other choices.
I'll admit to having one of the original (and second version) of the Sidekick (They were called the Hiptop everywhere else except the USA) and the idea of storing everything on the cloud seemed great at the time - through several device upgrades, warranty replacements, and other hardware changes everything just automagically restored to the new phone within 10-15 minutes of switching the SIM.
One should add that the devices themselves are designed to "Play dead" when the battery gets low and shut down while still maintaining enough power to ensure the volatile ram holding the devices local cache of data remains intact. It's only if the battery is fully exhausted to the point of not being able to accomplish this, or a critical error/OS crash (The dreaded "red X of death") is encountered is the volatile ram actually in danger of being erased.
Therefore all the warnings about not letting the phones go "dead" or turning them off are a bit misleading since, excluding one of the two above situations everything is actually safe, but it's not without warrant since I'm sure MS/Danger are going to try to "backwards restore" whatever is salvageable.
Furthermore, since the OS is locked down extremely tight there's no (to my understanding, admittedly a few years old now) method of locally backing up a Sidekicks data. Contacts stored on the device can be backed up to the SIM card one at a time (with only the basic name/phone data, all other extraneous data such as profile pics, etc will not be included) but it was tedious to accomplish (one contact at a time) and the average Sidekick user (read as teen/clueless) probably has no idea how to do it anyways.
If they're on the way to eventually eliminating Firewire I sure hope that Apple has plans to update USB support for more camcorders then.
I have a JVC hard drive camcorder that is USB and iMovie has absolutely no idea what to do with it when I plug it into any of my Macs. It seems thatt if I had chosen a camcorder with Firewire instead (which Apple themselves trumpeted as the thing to do) I'd have had no issues.
There was a modem-to-modem game (I think it was called ModemWars?) that I used to play all the time back in the Commodore days. It was great fun to play and was way ahead of it's time, despite the sometime painful process of getting the two systems to connect successfully to play. It wasn't ethernet, and it wasn't internet based, but it was multiplayer and it was "online".
We used to all have two phone lines back then so we'd play using one line for data, and talk about the game on the other line.
Wasn't it just a short while ago that these same people tossed aside net-neutrality? Either this is a huge double standard, or the people in control really have no idea whatsoever how the Internet works.
It was nice to see that Apple (unlike many American companies) is apparently actually aware of the fact that the US and Canadian dollar is effectively at par now - Leopard is $129 USD, and $129 CDN.
A refreshing change from the recent string of companies which are simply choosing to ignore the currency parity, and continuing to gouge Canadians for 20 or 30 percent phantom currency exchange.
With the exception of probably the majority of us here, most computer users are completely devoid of any regular backup schedule regardless. IMHO this makes Gmail far superior for the average (read as: hopelessly unprepared) computer user.
I've lost track of how many people I've heard say "I lost your email because my computer crashed" over the years. I've yet to hear one Gmail user say the same thing.
That aside, I'm sure Google, of all companies out there, make some effort to ensure there's some amount of backup or redundancy as part of the Gmail system.
FWIW the Registerfly main page still displays the ICANN logo, and based on a little experimentation a short while ago it seems that I could still register a domain there if I was so foolish to want to give them my money.
They seem to be taking that letter very seriously.
- Grandfathered Fido unlimited data plans can no longer be transfered.
- Rogers no longer advertises their Blackberry data plans as "unlimited", but at $100 for 200 megs it's still a huge ripoff.
- You can't "permanently roam" using a US registered Blackberry - clauses in contracts disallow this and you service will get disconnected if you ignore it.
And I'll wholeheartedly agree that mobile data is a HUGE rip off in Canada. It's disgusting.
Yes, Linux is no piece of cake to support to naive users, but is Windows that much better?
I've dealt with so many naive Windows users who couldn't (or don't know how) to install the most basic of Virus/Spyware protection, or how fix the most basic of issues.
I guess it's a matter of the lesser of two evils. Dell would rather help "naive" Windows users then perhaps open the door to something more secure and support "naive" users there instead.
With all the stories I've heard of the cooling fans on the MacBook's going wonky if run at too high of a speed for too long, I'm reluctant to offer my spare cycles to Xgrid.
The last thing I want to happen as a result of being a participant is seeing my fan spooled up to 6000+ RPM day in and day out while my Mac crunches numbers, only to result in the fan itself crapping out a few months later.
I look forward to the day where blanket WiFi reaches most Canadian cities and WiFi devices like this can compete on a level playing field (for both data and voice) with the monopolistic cellphone carriers.
Cellular data is so ridiculously overpriced in Canada ($100 for 200 megs!), so finally having to compete with cheap WiFi handsets will be one hell of a wakeup call to the cellular industry here.
I look forward to the day that I can call my cellphone carrier and tell them to get stuffed because there's now a WiFi based solution that will do the same for a fraction of the cost. Bring it on.
I've used my residential VoIP gateway through a WiFi connection (using my Mac as a Wifi to CAT5 gateway, at that) and it worked just fine.
I could pull up and park wherever there was WiFi and sit in my car and make calls as if I was sitting at home.
It was a bit unwieldy given I was using a hardware based VoIP box that usually resides on my computer desk at home, but it worked.
This is one of the reasons that I push Mac's on all my friends/family/etc whom I know are not up to the task of adequately maintaining a Windows machine to avoid stuff like this.
The simple fact that I know that my "service calls" will drop to little/none after they make the switch is a huge advantage for me.
I've got co-workers who, after discovering that I was the resident go-to guy for computer repairs, inundated me with various PC's with lots of the usual problems - spyware, virus', etc etc etc. Typical Windows issues.
I did some freebies for my coworkers, but that was a mistake, as it only brought more people looking for help. Eventually I told everyone that I charged $40 per hour for my services, and suddenly they all went away. Many came back to complain that "fixing their computers costs them so much" so they just stopped fixing them.
I know as a result of this there are countless Windows boxes out there infested with everything under the sun, but I've come to the point where I simply give up with Windows, and some of the clueless people who use it. You can't protect the world despite the fact that you know you are doing the rest of the world a disservice by not doing so.
I still happily support my family members using Windows, at least those who haven't switched to Mac's as well, but It never fails to amaze me what a black hole of vulnerability Windows is - it's no wonder the stats on bot nets are what they are.
With few exceptions, everyone that I've introduced to the world of Mac has been enlightened - several have gotten their own Mac's, and now love them.
People know Windows better then OS X because of forced exposure - you simply get Windows on every computer you buy. If everyone got Linux on every new system they would probably be more familiar with it as well.
Instead, It's "Windows by default", and you must expect that people will be overly familliar with it because of such.
That doesn't make it better by any stretch of the imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple observation quickly shows many people are clueless to the effect of their driving styles on their fuel economy as well. Full throttle rush towards the next red light, slam on brakes, stop....repeat. Highway driving? Absolutely positive HAVE to achieve that 10 foot gain on the guy beside you, even if it means changing lanes and mashing on the accelerator only to inevitably end up following another car and having to slow down. Again, repeat....over and over and over again.
Simple driving style changes can yield the average driver a HUGE increase in fuel mileage, but until the "I'm more important than everybody else, I need to be in front of you and get there as fast as humanly possible, screw you all" attitude of many of todays drivers change, all the technology advances in the world won't help if the idiots behind the wheel just continue to operate the vehicles in a basically inefficient fashion.
Some people have forgotten that driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right.
Accordingly, if you do something stupid, you damn well deserve to be held accountable for it. The "OMG ONOZ THE INSURANCE COMPANIES SEE MY PRIVATE BLACK BOX DATA!!" freakouts shouldn't fly with anyone who has a basic sense of respect for the privilege.
That would have been my suggestion as well. A carefully placed old iPhone 3G hardwired into the electrical system (to ensure it stays charged) with Find My iPhone enabled would do the trick, and be quite slick at that - you could track it on anything from a desktop computer, another iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, or heck, basically anything with a web browser.
Yes, there's a recurring monthly fee associated with that for the underlying cellular service, but I don't think that there's many options for this sort of system that won't carry a fee of one sort or another.
Not to come across as a tree hugger or anything, but is this landfill safe, since, ya know, a lot of it will eventually end up there in areas where recycling programs are not on place.
That presents another question - will it play havoc with the recycling process itself?
Polymer note lifespan is widely accepted to be about 5 years.
Given I just found a coin in my jeans from 1957 which is still in regular circulation, I think your suggestion that the two even remote compare in overall longevity remains flawed. Plenty of original 1987 $1.00 "Loonies" are still in circulation - at at 23+ years old. To replace the $1.00 and $2.00 coins with polymer would still mean that they would have been replaced at least 4 times over that same span of time, and every 5 years after that you add another replacement cycle.
To equate it to my 1957 coin in my jeans, a polymer equivalent would have had to have been replaced more than 20 times already.
Coins can easily last decades under regular circulation, and centuries with light circulation. Polymer will never match that no matter how hard you try.
The longevity of coins still far surpasses even these new plastic bills...by many times over. Your logic is flawed.
Agreed. I was excited to find a BBS a few months ago that was still running the same software I used when I was a SysOp myself in the late 80's. After about 15 minutes online the nostalgia effect quickly gave way to the reality that, well...it just sucked. +++ATH0
I own a CurrentCost ENVI. The current cost units do have basic device-level drivers for OSX but the interface software required to upload the data to Google Powermeter is (sadly) Windows only. It's one of the biggest gripes in the CurrentCost message forums but the developers appear complacent on the subject.
As such I've been forced to run Windows 24/7 via Parallels with the sole task of running the Google Powermeter application in Windows instead of OSX. Frustrating.
Frustration aside, I do like the unit, but I discovered shortly after my purchase that it only partially supports tiered pricing - it does support two tiers (day and night) with selectable rates and times, but our local utility uses three tiers with each coming into effect at various times of day - off peak, mid peak, and full peak. The ENVI has no ability to be programmed to support this - what I did was program it for the "average" price between mid=peak and on-peak so that it is at least relatively close on the price display.
I'm hoping eventually GPM will also add more options - it supports only *one* tarrif rate, making it even less useful for calculating pricing. It does graph the information nicely though.
Here in Canada we pay a huge levy on blank CD media, MP3 players, and virtually any other media capable of holding music. This "goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying. ", as per the Cnet article here http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html
Therefore, this shutdown is infringing on my legal right to download music.
Meh, there's always ISOhunt, or like everyone else has already said, plenty of other choices.
I'll admit to having one of the original (and second version) of the Sidekick (They were called the Hiptop everywhere else except the USA) and the idea of storing everything on the cloud seemed great at the time - through several device upgrades, warranty replacements, and other hardware changes everything just automagically restored to the new phone within 10-15 minutes of switching the SIM.
One should add that the devices themselves are designed to "Play dead" when the battery gets low and shut down while still maintaining enough power to ensure the volatile ram holding the devices local cache of data remains intact. It's only if the battery is fully exhausted to the point of not being able to accomplish this, or a critical error/OS crash (The dreaded "red X of death") is encountered is the volatile ram actually in danger of being erased.
Therefore all the warnings about not letting the phones go "dead" or turning them off are a bit misleading since, excluding one of the two above situations everything is actually safe, but it's not without warrant since I'm sure MS/Danger are going to try to "backwards restore" whatever is salvageable.
Furthermore, since the OS is locked down extremely tight there's no (to my understanding, admittedly a few years old now) method of locally backing up a Sidekicks data. Contacts stored on the device can be backed up to the SIM card one at a time (with only the basic name/phone data, all other extraneous data such as profile pics, etc will not be included) but it was tedious to accomplish (one contact at a time) and the average Sidekick user (read as teen/clueless) probably has no idea how to do it anyways.
If they're on the way to eventually eliminating Firewire I sure hope that Apple has plans to update USB support for more camcorders then.
I have a JVC hard drive camcorder that is USB and iMovie has absolutely no idea what to do with it when I plug it into any of my Macs. It seems thatt if I had chosen a camcorder with Firewire instead (which Apple themselves trumpeted as the thing to do) I'd have had no issues.
Nice.
There was a modem-to-modem game (I think it was called ModemWars?) that I used to play all the time back in the Commodore days. It was great fun to play and was way ahead of it's time, despite the sometime painful process of getting the two systems to connect successfully to play. It wasn't ethernet, and it wasn't internet based, but it was multiplayer and it was "online".
We used to all have two phone lines back then so we'd play using one line for data, and talk about the game on the other line.
Good times...
Wasn't it just a short while ago that these same people tossed aside net-neutrality? Either this is a huge double standard, or the people in control really have no idea whatsoever how the Internet works.
It was nice to see that Apple (unlike many American companies) is apparently actually aware of the fact that the US and Canadian dollar is effectively at par now - Leopard is $129 USD, and $129 CDN.
A refreshing change from the recent string of companies which are simply choosing to ignore the currency parity, and continuing to gouge Canadians for 20 or 30 percent phantom currency exchange.
With the exception of probably the majority of us here, most computer users are completely devoid of any regular backup schedule regardless. IMHO this makes Gmail far superior for the average (read as: hopelessly unprepared) computer user. I've lost track of how many people I've heard say "I lost your email because my computer crashed" over the years. I've yet to hear one Gmail user say the same thing. That aside, I'm sure Google, of all companies out there, make some effort to ensure there's some amount of backup or redundancy as part of the Gmail system.
FWIW the Registerfly main page still displays the ICANN logo, and based on a little experimentation a short while ago it seems that I could still register a domain there if I was so foolish to want to give them my money.
They seem to be taking that letter very seriously.
A couple of points on everyones posts.
- Grandfathered Fido unlimited data plans can no longer be transfered.
- Rogers no longer advertises their Blackberry data plans as "unlimited", but at $100 for 200 megs it's still a huge ripoff.
- You can't "permanently roam" using a US registered Blackberry - clauses in contracts disallow this and you service will get disconnected if you ignore it.
And I'll wholeheartedly agree that mobile data is a HUGE rip off in Canada. It's disgusting.
Yes, Linux is no piece of cake to support to naive users, but is Windows that much better?
I've dealt with so many naive Windows users who couldn't (or don't know how) to install the most basic of Virus/Spyware protection, or how fix the most basic of issues.
I guess it's a matter of the lesser of two evils. Dell would rather help "naive" Windows users then perhaps open the door to something more secure and support "naive" users there instead.
With all the stories I've heard of the cooling fans on the MacBook's going wonky if run at too high of a speed for too long, I'm reluctant to offer my spare cycles to Xgrid.
The last thing I want to happen as a result of being a participant is seeing my fan spooled up to 6000+ RPM day in and day out while my Mac crunches numbers, only to result in the fan itself crapping out a few months later.
Cellular data is so ridiculously overpriced in Canada ($100 for 200 megs!), so finally having to compete with cheap WiFi handsets will be one hell of a wakeup call to the cellular industry here.
I look forward to the day that I can call my cellphone carrier and tell them to get stuffed because there's now a WiFi based solution that will do the same for a fraction of the cost. Bring it on.
I've used my residential VoIP gateway through a WiFi connection (using my Mac as a Wifi to CAT5 gateway, at that) and it worked just fine. I could pull up and park wherever there was WiFi and sit in my car and make calls as if I was sitting at home. It was a bit unwieldy given I was using a hardware based VoIP box that usually resides on my computer desk at home, but it worked.
This is one of the reasons that I push Mac's on all my friends/family/etc whom I know are not up to the task of adequately maintaining a Windows machine to avoid stuff like this. The simple fact that I know that my "service calls" will drop to little/none after they make the switch is a huge advantage for me. I've got co-workers who, after discovering that I was the resident go-to guy for computer repairs, inundated me with various PC's with lots of the usual problems - spyware, virus', etc etc etc. Typical Windows issues. I did some freebies for my coworkers, but that was a mistake, as it only brought more people looking for help. Eventually I told everyone that I charged $40 per hour for my services, and suddenly they all went away. Many came back to complain that "fixing their computers costs them so much" so they just stopped fixing them. I know as a result of this there are countless Windows boxes out there infested with everything under the sun, but I've come to the point where I simply give up with Windows, and some of the clueless people who use it. You can't protect the world despite the fact that you know you are doing the rest of the world a disservice by not doing so. I still happily support my family members using Windows, at least those who haven't switched to Mac's as well, but It never fails to amaze me what a black hole of vulnerability Windows is - it's no wonder the stats on bot nets are what they are.
With few exceptions, everyone that I've introduced to the world of Mac has been enlightened - several have gotten their own Mac's, and now love them.
People know Windows better then OS X because of forced exposure - you simply get Windows on every computer you buy. If everyone got Linux on every new system they would probably be more familiar with it as well.
Instead, It's "Windows by default", and you must expect that people will be overly familliar with it because of such.
That doesn't make it better by any stretch of the imagination.