The problem that college CIO's (and CTO's) are describing are, as the "exasperation" article suggests, very much of their own making, but the article, and most likely the information officers themselves, is misstating the origin of the problem, and that may be complicating their legal responses.
The fundamental problem is that colleges have been hiring the wrong people into CIO/CTO positions and giving them the wrong mission. College CIO's fundamental job is to provide reliable information services on a limited (often far too limited) budget. People are hired into these positions for their willingness and ability to reduce costs while maintaining security and a high quality of service on the campus. In my experience (and I have had a number of them), they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the educational mission of the college and the freedom of educators to accomplish that mission if it will save a few dollars.
In the early part of this decade the RIAA's tactics worked perfectly with the goal of cost control. Large music and video downloads were overwhelming campus gateways and forcing ever larger expenditures on maintaining them. Blocking the ports most commonly used for music and video downloads was an easy solution to this cost problem, so the RIAA provided an excuse for cutting costs. A series of RIAA initiatives that played to CIO cost cutting and revenue enhancement were all easy to adopt.
The take down notices were another story. CIO complaints about having to devote personnel to this task started immediately, and it is getting worse as the costs grow. Legal costs are particularly problematic, especially if they get billed to the CIO's budget. With the costs of RIAA enforcement spinning rapidly out of control, CIO's are caught in a difficult trap of their own devising, and complaining that costs are an issue now will not impress judges who see a precedent in prior complience with RIAA demands.
The only way out of this mess is for colleges to do exactly what one of the judges suggested: to execute take downs without an investigation such that a student can sue the university and the RIAA for a abrogation of their rights, preferably as a class action. The universities could potentially then join the students in suing the RIAA, arguing that the RIAA forced them to abandon due process at the insistence of the courts, largely because Universities can't afford to do the RIAA's investigations for them, but RIAA evidence is often weak and inconsistent.
I don't know if this can be done (the details of this are a lawyers job to sort out), but I doubt that AG's are going to be able to help much given the precedents that colleges have alredy set for the wrong reasons. An avalanche of investigations forced on the courts might lead the courts to start to set the standards of evidence that the RIAA has to meet before filing a take down to begin with.
The real problem is that no such standard currently exists.
The other solution, of course, is legislation. LOL.
It has always been fairly trivial to transpose content from one document standard to another. You sometimes lose something (most often precise placement) in the details of the translation, but you more often do not. The only thing that matters about making ODF a standard is that it becomes a benchmark that other formats can be translated to and through. Microsoft has no reason to oppose it, as they understand that, as long as ODF is less detailed than Microsoft's preferred standard, the small loss of detail will make Microsoft's products look good when they demo them to executives and purchasing agents. Very few people who actually work with documents will care, as they understand that most content repurposing requires some giggling of the details, but Microsoft isn't likely to win that class of users anyway.
Its a very bad solution because it support to the RIAA's deep agenda of preserving the music industries oligopoly on music distribution. When you block P2P you block lots of legitimately shared music (from individuals, garage bands, etc) as well.
Others have already noted that P2P has other legitimate uses. Blocking the technology to block a subset of content is a very bad solution.
So the trick, if you really want to do this, is to install a piece of file sharing code on their machine (if you know what you are doing, an e-mail with the right attachment will do), request the song you put there over the net, and then file your DMCA notice.
I'm not advocating doing this, but the event series would null the conditions of the provision you point to.
My real point is that DMCA really does open the door to malicious attacks on innocent third parties. File sharing botnets are simply a semi-random variant of this.
I suppose I'm glad to hear that none of the RIAA notices were illegitimate while you were a student, the evidence from elsewhere suggests that they may not be. Stanford is exactly the kind of place that would attract the kind of RIAA allegations that Lessig documents at RIT (no real RIAA violation; just a search database that documents web documents on the net). The result in that case, a student settling to avoid the cost and hassle of litigation could easily have happened at Stanford as well. I guess I'd give above average odds that very few students at Stanford had their machines hijacked by file sharing botnets, but the RIAA's track record in getting DMCA notices right is abysmal.
I guess I just don't quite believe that your claim is necessarily true across the board.
There are no magic bullets for solving the problem you are dealing with. A lot depends on what your audience is trying to accomplish, what kind of constraints they feel they have to work within, and how much they know about the subject matter. High level managers and executives can't be experts on everything they need to make decisions on. The span of their decision making is to large and their ultimate focus has to be on bottom line issues like controlling costs, building revenue, and delivering on time. Note that none of those things are technical issues.
You may find considerable value in reading a book on making presentations (the kind they use in basic speech courses in college). There are a number of excellent choices out there. I'm particularly fond of Presentations In Everyday Life: Strategies For Effective Speaking, by Engleberg and Daly, because I think their recommendations are well researched. This kind of text is usually a goldmine of organizational strategies for presentations, any one of which may be right depending on the managers you are addressing and the type of recommendations you are trying to make.
The most important chapters in these books (make sure they have them) are the chapters on researching the audience and listening. Hardly anybody really learns how to do these things, but they are the key to making effective presentations to overburdened managers and executives, who often have to make difficult, risky, and expensive decisions based on one or a few ten minute meetings. What you need to find out, before you even walk into the room, are the following things:
What they are making the decision about. Like as not you already know this (its probably the only thing you already know). But it pays to confirm it by informally networking beforehand. You probably won't be able to get much from the executive or high level manager, but you probably can get useful information from people on their staff.
The context of the decision. Most recommendations are made within the context of a larger problem (an overarching project, a promise made to the a higher up, a company strategic direction, a specific customer problem, etc). The more you know about the context of the decision, the better you'll be able to customize your recommendation and presentation to the needs of the people you are presenting to, even if you don't mention that context (and its probably best if you don't).
The decision makers preferred presentation style. I have found that most executives have a preferred presentation style. Some want to see three slides (problem, solution, cost) and only want to hear your preferred recommendation (keep your other possibilities in your pocket as backup). Others want to see a specific set of tables. Most want you to get immediately to the point without justifying your recommendations (they wouldn't have asked you to present if they didn't value your judgment), but be ready to go into detail. They will ask for justification. Some will "blindside" you (well, they think its blindsiding) with aggressive interruptions. The good news is, there will be lots of people who have presented successfully to the manager/executive. Talk to the staff. Talk to other people who've pitched the executive. Customize your presentation to the decision makers preferences and be ready for their ideosyncracies.
Research. Listen. Listen to the staff you ask questions. Listen to the people who've presented. Take notes. Ask questions. Make sure you understand what you hear. I generally recommend that you do each of the following things as you listen:
Stop. Don't think about anything else. Get rid of distractions before you start listening.
Tend. Focus on the speaker, not just by paying attention, but by looking like you
I thought that Schwartz remarks were really illuminating. How good it was, I thought, that he talked about these unidentified others that tried to tempt Sun to the dark side.
Then I realized that Schwartz has set himself up to be subpoenaed. How sad if that happens.
You know, I posted this as a joke (as I presumed the item I replied to was. So far I've been modded ten times, including 50% Insightful, 30% Overrated, and 20% Troll. Did nobody with mod points get the joke? Geez
Look, I'm not anxious to defend Novell's contract with Microsoft, but it did have at least some purposes (cross-licensing and interoperability in networking software, for instance) that were not related to Linux. In this case, it apparently translates to Novell having some insight into the patents that Microsoft claims to be at issue. I don't know if that visibility is reflected in Novell's statement or not, but given Novell's still resolving litigation with SCO, I can't imagine they would have made such a strong statement lightly. Novell's statement says that Microsoft is shooting blanks on this one, and that's another useful datapoint for techs who are asked to evaluate a Microsoft request for royalty payments on a companies Linux machines.
Believe what you want. I've described white. You can label it as black if you want to, but other Insight owners (including my brother-in-law) report similar experiences to mine. Since you don't believe me, I've pulled some observations off the web for you.
First, we have the description of the Insight from the Honda Web Site. You'll notice that the EPA highway mileage for this version (2006) are 6 MPG higher than the city numbers (66 versus 60). My estimated highway mileage in 2001 was higher.
Second, you might You might also find the owner opinions at insightcentral.net interesting. I've not posted there, but there are some excellent relevant quotes:
I have gone from L.A. to Pennsylvania on four tanks of gas. You have to have the right tire pressure, good gas, follow big vehicles, and just know how to get the most out of the car.
This is certainly a driver's car in many respects. Beyond it's fun-to-drive factor, the central fuel efficiency display has this almost subliminal effect on your driving, helping you to learn how to get the most efficiency out of the car. I think this is an often ignored part of the overall equation.
the Insight's gear ratios take a bit of getting used to. You really have to think of 1st and 2nd gears as accelerating gears, 5 (and at residential speeds 4th) as a cruising gear, and 3rd as highway passing gear. Acceleration is very lively in 1st - enough so that I find myself hesitant to put the pedal to the aluminum in first. Acceleration is also more than adequate in 2nd. These two gears are enough to take you from 0 - 60, which leads to the much talked about Insight 1, 2, 5 gear shifting pattern that some owners adopt for best efficiency (and a little fun along the way).
I bought the car in Kansas in June, then I moved to Maryland in September. On the 1200 or so mile trip, I averaged 73.1 mpg! That was cruising at about 70mph.
Finally, I would point you to a review of the Insight written in about 2005 titled, appropriately enough "Defeating Ignorance With Insight". Here's another relevant passage:
the Insight's estimates of 57 city/56 highway for the automatic transmission and 60/65 for the manual are impressive. And as amazing as those numbers are, real life data shows that it is possible to beat the EPA estimates (See Elsewhere on the Web: GreenHybrid.com mileage database). Forget about getting only 300 miles on a tank of gas.
The reviewer is right, of course. I got 600 miles on my last tank of gas, and filled up (on Friday) for $28.00. That's fairly typical, in my experience, but what do I know?
That I absolutely agree with. I think of Bill as a hacker who was in the right place at the right time with the right idea and just the right lack of ethics to build a great company. But that is often how the world works.
Its not exactly random. The Popular Electronics issue that introduced the Altair microcomputer kit was the obvious beginning of a major opportunity. I recognized the moment as being a pivot point where someone with the right idea could leverage a fortune. I talked about it with friends at the time. We just didn't know what we could do to take advantage of the moment. Bill Gates and his Harvard poker buddies (Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer among them) recognized the moment as well, but distinguished themselves by understanding what they could do with the moment. Bill hacked together a workable Basic that would run on the machine, dropped out of school to make it happen, and, to his credit, did.
Everything from that point on was riding the ever larger waves of the PC revolution. Bill adapted the Basic (sometimes badly, and often burying the bad hacks used to make one machine work with more bad hacks) to a growing range of machines. It doesn't make Bill a great programmer, and they did they steal and/or buy (sometimes both, as with DOS) many of the pieces they needed along the way). But the growth of Microsoft inevitably put Bill in the position of making the key technical decisions. To make those decisions he had to have a more than passing knowledge of the code (even when he didn't write it).
That doesn't make him smarter than the rest of us (any more than Linus Torvalds or Tim Berners-Lee smarter than the rest of us. But all three were in the right place at the right time to make something important happen, all three have a broad reputation based on having done so, and those reputations have given all three credibility that most of the rest of us don't have when they talk about their products.
Which is why, going back to the beginning of this thread, it didn't matter that Linus' comments on Microsoft's FUD reiterated things that others had said before. His words had special weight.
I certainly won't disagree that the Insight is a light slippery car with a small motor or that all of those things contribute to its mileage. They clearly all do. Could I get the same mileage or better without the supplemental electric drivetrain? All you can do here is to assert that it might. All I can do is assert that it might not. I don't know of anyone who has removed the supplemental electric drivetrain out of the Insight to make the comparison. I would guess you don't either. Honda probably did, but they haven't published the results. A large number of mileage Geeks (especially in Japan) have had the opportunity to remove the electric drivetrain and find out (the mechanics tell me that, while its dangerous, its not all that hard to do once you have the high voltage lines turned off), but I've not seen reports of them doing so.
The weight you save will be offset somewhat by the addition of an electric starter motor and a larger engine battery, but you may still net a weight advantage. The resulting car will not be as safe (the electric motor adds a useful burst of power when you are passing other cars on a two lane road and doing other burst maneuvers) and you'll have to shift more often (the engine will be too small to do substantial uphill grades over third gear; that's a problem even with the supplemental drive train if the grade is long enough and you don't down shift soon enough).
What I will tell you based on the experience of driving the car is that the electric drive train really does appear to help at highway speeds. That could all be misimpression, but if it is, its a lot of miles of misimpression.
You should consider me a source. I have 104,000 miles on my Insight and nothing to gain by misrepresenting its behavior. Heck, they don't even sell the car anymore. Bottom line, I have watched the charge discharge patterns (there are little lights that show when the batteries are being charged by the motor and when the motor is being assisted by the electric motor) for six plus years now I'm a pretty good source.
The car will happily use the electric motor to accelerate as it discharges the batteries below 20 MPH (or so), but it will not charge them to noticeably unless the batteries are very low and the car is idling at stop.
The batteries will charge at any speed above 20 MPH for which the engine is putting out more power than the car needs. This is most noticeable on downhills and fairly level roads. The electric motor will boost the engine at any speed at which the engine needs a boost. I've seen both charge and discharge at 80 MPH (not a speed I normally do, but its nice to know that the car can do it).
I no longer remember the exact city numbers, but when I bought my standard transmission insight in early 2001, it was EPA rated at 70 MPH on the highway and somewhat below 60 MPH in the city. I'm sure I still have the original sticker in my car, so I can look it up if I need to, but its currently parked 20 miles away in New Jersey, so I can't run out into the garage and look.
These are not claims. I have driven about 96,000 of the 104,000 miles on my Insight. They are rather careful observations. What I will make as a claim is this. The Insight (my Insight) has a three cylinder engine. The boost I get from the electric motor feels the engine the "feel" of about four and a half cylinders. It probably isn't that high, but the Insight is a very light car with a very small engine, so the boost it gets is likely greater than the boost that a Civic would get from the same electric motor.
I assume you are the Daniel Phillips who is noted for the work he has done on the Linux Kernal and file systems. Beyond that I know I know nothing about your background. You may have worked directly with BillG, much as I once worked directly with MikeMap. Doesn't matter. If I've learned nothing else in my time in the computer industry and academia, its that you rarely put yourself in a strong position my assuming the worst about an adversary, and make no mistake, BillG and I were adversaries at key points in the Microsoft/IBM partnership. We were only in the same (fairly small) room twice and I doubt he would even know I exist, but we bumped virtual heads fairly directly over inclusion of REXX in OS/2, over the shape of the OS/2 file system, and other issues.
Very few of the people whose opinion I base my judgment on were fond of Bill. More than a few questioned some of his judgments, but they all worked at IBM. More than a few had, like me, lost a battle to him. But none were dummies in any sense of the word and all respected Bill Gates ability to digest and understand large amounts of information and to argue a case based on a knowledge of the details.
That said, and this may affect your thinking, all of my near direct knowledge of Bill is early to late 1980's knowledge. It may well be that, as Microsoft grew and his span of control expanded (not because of self-appointment, but because of his role in the history of the company), that he lost the time required to remain familiar with the operating system. I don't doubt, moreover, that there has been a lot of bad decision making around NT, all the way back to the point were it was a badly tested clone of OS/2 (the DEC VMS connection has always been more hype than code). I don't doubt that Bill contributed to it. But I still wouldn't underestimate the intelligence he brings to any problem.
I'm the last one to want to spend a lot of time defending Bill Gates, but he does have a well earned reputation for "knowing the code". I'm sure he no longer even tries, but the IBM guys I knew who worked on early PC's and then OS/2 (many of them recognized experts on operating systems) never had anything but praise for Bill Gates knowledge of the code and the intellectual property issues that surrounded it. Microsoft may have stolen a lot of that intellectual property (which is one of the reasons I'm loathe to defend Gates), but Bill understood it.
Nobody who knows Bill Gates gives him low grades for his knowledge, capacity to learn, or drive to know everything he can about any subject he takes on. They don't always like him, but they respect his intellect.
You are clearly thinking Prius rather than Insight. The Insight's electric motor/generator operates at all speeds above 20 MPH (and under some conditions under 20MPH). When I reach highway speeds and feather back on the accelerator to match the speed I want to go (usually the same as the traffic around me), the electric motor draws on the batteries on uphills and charges it whenever the power output of the engine exceeds the power required to maintain speed.
There are many ways to design a hybrid drivetrain. Some, like the Prius, are optimized to give great mileage in the city and don't significantly improve on that mileage on the highway. Some, like the Insight, give great mileage on the highway and merely good mileage in the city. Others improve performance at the expense of mileage.
I know. I own one and have tested most of them.
CVT is a big improvement over automatic. The EPA numbers, while the Insight stick was still available, suggested that the stick was still better on the highway, but that CVT was better in the city. The automatic on the original models was worse both highway and city.
In the end, of course, I got a stick because I like a stick. It gives me a feeling of control and, to be honest, it helps keep me interested in the process of driving.
As for "designed wrong", automatics have never done as well as stick in testing. CVT, on the other hand, has.
The key is creating relationships between key employees in India (and other countries) and the United States. 90% of the time associated with programming a large project is communication between programmers and others. Bringing somebody here for a year or two gives them lots of opportunities to get to know other people (not just at work, but over lunches, dinners, etc). Those relationships pay off when the employee returns home and has ways to exercise what, in Organizational Communication, is called Fayol's bridge: informal communication between peers in different parts of the organization that doesn't depend on the management chain keeping the messages straight.
I'm sure that Indian outsourcing firms are the only companies that do this. IBM, Microsoft, and other U.S. high tech companies that cycle their overseas employees through the U.S. for training wouldn't do this too, would they? Nah. No need to ask the same questions of U.S. companies.
I've averaged over 80 MPG on trips of over a thousand miles in the late spring and early summer along the mid-Atlantic coast (round trips, so elevation wasn't a factor). That's the best I've ever done over long distances at relatively high speeds.
There are a lot of variables in play for the mileage you get on a specific trip. Speed, interruptions to the continuity of driving, temperature, humidity, road conditions, tire pressure, atmospheric pressure, and the relative levelness of the landscape all play a role. A post responding to another recent Slashdot article recounted average mileage of over 68 MPG. I average 61.8 MPG. I'd be close to 64 MPG if I never let my children (who average closer to 55 MPG) or significant other (who averages closer to 60 MPG) drive the car. I'd probably be even higher if my usual road trips didn't go over mountains, if I never drove in New York City (which I do frequently), and I didn't live in a colder climate (New York/New England) compared with other parts of country. My mileage is better in the summer (closer to a 66 MPG average), worse in the winter (closer to a 58 MPG average), worse in the city (closer to a 58 MPG average) and better on the open road (closer to a 67 MPG average)
Your mileage may vary, but hybrids can do extremely well on the highway. Indeed, that's where the Honda Insight excels.
Your assumption that hybrids are "dead weight" at highway speeds is wrong. I get my best hybrid mileage on the highway (often at or over 70 MPG). It doesn't have to be that way. A hybrid designed for torque rather than economy might now do any better than a standard engine at highway speeds, but a hybrid designed for economy rather than torque (like my Honda Insight) does.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem that college CIO's (and CTO's) are describing are, as the "exasperation" article suggests, very much of their own making, but the article, and most likely the information officers themselves, is misstating the origin of the problem, and that may be complicating their legal responses.
The fundamental problem is that colleges have been hiring the wrong people into CIO/CTO positions and giving them the wrong mission. College CIO's fundamental job is to provide reliable information services on a limited (often far too limited) budget. People are hired into these positions for their willingness and ability to reduce costs while maintaining security and a high quality of service on the campus. In my experience (and I have had a number of them), they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the educational mission of the college and the freedom of educators to accomplish that mission if it will save a few dollars.
In the early part of this decade the RIAA's tactics worked perfectly with the goal of cost control. Large music and video downloads were overwhelming campus gateways and forcing ever larger expenditures on maintaining them. Blocking the ports most commonly used for music and video downloads was an easy solution to this cost problem, so the RIAA provided an excuse for cutting costs. A series of RIAA initiatives that played to CIO cost cutting and revenue enhancement were all easy to adopt.
The take down notices were another story. CIO complaints about having to devote personnel to this task started immediately, and it is getting worse as the costs grow. Legal costs are particularly problematic, especially if they get billed to the CIO's budget. With the costs of RIAA enforcement spinning rapidly out of control, CIO's are caught in a difficult trap of their own devising, and complaining that costs are an issue now will not impress judges who see a precedent in prior complience with RIAA demands.
The only way out of this mess is for colleges to do exactly what one of the judges suggested: to execute take downs without an investigation such that a student can sue the university and the RIAA for a abrogation of their rights, preferably as a class action. The universities could potentially then join the students in suing the RIAA, arguing that the RIAA forced them to abandon due process at the insistence of the courts, largely because Universities can't afford to do the RIAA's investigations for them, but RIAA evidence is often weak and inconsistent.
I don't know if this can be done (the details of this are a lawyers job to sort out), but I doubt that AG's are going to be able to help much given the precedents that colleges have alredy set for the wrong reasons. An avalanche of investigations forced on the courts might lead the courts to start to set the standards of evidence that the RIAA has to meet before filing a take down to begin with.
The real problem is that no such standard currently exists.
The other solution, of course, is legislation. LOL.
As I understand it, lossless translation with ODF has been demonstrated, but it was in combination with CSS.
It has always been fairly trivial to transpose content from one document standard to another. You sometimes lose something (most often precise placement) in the details of the translation, but you more often do not. The only thing that matters about making ODF a standard is that it becomes a benchmark that other formats can be translated to and through. Microsoft has no reason to oppose it, as they understand that, as long as ODF is less detailed than Microsoft's preferred standard, the small loss of detail will make Microsoft's products look good when they demo them to executives and purchasing agents. Very few people who actually work with documents will care, as they understand that most content repurposing requires some giggling of the details, but Microsoft isn't likely to win that class of users anyway.
Its a very bad solution because it support to the RIAA's deep agenda of preserving the music industries oligopoly on music distribution. When you block P2P you block lots of legitimately shared music (from individuals, garage bands, etc) as well. Others have already noted that P2P has other legitimate uses. Blocking the technology to block a subset of content is a very bad solution.
So the trick, if you really want to do this, is to install a piece of file sharing code on their machine (if you know what you are doing, an e-mail with the right attachment will do), request the song you put there over the net, and then file your DMCA notice. I'm not advocating doing this, but the event series would null the conditions of the provision you point to. My real point is that DMCA really does open the door to malicious attacks on innocent third parties. File sharing botnets are simply a semi-random variant of this.
I suppose I'm glad to hear that none of the RIAA notices were illegitimate while you were a student, the evidence from elsewhere suggests that they may not be. Stanford is exactly the kind of place that would attract the kind of RIAA allegations that Lessig documents at RIT (no real RIAA violation; just a search database that documents web documents on the net). The result in that case, a student settling to avoid the cost and hassle of litigation could easily have happened at Stanford as well. I guess I'd give above average odds that very few students at Stanford had their machines hijacked by file sharing botnets, but the RIAA's track record in getting DMCA notices right is abysmal. I guess I just don't quite believe that your claim is necessarily true across the board.
There are no magic bullets for solving the problem you are dealing with. A lot depends on what your audience is trying to accomplish, what kind of constraints they feel they have to work within, and how much they know about the subject matter. High level managers and executives can't be experts on everything they need to make decisions on. The span of their decision making is to large and their ultimate focus has to be on bottom line issues like controlling costs, building revenue, and delivering on time. Note that none of those things are technical issues.
You may find considerable value in reading a book on making presentations (the kind they use in basic speech courses in college). There are a number of excellent choices out there. I'm particularly fond of Presentations In Everyday Life: Strategies For Effective Speaking, by Engleberg and Daly, because I think their recommendations are well researched. This kind of text is usually a goldmine of organizational strategies for presentations, any one of which may be right depending on the managers you are addressing and the type of recommendations you are trying to make.
The most important chapters in these books (make sure they have them) are the chapters on researching the audience and listening. Hardly anybody really learns how to do these things, but they are the key to making effective presentations to overburdened managers and executives, who often have to make difficult, risky, and expensive decisions based on one or a few ten minute meetings. What you need to find out, before you even walk into the room, are the following things:
Research. Listen. Listen to the staff you ask questions. Listen to the people who've presented. Take notes. Ask questions. Make sure you understand what you hear. I generally recommend that you do each of the following things as you listen:
I thought that Schwartz remarks were really illuminating. How good it was, I thought, that he talked about these unidentified others that tried to tempt Sun to the dark side. Then I realized that Schwartz has set himself up to be subpoenaed. How sad if that happens.
You know, I posted this as a joke (as I presumed the item I replied to was. So far I've been modded ten times, including 50% Insightful, 30% Overrated, and 20% Troll. Did nobody with mod points get the joke? Geez
Look, I'm not anxious to defend Novell's contract with Microsoft, but it did have at least some purposes (cross-licensing and interoperability in networking software, for instance) that were not related to Linux. In this case, it apparently translates to Novell having some insight into the patents that Microsoft claims to be at issue. I don't know if that visibility is reflected in Novell's statement or not, but given Novell's still resolving litigation with SCO, I can't imagine they would have made such a strong statement lightly. Novell's statement says that Microsoft is shooting blanks on this one, and that's another useful datapoint for techs who are asked to evaluate a Microsoft request for royalty payments on a companies Linux machines.
First, we have the description of the Insight from the Honda Web Site. You'll notice that the EPA highway mileage for this version (2006) are 6 MPG higher than the city numbers (66 versus 60). My estimated highway mileage in 2001 was higher.
Second, you might You might also find the owner opinions at insightcentral.net interesting. I've not posted there, but there are some excellent relevant quotes:
Finally, I would point you to a review of the Insight written in about 2005 titled, appropriately enough "Defeating Ignorance With Insight". Here's another relevant passage:
The reviewer is right, of course. I got 600 miles on my last tank of gas, and filled up (on Friday) for $28.00. That's fairly typical, in my experience, but what do I know?
That I absolutely agree with. I think of Bill as a hacker who was in the right place at the right time with the right idea and just the right lack of ethics to build a great company. But that is often how the world works.
Its not exactly random. The Popular Electronics issue that introduced the Altair microcomputer kit was the obvious beginning of a major opportunity. I recognized the moment as being a pivot point where someone with the right idea could leverage a fortune. I talked about it with friends at the time. We just didn't know what we could do to take advantage of the moment. Bill Gates and his Harvard poker buddies (Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer among them) recognized the moment as well, but distinguished themselves by understanding what they could do with the moment. Bill hacked together a workable Basic that would run on the machine, dropped out of school to make it happen, and, to his credit, did.
Everything from that point on was riding the ever larger waves of the PC revolution. Bill adapted the Basic (sometimes badly, and often burying the bad hacks used to make one machine work with more bad hacks) to a growing range of machines. It doesn't make Bill a great programmer, and they did they steal and/or buy (sometimes both, as with DOS) many of the pieces they needed along the way). But the growth of Microsoft inevitably put Bill in the position of making the key technical decisions. To make those decisions he had to have a more than passing knowledge of the code (even when he didn't write it).
That doesn't make him smarter than the rest of us (any more than Linus Torvalds or Tim Berners-Lee smarter than the rest of us. But all three were in the right place at the right time to make something important happen, all three have a broad reputation based on having done so, and those reputations have given all three credibility that most of the rest of us don't have when they talk about their products.
Which is why, going back to the beginning of this thread, it didn't matter that Linus' comments on Microsoft's FUD reiterated things that others had said before. His words had special weight.
It seems to explain anonymous cowards too.
I certainly won't disagree that the Insight is a light slippery car with a small motor or that all of those things contribute to its mileage. They clearly all do. Could I get the same mileage or better without the supplemental electric drivetrain? All you can do here is to assert that it might. All I can do is assert that it might not. I don't know of anyone who has removed the supplemental electric drivetrain out of the Insight to make the comparison. I would guess you don't either. Honda probably did, but they haven't published the results. A large number of mileage Geeks (especially in Japan) have had the opportunity to remove the electric drivetrain and find out (the mechanics tell me that, while its dangerous, its not all that hard to do once you have the high voltage lines turned off), but I've not seen reports of them doing so.
The weight you save will be offset somewhat by the addition of an electric starter motor and a larger engine battery, but you may still net a weight advantage. The resulting car will not be as safe (the electric motor adds a useful burst of power when you are passing other cars on a two lane road and doing other burst maneuvers) and you'll have to shift more often (the engine will be too small to do substantial uphill grades over third gear; that's a problem even with the supplemental drive train if the grade is long enough and you don't down shift soon enough).
What I will tell you based on the experience of driving the car is that the electric drive train really does appear to help at highway speeds. That could all be misimpression, but if it is, its a lot of miles of misimpression.
You should consider me a source. I have 104,000 miles on my Insight and nothing to gain by misrepresenting its behavior. Heck, they don't even sell the car anymore. Bottom line, I have watched the charge discharge patterns (there are little lights that show when the batteries are being charged by the motor and when the motor is being assisted by the electric motor) for six plus years now I'm a pretty good source.
The car will happily use the electric motor to accelerate as it discharges the batteries below 20 MPH (or so), but it will not charge them to noticeably unless the batteries are very low and the car is idling at stop.
The batteries will charge at any speed above 20 MPH for which the engine is putting out more power than the car needs. This is most noticeable on downhills and fairly level roads. The electric motor will boost the engine at any speed at which the engine needs a boost. I've seen both charge and discharge at 80 MPH (not a speed I normally do, but its nice to know that the car can do it).
I no longer remember the exact city numbers, but when I bought my standard transmission insight in early 2001, it was EPA rated at 70 MPH on the highway and somewhat below 60 MPH in the city. I'm sure I still have the original sticker in my car, so I can look it up if I need to, but its currently parked 20 miles away in New Jersey, so I can't run out into the garage and look.
These are not claims. I have driven about 96,000 of the 104,000 miles on my Insight. They are rather careful observations. What I will make as a claim is this. The Insight (my Insight) has a three cylinder engine. The boost I get from the electric motor feels the engine the "feel" of about four and a half cylinders. It probably isn't that high, but the Insight is a very light car with a very small engine, so the boost it gets is likely greater than the boost that a Civic would get from the same electric motor.
I assume you are the Daniel Phillips who is noted for the work he has done on the Linux Kernal and file systems. Beyond that I know I know nothing about your background. You may have worked directly with BillG, much as I once worked directly with MikeMap. Doesn't matter. If I've learned nothing else in my time in the computer industry and academia, its that you rarely put yourself in a strong position my assuming the worst about an adversary, and make no mistake, BillG and I were adversaries at key points in the Microsoft/IBM partnership. We were only in the same (fairly small) room twice and I doubt he would even know I exist, but we bumped virtual heads fairly directly over inclusion of REXX in OS/2, over the shape of the OS/2 file system, and other issues. Very few of the people whose opinion I base my judgment on were fond of Bill. More than a few questioned some of his judgments, but they all worked at IBM. More than a few had, like me, lost a battle to him. But none were dummies in any sense of the word and all respected Bill Gates ability to digest and understand large amounts of information and to argue a case based on a knowledge of the details. That said, and this may affect your thinking, all of my near direct knowledge of Bill is early to late 1980's knowledge. It may well be that, as Microsoft grew and his span of control expanded (not because of self-appointment, but because of his role in the history of the company), that he lost the time required to remain familiar with the operating system. I don't doubt, moreover, that there has been a lot of bad decision making around NT, all the way back to the point were it was a badly tested clone of OS/2 (the DEC VMS connection has always been more hype than code). I don't doubt that Bill contributed to it. But I still wouldn't underestimate the intelligence he brings to any problem.
I'm the last one to want to spend a lot of time defending Bill Gates, but he does have a well earned reputation for "knowing the code". I'm sure he no longer even tries, but the IBM guys I knew who worked on early PC's and then OS/2 (many of them recognized experts on operating systems) never had anything but praise for Bill Gates knowledge of the code and the intellectual property issues that surrounded it. Microsoft may have stolen a lot of that intellectual property (which is one of the reasons I'm loathe to defend Gates), but Bill understood it.
Nobody who knows Bill Gates gives him low grades for his knowledge, capacity to learn, or drive to know everything he can about any subject he takes on. They don't always like him, but they respect his intellect.
You are clearly thinking Prius rather than Insight. The Insight's electric motor/generator operates at all speeds above 20 MPH (and under some conditions under 20MPH). When I reach highway speeds and feather back on the accelerator to match the speed I want to go (usually the same as the traffic around me), the electric motor draws on the batteries on uphills and charges it whenever the power output of the engine exceeds the power required to maintain speed. There are many ways to design a hybrid drivetrain. Some, like the Prius, are optimized to give great mileage in the city and don't significantly improve on that mileage on the highway. Some, like the Insight, give great mileage on the highway and merely good mileage in the city. Others improve performance at the expense of mileage. I know. I own one and have tested most of them.
CVT is a big improvement over automatic. The EPA numbers, while the Insight stick was still available, suggested that the stick was still better on the highway, but that CVT was better in the city. The automatic on the original models was worse both highway and city. In the end, of course, I got a stick because I like a stick. It gives me a feeling of control and, to be honest, it helps keep me interested in the process of driving. As for "designed wrong", automatics have never done as well as stick in testing. CVT, on the other hand, has.
The key is creating relationships between key employees in India (and other countries) and the United States. 90% of the time associated with programming a large project is communication between programmers and others. Bringing somebody here for a year or two gives them lots of opportunities to get to know other people (not just at work, but over lunches, dinners, etc). Those relationships pay off when the employee returns home and has ways to exercise what, in Organizational Communication, is called Fayol's bridge: informal communication between peers in different parts of the organization that doesn't depend on the management chain keeping the messages straight.
I'm sure that Indian outsourcing firms are the only companies that do this. IBM, Microsoft, and other U.S. high tech companies that cycle their overseas employees through the U.S. for training wouldn't do this too, would they? Nah. No need to ask the same questions of U.S. companies.
I've averaged over 80 MPG on trips of over a thousand miles in the late spring and early summer along the mid-Atlantic coast (round trips, so elevation wasn't a factor). That's the best I've ever done over long distances at relatively high speeds.
There are a lot of variables in play for the mileage you get on a specific trip. Speed, interruptions to the continuity of driving, temperature, humidity, road conditions, tire pressure, atmospheric pressure, and the relative levelness of the landscape all play a role. A post responding to another recent Slashdot article recounted average mileage of over 68 MPG. I average 61.8 MPG. I'd be close to 64 MPG if I never let my children (who average closer to 55 MPG) or significant other (who averages closer to 60 MPG) drive the car. I'd probably be even higher if my usual road trips didn't go over mountains, if I never drove in New York City (which I do frequently), and I didn't live in a colder climate (New York/New England) compared with other parts of country. My mileage is better in the summer (closer to a 66 MPG average), worse in the winter (closer to a 58 MPG average), worse in the city (closer to a 58 MPG average) and better on the open road (closer to a 67 MPG average)
Your mileage may vary, but hybrids can do extremely well on the highway. Indeed, that's where the Honda Insight excels.
Hey, cost is a measure in any competition. No argument with you there.
Your assumption that hybrids are "dead weight" at highway speeds is wrong. I get my best hybrid mileage on the highway (often at or over 70 MPG). It doesn't have to be that way. A hybrid designed for torque rather than economy might now do any better than a standard engine at highway speeds, but a hybrid designed for economy rather than torque (like my Honda Insight) does.
For the record, my hybrid has a "stick". I rather like it that way (and I get slightly better mileage because of it).