Because the grid, even in California, is overtaxed only during peak hours of use. That tends to be during the day and early evening when people are running air conditioning units heavily.
At night there is very little use of power, and so people charging up their Priuses at night is not going to add to the power crunch. I doubt that a Prius on charge uses nearly as much power as a home air conditioning unit, so night loads are never going to approach day loads.
It's very cheap to charge a car and so a plug-in hybrid electric would have enormous advantages. See my earlier post for details.
I did a bit of research and found out roughly what it would cost.
It turns out that electricity is extremely cheap per unit of energy. According to these folks, it takes about.4kw per mile of driving. That's about 400 watts, or 1-2 large rooms worth of light bulbs. I believe these figures to be correct because I've seen some similar ones elsewhere.
The national average for electricity is around $ 0.10 per kwh, so this is a phenomenally cheap way to power a car. If we wanted to go 100 miles in a purely electric car, it would take 40 kwh, or $0.40.
I rented a Dodge Neon recently and got only 20mpg from it. (It must have had an old or badly tuned engine). Going 100 miles in the Neon would have taken 5 gallons of gas, at about $ 2.50 a gallon. That's $12.50! Even if I could get the peak mileage of non-hybrid cars, or 40mpg, that's still over $6 to run the car the same number of miles electricity would power for $ 0.40. Even if electric rates doubled, electricity would still be phenomenally cheaper than gas.
So why haven't electric cars taken over the world? Because often you need to go further than the charge range in a day. When I went to Sacramento a year or so ago to visit the Capitol, I decided to try renting an electric car. All it had to do was go about 20 miles, the round trip to and from the Capitol. With extra excursions to find parking and the like, I barely got there and back successfully. On the other hand, I had completely free "fuel". The rental company didn't account for it in any way, because it was, truly, too cheap to meter.
So it seems clear that if you can squeeze a big enough battery into the Prius, you could have the best of both worlds: The economy of having a purely electric car, combined with the "get home" ability of the gas engine.
I should briefly address a specious argument against this idea which seems to have gotten wide currency. Once we Californians got through our tiresome power crisis, we thought that anything that plugged in was Bad. Well, true, during the day when we run hefty air conditioners and the like. But once we've cooled down, demand for power plummets and there is no problem at all with plugging in something like an electric car. In fact, the power companies dearly want this to ramp up demand and enable expensive power plants to run at a higher duty cycle.
Once you express this idea in terms of costs, it becomes, well, pretty obviously a brainy scheme. I wonder why Toyota wants to shut it down, since it seems like a wonderful idea for everyone involved, and really, an amazing PR coup for Toyota.
Hope this helps.
D
Re:Spam with trigger words in the pictures
on
Spam Kings
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you correspond with Windows/Outlook users who aren't geeks, I'd say the odds are almost 100% that you'll get HTML email from them.
In fact, I even send it myself. As a Mac user, it comes out in pretty fonts, and I actually like things that way.
What might work is to round file HTML email with images since most people aren't going to send that to strangers. Unless, of course, you've placed a personal ad asking for a picture.
Then you might wind up throwing away all your responses and wondering why nobody loves you!
Bad example. Panther actually improved performance significantly on a PowerBook G4/400 (the oldest Titanium model) compared to any previous version of MacOS X.
It's not like Windows, where the hardware upgrade is virtually compulsory for every new version of the OS.
Microsoft appears to have been the sole vector of catastrophically stupid applications, so effectively you are agreeing that it's a Windows problem, security model or no.
I'm afraid even Americans can't sue Microsoft. The license agreements clearly prohibit recovery of any more than the purchase price of the software, no matter how much damage it causes.
And unfortunately I don't think any software publisher would be in business today if it took responsibility for consequential damages of use of their products. Every complex software product worth its salt has bugs aplenty, and some of them are bound to cause hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of hurt.
So however wonderful it would be to become legally empowered to sue Microsoft and get our revenge against horrible software, I can't conceive of doing it because it would destroy the industry as a whole, including plenty of companies I like and respect. So in the end, reluctantly, I have to support the law as it stands.
It's similar to the problem general aviation manufacturers had when lawsuits shot them out of the sky a few decades back. Nobody could afford to buy small planes anymore, so a lot of really great companies either went out of business or went into manufacturing business jets and large props, where the profit margins were high and professional pilots usually employed.
I don't think we really want to restrict use of software to only people of airplane pilot calibre, however tempting that may seem at times...
The biggest virus vector in Windows has been Outlook. Since it's scriptable, you can tell it to do all sorts of bad things.
I believe a lot of those holes were closed, and now the big problem is browser helper objects in IE, which can be used to install programs without informing the user.
Nothing even close to that severity has been found in MacOS X. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but so far our security has been excellent, and I expect any vunerabilities of that scale will be closed extremely fast.
Give me a proof of concept virus that actually spreads via email, instant messenger or something similar, and I'll start worrying.
The problem is that the email client in MacOS X isn't scriptable, and so you can't use it to read the address book and automatically send out messages.
If malware comes for the Mac, it will probably come through something like Kazaa. The simple fix, of course, is not to install whatever program introduces the spyware.
Actually, it says exactly that, in the section on the atrium.
It is one beautiful set of offices, and must have cost a mint. Since the company's coining money, there is of course absolutely nothing wrong with that. I hear Pixar salaries aren't that great, but with this as what they get in compensation, I suspect there are few complaints.
Depends on your definition of expensive, of course.
For instance, Apple's Xserve RAID is often considered inexpensive because it's about a third the price of other RAID solutions for similar storage space. It's still over $10,000 for a loaded configuration, so most people wouldn't think of it as that cheap. But people who need it just might.
Right now, you can get from LAX to Frankfurt, Germany with one stop for $454 tourist class. There are some lucky souls willing to pay $11,825 for a first-class ticket, non-stop.
I'm going to hazard a guess that the fortunate fellow who paid $11,825 for first-class is going to consider a $30 charge "inexpensive" (although if I had to guess, I'd assume it's included in first class anyway).
In other words, the meaning of the word "cheap" is pretty elastic depending on who you are. I doubt that Boeing executives make many tourist-class flights:-).
I think the main complaint, which I think is reasonable, is that millions of lines of code have already been written in VB 6.0.
These millions of lines constitute already running applications, many of which have taken years of work. True, they will continue to run as long as people still have copies of VB 6.0 to use. But when Microsoft adds new technologies for, say, interacting between VB programs and Word, the old software won't be able to take advantage of this.
Products are indeed eventually end of lifed, but generally they are replaced by new, comparable products. I've owned Mercedes-Benz cars for all my life, and the same basic driving techniques I've used on the ancient 1972 280SEL 4.5 work now on my 1991 420SEL. If I walk into the showroom tomorrow and buy a 2005 S500, I can drive out without an extensive retraining course. I might want to learn the new features, but the core driving techniques don't change. All my old skills and habits will still work fine.
In many respects, VB is actually a very nicely designed environment. The concept was brilliant, despite what all you code snobs say today. I loved VB and then I grew to loathe it, because bugs and bloat made the product I wrote in it much less than it should have been. As a direct result of my VB experience, I grew to loathe Microsoft with a passion, and became an all-Macintosh kind of guy.
I remember in particular how awful the change from VB 3 to VB 4 was. Every SQL statement in my program - and there were hundreds - had to be found, tracked down and recoded. It was a real nightmare. I can only imagine what today's VB programmers are doing trying to imperfectly convert 6.0 to.net. Even though I no longer use VB, I shed a tear of pity for them and their present fate.
So I would not be so harsh on VB developers, because converting thousands of lines of code into an all-new environment with completely different designs and challenges is a tough, thankless job.
No wonder a lot of them switched out of the Microsoft domain. Clearly, you can't trust Microsoft. And doesn't that make most of us, well, actually agree with them for a change?
If my memory serves, the newsstand price of a paper goes about half into the pocket of the newsstand owner, and the other half barely pays for paper and printing costs.
It's advertising, then, that carries the cost of the paper. I think the real problem is that online advertising is a lot cheaper than print. Certainly print ads are a lot bigger than their online cousins, and are way better at conveying a message.
Since a lot of people are willing to buy the paper to (say) get grocery coupons and find out what the car dealerships are up to, it seems to me that adding those advertising sections to the online paper might really help revenues.
Okay, I laughed. But it's a bit off-base, at least for modern Macs.
Apple has been using the video card to do much of this rendering, which has resulted in major speed increases in more recent versions of MacOS X. This is called Quartz Extreme and it really does work great.
I talked to the nice folks at Perceptive Automation, makers of the Indigo home automation program for the Mac.
They are expecting products "over the next few years", and of course their own support is going to appear roughly in parallel with the technology's release.
I must admit a prejudice against X10, mainly due to the company with the same name. It produces bad products at admittedly super-low prices. I don't care so much about the pop-under ads (web sites have to eat, after all), but about the laughably bad products. I saw the Xcam demonstrated at Fry's a few years back and to be honest my DMV photograph looked better than that image. Use it to photograph a beautiful woman and she'll never forgive you. Use it as evidence in a criminal trial and the defendant walks.
However, SmartHome.com apparently has some very nice X10 products that are apparently designed with care and flair, and of course I would use those in my house instead of the dreaded X10 stuff. What I don't like, though, is that X10 signals seem to take forever to get through the electrical system to the devices they are controlling.
Still, tis better than nothing, and it's probably what I will have to use. But I shed a tear for technologies yet unborn that would make my huge house just a bit more sophisticated.
My business partner and I just bought a house that's almost 4,000 square feet.
Controlling the lights in a house this massive is a genuine pain. It would be very cool to be able to punch one button and know all the lights were off, or dimmed to a cheap to run intensity. That's why I'm looking into home automation alternatives.
This being said, could someone explain why Zigbee and the other newer alternatives are better than X10? What was wrong with X10, and what do the new alternatives do that's better?
Incidentally, in response to some of the hacking comments, there's no reason to put a refrigerator into a home automation system since it's never shut off. An oven would only be usefully automated if it was one of those newfangled oven/refrigerator combinations.
It would not be a brainy scheme to run one of these systems without having a secure, closed home network. That's just common sense.
That is a nice system. I had it at work at the same time I had the G5 at home, and for anything other than multimedia development the difference in speed is not significant.
But for multimedia development, it is.
Or is it? I upgraded from a G4/dual 450 system so the speed difference is huge, but I don't know how it would have been from the MDD system. I suspect, though, that my system's quite a bit faster with Motion and similar programs, which I'm using to make my living nowadays. So on the whole I'm pretty happy.
For one thing, some people are egotistical enough to want the latest and greatest thing. It may not be the smartest thing in the world, but it's very human. The longer you have the latest and greatest thing, the more ego satisfaction it brings you. So the optimal strategy is to buy the system when it first comes out and to hope that when you have the budget for it, something even greater will come out to replace it.
I have what was the lastest and greatest thing a year and a half ago: The PowerMac G5 2.0ghz dual processor system. It's been through a revision or two since then, but nothing earth-shattering.
You would be right about wanting to buy the system you need today, but if you already have a system that's working well, such as my 2.0ghz dual processor G5 I bought a year and a half ago, things are different. Do I want to get the 2.5ghz revision, or do I want to wait until it gets to 3.0ghz? This is particularly interesting since I do work that would enormously benefit from a quad-processor system.
So in this respect, rumors are valuable since they help us see ahead, even if through an Apple-created fog. Apple hates them because they want me to buy my 2.5ghz system today. At the same time, I had decided at the time the system was introduced that the small performance improvement probably wasn't worth it. So I'm stuck, but rumor sites give me something to look forward to.
It seems a pity that the best answer to my question is the lowest moderated, so perhaps some kind soul with moderator points could promote this on my behalf. (I'm the original poster so I can't use my own points).
I really don't like the idea of storing real information in whether something's in caps or lower case. I suppose it started with
#define TRUE 1
but that at least has the virtue of being obvious at a glance. The difference between
List
and
list
isn't nearly as clear for untrained eyes.
But I do see some logic behind this, and it's good for me to know the actual reason for this situation. I'm going to have to do some Java programming soon so it's good to recognize that in advance.
What I like about case insensitivity is that I'm not forcing my capitalization scheme on others, and vice versa.
Many years ago, I worked in environments WHERE EVERYTHING WAS CODED IN ALL CAPS, and I found that icky to read, so I used all lowercase which I find more legible. I'd just like to still have that choice.
Within a program, I'm going to be entirely consistent in my use of case, but I don't want to have to be consistent with other people when I find their conventions difficult to read.
I've always hated that, probably because I think the most important thing about something is not its data type but what it is.
For example, strName is emphasizing that it's a string, and not that it's a name. And of course I know a name is going to be a string and have no need to tell me that it is.
Maybe if this is really important to someone it should be NameStr (meaning the most important thing is that it's a name, and its variable type is string).
This is a little off-topic but it's something I'm very curious about.
Mr Grimes says:
I think that case insensitivity is juvenile
and so I can, perhaps, ask about capitalization conventions.
Why is it that people write (and case-sensitivity therefore forces me to write)
thisLittleThing();
instead of
ThisLittleThing();
or even
this_little_thing();
?
To me, this_little_thing() is much easier to read, and at least ThisLittleThing is tolerable. But I am forced to say thisLittleThing() instead. It seems just plain counterintuitive to use capital letters within the name of something, but to not capitalize the first letter of it.
I really wish most langages WERE case-insensitive, because then I could type ThisLittleThing() and nobody would care except me (who would find it much easier to read my own code). The only thing case sensitivity lets you do is make ThisLittleThing mean something else from THisLittleThing and I don't see how that benefits anyone.
I think the best case convention is in the Apple file system, where I could say THISLITTLETHING and it meant the same as ThisLittleThing, but if I saved a file as ThisLittleThing it would appear in that same case.
So could some kind soul explain the benefits of case-sensitivity, and why we should write thisLittleThing() instead of ThisLittleThing?
I know it's a little thing but since I value more or less correct English, writing like that bugs the heck out of me.
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Because the grid, even in California, is overtaxed only during peak hours of use. That tends to be during the day and early evening when people are running air conditioning units heavily.
At night there is very little use of power, and so people charging up their Priuses at night is not going to add to the power crunch. I doubt that a Prius on charge uses nearly as much power as a home air conditioning unit, so night loads are never going to approach day loads.
It's very cheap to charge a car and so a plug-in hybrid electric would have enormous advantages. See my earlier post for details.
D
I did a bit of research and found out roughly what it would cost.
.4kw per mile of driving. That's about 400 watts, or 1-2 large rooms worth of light bulbs. I believe these figures to be correct because I've seen some similar ones elsewhere.
It turns out that electricity is extremely cheap per unit of energy. According to these folks, it takes about
The national average for electricity is around $ 0.10 per kwh, so this is a phenomenally cheap way to power a car. If we wanted to go 100 miles in a purely electric car, it would take 40 kwh, or $0.40.
I rented a Dodge Neon recently and got only 20mpg from it. (It must have had an old or badly tuned engine). Going 100 miles in the Neon would have taken 5 gallons of gas, at about $ 2.50 a gallon. That's $12.50! Even if I could get the peak mileage of non-hybrid cars, or 40mpg, that's still over $6 to run the car the same number of miles electricity would power for $ 0.40. Even if electric rates doubled, electricity would still be phenomenally cheaper than gas.
So why haven't electric cars taken over the world? Because often you need to go further than the charge range in a day. When I went to Sacramento a year or so ago to visit the Capitol, I decided to try renting an electric car. All it had to do was go about 20 miles, the round trip to and from the Capitol. With extra excursions to find parking and the like, I barely got there and back successfully. On the other hand, I had completely free "fuel". The rental company didn't account for it in any way, because it was, truly, too cheap to meter.
So it seems clear that if you can squeeze a big enough battery into the Prius, you could have the best of both worlds: The economy of having a purely electric car, combined with the "get home" ability of the gas engine.
I should briefly address a specious argument against this idea which seems to have gotten wide currency. Once we Californians got through our tiresome power crisis, we thought that anything that plugged in was Bad. Well, true, during the day when we run hefty air conditioners and the like. But once we've cooled down, demand for power plummets and there is no problem at all with plugging in something like an electric car. In fact, the power companies dearly want this to ramp up demand and enable expensive power plants to run at a higher duty cycle.
Once you express this idea in terms of costs, it becomes, well, pretty obviously a brainy scheme. I wonder why Toyota wants to shut it down, since it seems like a wonderful idea for everyone involved, and really, an amazing PR coup for Toyota.
Hope this helps.
D
If you correspond with Windows/Outlook users who aren't geeks, I'd say the odds are almost 100% that you'll get HTML email from them.
In fact, I even send it myself. As a Mac user, it comes out in pretty fonts, and I actually like things that way.
What might work is to round file HTML email with images since most people aren't going to send that to strangers. Unless, of course, you've placed a personal ad asking for a picture.
Then you might wind up throwing away all your responses and wondering why nobody loves you!
D
Bad example. Panther actually improved performance significantly on a PowerBook G4/400 (the oldest Titanium model) compared to any previous version of MacOS X.
It's not like Windows, where the hardware upgrade is virtually compulsory for every new version of the OS.
D
Microsoft appears to have been the sole vector of catastrophically stupid applications, so effectively you are agreeing that it's a Windows problem, security model or no.
...
I'm afraid even Americans can't sue Microsoft. The license agreements clearly prohibit recovery of any more than the purchase price of the software, no matter how much damage it causes.
And unfortunately I don't think any software publisher would be in business today if it took responsibility for consequential damages of use of their products. Every complex software product worth its salt has bugs aplenty, and some of them are bound to cause hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of hurt.
So however wonderful it would be to become legally empowered to sue Microsoft and get our revenge against horrible software, I can't conceive of doing it because it would destroy the industry as a whole, including plenty of companies I like and respect. So in the end, reluctantly, I have to support the law as it stands.
It's similar to the problem general aviation manufacturers had when lawsuits shot them out of the sky a few decades back. Nobody could afford to buy small planes anymore, so a lot of really great companies either went out of business or went into manufacturing business jets and large props, where the profit margins were high and professional pilots usually employed.
I don't think we really want to restrict use of software to only people of airplane pilot calibre, however tempting that may seem at times
D
Would you rather raise kids or change the world?
Some people will say change the world. Others will say raise kids.
More power to both.
D
The biggest virus vector in Windows has been Outlook. Since it's scriptable, you can tell it to do all sorts of bad things.
I believe a lot of those holes were closed, and now the big problem is browser helper objects in IE, which can be used to install programs without informing the user.
Nothing even close to that severity has been found in MacOS X. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but so far our security has been excellent, and I expect any vunerabilities of that scale will be closed extremely fast.
D
Frankly, this annoys the heck out of me.
Give me a proof of concept virus that actually spreads via email, instant messenger or something similar, and I'll start worrying.
The problem is that the email client in MacOS X isn't scriptable, and so you can't use it to read the address book and automatically send out messages.
If malware comes for the Mac, it will probably come through something like Kazaa. The simple fix, of course, is not to install whatever program introduces the spyware.
D
Actually, it says exactly that, in the section on the atrium.
It is one beautiful set of offices, and must have cost a mint. Since the company's coining money, there is of course absolutely nothing wrong with that. I hear Pixar salaries aren't that great, but with this as what they get in compensation, I suspect there are few complaints.
D
Depends on your definition of expensive, of course.
:-).
For instance, Apple's Xserve RAID is often considered inexpensive because it's about a third the price of other RAID solutions for similar storage space. It's still over $10,000 for a loaded configuration, so most people wouldn't think of it as that cheap. But people who need it just might.
Right now, you can get from LAX to Frankfurt, Germany with one stop for $454 tourist class. There are some lucky souls willing to pay $11,825 for a first-class ticket, non-stop.
I'm going to hazard a guess that the fortunate fellow who paid $11,825 for first-class is going to consider a $30 charge "inexpensive" (although if I had to guess, I'd assume it's included in first class anyway).
In other words, the meaning of the word "cheap" is pretty elastic depending on who you are. I doubt that Boeing executives make many tourist-class flights
D
The developers start complaining first.
Then the businesses.
Call it an early-warning system.
D
I think the main complaint, which I think is reasonable, is that millions of lines of code have already been written in VB 6.0.
.net. Even though I no longer use VB, I shed a tear of pity for them and their present fate.
These millions of lines constitute already running applications, many of which have taken years of work. True, they will continue to run as long as people still have copies of VB 6.0 to use. But when Microsoft adds new technologies for, say, interacting between VB programs and Word, the old software won't be able to take advantage of this.
Products are indeed eventually end of lifed, but generally they are replaced by new, comparable products. I've owned Mercedes-Benz cars for all my life, and the same basic driving techniques I've used on the ancient 1972 280SEL 4.5 work now on my 1991 420SEL. If I walk into the showroom tomorrow and buy a 2005 S500, I can drive out without an extensive retraining course. I might want to learn the new features, but the core driving techniques don't change. All my old skills and habits will still work fine.
In many respects, VB is actually a very nicely designed environment. The concept was brilliant, despite what all you code snobs say today. I loved VB and then I grew to loathe it, because bugs and bloat made the product I wrote in it much less than it should have been. As a direct result of my VB experience, I grew to loathe Microsoft with a passion, and became an all-Macintosh kind of guy.
I remember in particular how awful the change from VB 3 to VB 4 was. Every SQL statement in my program - and there were hundreds - had to be found, tracked down and recoded. It was a real nightmare. I can only imagine what today's VB programmers are doing trying to imperfectly convert 6.0 to
So I would not be so harsh on VB developers, because converting thousands of lines of code into an all-new environment with completely different designs and challenges is a tough, thankless job.
No wonder a lot of them switched out of the Microsoft domain. Clearly, you can't trust Microsoft. And doesn't that make most of us, well, actually agree with them for a change?
D
If my memory serves, the newsstand price of a paper goes about half into the pocket of the newsstand owner, and the other half barely pays for paper and printing costs.
It's advertising, then, that carries the cost of the paper. I think the real problem is that online advertising is a lot cheaper than print. Certainly print ads are a lot bigger than their online cousins, and are way better at conveying a message.
Since a lot of people are willing to buy the paper to (say) get grocery coupons and find out what the car dealerships are up to, it seems to me that adding those advertising sections to the online paper might really help revenues.
D
Okay, I laughed. But it's a bit off-base, at least for modern Macs.
Apple has been using the video card to do much of this rendering, which has resulted in major speed increases in more recent versions of MacOS X. This is called Quartz Extreme and it really does work great.
D
I talked to the nice folks at Perceptive Automation, makers of the Indigo home automation program for the Mac.
They are expecting products "over the next few years", and of course their own support is going to appear roughly in parallel with the technology's release.
I must admit a prejudice against X10, mainly due to the company with the same name. It produces bad products at admittedly super-low prices. I don't care so much about the pop-under ads (web sites have to eat, after all), but about the laughably bad products. I saw the Xcam demonstrated at Fry's a few years back and to be honest my DMV photograph looked better than that image. Use it to photograph a beautiful woman and she'll never forgive you. Use it as evidence in a criminal trial and the defendant walks.
However, SmartHome.com apparently has some very nice X10 products that are apparently designed with care and flair, and of course I would use those in my house instead of the dreaded X10 stuff. What I don't like, though, is that X10 signals seem to take forever to get through the electrical system to the devices they are controlling.
Still, tis better than nothing, and it's probably what I will have to use. But I shed a tear for technologies yet unborn that would make my huge house just a bit more sophisticated.
D
That list doesn't seem to be particularly useful if I actually want to find home control equipment that conforms to that standard.
Looks to me like it might not yet exist, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
D
What kind of doodads does IE have that Safari doesn't?
Not a troll, just curious.
D
Interesting information, many thanks.
But it seems like it might not be ready for prime time. Their products page is "Coming Soon" and nothing more.
Who are the leading manufacturers of devices for this technology? I'd really like to check it out.
D
My business partner and I just bought a house that's almost 4,000 square feet.
Controlling the lights in a house this massive is a genuine pain. It would be very cool to be able to punch one button and know all the lights were off, or dimmed to a cheap to run intensity. That's why I'm looking into home automation alternatives.
This being said, could someone explain why Zigbee and the other newer alternatives are better than X10? What was wrong with X10, and what do the new alternatives do that's better?
Incidentally, in response to some of the hacking comments, there's no reason to put a refrigerator into a home automation system since it's never shut off. An oven would only be usefully automated if it was one of those newfangled oven/refrigerator combinations.
It would not be a brainy scheme to run one of these systems without having a secure, closed home network. That's just common sense.
D
That is a nice system. I had it at work at the same time I had the G5 at home, and for anything other than multimedia development the difference in speed is not significant.
But for multimedia development, it is.
Or is it? I upgraded from a G4/dual 450 system so the speed difference is huge, but I don't know how it would have been from the MDD system. I suspect, though, that my system's quite a bit faster with Motion and similar programs, which I'm using to make my living nowadays. So on the whole I'm pretty happy.
D
For one thing, some people are egotistical enough to want the latest and greatest thing. It may not be the smartest thing in the world, but it's very human. The longer you have the latest and greatest thing, the more ego satisfaction it brings you. So the optimal strategy is to buy the system when it first comes out and to hope that when you have the budget for it, something even greater will come out to replace it.
I have what was the lastest and greatest thing a year and a half ago: The PowerMac G5 2.0ghz dual processor system. It's been through a revision or two since then, but nothing earth-shattering.
You would be right about wanting to buy the system you need today, but if you already have a system that's working well, such as my 2.0ghz dual processor G5 I bought a year and a half ago, things are different. Do I want to get the 2.5ghz revision, or do I want to wait until it gets to 3.0ghz? This is particularly interesting since I do work that would enormously benefit from a quad-processor system.
So in this respect, rumors are valuable since they help us see ahead, even if through an Apple-created fog. Apple hates them because they want me to buy my 2.5ghz system today. At the same time, I had decided at the time the system was introduced that the small performance improvement probably wasn't worth it. So I'm stuck, but rumor sites give me something to look forward to.
Hope that helps.
D
It seems a pity that the best answer to my question is the lowest moderated, so perhaps some kind soul with moderator points could promote this on my behalf. (I'm the original poster so I can't use my own points).
I really don't like the idea of storing real information in whether something's in caps or lower case. I suppose it started with
#define TRUE 1
but that at least has the virtue of being obvious at a glance. The difference between
List
and
list
isn't nearly as clear for untrained eyes.
But I do see some logic behind this, and it's good for me to know the actual reason for this situation. I'm going to have to do some Java programming soon so it's good to recognize that in advance.
D
What I like about case insensitivity is that I'm not forcing my capitalization scheme on others, and vice versa.
Many years ago, I worked in environments WHERE EVERYTHING WAS CODED IN ALL CAPS, and I found that icky to read, so I used all lowercase which I find more legible. I'd just like to still have that choice.
Within a program, I'm going to be entirely consistent in my use of case, but I don't want to have to be consistent with other people when I find their conventions difficult to read.
D
I've always hated that, probably because I think the most important thing about something is not its data type but what it is.
For example, strName is emphasizing that it's a string, and not that it's a name. And of course I know a name is going to be a string and have no need to tell me that it is.
Maybe if this is really important to someone it should be NameStr (meaning the most important thing is that it's a name, and its variable type is string).
D
This is a little off-topic but it's something I'm very curious about.
Mr Grimes says:
I think that case insensitivity is juvenile
and so I can, perhaps, ask about capitalization conventions.
Why is it that people write (and case-sensitivity therefore forces me to write)
thisLittleThing();
instead of
ThisLittleThing();
or even
this_little_thing();
?
To me, this_little_thing() is much easier to read, and at least ThisLittleThing is tolerable. But I am forced to say thisLittleThing() instead. It seems just plain counterintuitive to use capital letters within the name of something, but to not capitalize the first letter of it.
I really wish most langages WERE case-insensitive, because then I could type ThisLittleThing() and nobody would care except me (who would find it much easier to read my own code). The only thing case sensitivity lets you do is make ThisLittleThing mean something else from THisLittleThing and I don't see how that benefits anyone.
I think the best case convention is in the Apple file system, where I could say THISLITTLETHING and it meant the same as ThisLittleThing, but if I saved a file as ThisLittleThing it would appear in that same case.
So could some kind soul explain the benefits of case-sensitivity, and why we should write thisLittleThing() instead of ThisLittleThing?
I know it's a little thing but since I value more or less correct English, writing like that bugs the heck out of me.
Many thanks.
D