I have one, and I broke it by stepping on it. (It was in my pants, which were on the floor, thus making it an easy mistake to make - don't do this!)
I am trying to find a replacement screen, but it's pretty expensive compared to the cost of the device, so I will probably just wait for the colour model since I'm not a heavy cellphone user.
I had reception problems which made it almost useless for a while, but when I went back to it a month or so ago it seemed to be working quite a bit better.
One problem is that they tiny type and low-contrast screen is hard to read. I think the upcoming colour version will be enormously better, which is why I'm willing to go without a device until it comes out.
Did SSH for it ever get introduced? I know it was available internally.
Same model as I have; I simply didn't include tax in the price:-)
I am a bit sad I missed getting the 17" model. I have a feeling I would have loved it even more.
You can edit text a lot more efficiently on a machine with a nice roomy screen, at least if you're referring to other sources of information while doing it. So at least some of the machine's power isn't wasted.
But it is a bit strange that I'm typing this on the most powerful machine in my entire company save for one of the servers. And yet I'm using it to type stuff on. That's today's world of computing for you.
Well, we really don't know what they want. Democracy enables us to ask them.
Democracy is a way to enable them to select what they want through their evaluation of competing proposals. It is theoretically compatible with anything from libertarian capitalism to an Islamist freakshow or the worst forms of ossified socialism.
I suspect they will choose capitalism, since Islamism has been tried unsuccessfully in both Afghanistan and Iran, both times with very poor results, and ossified socialism is remarkably similar to what the Baath party advocates. But that's not saying that we will force them to make that decision; they will make up their own minds.
And that's the beauty of Democracy. We aren't imposing anything on them; we are giving them the tools to select what pleases them.
My company buys Windows machines for about $550 including an XP Pro license. You'd still need a FireWire card (say $100) and a monitor ($130). So we have about a $780 system that can, theoretically, edit video using Windows Movie Maker bundled with XP.
The Mac experience is so good, though, that I think it's worth the extra $220 (for an eMac). I'd take the full-on iMac myself because I like the display and adjustable arm so much.
What I actually use is a $3,000 PowerBook G4 with 1GB RAM. But that's because I like to freak restaurant owners out by editing video during my lunch break. Sometimes I even haul in my XL1 and do video capture right on the table.
The problem is not the speed of the query, but that it blocked all writes on the table while it was running. My users didn't mind the slow speed that much, but they definitely did mind that writes were blocked.
Does Oracle block writes as well during long queries, or is this genuinely a mySQL-only problem?
A combination of slow queries and frequent writes will cause mySQL to die. Totally. It can cause data to take ten minutes to save.
The solution is to rewrite your applications to use only fast queries, but if you really need to do slow queries it's a genuinely serious problem. I had it for a long time, and it drove people nuts. I eventually discovered how to optimize certain queries and the problem went away, but it is real.
Slashdot doesn't have this problem because the queries it uses are rarely complex. You can do "select x,y,x from messages where thread_id = 10445" all day without it breaking a sweat. But try to do something it can't optimize with indexes and it will die.
My problem was using:
select * from cal where left(date, 10) = '2003-01-01'
instead of
select * from cal where date >= '2003-01-01' and date date_sub('2003-01-01', interval 1 day)
The first can't use indexes and the second can.
During these SELECTs, mySQL locks the tables involved, preventing writes from happening. So one slow query on crucial databases can hang the system.
In the end, I found the problem was pretty easy to work around, but it took forever for me to figure out what it was. Watch out for those date fields!
I believe there's some sort of software RAID solution supported by MacOS X, and you can get four hard drives in the G4 chassis. I don't have details, but it might be worth thinking about.
I'd be surprised if there aren't similar hardware RAID solutions, too. You just have to dig a bit harder for them.
Depends on what you do. I work almost exclusively on the web and almost never print anything out, and most of the stuff I process are my own photographs, not complex layered art.
So speed really doesn't matter for most things I do. If I did lots of After Effects work, I'd probably buy a couple of really fast PCs to use as rendering engines and therefore keep my Mac-based work environment.
Have you seen any tests of the new 1.43ghz PowerMacs? Seems to me that's not too far remote from the fastest PCs.
Things are always changing. I hear rumors that a 2.3ghz PowerPC is coming out. I will certainly look forward to it. Might even have to buy a new desktop.
If speed matters more than software quality, then you're right. I should switch to the PC straight away.
But around the time the 500mhz processor came to be, a funny thing happened. Most people don't need more speed than that. Sure, it's nicer to have a faster computer, but other things are more important past roughly that point.
I do video editing with Final Cut Pro on my 1ghz PowerBook G4, and speed is more than ample for my needs. It's all cuts-only anyway, so there's no rendering time involved and everything happens right away. Switching to the PC would mean using lousy PC software (like Adobe Premiere) or tackling the exceptionlly high learning curve of an Avid.
Macs are beautifully designed and engineered, from the cases to the software. PCs are, well, PCs. Am I willing to deal with a 50% speed decline to have a more pleasing computer experience, with less confusing administration and fewer crashes?
When put that way, well, of course I am.
Would I like to have a faster computer? Sure. But it wouldn't make such a huge difference that I'm willing to use lousy Windows software in exchange.
When I see the CD that I want in Borders, which I've visited because I'm really looking for books, I think "$18.99 for a CD? Who they kidding?", put it down and walk out of the store.
It's this kind of thing Apple's system will prevent. And it's pretty obvious that however much people here complain, those of us with Apple computers are going to buy. You heard it here first: This service will be a home run.
The reason is that it costs a lot to package and market a product. In the case of matches, it costs a very tiny fraction of a cent to make one, but to package, market and put it on store shelves costs enormously more. So it's not economic to sell something as cheap as a single match, or even ten matches.
Last time I looked, CD singles cost a substantial fraction of what albums cost, and I think that's why albums are popular. If we can reduce the transaction cost, as Apple has, then we can sell individual songs.
I like buying albums, though, because there are at least a few songs in a typical album that I will enjoy that I didn't hear before buying it. For instance, I bought Vanessa Daou's 'Make you Love' CD based on a couple of tracks, and my favourite song happens to be one I didn't hear before I bought the CD. I wonder how you could work around that problem. If people only hear one song on the radio, that's the song they'll buy.
I wonder if this might be a way to eliminate the truly stultifying "we only play three songs" commercial radio experience? It maybe become necessary, for marketing purposes, to play a wider variety!
Some gaming magazine reviewed the 800mhz TiBook (single-processor laptop) very favourably.
The 1ghz TiBook is price-competitive with comparable machines at $2,800-odd, includes a DVD writer which is very cool, and looks and feels very fast indeed. If you need a laptop, that might be the best way to ease your way into the Mac world, since they are not as proportionately expensive as Apple's desktops.
That being said, you may want to wait a few months for the aluminum version of the 15" laptop, said to be coming out Any Month Now. I tried the 12" aluminum notebook, and I thought the keyboard was quite a bit nicer than that on the 15" TiBook I own.
Another thing to bear in mind is that the 20" monitor is a 20" LCD not a CRT; it's pretty darn big. If you compare it to other 20" LCDs, it's definitely within a reasonable premium of what everyone else is charging. Not to mention the giant 23" LCD at $1,999, which is just a shade over half what its competitors are charging.
I'll probably be flamed for visiting notorious conservative site http://www.freerepublic.com/ , but the articles are actually quite balanced, and in these times of war you can read fascinating things from the horse's mouth in the Middle East. It's only the comments that aren't balanced (and some of them make me question the nature of human evolution). Still, if you want all the world's news in one place, I have yet to find a better way to get it.
I tend to skip visiting Free Republic during days of light political activity, not that there's any such thing nowadays. But for War on Terrorism news it's perfect.
http://www.economist.com/ brings a European perspective to the news, although I often get my fix through the print edition instead of the web. Although Europe has not been good at supporting us against Iraq (although The Economist has been steadfast), it does have better journalism overall than the US.
I've been checking out la.indymedia.org because I want to film a big left protest. I notice that the left and right nowadays are arguing completely at cross-purposes; if you visit a left web site, it doesn't even address the points given on the right, and vice versa. I find this unfortunate; how can you make up your mind on the issues when the two sides won't even debate?
Slashdot, of course.
I join the mainstream of Slashdot in reading http://www.theregister.co.uk - it has just the right sarcastic bite to it to make it fun to read the news.
http://www.ubersoft.net/ , while uneven, often reaches the level of true greatness, as when they had Binky, the paperclip character from Office, on the witness stand testifying for "Ubersoft".
http://www.macsurfer.com/ keeps me updated on the Macintosh world. http://www.appleturns.com/ is probably the world's best Mac news site, if they would only start doing it again. Having a kid seems to have really damaged their production schedule:-(.
http://www.wired.com still has high-quality news articles on an interesting range of subjects.
I don't have any particular routine, but on a typical day I'll visit all those sites. Slashdot and Free Republic tend to send me to some pretty strange sites on occasion.
The Budget Rent-A-Car guy actually tried to talk me out of renting the electric car. Only when I said "Oh, I'm just going to the Capitol and back" did he relent and let me rent the thing.
It was the Honda that looks vaguely like a mini-SUV.
Likes: It was quiet, whine of the electric motor a nice change over internal combustion growls. Acceleration wasn't bad.
Dislikes: Handling lousy, not what I would have expected in a Honda. Battery life hideously bad, no other way to describe it. (In the 30-odd miles I went, I used up about 60% of the battery. Of course I am a notorious speed demon but my 14mpg Mercedes S-Class sedan can go about 300 miles between fillups).
In the end, I have to agree with you. Even if your idea was truly workable, battery life is still way too short.
Your idea sounds good if batteries were normally placed in accessible locations, but my impression is that they squeeze them into dark corners of the vehicle where it would be just about impossible to retrieve them. And they have to do that because otherwise the passenger cabin or cargo space would be filled with batteries.
Fuel cell, natural gas and electric cars may have various problems, but I've never heard that we'd need to redesign cities to accomodate them.
The first two would need different types of gas pumps, but you could still use the same basic filling station design.
Electric cars, at least as designed today, require charging stations everywhere. Santa Monica and some other "progressive" cities have tons of them, but I had a hard time finding one near the Capitol in Sacramento when I tried renting an EV there. Again, though, this doesn't require an urban redesign, just a few parking spaces with chargers.
I saw someone out riding a Segway in my neighborhood in Woodland Hills, California. It seemed to work just fine on the sidewalk.
So it doesn't seem to me like any of these innovations requires urban redesign. The Segway needs to be a lot cheaper for people to be interested, though, since it's nowhere near the total transportation solution a car is. It won't work comfortably in bad weather, and I go on a lot of trips more than 10 miles.
I've been using C-based CGIs for years - once I started doing it and got used to coding everything in C, and developing my own libraries and what-not, it was very difficult to change.
Seems to me the overhead's pretty low compared to the competition. People argue for things like JSP as more efficient and cleaner than CGI, but I've never seen a JSP web site that's not dog slow.
When I started reading that opening a database connection had enormous overhead, I got worried that I was really doing something dumb. So I wrote a program to open and close a mySQL database 1000 times and it took a total of 2 seconds. That's 0.002 seconds per open/close combination.
Then I stopped worrying and went back to work. I'd rather be right in practice and wrong in theory than vice versa.
If you press the green button to maximize (the yellow button doesn't maximize!), it will maximize based on the contents of the window. So if you maximize a page with a lot of table-based page layout, it will size itself based on the widest table.
The problem with this is that if the page is still loading, and there's even wider stuff below, it will not change to reflect it. Just maximize again to fix this.
In my view, this is actually a good thing because you retain the ability to see multiple windows on the screen at once. So maximizing sets the window size to the smallest size that lets you see all the content.
MacOS X performs extremely well for me, and I'm using a computer only a bit faster than the one I assume you bought. I have a PowerBook G4/1ghz with SuperDrive, and it's blazingly fast on everything but resizing web browser windows. I solve that problem by maximizing the windows instead of resizing. Works great for me.
Sadly, no computing environment is perfect. I think MacOS X is a lot better than the competition (Linux, Windows, etc). However I agree that there's plenty of room for improvement, on all sides.
He may have an entry-level computer with 128mb RAM or less.
My company bought Compaq 1.8ghz Celeron machines with 128mb RAM, which is double the amount of RAM we had with Windows 2000, and four times the amount of RAM we had with Windows 95 or 98, and it's definitely slow if you run more than one or two applications at a time, and even when you're not running much, it will slow down at odd spots such as performing routine tasks in the Control Panel. (I know because I have to do many of them:-( ).
I know the Celeron isn't the sharpest chip on the block, but I'd think it should be able to beat a system that has a quarter the clock speed... or should it?
Incidentally, I use a PowerBook G4/1ghz Superdrive system both at home and at work, and it's blazingly fast on everthing but window resizing. The problem, of course, is that most people resize windows a lot. When I started maximizing them instead of resizing, my troubles with MacOS X faded away fast.
Today, MacOS X is by far my favourite operating system.
Tabs are a way of organizing multiple browser windows. Instead of having them in separate windows, there is a set of tabs on top of your screen (sort of like the top of the Apple home page).
You can open a web page in a new tab. You can then switch to another tab and read that page while the one in the tab is loading. When it's done you can switch over to it and read it.
You can flip between pages by flipping between the tabs.
For people with small monitors (say 1024x768 resolution and down), tabs are really useful because repositioning windows on a small screen is a hassle. For people using larger screens, including myself, I normally find it much more convenient to simply view multiple web pages in multiple windows, which can be easily resized and dragged around the screen so I can see more of them at once.
I think that explains why many people are so fanatical about tabs, while they leave me cold.
Hope that helps.
D
Re:Why not just move to a foreign country?
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
One aspect of standard of living is attractiveness to the opposite sex. I am a babe magnet in a third world country, but not here. Certainly you can say that they only want your money, and of course this is true. But that's a lot better than no feminine company at all, which seems to be my lot here in the US.
That can make up for a lot of potholed streets, that's for sure. And, having checked out one third world country, I can certainly concede the horrible deterioration that goes on around there.
Of course as third world countries get closer to first-world incomes, all of that is going to change, and probably a lot faster than many would like.
The point of my post, of course, is that maybe things can go both ways, and in the end perhaps the net result will be better lives for more people -- at least those inclined to be flexible in attitude and spirit.
If the average yearly income in India is $500 and you can make $10,000 a year as a subcontractor, it seems to me that our standard of living would increase temendously if we moved to India and accepted the wages being paid to Indian contractors.
My standard of living at $100,000 a year isn't that great. Is it worth it to live here? Everyone might be better off if we emigrated to a lower cost country.
I hear tell that for the typical male geek, there is a much higher supply of cute, uninhibited women in many of these third world countries, so perhaps there is a silver lining behind the cloud.
Maybe many of us would be a lot better off if we moved... just some food for thought.
Best answer to that is that the new machines do more of the effects in real time, which is a lot faster than even the fast rendering of the G4/dual 450.
Also, if you want to play with After Effects you really need a fast machine. I have a dual 450 too, but my new PowerBook G4 1ghz smokes it in After Effects - not even a contest.
The surprising lifespan of the dual 450 is thanks to the dual processors - I would certainly not buy a single processor desktop again.
Trust me, if you bought a faster machine, you'd love it even more:-).
Slashdot Mirror
I have one, and I broke it by stepping on it. (It was in my pants, which were on the floor, thus making it an easy mistake to make - don't do this!)
I am trying to find a replacement screen, but it's pretty expensive compared to the cost of the device, so I will probably just wait for the colour model since I'm not a heavy cellphone user.
I had reception problems which made it almost useless for a while, but when I went back to it a month or so ago it seemed to be working quite a bit better.
One problem is that they tiny type and low-contrast screen is hard to read. I think the upcoming colour version will be enormously better, which is why I'm willing to go without a device until it comes out.
Did SSH for it ever get introduced? I know it was available internally.
D
Don't go to an Apple store about now if you don't want to spend $3,300 on a 17" model. It's stunning.
Get the Cinema HD display. Amazing resolution.
I know you can control transparency of terminal windows - you might want to look it up.
D
Same model as I have; I simply didn't include tax in the price :-)
I am a bit sad I missed getting the 17" model. I have a feeling I would have loved it even more.
You can edit text a lot more efficiently on a machine with a nice roomy screen, at least if you're referring to other sources of information while doing it. So at least some of the machine's power isn't wasted.
But it is a bit strange that I'm typing this on the most powerful machine in my entire company save for one of the servers. And yet I'm using it to type stuff on. That's today's world of computing for you.
D
Well, we really don't know what they want. Democracy enables us to ask them.
Democracy is a way to enable them to select what they want through their evaluation of competing proposals. It is theoretically compatible with anything from libertarian capitalism to an Islamist freakshow or the worst forms of ossified socialism.
I suspect they will choose capitalism, since Islamism has been tried unsuccessfully in both Afghanistan and Iran, both times with very poor results, and ossified socialism is remarkably similar to what the Baath party advocates. But that's not saying that we will force them to make that decision; they will make up their own minds.
And that's the beauty of Democracy. We aren't imposing anything on them; we are giving them the tools to select what pleases them.
D
My company buys Windows machines for about $550 including an XP Pro license. You'd still need a FireWire card (say $100) and a monitor ($130). So we have about a $780 system that can, theoretically, edit video using Windows Movie Maker bundled with XP.
The Mac experience is so good, though, that I think it's worth the extra $220 (for an eMac). I'd take the full-on iMac myself because I like the display and adjustable arm so much.
What I actually use is a $3,000 PowerBook G4 with 1GB RAM. But that's because I like to freak restaurant owners out by editing video during my lunch break. Sometimes I even haul in my XL1 and do video capture right on the table.
You can't get much cooler than that.
D
The problem is not the speed of the query, but that it blocked all writes on the table while it was running. My users didn't mind the slow speed that much, but they definitely did mind that writes were blocked.
Does Oracle block writes as well during long queries, or is this genuinely a mySQL-only problem?
D
A combination of slow queries and frequent writes will cause mySQL to die. Totally. It can cause data to take ten minutes to save.
The solution is to rewrite your applications to use only fast queries, but if you really need to do slow queries it's a genuinely serious problem. I had it for a long time, and it drove people nuts. I eventually discovered how to optimize certain queries and the problem went away, but it is real.
Slashdot doesn't have this problem because the queries it uses are rarely complex. You can do "select x,y,x from messages where thread_id = 10445" all day without it breaking a sweat. But try to do something it can't optimize with indexes and it will die.
My problem was using:
select * from cal where left(date, 10) = '2003-01-01'
instead of
select * from cal where date >= '2003-01-01' and date date_sub('2003-01-01', interval 1 day)
The first can't use indexes and the second can.
During these SELECTs, mySQL locks the tables involved, preventing writes from happening. So one slow query on crucial databases can hang the system.
In the end, I found the problem was pretty easy to work around, but it took forever for me to figure out what it was. Watch out for those date fields!
D
I believe there's some sort of software RAID solution supported by MacOS X, and you can get four hard drives in the G4 chassis. I don't have details, but it might be worth thinking about.
I'd be surprised if there aren't similar hardware RAID solutions, too. You just have to dig a bit harder for them.
D
Depends on what you do. I work almost exclusively on the web and almost never print anything out, and most of the stuff I process are my own photographs, not complex layered art.
So speed really doesn't matter for most things I do. If I did lots of After Effects work, I'd probably buy a couple of really fast PCs to use as rendering engines and therefore keep my Mac-based work environment.
Have you seen any tests of the new 1.43ghz PowerMacs? Seems to me that's not too far remote from the fastest PCs.
Things are always changing. I hear rumors that a 2.3ghz PowerPC is coming out. I will certainly look forward to it. Might even have to buy a new desktop.
D
If speed matters more than software quality, then you're right. I should switch to the PC straight away.
But around the time the 500mhz processor came to be, a funny thing happened. Most people don't need more speed than that. Sure, it's nicer to have a faster computer, but other things are more important past roughly that point.
I do video editing with Final Cut Pro on my 1ghz PowerBook G4, and speed is more than ample for my needs. It's all cuts-only anyway, so there's no rendering time involved and everything happens right away. Switching to the PC would mean using lousy PC software (like Adobe Premiere) or tackling the exceptionlly high learning curve of an Avid.
Macs are beautifully designed and engineered, from the cases to the software. PCs are, well, PCs. Am I willing to deal with a 50% speed decline to have a more pleasing computer experience, with less confusing administration and fewer crashes?
When put that way, well, of course I am.
Would I like to have a faster computer? Sure. But it wouldn't make such a huge difference that I'm willing to use lousy Windows software in exchange.
D
If the barely legal teens were real and actually offered real sex, I suspect many of us would just love to get the offer in person :-).
D
But what percentage of the audience has discriminating enough ears to care?
A lot of people seem perfectly happy with transistor radio quality sound, at least based on what I hear in the office.
D
When I see the CD that I want in Borders, which I've visited because I'm really looking for books, I think "$18.99 for a CD? Who they kidding?", put it down and walk out of the store.
It's this kind of thing Apple's system will prevent. And it's pretty obvious that however much people here complain, those of us with Apple computers are going to buy. You heard it here first: This service will be a home run.
D
The reason is that it costs a lot to package and market a product. In the case of matches, it costs a very tiny fraction of a cent to make one, but to package, market and put it on store shelves costs enormously more. So it's not economic to sell something as cheap as a single match, or even ten matches.
Last time I looked, CD singles cost a substantial fraction of what albums cost, and I think that's why albums are popular. If we can reduce the transaction cost, as Apple has, then we can sell individual songs.
I like buying albums, though, because there are at least a few songs in a typical album that I will enjoy that I didn't hear before buying it. For instance, I bought Vanessa Daou's 'Make you Love' CD based on a couple of tracks, and my favourite song happens to be one I didn't hear before I bought the CD. I wonder how you could work around that problem. If people only hear one song on the radio, that's the song they'll buy.
I wonder if this might be a way to eliminate the truly stultifying "we only play three songs" commercial radio experience? It maybe become necessary, for marketing purposes, to play a wider variety!
D
Some gaming magazine reviewed the 800mhz TiBook (single-processor laptop) very favourably.
The 1ghz TiBook is price-competitive with comparable machines at $2,800-odd, includes a DVD writer which is very cool, and looks and feels very fast indeed. If you need a laptop, that might be the best way to ease your way into the Mac world, since they are not as proportionately expensive as Apple's desktops.
That being said, you may want to wait a few months for the aluminum version of the 15" laptop, said to be coming out Any Month Now. I tried the 12" aluminum notebook, and I thought the keyboard was quite a bit nicer than that on the 15" TiBook I own.
Another thing to bear in mind is that the 20" monitor is a 20" LCD not a CRT; it's pretty darn big. If you compare it to other 20" LCDs, it's definitely within a reasonable premium of what everyone else is charging. Not to mention the giant 23" LCD at $1,999, which is just a shade over half what its competitors are charging.
D
I'll probably be flamed for visiting notorious conservative site http://www.freerepublic.com/ , but the articles are actually quite balanced, and in these times of war you can read fascinating things from the horse's mouth in the Middle East. It's only the comments that aren't balanced (and some of them make me question the nature of human evolution). Still, if you want all the world's news in one place, I have yet to find a better way to get it.
:-(.
I tend to skip visiting Free Republic during days of light political activity, not that there's any such thing nowadays. But for War on Terrorism news it's perfect.
http://www.economist.com/ brings a European perspective to the news, although I often get my fix through the print edition instead of the web. Although Europe has not been good at supporting us against Iraq (although The Economist has been steadfast), it does have better journalism overall than the US.
I've been checking out la.indymedia.org because I want to film a big left protest. I notice that the left and right nowadays are arguing completely at cross-purposes; if you visit a left web site, it doesn't even address the points given on the right, and vice versa. I find this unfortunate; how can you make up your mind on the issues when the two sides won't even debate?
Slashdot, of course.
I join the mainstream of Slashdot in reading http://www.theregister.co.uk - it has just the right sarcastic bite to it to make it fun to read the news.
http://www.ubersoft.net/ , while uneven, often reaches the level of true greatness, as when they had Binky, the paperclip character from Office, on the witness stand testifying for "Ubersoft".
http://www.macsurfer.com/ keeps me updated on the Macintosh world. http://www.appleturns.com/ is probably the world's best Mac news site, if they would only start doing it again. Having a kid seems to have really damaged their production schedule
http://www.wired.com still has high-quality news articles on an interesting range of subjects.
I don't have any particular routine, but on a typical day I'll visit all those sites. Slashdot and Free Republic tend to send me to some pretty strange sites on occasion.
The Budget Rent-A-Car guy actually tried to talk me out of renting the electric car. Only when I said "Oh, I'm just going to the Capitol and back" did he relent and let me rent the thing.
It was the Honda that looks vaguely like a mini-SUV.
Likes: It was quiet, whine of the electric motor a nice change over internal combustion growls. Acceleration wasn't bad.
Dislikes: Handling lousy, not what I would have expected in a Honda. Battery life hideously bad, no other way to describe it. (In the 30-odd miles I went, I used up about 60% of the battery. Of course I am a notorious speed demon but my 14mpg Mercedes S-Class sedan can go about 300 miles between fillups).
In the end, I have to agree with you. Even if your idea was truly workable, battery life is still way too short.
Your idea sounds good if batteries were normally placed in accessible locations, but my impression is that they squeeze them into dark corners of the vehicle where it would be just about impossible to retrieve them. And they have to do that because otherwise the passenger cabin or cargo space would be filled with batteries.
D
Fuel cell, natural gas and electric cars may have various problems, but I've never heard that we'd need to redesign cities to accomodate them.
The first two would need different types of gas pumps, but you could still use the same basic filling station design.
Electric cars, at least as designed today, require charging stations everywhere. Santa Monica and some other "progressive" cities have tons of them, but I had a hard time finding one near the Capitol in Sacramento when I tried renting an EV there. Again, though, this doesn't require an urban redesign, just a few parking spaces with chargers.
I saw someone out riding a Segway in my neighborhood in Woodland Hills, California. It seemed to work just fine on the sidewalk.
So it doesn't seem to me like any of these innovations requires urban redesign. The Segway needs to be a lot cheaper for people to be interested, though, since it's nowhere near the total transportation solution a car is. It won't work comfortably in bad weather, and I go on a lot of trips more than 10 miles.
D
I've been using C-based CGIs for years - once I started doing it and got used to coding everything in C, and developing my own libraries and what-not, it was very difficult to change.
Seems to me the overhead's pretty low compared to the competition. People argue for things like JSP as more efficient and cleaner than CGI, but I've never seen a JSP web site that's not dog slow.
When I started reading that opening a database connection had enormous overhead, I got worried that I was really doing something dumb. So I wrote a program to open and close a mySQL database 1000 times and it took a total of 2 seconds. That's 0.002 seconds per open/close combination.
Then I stopped worrying and went back to work. I'd rather be right in practice and wrong in theory than vice versa.
D
If you press the green button to maximize (the yellow button doesn't maximize!), it will maximize based on the contents of the window. So if you maximize a page with a lot of table-based page layout, it will size itself based on the widest table.
The problem with this is that if the page is still loading, and there's even wider stuff below, it will not change to reflect it. Just maximize again to fix this.
In my view, this is actually a good thing because you retain the ability to see multiple windows on the screen at once. So maximizing sets the window size to the smallest size that lets you see all the content.
MacOS X performs extremely well for me, and I'm using a computer only a bit faster than the one I assume you bought. I have a PowerBook G4/1ghz with SuperDrive, and it's blazingly fast on everything but resizing web browser windows. I solve that problem by maximizing the windows instead of resizing. Works great for me.
Sadly, no computing environment is perfect. I think MacOS X is a lot better than the competition (Linux, Windows, etc). However I agree that there's plenty of room for improvement, on all sides.
D
He may have an entry-level computer with 128mb RAM or less.
:-( ).
... or should it?
My company bought Compaq 1.8ghz Celeron machines with 128mb RAM, which is double the amount of RAM we had with Windows 2000, and four times the amount of RAM we had with Windows 95 or 98, and it's definitely slow if you run more than one or two applications at a time, and even when you're not running much, it will slow down at odd spots such as performing routine tasks in the Control Panel. (I know because I have to do many of them
I know the Celeron isn't the sharpest chip on the block, but I'd think it should be able to beat a system that has a quarter the clock speed
Incidentally, I use a PowerBook G4/1ghz Superdrive system both at home and at work, and it's blazingly fast on everthing but window resizing. The problem, of course, is that most people resize windows a lot. When I started maximizing them instead of resizing, my troubles with MacOS X faded away fast.
Today, MacOS X is by far my favourite operating system.
D
Tabs are a way of organizing multiple browser windows. Instead of having them in separate windows, there is a set of tabs on top of your screen (sort of like the top of the Apple home page).
You can open a web page in a new tab. You can then switch to another tab and read that page while the one in the tab is loading. When it's done you can switch over to it and read it.
You can flip between pages by flipping between the tabs.
For people with small monitors (say 1024x768 resolution and down), tabs are really useful because repositioning windows on a small screen is a hassle. For people using larger screens, including myself, I normally find it much more convenient to simply view multiple web pages in multiple windows, which can be easily resized and dragged around the screen so I can see more of them at once.
I think that explains why many people are so fanatical about tabs, while they leave me cold.
Hope that helps.
D
One aspect of standard of living is attractiveness to the opposite sex. I am a babe magnet in a third world country, but not here. Certainly you can say that they only want your money, and of course this is true. But that's a lot better than no feminine company at all, which seems to be my lot here in the US.
That can make up for a lot of potholed streets, that's for sure. And, having checked out one third world country, I can certainly concede the horrible deterioration that goes on around there.
Of course as third world countries get closer to first-world incomes, all of that is going to change, and probably a lot faster than many would like.
The point of my post, of course, is that maybe things can go both ways, and in the end perhaps the net result will be better lives for more people -- at least those inclined to be flexible in attitude and spirit.
D
If the average yearly income in India is $500 and you can make $10,000 a year as a subcontractor, it seems to me that our standard of living would increase temendously if we moved to India and accepted the wages being paid to Indian contractors.
... just some food for thought.
My standard of living at $100,000 a year isn't that great. Is it worth it to live here? Everyone might be better off if we emigrated to a lower cost country.
I hear tell that for the typical male geek, there is a much higher supply of cute, uninhibited women in many of these third world countries, so perhaps there is a silver lining behind the cloud.
Maybe many of us would be a lot better off if we moved
D
Best answer to that is that the new machines do more of the effects in real time, which is a lot faster than even the fast rendering of the G4/dual 450.
:-).
Also, if you want to play with After Effects you really need a fast machine. I have a dual 450 too, but my new PowerBook G4 1ghz smokes it in After Effects - not even a contest.
The surprising lifespan of the dual 450 is thanks to the dual processors - I would certainly not buy a single processor desktop again.
Trust me, if you bought a faster machine, you'd love it even more
D