You can fit Opera, Safari, Firefox, and Konquerer in under 150 M[B]
Don't stop with those four. We're talking about including the competition, so we'll be starting at A for ABrowse, include the AOL Explorer, Amaya, CompuServe, Dillo, ELinks, K-Meleon, Lynx, Maxthon, NeoPlanet, NetCaptor, Netscape, Skipstone, iRider, Shiira, Lobo and end at Y for the Yahoo! Browser.
Then, we're going to do the same for every other part of the OS. Vi, Emacs, gedit, kate, Notepad++ and Notepad2 will be nice alternatives to the standard Notepad, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, NeoOffice (ported, of course), AbiWord, Windows versions of Zoho Office and Google Apps as well as trial versions of MS Office 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007 will make sure a few additional DVDs (and 120 instead of 25 gigs of harddrive space) will be used up by Vista.
Microsoft will roughly tripe their current personnel, with 80% of all employees testing combinations of new and old versions of all those embedded products. The other 20% are comprised of lawyers fending off lawsuits about damages done by bundled software.
So, how exactly are Mozilla and Opera going to pump out millions of nicely packaged CDs and freely deliver them to every shop they can to be distributed freely again (and replaced only few weeks later)? Or were you thinking more along the lines of returning to a pay-for-your-browser model? How exactly would having to pay another $20 (on top of the unchanged windows license) benefit customers?
Oookay, so *any* competitor should get their products bundled by Microsoft with a Microsoft product, eh? Would this include Nagware like the Real Player or Apple Quicktime (eating up your Ram, annoying you at every reboot)? Would it include trialware like most Symantec consumer trash (actually popping up some kind of assistant on every boot, taking minutes to get rid of)? What about administrative tools like DameWare (a nice administrative tool for networks you're supposed to administrate) or SubSeven? Maybe even some multimedia enhancers like a Sony Rootkit or StarForce copy protection?
As you see, it's pretty much impossible to draw a line there. Quality software like Opera may be a nice addition to Windows, lots of other software isn't what you'd expect on a nicely-configured box. Don't forget "With great bundling comes great resposability". IIRC EULAs haven't quite proven their waterproofness in court yet, so even a "We don't take no responsability for non-MSFT-software" might not stop people from winning court cases against Microsoft for faulty software.
So what you're saying is the icon should be hidden by default and unhidden for every user when first clicking on or typing any uri? Do you seriously believe this would change anything? How would the users go on installing Opera, piping telnet output from a handmade http request to Opera.exe or maybe, just maybe by visiting Opera.com in their... preinstalled and newly enabled browser?
Keeping it clean isn't the problem or even necessary at all - the laser takes care of vaporizing all the dirt on the mirror. Then the mirror itself. Then you.
The Google proposal is limited to the 700 MHz spectrum being auctioned off. There's not going to be any "any device, any app" going on in GSM/CDMA/FM/Ham/CB or any other licensed bands policy more than there is today.
Just like today, nobody is going to stop you from building your own or tinkering with pre-built tools as long as you're not selling them and aren't causing any interference. If you are, the FCC is just as probable to come around and "talk" as they are now.
From your point of view, local time always passes at the same rate. When moving at a velocity of c, simply look at your clock and measure the time it takes you to get from A to B, just like you'd do when moving at "usual" speeds.
Unfortunately, your local time will have run differently from the time of that cop with the radar gun, so unless you've got some kind of officially approved black box on board be prepared to pay some speeding tickets.
Yeah, what is the different between these cars and a UPS-like device in every garage?
Most every household has a car, how many people you know would spend $20k on a UPS sitting in their garage, increasing their power stability from 99.5% to 99.99%? (You read/., so the percentage of people you know willing to do this ought to be about ten times the percentage of a representative subset of your respective country's population. May not apply if you know rich people living in extremely poor countries (drug lords, crime kingpins) with very shaky power supply.)
Future hybrids will use gasoline or diesel solely for electricity generation to run drive motors and, eventually, grid power.
Gasoline has some 35 MJ of theoretical energy per litre. That's about 10 kWh per litre (36'000 kJ = 36'000 kWs = 10 kWh). Actual power generation tends to be very lossy, I don't have any numbers ready but 30% (3 kWh/l) probably is a way too optimistic figure.
Gasoline prices in the U.S. are some $3 per gallon (3.8 litres), resulting in some 11.4 kWh per gallon or about a quarter per kWh. The gas price will very probably go (way) up in the coming months and years, western european prices mostly are over $7 per gallon.
Energy prices, OTOH, are very low in the U.S., starting at some $.03 per kWh, very rarely surpassing the $.15 mark.
My $5 alarm clock can store different alarm times for weekdays and the weekend. A $25k car should, IMO, be very able to let you tell it to never be below 25% on weekdays, never be below 80% on weekends and make sure to be fully charged next friday.
With a bit of sync magic and the ever rising penetration of calendar/mobile phone syncing you mightn't even have to specifically tell it about the long holiday trip. Change is fast in the tech industry and often even faster in the mobile tech industry, don't underestimate that.
Some notebooks (modern ThinkPads do) allow their users to configure charge/discharge levels when connected to an AC source (e.g. "Start charging if the battery level's below 80%, charge to 95%" saves a lot of cycles if the machine isn't usually running on battery power).
Future V2G cars might (very probably if this V2G idea takes off) very well allow their users to configure a similar set of values (except it'd be the other way round). Assuming a 250 mi range with 100% charge of a 50 kWh battery (rounded Tesla Roadster values), allowing up to 20% to be used for V2G would strip you of some 50 mi of range and 10 kWh of capacity. At 65 mph that's the difference between three hours and 3:45 of driving. How many, if I may ask, 200-250 mile trips did you spontaneously (20% of the tesla's battery are charged in some 40 minutes) undertake in the past 6 months? (Less than 200 or more than 250 miles of driving don't count because the former's still possible and the latter's impossible without intermittent battery swapping or recharging)
Also, the V2G system would probably be used mostly for unexpected spikes where lots of power are required in tenths of seconds for few minutes until hydro/nuke/coal power generation is ramped up enough to cover the demand.
Well, what's wrong with having your own private grid?
Not gonna happen in the next few years. Especially in the U.S., energy prices are ridiculously low thanks to the economies of scale kicking in. To truly live off grid, investments in the (lots of) tens to hundreds of thousands are necessary; the typical break-even for "private" type generators seems to be in the order of 10+ years; quite a bit out of reach for the average consumer.
If you really care about the stability of your power, some UPS kind of installation is, of course, possible. On its own this will ensure short-term stability, augmented with an own diesel generator you could bridge blacked out days or even weeks, datacentre- or hospital-style. It's somewhat of an own private grid but most people find a nice stack of hundred-dollar bills a lot more attractive than 99.99% instead of 99.5% or even 98% of power.
V2G is somewhat of a combination of this UPS idea with typical griddedness. Given the (gradually more-or-less forced) switch to electric cars, it'll be a few bucks saved without (much of) an investment to many. Given enough users, it could very well turn into a great way to cheaply turn the grid into a large-scale UPS. Implemented correctly this might not only balance out spikes extremely fast and on location but keep whole blocks powered even in worst-case situations without any connection of those blocks to the outside grid.
Driving up to a service station and quickly swapping your battery for one of theirs and a few bucks probably isn't that feasible because (understandable) worries of you or them getting a subpar quality bat (or an old, worn-down one) for your brand new one.
The best possibility I could imagine would be some nationwide (maybe international, even) organization whom you pay an annual membership fee for which they lend you one of their batteries. You could then exchange this battery at every participating service station for another, fully charged battery of this organization (and, probably, pay a few cents per used kWh and a few bucks for the actual exchange). Of course, this would involve them guaranteeing a minimum charge per battery you get and probably some degree of availability (e.g. battery exchange point within 50 miles nationwide).
Apart from the obvious privacy problems (those batteries would be sealed and might contain black boxes and tracking devices; every battery exchange you do would be logged along with how much capacity you used) this sounds like a pretty neat and possible solution to me. And since we're abolishing the outdated concept of "privacy" anyways, let's do this!
A movie is "shit" only when you have to pay for it. Otherwise it's a justified use of bandwidth (downloading it), storage (burn it to media), and maybe even time (watching it).
Movie on a retail DVD: $25. (Current titles ranging from some $10 after rebates to $40 full retail)
2 GB of Bandwidth: $2. (Ranging from some $.10 volume datacentre pricing to way more; $2 seems realistic)
DVD-R: $.50
Movie on a selfmade DVD: $2.50
If your quality requirement for both products is equal, I'd happily trade a used Daewoo of mine for a new Porsche of yours </car_analogy>
(The price comparison is somewhat inaccurate because of the difficulties of factoring in any time consumed. Assuming you'd typically buy some 2-3 retail DVDs at once but 25-50 DVD-Rs should somewhat make up for the time spent starting the download and burning the DVD. The time spent watching the film was deliberately omitted because most people tend to enjoy this process.)
You probably meant sestary, but actually it's only a quinary operation (a ternary of which one argument is another ternary resulting in five, not six, arguments).
Or (c) total surveillance of politicians above a certain paygrade (i.e. everyone whose decisions may affect the law) coupled with nice salaries and extremely tight bribery regulations.
While I usually tend to oppose any loss of privacy, complete transparency for public representatives should be a must. As long as consent of the representative is required for him to be elected, I find stripping him of any kind of privacy acceptable.
Let's start a WAR ON WARS ON STUFF then. Actually, at the current rate, a WAR ON NOT BEING AT WAR might be in the general public's best interest. Whaddaya know, maybe it'll work out:)
You can't really write a congressman, but you could, as superwiz noted above write to the NATO supreme commander and ask him to get NATO to nuke (at least) Wash DC or the whole U.S. off the map. Pretty sure that'd help.
Perhaps they could un-automate it a tiny bit. Instead of "Any copyrighted content?" ? "DMCA" : "Go on", building "Any copyrighted content?" ? ("95%+ directly copied from copyrighted work?" ? "DMCA" : "Minimum wage operator, is this parody, educational or other fair use?") : "Go on" could be a possible solution.
If such a system could reduce the workload for human-assisted operators to a sensible level, the operating costs shouldn't be too high. A community effort to raise the cost of DMCA takedowns by issuing counter-notices for all "bad" requests would also help lowering the cost of such a layer.
I can confirm that. Could recover most of the data from a (very b0rken) laptop hard drive while it was in the freezer. If your freezer's large enough, try it. Don't forget putting it in a bag though;)
Slashdot Mirror
Then, we're going to do the same for every other part of the OS. Vi, Emacs, gedit, kate, Notepad++ and Notepad2 will be nice alternatives to the standard Notepad, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, NeoOffice (ported, of course), AbiWord, Windows versions of Zoho Office and Google Apps as well as trial versions of MS Office 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007 will make sure a few additional DVDs (and 120 instead of 25 gigs of harddrive space) will be used up by Vista.
Microsoft will roughly tripe their current personnel, with 80% of all employees testing combinations of new and old versions of all those embedded products. The other 20% are comprised of lawyers fending off lawsuits about damages done by bundled software.
So, how exactly are Mozilla and Opera going to pump out millions of nicely packaged CDs and freely deliver them to every shop they can to be distributed freely again (and replaced only few weeks later)? Or were you thinking more along the lines of returning to a pay-for-your-browser model? How exactly would having to pay another $20 (on top of the unchanged windows license) benefit customers?
Don't forget to include some wget scripts to configure your newly bought dsl router. For every ISP/router combination out there.
Oookay, so *any* competitor should get their products bundled by Microsoft with a Microsoft product, eh? Would this include Nagware like the Real Player or Apple Quicktime (eating up your Ram, annoying you at every reboot)? Would it include trialware like most Symantec consumer trash (actually popping up some kind of assistant on every boot, taking minutes to get rid of)? What about administrative tools like DameWare (a nice administrative tool for networks you're supposed to administrate) or SubSeven? Maybe even some multimedia enhancers like a Sony Rootkit or StarForce copy protection?
As you see, it's pretty much impossible to draw a line there. Quality software like Opera may be a nice addition to Windows, lots of other software isn't what you'd expect on a nicely-configured box. Don't forget "With great bundling comes great resposability". IIRC EULAs haven't quite proven their waterproofness in court yet, so even a "We don't take no responsability for non-MSFT-software" might not stop people from winning court cases against Microsoft for faulty software.
So what you're saying is the icon should be hidden by default and unhidden for every user when first clicking on or typing any uri? Do you seriously believe this would change anything? How would the users go on installing Opera, piping telnet output from a handmade http request to Opera.exe or maybe, just maybe by visiting Opera.com in their... preinstalled and newly enabled browser?
Keeping it clean isn't the problem or even necessary at all - the laser takes care of vaporizing all the dirt on the mirror. Then the mirror itself. Then you.
The Google proposal is limited to the 700 MHz spectrum being auctioned off. There's not going to be any "any device, any app" going on in GSM/CDMA/FM/Ham/CB or any other licensed bands policy more than there is today.
Just like today, nobody is going to stop you from building your own or tinkering with pre-built tools as long as you're not selling them and aren't causing any interference. If you are, the FCC is just as probable to come around and "talk" as they are now.
From your point of view, local time always passes at the same rate. When moving at a velocity of c, simply look at your clock and measure the time it takes you to get from A to B, just like you'd do when moving at "usual" speeds.
Unfortunately, your local time will have run differently from the time of that cop with the radar gun, so unless you've got some kind of officially approved black box on board be prepared to pay some speeding tickets.
I fully agree. The only thing worse than such a flywheel would be packing cars full of highly flammable substances with the tenfold energy density of TNT.
Gasoline prices in the U.S. are some $3 per gallon (3.8 litres), resulting in some 11.4 kWh per gallon or about a quarter per kWh. The gas price will very probably go (way) up in the coming months and years, western european prices mostly are over $7 per gallon.
Energy prices, OTOH, are very low in the U.S., starting at some $.03 per kWh, very rarely surpassing the $.15 mark.
My $5 alarm clock can store different alarm times for weekdays and the weekend. A $25k car should, IMO, be very able to let you tell it to never be below 25% on weekdays, never be below 80% on weekends and make sure to be fully charged next friday.
With a bit of sync magic and the ever rising penetration of calendar/mobile phone syncing you mightn't even have to specifically tell it about the long holiday trip. Change is fast in the tech industry and often even faster in the mobile tech industry, don't underestimate that.
Some notebooks (modern ThinkPads do) allow their users to configure charge/discharge levels when connected to an AC source (e.g. "Start charging if the battery level's below 80%, charge to 95%" saves a lot of cycles if the machine isn't usually running on battery power).
Future V2G cars might (very probably if this V2G idea takes off) very well allow their users to configure a similar set of values (except it'd be the other way round). Assuming a 250 mi range with 100% charge of a 50 kWh battery (rounded Tesla Roadster values), allowing up to 20% to be used for V2G would strip you of some 50 mi of range and 10 kWh of capacity. At 65 mph that's the difference between three hours and 3:45 of driving. How many, if I may ask, 200-250 mile trips did you spontaneously (20% of the tesla's battery are charged in some 40 minutes) undertake in the past 6 months? (Less than 200 or more than 250 miles of driving don't count because the former's still possible and the latter's impossible without intermittent battery swapping or recharging)
Also, the V2G system would probably be used mostly for unexpected spikes where lots of power are required in tenths of seconds for few minutes until hydro/nuke/coal power generation is ramped up enough to cover the demand.
If you really care about the stability of your power, some UPS kind of installation is, of course, possible. On its own this will ensure short-term stability, augmented with an own diesel generator you could bridge blacked out days or even weeks, datacentre- or hospital-style. It's somewhat of an own private grid but most people find a nice stack of hundred-dollar bills a lot more attractive than 99.99% instead of 99.5% or even 98% of power.
V2G is somewhat of a combination of this UPS idea with typical griddedness. Given the (gradually more-or-less forced) switch to electric cars, it'll be a few bucks saved without (much of) an investment to many. Given enough users, it could very well turn into a great way to cheaply turn the grid into a large-scale UPS. Implemented correctly this might not only balance out spikes extremely fast and on location but keep whole blocks powered even in worst-case situations without any connection of those blocks to the outside grid.
Driving up to a service station and quickly swapping your battery for one of theirs and a few bucks probably isn't that feasible because (understandable) worries of you or them getting a subpar quality bat (or an old, worn-down one) for your brand new one.
The best possibility I could imagine would be some nationwide (maybe international, even) organization whom you pay an annual membership fee for which they lend you one of their batteries. You could then exchange this battery at every participating service station for another, fully charged battery of this organization (and, probably, pay a few cents per used kWh and a few bucks for the actual exchange). Of course, this would involve them guaranteeing a minimum charge per battery you get and probably some degree of availability (e.g. battery exchange point within 50 miles nationwide).
Apart from the obvious privacy problems (those batteries would be sealed and might contain black boxes and tracking devices; every battery exchange you do would be logged along with how much capacity you used) this sounds like a pretty neat and possible solution to me. And since we're abolishing the outdated concept of "privacy" anyways, let's do this!
The all-too human hunter-gatherer instinct comes to mind...
2 GB of Bandwidth: $2. (Ranging from some $.10 volume datacentre pricing to way more; $2 seems realistic)
DVD-R: $.50
Movie on a selfmade DVD: $2.50
If your quality requirement for both products is equal, I'd happily trade a used Daewoo of mine for a new Porsche of yours </car_analogy>
(The price comparison is somewhat inaccurate because of the difficulties of factoring in any time consumed. Assuming you'd typically buy some 2-3 retail DVDs at once but 25-50 DVD-Rs should somewhat make up for the time spent starting the download and burning the DVD. The time spent watching the film was deliberately omitted because most people tend to enjoy this process.)
You probably meant sestary, but actually it's only a quinary operation (a ternary of which one argument is another ternary resulting in five, not six, arguments).
Or (c) total surveillance of politicians above a certain paygrade (i.e. everyone whose decisions may affect the law) coupled with nice salaries and extremely tight bribery regulations.
While I usually tend to oppose any loss of privacy, complete transparency for public representatives should be a must. As long as consent of the representative is required for him to be elected, I find stripping him of any kind of privacy acceptable.
Let's start a WAR ON WARS ON STUFF then. Actually, at the current rate, a WAR ON NOT BEING AT WAR might be in the general public's best interest. Whaddaya know, maybe it'll work out :)
You can't really write a congressman, but you could, as superwiz noted above write to the NATO supreme commander and ask him to get NATO to nuke (at least) Wash DC or the whole U.S. off the map. Pretty sure that'd help.
Perhaps they could un-automate it a tiny bit. Instead of "Any copyrighted content?" ? "DMCA" : "Go on", building "Any copyrighted content?" ? ("95%+ directly copied from copyrighted work?" ? "DMCA" : "Minimum wage operator, is this parody, educational or other fair use?") : "Go on" could be a possible solution.
If such a system could reduce the workload for human-assisted operators to a sensible level, the operating costs shouldn't be too high. A community effort to raise the cost of DMCA takedowns by issuing counter-notices for all "bad" requests would also help lowering the cost of such a layer.
I can confirm that. Could recover most of the data from a (very b0rken) laptop hard drive while it was in the freezer. If your freezer's large enough, try it. Don't forget putting it in a bag though ;)