Zmodem rules. I use it all the time. SecureCRT (an ssh client for Windows) has support for it and it's great for logging in somewhere and quickly sending files to/from your local machine, no filesharing necessary.
Many Linux distributions still have Zmodem installed. I think the package is "lrzsz".
Just to plug SecureCRT, so far it's the fastest, most convienent, best SSH client I've ever used on any platform, which is sad considering it's a Windows app.
I think a big part of the problem is the "build it and they will come" mentality that drove the installation of technology in schools. We put the hardware into the schools without thinking of what we would do with it.
Classroom technology needs to be rethought from the perspective of the student. What software exists that can teach something better or add some value to a subject? Good software is the key to technology helping in the classroom. The problem is schools throw $300 per computer at MS Office which is not at all useful to most students instead of throwing $300 at the teacher to buy software that complements their classroom. Software decisions are often handled by technology people not educators, which makes for software that isn't very useful and/or doesn't get used.
Education and schools should also start embracing Linux in big ways. My wife's school converted to diskless Linux based workstations and it's been a little bit of an adjustment but I think they're headed in the right direction. The Linux model just seems to work better in an environment where getting a software upgrade to fix stability issues may involve a town meeting with old people complaining about you're stealing their fixed income. The Linux model provides the opportunity for various levels of centralized control. NFS based home directories can make it so that no matter what machine you sign into you're at home.
It would also be a big help if someone would create an open source set of API's for keeping a student database that educational software could tie into so that no matter who's software you are using on which machine you could keep track of a students progress and log their performance to be used in assessments.
I have no idea how they would implement this, but I do recall hearing it.
See X-Box.
AKA. Linux killer beta 2A.
Hey.. psst.. motherboard manufacturer... if you incorperate our proprietary BIOS that limits you to booting our signed encrypted OS's we'll give you $15 per machine. Then we can just boost Windows's price $15 per machine and our profits stay the same but there are no machines capable of booting Linux anymore. What about laws preventing anti-competitive behavior? BAH. Didn't you see how hard we sued people who tried to change X-Boxes so they could run non-signed OS's. We write the laws. Ignore them.
Tokyo isn't exactly a low density suburban populations. Read what I wrote. Trains have a place. It's highly specialized though and not a general purpose solution.
In most backups, the amount of traffic does not even approach saturation point. People slow down due to badly designed merges, visibility problems, and simply bad driving.
You obviously don't understand the concept of a saturation point.
U235 is already radioactive. We just pull it out of the ground and help it decay faster. When it decays natrually in the wild we get radon gas which kills us. When it's broken down in reactors it's radioactive byproducts are safely contained.
Mercury is a neurotoxin. It destroys the brain causing all kinds of mental disorders. And what is mercury's half life? Mercury is much more dangerous to people than nuclear waste.
Tthe reason we don't increase the number of lanes when we replace highways is that most backup problems can't be solved with more lanes. Backups around here are due to crests in the road that drivers can't see over, or turns that block a driver's view of upcoming traffic. You can't mitigate these with more lanes. It would be sticking our heads in the sand to suggest we *could*.
This is a big copout lie. Backups are caused by traffic volume exceding the capacity of the roadway. Once you hit the saturation point on a road any one of a large number of things can cause a backup right down to someone leaving too much room in front of them. If a road is well below the saturation point no ammount of twists and truns will cause a backup. No road should ever run consistantly at the saturation point. If they do we have failed to create an adiquate tranportation system. Much of our nations highways sadly fall into this category now.
More lanes is part of the solution but more roads is also. We need to zone next to highways as unbuildable so they can expand when necessary and we need to cut new paths for new roads, something which people seem unwilling to do mostly, I think, because people are looking to rail as a magic bullet to solve all tranportation problems.
Do you really believe that millions of tiny fossil fuel burning engines running around everywhere in various states of repair are no dirtier than a handful of large, well maintained and regulated power plants?
That depends on how you look at it. If you are looking at carbon dioxide emmissions then it's all about the efficiency of the system and centralized powerplants have 2 big disadvantages in that area. One is trasmission loss. When you transmit electricity you lose between 3 and 9 percent of the energy generated. The second is in waste heat loss. In a car in the winter you can use the waste heat from the engine to heat the car and it's free energy. When you are centrally powered you need to use useful work energy to heat the car thus further reducing efficiency. This effect can be dramatic in colder climates.
Tomorrow it may come from coal, but the next day when the fusion power plant is built - all of the cars instantly become true zero emission vehicles.
That tomorrow simply isn't coming soon. Fusion has been 50 years away for 50 years. Its time to give up on fusion as the magic bullet that will solve everything and focus on reality. Real solutions to our real problems do exist. You want true zero emission vehicles, try turning to clean, environmentally friendly uranium based nuclear power. Until that infrastructure is built there is no need to switch to electric vehicles because it ends up being a net loss.
Most of the maintenance costs of our roads are, indeed, interstates and truck-carrying highways
Expansion is not maintenance. Properly constructed highways, ones that are built big enough to handle the traffic that they will see for the next 10-20 years are cheap to maintain.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find an example of such a thing constructed since the 1950's. Somewhere along the way we decided highways are the problem, not the solution and stopped creating new ones as populations expanded. The result is this crazy mess where capacity needs to be tripled and people begrudgingly add a single lane to an existing road. The big dig in Boston is a great example of ignoring capacity needs. They took 2 and 3 lane road that backs up for hours and spent tens of billions of dollars to replace it with a 2 and 3 lane road that backs up for hours. How long are we going to stick our heads in the sand and say more capacity isn't the answer to our capacity issues.
And a rail line carries about as many people, realistically, as two to three lanes of highway
These figures are usually arrived at by comparing rail theory with road reality. Theoretically a rail line can handle as many people as 2 to 3 lanes of highway do. In theory though, a highway full of busses can handle 20-30 times the capacity it does. In practice, however, highways only handle a fraction of their theoretical limit but so do rail lines. Look at reality compared to reality and a highway lane typically carries 5 times as many people as a rail line in most areas.
It's easy to imagine a scenario where one rail line can carry more people than an entire L.A. interstate.
And it's easy to imagine a highway carrying 1 bus full of 70 people every 3 seconds. We don't live in an imaginary world though. I'll admit that trains are capable of moving lots of people in dense areas and that they are appropriate there. Their capacity doesn't come from the rail though, it comes from packing many people into the same compartment, something which is not unique to rail.
Of course, what I said was 1 lane of highway handles as much traffic as 5 rail lines. Not "can handle" but "handles". If we are talking theory, busses on highways can move many more people than train cars on tracks because of the ability to safely pack them much closer together. If we are talking reality, in most areas those 10 car 70 person per car trains usually are only 5 car 20 people per car trains.
If everyone were able to live as frugally as those in the big city, the world's pollution and energy problems would be much more tractable.
I absolutely agree with this but you're ignoring the fact that most people hate being packed together in cities. They want their little boys to be able to go play in the sandbox out back. They want a place to put down a pool and barbecue some stakes and plant some blueberry bushes and apple trees and have a place for their dog to go romp around. We don't want to be able to hear the neighbors argument or smell their dinner. We want elbow room. That means low density suburban areas and rail simply can't serve that type of population economically.
Interesting concept but as long as it's fueled by coal and oil it will basically be just as polluting as existing internal combustion engines. Electricity has to come from somewhere.
The point is that oil is almost free which makes it impossible to compete with. The cost to produce it is basically nothing, it's the cost of running the pump. The only big costs are in expanding production capacity, which ends up being subsidized (which destroys any possiblity of competitive forces taking hold). In an environment like that, alternative fuels simply can't compete and you end up with weird imbalances and fluctuations like we have now.
A similar system could be effected for automobiles, with a buried cable that sends high-frequency pulses communicating road instructions.
I too like this concept but you'll notice, there's no rails. Pavement and tires means higher rolling resistance. It's unfortunate but necessary.
A hybrid system that incorporated a different propulsion and suspension system when traveling on high speed long distance runs would be a nice optimization to roads but the fundamental backbone of any near future general purpose transportation system must be pavement and tires.
if there aren't people like me urging folks to pay attention to the impending problem and make an effort to work around it, we won't.
Thank you for saving us all.:) All I ask out of life to make me happy is a constantly over-inflated sense of self worth. Apparently, you already have yours. Me, I trust in greed to solve this problem when the time comes. It's naive to underestimate the power of profit motive.
they're cheaper to build for the amount that can be shipped on them
No they aren't when you are looking at it from a people-moving standpoint. Construction and maintenance of commuter rails (despite only ever being done for the most economical, high volume areas) is more expensive than roads when you look at the cost per person moved.
When you look at low volume areas (back rods, driveways, etc) which are a necessary part of any modern general purpose transportation system, rail just doesn't make sense. We have a false sense of the expense of road maintenance because we pay into a common pool to maintain all the roads. We don't se separate costs for high volume interstate highways vs low volume back roads and rural highways that make up most of our road network and most of the maintenance costs. As a whole maintenance costs look high, but if you look at the costs only in high volume areas, it's remarkably cheap per person moved. Much of the cost of roads is in expansion which again, since 1 lane of highway handles as much traffic as 5 rail lines, is dramatically cheaper when using roads (yea, that's accurate. look it up. Or better yet, go somewhere where there is a busy highway and a busy train track and count for a few hours. The difference is staggering.)
Rail is cheaper for heavy, bulky goods that travel fixed routes in high volumes like coal, grain, oil, and rock and it probably always will be. Moving people around is a different thing altogether. There, rail is only appropriate for densely populate urban areas, the same places that are associated with crime, pollution, noise, disease and all kinds of other things I don't want my kids growing up around. Roads may not be the perfect answer, but rails are worse.
..because it's impossible to power cars that drive on roads with anything but oil?!? You can create gasoline from stuff that wasn't pumped out of the ground.
Also, you say "When" oil gets too expensive which is making a lot of assumptions.
People, very smart people, have always been around warning that you need to listen to them and do what they tell you to or all kinds of doom will come to pass. Rarely are they right. Human ingenuity and the free-market economy can route around just about anything. Most people point to the fact that it hasn't routed around dependence on oil as some sort of an issue but look at the situation carefully. Oil is cheaper per gallon than bottled water despite being shipped over half the globe and run through refineries to get here. There is no problem so there is no motivation to route around it.
There are a few too many "anal" references in there that weren't in the actual article.
Ha. ha. funny. You got a few moderators to mod it up.
Re:The changes that should be made
on
The Future of the Car
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Rail can't replace roads. It's much less flexible than pavement, more expensive to maintain and not compatible with the existing transportation.
People aren't going to be running rails into their garages, to their front doors.. across the lawn to where you need to back up to hook up the trailer.. etc. When there's an accident a rail vehicle can't just drive on the dirt to go around which may not seem important until you think of the fire truck that's coming to pry someone out of the wreckage in that accident. Rail isn't flexible enough for a general purpose transportation system. That lack of flexibility is one of the two advantages you have with rail. It lets you predict exactly where things will travel and run things like power lines to them. That advantage is it's downfall when it comes to general purpose transportation though.
The other advantage is lower rolling resistance. As speeds go up air friction accounts for a larger percent of the energy used to keep the vehicle moving so as speeds increase this is actually less important.
Also, car insurance wouldn't go away it would just get cheaper. Gas may go away but you have to power the vehicles somehow and since we aren't building any more clean environmentally friendly nuclear power plants we'll probably be burning oil or more likely coal which dumps tons and tons of mercury into our food chain every year (anyone know what the half life of mercury is?)
The benefits you describe could be here soon, but the only realistic way to get them is if computers drive our cars. That's the right answer.
Perl makes for a great language to pick up and program with. You can do cool things in just a few lines and use those same basic skills to create everything from GUI Windows applications to full interactive web sites to batch server based data processing applications.
Perl is an elegant language that will let you do something useful in just a few lines. It has an object model which is bolted over some simple standard programming constructs so it's reasonably easy to flow from standard linear functional programming to OO programming.
If you use Perl though, please, don't treat it like a scripting language like most people do. Read the perl style guide and follow it's recommendations. Use strict for all but tiny programs and use constants and find some libraries of interest to kids that would be fun to learn like Image::Magick, WIN32::Gui and LWP::UserAgent and introduce them to them.
And as far as exciting languages go, I'm most excited about Perl 6. I've been reading a lot of the work that's gone into the language design and it seems like they are building a really great clean language which will be running on top of a cool new VM that promises to solve a lot of the problems seen with java and.net's VMs.
Barring that.. I might go with C. Working with it isn't as hard as it used to be and you are low enough to see the mechanisms behind how computers do all the stuff they do.
FCC says you can't forbid operation of wireless on premises and you will certianly be in a heap of trouble if you jam anyone's signal to stifle competition.
You can't forbid operation of wireless devices but that's exactly why I can operate my device which just happen to transmit whatever garbage on the same frequencies as 802.11 uses thus taking away anyone else's ability to use those channels and thus disrupting 802.11 service.
I would hope that no company runs a 802.11 system as their primary networking infrastructure.
I never said anything about primary network infrastructure, I said critical. People are using wireless more and more these days and while there is usually a wired alternative there are often times when having wireless unavailable would be a time consuming annoyance. Companies have wireless Ethernet and they don't have it for fun, it's because it's a useful tool for business. The problem is it's a very vulnerable system with basically no legal protection.
Also, if you walk into a company's pemiesis without their premission, they can boot you out or have you hauled away for tresspassing.
Who said anything about going there without permission. If you didn't have permission you might be able to do something else. Maybe "sit on the road outside their office". RTFP.
If you're jamming their signal, you can be in hot water with the FCC.
Not true. If I setup my WAP on the same channel as the WAP my neighbor setup and send data on it constantly his won't work well. I've essentially jammed him. Since this is obvously legal it is possible to jam 802.11 legally. I'm assuming that a device that simply transmits noise on all 802.11 channels would be legal as well as long as it stayed within the power requrements. Granted, for large facilities this may not work so well if done from the road but from smaller more urban places where businesses are stacked up this could be a problem.
They do make licensed wireless systems. They just cost an assload becuase no one wants them.
I'm talking about opening up 1-2 more channels in a band right next to 802.11 which current 802.11 chipsets could easily be expanded to work in that were licensed at the same power levels as the current 802.11 band is limited to. It would allow the creation of dependable 802.11 systems in places where you may not have control over who broadcasts on the 802.11 frequencies like universities, apartment buildings, airports, conventions and generally anywhere a large number of people are with computers.
A few slightly higher powered channels might not be a bad idea for applications that don't quite need WiMax or other systems.
I'd like to see a high power, unidirectional only frequency opened up for site to site communication.
I think they should extend the 802.11 spectrum slightly and add a few licensed channels specifically for this sort of thing. Then a company could buy the license for the area it operated on and forbid equipment on premises that operates in the unlicensed space (and/or jam those channels.)
As of now, I can legally walk into a company or sit on the road outside their office with something that jams 802.11 and there's not a damn thing they can do about it. I can disrupt what is becoming a critical infrastructure just for fun. 802.11 is great stuff and there should be an unlicensed 802.11 band but since it is also useful for infrastructure type environments it's appropriate to have a licensed band as well.
I agree, good headphones are great when dealing with lots of machine noise. I'm actually sitting here reading slashodot with a pair of Koss R/80's on. I have no music playing either and probably don't about half the time I'm wearing them. I just like the quiet they provide.
I've gotten into the habit of just putting them on. It makes everything quieter and helps me focus. Of course, I have 14 computers in this tiny office and an air conditioner which drowns them all out so this room is probably louder than many.
FYI, I've had R/80's and Pro3AA's from Koss and can't recommend either. They both have ridiculously fragile parts where they attach to the headband and will break in a fall from desk height. They sound great and keep noise out well but they need replacing often.
Actually.. I'm impressed with how much progress they have made. I barely ever run into bugs that effect my game play. Yea.. there are issues here but they were also quite aggressive in how complicated a world they set up.
Anyone remember the auction house for the first few months and how long you had to wait for results to a search? It was unusable. Even in very heavy load it's quite snappy these days. IF lags a big but it's nothing like what it used to be. The new code making people at a distance stationary seems to have some bugs in it (people just floating around) but I'm sure they'll have that worked out before long.
All in all I'd say WoW gets less buggy every month.
Trying to stop people who obviously are setting up workarounds to serious shortcomings in your companies IT department is not useful. Make them go away by making them unnecessary.
Each access point that exists is an employees time and money your IT department wasted. Now you are wasting more time and money hunting them down and if you succeed you will waste even more by forcing the employee to find another workaround.
Some people's job is to get stuff done. Other people's is to stop people from getting stuff done. Most companies would be better off if they fired everyone of the second type.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't, by some chance, work for NYISO, do you?
Nope.
Zmodem rules. I use it all the time. SecureCRT (an ssh client for Windows) has support for it and it's great for logging in somewhere and quickly sending files to/from your local machine, no filesharing necessary.
Many Linux distributions still have Zmodem installed. I think the package is "lrzsz".
Just to plug SecureCRT, so far it's the fastest, most convienent, best SSH client I've ever used on any platform, which is sad considering it's a Windows app.
I think a big part of the problem is the "build it and they will come" mentality that drove the installation of technology in schools. We put the hardware into the schools without thinking of what we would do with it.
Classroom technology needs to be rethought from the perspective of the student. What software exists that can teach something better or add some value to a subject? Good software is the key to technology helping in the classroom. The problem is schools throw $300 per computer at MS Office which is not at all useful to most students instead of throwing $300 at the teacher to buy software that complements their classroom. Software decisions are often handled by technology people not educators, which makes for software that isn't very useful and/or doesn't get used.
Education and schools should also start embracing Linux in big ways. My wife's school converted to diskless Linux based workstations and it's been a little bit of an adjustment but I think they're headed in the right direction. The Linux model just seems to work better in an environment where getting a software upgrade to fix stability issues may involve a town meeting with old people complaining about you're stealing their fixed income. The Linux model provides the opportunity for various levels of centralized control. NFS based home directories can make it so that no matter what machine you sign into you're at home.
It would also be a big help if someone would create an open source set of API's for keeping a student database that educational software could tie into so that no matter who's software you are using on which machine you could keep track of a students progress and log their performance to be used in assessments.
See X-Box.
AKA. Linux killer beta 2A.
Have a look at Tokyo, for instance
Tokyo isn't exactly a low density suburban populations. Read what I wrote. Trains have a place. It's highly specialized though and not a general purpose solution.
In most backups, the amount of traffic does not even approach saturation point. People slow down due to badly designed merges, visibility problems, and simply bad driving.
You obviously don't understand the concept of a saturation point.
U235 is already radioactive. We just pull it out of the ground and help it decay faster. When it decays natrually in the wild we get radon gas which kills us. When it's broken down in reactors it's radioactive byproducts are safely contained.
Mercury is a neurotoxin. It destroys the brain causing all kinds of mental disorders. And what is mercury's half life? Mercury is much more dangerous to people than nuclear waste.
Tthe reason we don't increase the number of lanes when we replace highways is that most backup problems can't be solved with more lanes. Backups around here are due to crests in the road that drivers can't see over, or turns that block a driver's view of upcoming traffic. You can't mitigate these with more lanes. It would be sticking our heads in the sand to suggest we *could*.
This is a big copout lie. Backups are caused by traffic volume exceding the capacity of the roadway. Once you hit the saturation point on a road any one of a large number of things can cause a backup right down to someone leaving too much room in front of them. If a road is well below the saturation point no ammount of twists and truns will cause a backup. No road should ever run consistantly at the saturation point. If they do we have failed to create an adiquate tranportation system. Much of our nations highways sadly fall into this category now.
More lanes is part of the solution but more roads is also. We need to zone next to highways as unbuildable so they can expand when necessary and we need to cut new paths for new roads, something which people seem unwilling to do mostly, I think, because people are looking to rail as a magic bullet to solve all tranportation problems.
Do you really believe that millions of tiny fossil fuel burning engines running around everywhere in various states of repair are no dirtier than a handful of large, well maintained and regulated power plants?
That depends on how you look at it. If you are looking at carbon dioxide emmissions then it's all about the efficiency of the system and centralized powerplants have 2 big disadvantages in that area. One is trasmission loss. When you transmit electricity you lose between 3 and 9 percent of the energy generated. The second is in waste heat loss. In a car in the winter you can use the waste heat from the engine to heat the car and it's free energy. When you are centrally powered you need to use useful work energy to heat the car thus further reducing efficiency. This effect can be dramatic in colder climates.
Tomorrow it may come from coal, but the next day when the fusion power plant is built - all of the cars instantly become true zero emission vehicles.
That tomorrow simply isn't coming soon. Fusion has been 50 years away for 50 years. Its time to give up on fusion as the magic bullet that will solve everything and focus on reality. Real solutions to our real problems do exist. You want true zero emission vehicles, try turning to clean, environmentally friendly uranium based nuclear power. Until that infrastructure is built there is no need to switch to electric vehicles because it ends up being a net loss.
Most of the maintenance costs of our roads are, indeed, interstates and truck-carrying highways
Expansion is not maintenance. Properly constructed highways, ones that are built big enough to handle the traffic that they will see for the next 10-20 years are cheap to maintain.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find an example of such a thing constructed since the 1950's. Somewhere along the way we decided highways are the problem, not the solution and stopped creating new ones as populations expanded. The result is this crazy mess where capacity needs to be tripled and people begrudgingly add a single lane to an existing road. The big dig in Boston is a great example of ignoring capacity needs. They took 2 and 3 lane road that backs up for hours and spent tens of billions of dollars to replace it with a 2 and 3 lane road that backs up for hours. How long are we going to stick our heads in the sand and say more capacity isn't the answer to our capacity issues.
And a rail line carries about as many people, realistically, as two to three lanes of highway
These figures are usually arrived at by comparing rail theory with road reality. Theoretically a rail line can handle as many people as 2 to 3 lanes of highway do. In theory though, a highway full of busses can handle 20-30 times the capacity it does. In practice, however, highways only handle a fraction of their theoretical limit but so do rail lines. Look at reality compared to reality and a highway lane typically carries 5 times as many people as a rail line in most areas.
It's easy to imagine a scenario where one rail line can carry more people than an entire L.A. interstate.
And it's easy to imagine a highway carrying 1 bus full of 70 people every 3 seconds. We don't live in an imaginary world though. I'll admit that trains are capable of moving lots of people in dense areas and that they are appropriate there. Their capacity doesn't come from the rail though, it comes from packing many people into the same compartment, something which is not unique to rail.
Of course, what I said was 1 lane of highway handles as much traffic as 5 rail lines. Not "can handle" but "handles". If we are talking theory, busses on highways can move many more people than train cars on tracks because of the ability to safely pack them much closer together. If we are talking reality, in most areas those 10 car 70 person per car trains usually are only 5 car 20 people per car trains.
If everyone were able to live as frugally as those in the big city, the world's pollution and energy problems would be much more tractable.
I absolutely agree with this but you're ignoring the fact that most people hate being packed together in cities. They want their little boys to be able to go play in the sandbox out back. They want a place to put down a pool and barbecue some stakes and plant some blueberry bushes and apple trees and have a place for their dog to go romp around. We don't want to be able to hear the neighbors argument or smell their dinner. We want elbow room. That means low density suburban areas and rail simply can't serve that type of population economically.
Interesting concept but as long as it's fueled by coal and oil it will basically be just as polluting as existing internal combustion engines. Electricity has to come from somewhere.
The point is that oil is almost free which makes it impossible to compete with. The cost to produce it is basically nothing, it's the cost of running the pump. The only big costs are in expanding production capacity, which ends up being subsidized (which destroys any possiblity of competitive forces taking hold). In an environment like that, alternative fuels simply can't compete and you end up with weird imbalances and fluctuations like we have now.
A similar system could be effected for automobiles, with a buried cable that sends high-frequency pulses communicating road instructions.
I too like this concept but you'll notice, there's no rails. Pavement and tires means higher rolling resistance. It's unfortunate but necessary.
A hybrid system that incorporated a different propulsion and suspension system when traveling on high speed long distance runs would be a nice optimization to roads but the fundamental backbone of any near future general purpose transportation system must be pavement and tires.
Er, no. You don't see a stampede to Volvo dealers...
All you've shown is that you believe what Volvo adds tell you.
if there aren't people like me urging folks to pay attention to the impending problem and make an effort to work around it, we won't.
:) All I ask out of life to make me happy is a constantly over-inflated sense of self worth. Apparently, you already have yours. Me, I trust in greed to solve this problem when the time comes. It's naive to underestimate the power of profit motive.
Thank you for saving us all.
they're cheaper to build for the amount that can be shipped on them
No they aren't when you are looking at it from a people-moving standpoint. Construction and maintenance of commuter rails (despite only ever being done for the most economical, high volume areas) is more expensive than roads when you look at the cost per person moved.
When you look at low volume areas (back rods, driveways, etc) which are a necessary part of any modern general purpose transportation system, rail just doesn't make sense. We have a false sense of the expense of road maintenance because we pay into a common pool to maintain all the roads. We don't se separate costs for high volume interstate highways vs low volume back roads and rural highways that make up most of our road network and most of the maintenance costs. As a whole maintenance costs look high, but if you look at the costs only in high volume areas, it's remarkably cheap per person moved. Much of the cost of roads is in expansion which again, since 1 lane of highway handles as much traffic as 5 rail lines, is dramatically cheaper when using roads (yea, that's accurate. look it up. Or better yet, go somewhere where there is a busy highway and a busy train track and count for a few hours. The difference is staggering.)
Rail is cheaper for heavy, bulky goods that travel fixed routes in high volumes like coal, grain, oil, and rock and it probably always will be. Moving people around is a different thing altogether. There, rail is only appropriate for densely populate urban areas, the same places that are associated with crime, pollution, noise, disease and all kinds of other things I don't want my kids growing up around. Roads may not be the perfect answer, but rails are worse.
..because it's impossible to power cars that drive on roads with anything but oil?!? You can create gasoline from stuff that wasn't pumped out of the ground.
Also, you say "When" oil gets too expensive which is making a lot of assumptions.
People, very smart people, have always been around warning that you need to listen to them and do what they tell you to or all kinds of doom will come to pass. Rarely are they right. Human ingenuity and the free-market economy can route around just about anything. Most people point to the fact that it hasn't routed around dependence on oil as some sort of an issue but look at the situation carefully. Oil is cheaper per gallon than bottled water despite being shipped over half the globe and run through refineries to get here. There is no problem so there is no motivation to route around it.
The sky isn't falling.
There are a few too many "anal" references in there that weren't in the actual article.
Ha. ha. funny. You got a few moderators to mod it up.
Rail can't replace roads. It's much less flexible than pavement, more expensive to maintain and not compatible with the existing transportation.
People aren't going to be running rails into their garages, to their front doors.. across the lawn to where you need to back up to hook up the trailer.. etc. When there's an accident a rail vehicle can't just drive on the dirt to go around which may not seem important until you think of the fire truck that's coming to pry someone out of the wreckage in that accident. Rail isn't flexible enough for a general purpose transportation system. That lack of flexibility is one of the two advantages you have with rail. It lets you predict exactly where things will travel and run things like power lines to them. That advantage is it's downfall when it comes to general purpose transportation though.
The other advantage is lower rolling resistance. As speeds go up air friction accounts for a larger percent of the energy used to keep the vehicle moving so as speeds increase this is actually less important.
Also, car insurance wouldn't go away it would just get cheaper. Gas may go away but you have to power the vehicles somehow and since we aren't building any more clean environmentally friendly nuclear power plants we'll probably be burning oil or more likely coal which dumps tons and tons of mercury into our food chain every year (anyone know what the half life of mercury is?)
The benefits you describe could be here soon, but the only realistic way to get them is if computers drive our cars. That's the right answer.
Perl makes for a great language to pick up and program with. You can do cool things in just a few lines and use those same basic skills to create everything from GUI Windows applications to full interactive web sites to batch server based data processing applications.
.net's VMs.
Perl is an elegant language that will let you do something useful in just a few lines. It has an object model which is bolted over some simple standard programming constructs so it's reasonably easy to flow from standard linear functional programming to OO programming.
If you use Perl though, please, don't treat it like a scripting language like most people do. Read the perl style guide and follow it's recommendations. Use strict for all but tiny programs and use constants and find some libraries of interest to kids that would be fun to learn like Image::Magick, WIN32::Gui and LWP::UserAgent and introduce them to them.
And as far as exciting languages go, I'm most excited about Perl 6. I've been reading a lot of the work that's gone into the language design and it seems like they are building a really great clean language which will be running on top of a cool new VM that promises to solve a lot of the problems seen with java and
Barring that.. I might go with C. Working with it isn't as hard as it used to be and you are low enough to see the mechanisms behind how computers do all the stuff they do.
FCC says you can't forbid operation of wireless on premises and you will certianly be in a heap of trouble if you jam anyone's signal to stifle competition.
You can't forbid operation of wireless devices but that's exactly why I can operate my device which just happen to transmit whatever garbage on the same frequencies as 802.11 uses thus taking away anyone else's ability to use those channels and thus disrupting 802.11 service.
I would hope that no company runs a 802.11 system as their primary networking infrastructure.
I never said anything about primary network infrastructure, I said critical. People are using wireless more and more these days and while there is usually a wired alternative there are often times when having wireless unavailable would be a time consuming annoyance. Companies have wireless Ethernet and they don't have it for fun, it's because it's a useful tool for business. The problem is it's a very vulnerable system with basically no legal protection.
Also, if you walk into a company's pemiesis without their premission, they can boot you out or have you hauled away for tresspassing.
Who said anything about going there without permission. If you didn't have permission you might be able to do something else. Maybe "sit on the road outside their office". RTFP.
If you're jamming their signal, you can be in hot water with the FCC.
Not true. If I setup my WAP on the same channel as the WAP my neighbor setup and send data on it constantly his won't work well. I've essentially jammed him. Since this is obvously legal it is possible to jam 802.11 legally. I'm assuming that a device that simply transmits noise on all 802.11 channels would be legal as well as long as it stayed within the power requrements. Granted, for large facilities this may not work so well if done from the road but from smaller more urban places where businesses are stacked up this could be a problem.
They do make licensed wireless systems. They just cost an assload becuase no one wants them.
I'm talking about opening up 1-2 more channels in a band right next to 802.11 which current 802.11 chipsets could easily be expanded to work in that were licensed at the same power levels as the current 802.11 band is limited to. It would allow the creation of dependable 802.11 systems in places where you may not have control over who broadcasts on the 802.11 frequencies like universities, apartment buildings, airports, conventions and generally anywhere a large number of people are with computers.
A few slightly higher powered channels might not be a bad idea for applications that don't quite need WiMax or other systems.
I'd like to see a high power, unidirectional only frequency opened up for site to site communication.
I think they should extend the 802.11 spectrum slightly and add a few licensed channels specifically for this sort of thing. Then a company could buy the license for the area it operated on and forbid equipment on premises that operates in the unlicensed space (and/or jam those channels.)
As of now, I can legally walk into a company or sit on the road outside their office with something that jams 802.11 and there's not a damn thing they can do about it. I can disrupt what is becoming a critical infrastructure just for fun. 802.11 is great stuff and there should be an unlicensed 802.11 band but since it is also useful for infrastructure type environments it's appropriate to have a licensed band as well.
I agree, good headphones are great when dealing with lots of machine noise. I'm actually sitting here reading slashodot with a pair of Koss R/80's on. I have no music playing either and probably don't about half the time I'm wearing them. I just like the quiet they provide.
I've gotten into the habit of just putting them on. It makes everything quieter and helps me focus. Of course, I have 14 computers in this tiny office and an air conditioner which drowns them all out so this room is probably louder than many.
FYI, I've had R/80's and Pro3AA's from Koss and can't recommend either. They both have ridiculously fragile parts where they attach to the headband and will break in a fall from desk height. They sound great and keep noise out well but they need replacing often.
Actually.. I'm impressed with how much progress they have made. I barely ever run into bugs that effect my game play. Yea.. there are issues here but they were also quite aggressive in how complicated a world they set up.
Anyone remember the auction house for the first few months and how long you had to wait for results to a search? It was unusable. Even in very heavy load it's quite snappy these days. IF lags a big but it's nothing like what it used to be. The new code making people at a distance stationary seems to have some bugs in it (people just floating around) but I'm sure they'll have that worked out before long.
All in all I'd say WoW gets less buggy every month.
Trying to stop people who obviously are setting up workarounds to serious shortcomings in your companies IT department is not useful. Make them go away by making them unnecessary.
Each access point that exists is an employees time and money your IT department wasted. Now you are wasting more time and money hunting them down and if you succeed you will waste even more by forcing the employee to find another workaround.
Some people's job is to get stuff done. Other people's is to stop people from getting stuff done. Most companies would be better off if they fired everyone of the second type.