Seriously, how much could it cost a gas station to add a single battery exchange point for EV's? I can't see it costing more than exchange points for kerosene tanks or being any more of a hassle. Have some sort of device for removing the old pack and putting a fresh pack in and some sort of recharge station for the old packs. Maybe a few thousand dollars to add at most. If there was a standard for such an exchange station, that was actually used, then EV's would start falling in line to be compatible. Somebody needs to create such a thing and push it through a well placed person in one of the big gasmart chains. I'd say Shell would be a good target because they are moving towards being a renewable resource company already. If only I had some funding.. *sighs*
You've got a point but a lot of the changes are done for effeciency reasons. I think they need to learn moderation though. Start off with something similar to the Honda Insight and gradually whittle down until you find the point people stop buying the cars at.
My favorite EV's are old muscle cars that have been overhauled into EV's. A 60's Mustang as an EV is really pretty hot. I really want an old GTO converterable made into an EV.. someday. *Dreams*
If it was in your baggage at the airport you'd probably not have to pay a tarriff. I never tried moving that many machines from one country to another in such a manner but I've seen auto parts and other weird things moved around that way without any extra fees being attached. It might depend on luck and the individual countries your moving between though. I have had friends that traveled by air and had more than one laptop though.(why? I dunno why one person needs three laptops and a pda in their carry-on)
That's fine. The PHB's companies can keep spending an extra few million a year on software. That makes life easier for all their competition that is smart enough to accept the savings.:)
As a loving owner of some Via processors let me say that I wouldn't let that stop you. They compete well against an equivilant speed of Celeron processor and run cooler and quieter. I have a lot of different CPUs running around my lan and the via are my current favorites.
For a fun project you could buy a cheap lcd monitor and a mini-itx mobo with via cpu and build your own laptop. It'd be pretty easy to remove the monitor from it's case and then you'd just have to make a new case, add a dc-dc power converter, some ram, a hdd, and you prefered input devices. The only hard part would be making your own case.:)
The only thing I use my dvd rom drive for is installs and ripping movies and music. I no longer include any sort of floppy drives in my computers and it won't be long before I stop including optical drives also. I might keep one around for ripping and maybe a burner but that's about it. Most my data goes straight through the network or resides on a removable harddrive. Other than my servers I'm even working on removing drives altogether from my computers and setting them up as thin clients.
I'd be tempted. I bet you could sell them for more like $650 in the US if the hardware isn't to shabby. Especially if while your there you make them dual boot between Linux and pirate copies of XP. I have a couple cousins just entering college and their parents would love to see a $650 laptop. About $800 is the best deal I've found for new non-shitty laptops locally.
Possibly, I've had my domain name for two years and it hasn't been noticable stollen but it's just a geek site. I would say that you'd probably have a good trademark lawsuit if someone stole a word you made up after you've already had it for a while.
I use my cellphone's web ability for IM and email more than i use the phone for voice calls. I developed a similar device as this for home use.. basiclly a PDA that runs Linux and allows text based web (including IM and email) as well as VoIP calls. Mine uses WiFi which was the easiest solution for me. Mine cost about $500 to make though and requires a Linux server to be handy. Overall, I like what they did with this but I think they'd have better luck if it could access the PCS (or similar digital cell network) as well as some sort of base unit when at home. Possibly allowing unit-to-unit messaging would be cool too. I think the article makes a good point that it'd be a great idea if the base unit was self-contained so as not steal processing power from a PC (or require it be left on) and could be plugged directly into a network hub. I wasn't clear from the article if this thing could support multiple users but I'd say that such support would be a very good idea. Being limited to messaging with just six people seems kind of sucky too. On my phone I can IM with any number of people so I see no reason this unit couldn't do the same. As for a future addition.. obviously it'd be awesome to give these things color screens and mini-cameras like newer cell phones so that you could IM pictures to each other.
Hrm. Maybe not if you shot the water up with low force and had hidden jets under neath that'd give the water a new boost with each step. I'd have to try it but I think I could make it look realistic.
If businesses ran at peak effeciency each business would probably need to hire fewer employees but there'd be room for a lot more businesses.
In this case I'll tell any of these companies that if they want someone to setup a system to store resumes effeciently then just give me a call. All I hear from this article is 'whiiiiiiiine'. Honestly, a hdd costs about $1 a gig (for the price I've been paying). An average plaintext resume is less than 10k (and you can easily convert non-plaintext resumes). If my quick math is right then that means you can store roughly 12 million resumes on a 120Gb hdd. All the software to do this task is opensource and thus free. A consultant to configure such a system (me) might cost $100 a day for about 5 business days to intergrate the system into your network. The system itself minus hdd would cost roughly $350.
$350 (system) $120 (hdd) $500 (support) ---- $970
So let's just say that setting up such a system would cost about a thousand dollars with a semi-annual additional cost of $100 in expected support. Hardly a killing blow to a business. Obviously for big businesses they can scale this system to increased needs just by adding more hdd space.
I handle more data collecting / indexing than this just as a hobby at home.
Re:Immediate dissapointment
on
Water Flows Uphill
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They have uphill waterslides that just shoot the water uphill. Why couldn't you build an uphill waterfall that way.. which would allow your boat to flow uphill.
How expensive could these be to make? The mentioned unit sounds big and probably has some interesting features to handle various problems but still I can't see why these should cost more than a few thousand dollars. In college I built a small robot (about the size of a toaster) that could do the same thing. It had arms for popping a book off the stack and pushing it into a new stack when finished. It also had small arms for flattening and turning pages (credits to Real Genius for the concept). The last arm used a handheld scanner to scan the pages into a connected laptop. The whole thing cost a couple hundred dollars to make. I admit that the 'puff of air' solution is a good idea but how much is it worth? Of course my solution required a connected computer to store the data and run it through OCR but even that didn't cost much. These days I'd probably use a laptop with a WiFi card to locally store the data and broadcast it to a nearby computer for OCR processing. Even including the small cluster to make OCR processing fast you could probably keep the cost to $10,000.
What kind of multimedia? There are firly good programs for both audio and video editing. Linux lacks a full Photoshop clone (Gimp isn't bad but isn't the same) but can run Photoshop itself if you use Wine. Am I leaving something out?
A good portion of the problem I lay on hardware companies. They refuse to set interface standards and stick to them and they seldom test their drivers as well as they could. If every printer in the world would use the same print driver and API's then the code could be a lot more robust. Sure, for new innovations you'd need to release a new version of the driver but if you had a standards body that released the driver (with these new features) every so often it'd keep things clean.
More along all websites output HTML and it's the browsers job to render that. Let all apps print Postscript and let it be the printers job to render it. The same with scanners, soundcards, video cards, modems, etc. There is just no need for each to have it's own driver.
Yeah but most of them wouldn't know how to find the any key let alone debug a problemm and submit a patch. Are we back to the question of how many trained chimps it'd take to beta test Windows 2010?:)
It depends what you want to do. If you want to play games then sure Windows can do more.. except I use my Playstation for games so I don't really care.
I use my computer to work. Linux can do more work tasks because it's stable and more affordable to produce software on than Windows. There are programs in existence to do damn near every work related task (of any kind) on Linux and when you happen to find something missing (or not good enough) it's affordable to write your own. Also you can run many Windows apps in Linux (thanks to Wine) such as M$ Office, Quicken, Photoshop, and IE.. even games.
I guess my point is that other than for games (which have specific copyrighted artwork) there is a similar program, for almost every task, that runs under Linux. You are right that Windows has more programs available but that is because you have 4000 types of minesweeper and 20000 different versions of tetris. It's also because most opensource programs develop such that their code can be ported to Windows (or any OS) while commercial Windows products are often not designed to be portable. The lack of Linux software is a myth.
Hrm. I'd rather look at ass and legs. The real kicker for me though is if the woman has some sort of odd colored hair.. blue, pink, purple, green, etc. Especially if the drapes match the carpet. Girls that look like they stepped out of anime. I guess at least that's a healthier fantasy than being into children.;)
I'd never take my computer to be repaired by anyone else because of snooping. I've seen many a tech browse around, steal software, look at the users porn, look at private data.. etc. Unless there is a reason to be looking at this stuff you should keep your eyes to yourself.
On the other hand if it's a public computer - such as in a computer lab - then I see no problem with policing the filesystem for files that could get your company in trouble or simply clog things up. That is your job. I routinely have such computers run a 'sweep' program that locates any new files and sends me a copy and a notice to where the file came from.. that way I can have them removed. The worst offender I've seen is IM's. Files users trade tend to sit on the hdd without the users knowing so you get a lot of files popping up they'd probably not want to share with everyone else (nudes of themselves) so it can be beneficial to have such things deleted routinely.
That is why they invented GreenCine or it's lame cousin NetFlix.:)
Good thing I rip my rentals. I won't have to worry about them expiring. Will this make rentals cheaper? Oh well, the hdd space costs more than the rental anyway.:)
Media companies, spammers, stupid politiciians, etc might be able to kill of the Internet as we know it today.. but in doing so they'll force it to be reborn in a way that they should REALLY fear. People will always want to communicte with each other.. technology can make that communication faster, easier, and cheaper. Take away the distributed network we call the Internet and in it's place will form a grass roots fully decentralized Internet. Wireless networking is already being used for city wide networks and people are trying to span the country with it. Some people I know have some nifty ideas on how to span the oceans with wireless. Some groups have designed wireless systems that are good at finding each other and handling the problems of a less reliable network. Eventually it'll all fit together.. and will become more powerful than the controlled wired network. Sure such wireless networks may be outlawed but people will still use them. At the worst the network may get stomped in metro areas of the US and the countries that follow it around on their leashes.
As for the stories whine that computers are noisy.. speak for your own. My computer can't even be heard unless I've really got the hdd's busy and even then it's just a whisper. It's small, energy effecient, and stable.
Spam remains something of a problem but the solution is easy - use a new mail protocol that fixes the problems that allow relay hijacking and that requires digital signatures with all mail. Sure then people will have to first whitelist friends for email but it'll still ellimate 99% of the problem. Even now it's not THAT bad. I get 100's of spam's a day but only 2-3 make it through my filters and each of those are used to improve my filters.
I've used X for many years and it still works well for me. IMO it is far better than Windows and is better than MacOS. What benefit does this new gui (or any of the others) have over using X? Themes are no big deal. If one feels like it they can theme just about anything in X. X boots from cd too. The page seems to be/.'d so I can't dig to deep.
For any opposing GUI to make ground I'd say it'll need all the features of X and a compatibility layer to let X apps run on them. At the minimum they'd need to make something like a wxWindows port for their gui.
I don't rent anything I don't want to spend the hdd space to rip. If it isn't worth the $5 (at $1/gig) of hdd space and the $1 rental fee then why bother.:)
This thing looks frightening and unsuitable. My whole room is my computing enviroment. I wouldn't want to try to cram it into this tiny space. I have several computers I work on, whiteboards, table tops, phones, printers, fridge, microwave, sofa, tv, vcr, dvd player. and bathroom. I like to pace the room, jump around, etc while working. This thing looks like an absolute nightmare for those things. Leave the fetish equipment in the bedroom.
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Seriously, how much could it cost a gas station to add a single battery exchange point for EV's? I can't see it costing more than exchange points for kerosene tanks or being any more of a hassle. Have some sort of device for removing the old pack and putting a fresh pack in and some sort of recharge station for the old packs. Maybe a few thousand dollars to add at most. If there was a standard for such an exchange station, that was actually used, then EV's would start falling in line to be compatible. Somebody needs to create such a thing and push it through a well placed person in one of the big gasmart chains. I'd say Shell would be a good target because they are moving towards being a renewable resource company already. If only I had some funding.. *sighs*
You've got a point but a lot of the changes are done for effeciency reasons. I think they need to learn moderation though. Start off with something similar to the Honda Insight and gradually whittle down until you find the point people stop buying the cars at.
My favorite EV's are old muscle cars that have been overhauled into EV's. A 60's Mustang as an EV is really pretty hot. I really want an old GTO converterable made into an EV.. someday. *Dreams*
If it was in your baggage at the airport you'd probably not have to pay a tarriff. I never tried moving that many machines from one country to another in such a manner but I've seen auto parts and other weird things moved around that way without any extra fees being attached. It might depend on luck and the individual countries your moving between though. I have had friends that traveled by air and had more than one laptop though .(why? I dunno why one person needs three laptops and a pda in their carry-on)
That's fine. The PHB's companies can keep spending an extra few million a year on software. That makes life easier for all their competition that is smart enough to accept the savings. :)
As a loving owner of some Via processors let me say that I wouldn't let that stop you. They compete well against an equivilant speed of Celeron processor and run cooler and quieter. I have a lot of different CPUs running around my lan and the via are my current favorites.
:)
For a fun project you could buy a cheap lcd monitor and a mini-itx mobo with via cpu and build your own laptop. It'd be pretty easy to remove the monitor from it's case and then you'd just have to make a new case, add a dc-dc power converter, some ram, a hdd, and you prefered input devices. The only hard part would be making your own case.
The only thing I use my dvd rom drive for is installs and ripping movies and music. I no longer include any sort of floppy drives in my computers and it won't be long before I stop including optical drives also. I might keep one around for ripping and maybe a burner but that's about it. Most my data goes straight through the network or resides on a removable harddrive. Other than my servers I'm even working on removing drives altogether from my computers and setting them up as thin clients.
Try http://idot.com. They have customizable laptops starting at $799. I've done business with iDot before and it's been an overall good experience.
I'd be tempted. I bet you could sell them for more like $650 in the US if the hardware isn't to shabby. Especially if while your there you make them dual boot between Linux and pirate copies of XP. I have a couple cousins just entering college and their parents would love to see a $650 laptop. About $800 is the best deal I've found for new non-shitty laptops locally.
Possibly, I've had my domain name for two years and it hasn't been noticable stollen but it's just a geek site. I would say that you'd probably have a good trademark lawsuit if someone stole a word you made up after you've already had it for a while.
I use my cellphone's web ability for IM and email more than i use the phone for voice calls. I developed a similar device as this for home use.. basiclly a PDA that runs Linux and allows text based web (including IM and email) as well as VoIP calls. Mine uses WiFi which was the easiest solution for me. Mine cost about $500 to make though and requires a Linux server to be handy. Overall, I like what they did with this but I think they'd have better luck if it could access the PCS (or similar digital cell network) as well as some sort of base unit when at home. Possibly allowing unit-to-unit messaging would be cool too. I think the article makes a good point that it'd be a great idea if the base unit was self-contained so as not steal processing power from a PC (or require it be left on) and could be plugged directly into a network hub. I wasn't clear from the article if this thing could support multiple users but I'd say that such support would be a very good idea. Being limited to messaging with just six people seems kind of sucky too. On my phone I can IM with any number of people so I see no reason this unit couldn't do the same. As for a future addition.. obviously it'd be awesome to give these things color screens and mini-cameras like newer cell phones so that you could IM pictures to each other.
Hrm. Maybe not if you shot the water up with low force and had hidden jets under neath that'd give the water a new boost with each step. I'd have to try it but I think I could make it look realistic.
If businesses ran at peak effeciency each business would probably need to hire fewer employees but there'd be room for a lot more businesses.
In this case I'll tell any of these companies that if they want someone to setup a system to store resumes effeciently then just give me a call. All I hear from this article is 'whiiiiiiiine'. Honestly, a hdd costs about $1 a gig (for the price I've been paying). An average plaintext resume is less than 10k (and you can easily convert non-plaintext resumes). If my quick math is right then that means you can store roughly 12 million resumes on a 120Gb hdd. All the software to do this task is opensource and thus free. A consultant to configure such a system (me) might cost $100 a day for about 5 business days to intergrate the system into your network. The system itself minus hdd would cost roughly $350.
$350 (system)
$120 (hdd)
$500 (support)
----
$970
So let's just say that setting up such a system would cost about a thousand dollars with a semi-annual additional cost of $100 in expected support. Hardly a killing blow to a business. Obviously for big businesses they can scale this system to increased needs just by adding more hdd space.
I handle more data collecting / indexing than this just as a hobby at home.
They have uphill waterslides that just shoot the water uphill. Why couldn't you build an uphill waterfall that way.. which would allow your boat to flow uphill.
How expensive could these be to make? The mentioned unit sounds big and probably has some interesting features to handle various problems but still I can't see why these should cost more than a few thousand dollars. In college I built a small robot (about the size of a toaster) that could do the same thing. It had arms for popping a book off the stack and pushing it into a new stack when finished. It also had small arms for flattening and turning pages (credits to Real Genius for the concept). The last arm used a handheld scanner to scan the pages into a connected laptop. The whole thing cost a couple hundred dollars to make. I admit that the 'puff of air' solution is a good idea but how much is it worth? Of course my solution required a connected computer to store the data and run it through OCR but even that didn't cost much. These days I'd probably use a laptop with a WiFi card to locally store the data and broadcast it to a nearby computer for OCR processing. Even including the small cluster to make OCR processing fast you could probably keep the cost to $10,000.
What kind of multimedia? There are firly good programs for both audio and video editing. Linux lacks a full Photoshop clone (Gimp isn't bad but isn't the same) but can run Photoshop itself if you use Wine. Am I leaving something out?
A good portion of the problem I lay on hardware companies. They refuse to set interface standards and stick to them and they seldom test their drivers as well as they could. If every printer in the world would use the same print driver and API's then the code could be a lot more robust. Sure, for new innovations you'd need to release a new version of the driver but if you had a standards body that released the driver (with these new features) every so often it'd keep things clean.
More along all websites output HTML and it's the browsers job to render that. Let all apps print Postscript and let it be the printers job to render it. The same with scanners, soundcards, video cards, modems, etc. There is just no need for each to have it's own driver.
Yeah but most of them wouldn't know how to find the any key let alone debug a problemm and submit a patch. Are we back to the question of how many trained chimps it'd take to beta test Windows 2010? :)
It depends what you want to do. If you want to play games then sure Windows can do more.. except I use my Playstation for games so I don't really care.
I use my computer to work. Linux can do more work tasks because it's stable and more affordable to produce software on than Windows. There are programs in existence to do damn near every work related task (of any kind) on Linux and when you happen to find something missing (or not good enough) it's affordable to write your own. Also you can run many Windows apps in Linux (thanks to Wine) such as M$ Office, Quicken, Photoshop, and IE.. even games.
I guess my point is that other than for games (which have specific copyrighted artwork) there is a similar program, for almost every task, that runs under Linux. You are right that Windows has more programs available but that is because you have 4000 types of minesweeper and 20000 different versions of tetris. It's also because most opensource programs develop such that their code can be ported to Windows (or any OS) while commercial Windows products are often not designed to be portable. The lack of Linux software is a myth.
Hrm. I'd rather look at ass and legs. The real kicker for me though is if the woman has some sort of odd colored hair.. blue, pink, purple, green, etc. Especially if the drapes match the carpet. Girls that look like they stepped out of anime. I guess at least that's a healthier fantasy than being into children. ;)
I'd never take my computer to be repaired by anyone else because of snooping. I've seen many a tech browse around, steal software, look at the users porn, look at private data.. etc. Unless there is a reason to be looking at this stuff you should keep your eyes to yourself.
On the other hand if it's a public computer - such as in a computer lab - then I see no problem with policing the filesystem for files that could get your company in trouble or simply clog things up. That is your job. I routinely have such computers run a 'sweep' program that locates any new files and sends me a copy and a notice to where the file came from.. that way I can have them removed. The worst offender I've seen is IM's. Files users trade tend to sit on the hdd without the users knowing so you get a lot of files popping up they'd probably not want to share with everyone else (nudes of themselves) so it can be beneficial to have such things deleted routinely.
That is why they invented GreenCine or it's lame cousin NetFlix. :)
:)
Good thing I rip my rentals. I won't have to worry about them expiring. Will this make rentals cheaper? Oh well, the hdd space costs more than the rental anyway.
Media companies, spammers, stupid politiciians, etc might be able to kill of the Internet as we know it today.. but in doing so they'll force it to be reborn in a way that they should REALLY fear. People will always want to communicte with each other.. technology can make that communication faster, easier, and cheaper. Take away the distributed network we call the Internet and in it's place will form a grass roots fully decentralized Internet. Wireless networking is already being used for city wide networks and people are trying to span the country with it. Some people I know have some nifty ideas on how to span the oceans with wireless. Some groups have designed wireless systems that are good at finding each other and handling the problems of a less reliable network. Eventually it'll all fit together.. and will become more powerful than the controlled wired network. Sure such wireless networks may be outlawed but people will still use them. At the worst the network may get stomped in metro areas of the US and the countries that follow it around on their leashes.
As for the stories whine that computers are noisy.. speak for your own. My computer can't even be heard unless I've really got the hdd's busy and even then it's just a whisper. It's small, energy effecient, and stable.
Spam remains something of a problem but the solution is easy - use a new mail protocol that fixes the problems that allow relay hijacking and that requires digital signatures with all mail. Sure then people will have to first whitelist friends for email but it'll still ellimate 99% of the problem. Even now it's not THAT bad. I get 100's of spam's a day but only 2-3 make it through my filters and each of those are used to improve my filters.
I've used X for many years and it still works well for me. IMO it is far better than Windows and is better than MacOS. What benefit does this new gui (or any of the others) have over using X? Themes are no big deal. If one feels like it they can theme just about anything in X. X boots from cd too. The page seems to be /.'d so I can't dig to deep.
For any opposing GUI to make ground I'd say it'll need all the features of X and a compatibility layer to let X apps run on them. At the minimum they'd need to make something like a wxWindows port for their gui.
I don't rent anything I don't want to spend the hdd space to rip. If it isn't worth the $5 (at $1/gig) of hdd space and the $1 rental fee then why bother. :)
This thing looks frightening and unsuitable. My whole room is my computing enviroment. I wouldn't want to try to cram it into this tiny space. I have several computers I work on, whiteboards, table tops, phones, printers, fridge, microwave, sofa, tv, vcr, dvd player. and bathroom. I like to pace the room, jump around, etc while working. This thing looks like an absolute nightmare for those things. Leave the fetish equipment in the bedroom.