... or boot into a second "bare bones" installation of Windows on a different partition so that you can do maintenance on the primary Windows installation.
Well, theoretically, sure, but does XP even let you install a second copy on same machine? For sure the so-called command prompt you get with boot cd is so limited it's mostly useless.
On Windows, you cant delete a exec if its running..and most botnet execs fuck up things like the task manager and have backups of themselfs on your box.
Not to mention going to extreme lengths to avoid being wiped out, usually. Try to sneak in that "run during login" registry item to remove the offending "winlogon" registry item? Gone as soon as you hit enter (from your point of view).
Try to be even more clever and put another login item to run a batch file (or whatever) to remove/corrupt the offending dll? Not going to work, malware gets executed too early in the startup process.
Try to be clever and kill the dll while it's running? Bluescreen.
And that's assuming you have access to more advanced process monitor tools and good all around knowledge of some of the myriad ways you can be screwed by autostarting items. Obvious solution is not to run suspicious items but, hey, we all like those suspicious little "patches".
Pretty much the only ways to deal with crap like that is to either get purpose-made tool from AV company or get a linux boot CD with NTFS write access.
Windows has color management support that goes far beyond sRGB. It is capable of doing color space conversions, and its printing subsystem does support this. It's up to the application to spec the source profiles of artwork, and to invoke the ICC support to do the conversion. All that said, Windows color management is crap. That's why all the commercial print products such as Adobe's stuff, disable it.
I may be wrong but I've been lead to believe the windows ICM converts the photo to sRGB for printing if it's enabled. So, yes, the end result IS printed properly, but it's printed in sRGB space so you lose all the extra gamut that presumably your camera and inkjet are capable of handling.
I would speculate the ICM behavior is because the manufacturers supply sRGB ICM profiles with their printers.
Incidentally, photoshop printing doesn't automagically bypass the windows ICM. At least not with Canon inkjet drivers. You get nice double profile conversion resulting in crappy colors unless you un-tick the driver ICM option.
Digital cameras can record colours outside sRGB, so if you ensure your workflow never enforces that constraint, you can end up with a file that can be printed using colours your monitor can't see.
Typically, the input file (usually a raw camera file) is transformed via a device profile (representing the camera's actual spectral response) into a working space (a device-independent space for editing). Whilst editing, the image is viewed using a transform to sRGB (or your display's output profile, if you've calibrated it), but this restriction is for viewing only and doesn't change the file. Then, when you print, the image is converted via a device profile for your printer to print to the extremes of its capabilities - which may exceed sRGB in some colours (e.g. cyan), and be even worse in others (e.g. pure blue).
Most 6 or 7 component inkjets can go well beyond sRGB gamut.
Life stops being simple and nice once you take that step, thought. With AdobeRGB for example, you cannot share any of your images with your friends or print them in commercial shops unless the recipient can handle color profiles properly. XP image preview actually can, but none of the browsers do.
True, you can change the profile but unless you've got full photoshop, it's more conversion steps as the freeware utilities that I'm aware of can only do TIFF and JPG.
2nd hurdle is actually getting the photos to print. You have to be able to bypass all windows color management (which uses sRGB) and use photoshop (or photoshop elements) to print, which needs to have the profile for your printer AND photo paper for things to work right.
As an end result, you *may* get images of a lagoon or something that has deeper hues your commercial print shop would print. But how many of images like that "ordinary" people have in the 1st place?
There are even wider gamuts as AdobeRGB still doesn't surpass what you can see. I think PhotoPro will show all the colors (reference) eye can see and in fact quite a lot it can't, since color vision is not nice and linear.
Bottom line is, unless you're absolutely sure what you're doing, stick with the sRGB! Going with AdobeRGB or similar will make your photos look WORSE unless the rest of the cain supports it.
Of course what they really should be doing is not using anything complicated like a real OS anyway and instead an EVM.
Sanity prevails at last.
As an PCB designer, it seems to me to be insane to use anything remotely as complicated as Linux or Windows CE here. It's a machine designed to do one thing and one thing only, it's not supposed to run your bloody torrent client in the background.
Kill the OS, put in some kind of bare-bones embedded OS, which has kernel memory footprint like 1kB if even that and write the damn application in assembler for another 0.5kB code.
Or, hell, nuke even the embedded OS and code the entire voting app in ASM from system boot code up. Sure it's bit 1980, but this is a VOTING MACHINE for god's sake.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information. Maybe useful to find general information about a topic and (if you're really lucky) some references to check more reputable sources.
The main problem with AC/DC Converters is that at higher power consumption, they typically become less efficient. This is partly due to the technologies involved. Switching power supplies are +90% efficient. However, they are solid state and do have a limit to how much power they can supply and still be cost effective. Higher power models require other, more traditional and less efficient converters. The converters can't get much more efficient any time soon. As the more efficient converters drop in price, you'll see them in cheaper applications. In the mean time, efficiency of the device itself is, for now, the best way to go, not in the converters.
IAASD (I am an SMPS designer).. AC/DC converter is usually always SMPS (Flyback or forward converter for low powered stuff, half-bridge or full-bridge types for electric tools and the like)) except maybe in high-end audio. Most decent PSUs do have power factor correction too, which doesn't actually make the supply any more efficient but provides much "nicer" load for the network.
As for the SMPS efficiency, many PC supplies for example are around 70-80% efficient. It takes actually great care to design >90% efficient PSU and requires all kinds of tricks to reach such figures such as storing energy from the filters and gate drivers and feeding it back to the system.
If you target 75% efficiency, you can get away with much more basic design that uses passive rectifying and turns electromagnetic noise into heat.. At the store you, Joe Consumer, always fork over for the "450W" mystery-PSU which costs 1/3rd of an actually well-designed and built unit (of course price is no guarantee it's been well designed..)
There are also techniques to extend output power range which is used for example in PC motherboards that have to supply silly current densities to today's processors. For example, 80A at 1.3V for Athlon 64 X2 4800, which is 110W. To reach such output they're probably using 2-phase (40A per phase) to 8-phase (10A per phase) DC/DC converters which have to run at very high efficiency as 20% of 110W = 22W, which is a lot for small semiconductors. So in your typical PC you usually have at least two SMPS circuits in series for the worst power hogs which are CPU and GPU. So for mom + pop 75% efficient PSU and maybe 90% efficient motherboard SMPS you're down to maybe 67,5% efficiency of that ~200W load your CPU and GPU generate while you're playing Half Life..
So the principal rationale of higher PSU efficiency isn't ecology at all but thermal management. You can cram 92% efficient DC/DC converter into much smaller package with much less aggressive cooling than 75% PSU. Just look at the big-ass 12cm fan at the power supply that sounds like a hairdryer..
Of course, parent is absolutely correct, Athlon X2 is much nicer about using power than processors from few years ago as it uses similar techniques with mobile processors such as reducing clock speeds and core voltages when you're reading slashdot and not using CPU much, unless you're calculating potential cancer-busting proteins in the background or something.
At 100 GHz the wavelength is 3 cm. This thing is operating at a frequency well above that at which it is easy/feasible to use a printed circuit board.
More like 3mm when we get down to it.
Basically you have to use balanced transmission lines such as LVDS and start learning how to define trace impedance for PCB. Oh and stop putting unrelated power/GND planes on same sections of the PCB..
Agreed - I just thank Zeus that we finally have a good ol' fashioned price war again - Both Intel and AMD have, for a year or two, just kept pushing prices up as though not in competition (which I suppose partially holds true - Intel didn't need to fight for business market share, and AMD didn't need to fight for the DIY'ers).
I remember the good old days when the fastest damn CPU you could buy could not run latest flight simulators and the like decently.
These days the CPU speed is fairly irrelevant. I went a while ago from XP 2400+ to X64 3000+ overclocked by about 45% (sic).. Little or no gains to be seen in FPS. However, replacing the 3D card was a real ballbreaker games performance-wise.
1) Yes, the EU can enforce the money. If MS doesn't pay, EU can hit them with sanctions (what do you think, how big is the EU part of MS revenue pool. Right, pretty relevant) and finally seize their physical assets. (Guess what, MS exists outside the US)
Why do you think there are so much "loan" spam? People just don't seem to have a concept of having their balls on the line if they default on their debts.
Unfortunately, no. You can't turn a 31-year-old cruise liner as quickly as you can turn a 4 passenger ski-boat. Small companies succeed by agility; Large companies succeed by dieing.
Oh? I thought they do it by smashing through the small guys, sinking with the wake what they cannot crush and having CEO pop over to on-board helo to buy off any that survive.
you are right on the "someone's gonna die" level on tension (well known with eg. mooring lines), but it's going to be a manageable risk because it is already managed with ships of this size.
Depends on where it's going to break I suppose. If the root is engineered to be weaker than the rest, the cable recoil is mostly going to go up. You lose nice long expensive cable that way, of course. What was the going rate of seaman fatality for shipping companies again?
Thus, it's honestly not any easier for us to switch from US to metric than it would be for, say, New Zealand to switch from metric to US.
That's not true. Metric kicks ass for all engineering and manufacturing purposes. Sure, for your average arts school graduate it wouldn't make much difference but you'd have revolt by engineers. (And chemists. And architects. And shipwrights)
Having volume/length/mass multiply/divide by 10 is amazingly convenient. Whether you deal in small distances like PCB designer or large ones like guys building railroads..
Heck, you guys invented a silly unit called "mil" which is 1/1000th inch just to have one reasonable unit of length. Too bad mile isn't 1000 inches or it might almost make sense.
Erh. CRT capable of displaying NICE 1600x1200 resolution is practically 21". Some 20" tubes can do that but that's pushing it.
They're not that "cheap" either. It's starting to be so that no tubes are made except for graphics professionals etc. You see big manufacturers stopping crt manufacturing..
I just checked big online component store and they have whopping 1 21" CRT on sale and 2 19" CRTs. Hundreds of LCDs, thought.
Re:When dealing in huge volumes of humans
on
Spam Gets Personal
·
· Score: 1
This can only be done with cryptographic hardware installed on every machine, and a new SMTP protocol. Sucks, doesn't it. Bye bye anonymity, but at least it would get rid of spam. Pick your poison.
There's this SPAM remedy boilerplate which would be appropriate here. However, I'm too lazy to look it up.
Short answer: Botnets send out majority of spam right now. Botnet pwned box will pass whatever origin query you may subject it to, right down to chirpily answering challenge/response type lookups. And most boxes are behind dynamic IP so your spam is coming from different IP every time you reboot your ADSL modem. And you can get hosed because the granny downstairs had same IP before you did!
So you need to eradicate spyware before pipe-dreaming of rooting up spam problem.
I still think sending high-profile spammers to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison is a decent alternative.
Most jobs I have applied for as an Electrical Engineer make it quite clear that overtime is not given and that you may be required to work 50 or 60 hr weeks
Oh boy. As an EE PCB/EMC/Circuit/system/whatever designer, I have to say that my 40 hours/week job at around $60k/year (Finnish wage in euros so given 1e = $1.22) just started sounding whole a lot more lucrative.
I get to work sane hours and get enough wage to get by.
I hate to post a blatant 'me too' but you've hit the nail on the head. I'm Canadian (no id cards) but I've lived in Indonesia for the last 15 years (id cards). I am vehemently opposed to the idea of id cards in principle. But... in 15 years have I noticed any problems or difficulties caused by them? No.
In principle they're awful, but in practice they hve been fine for me so far.
As a someone who lives where national ID card has been used for great long time (Finland) I would say -
Problems: Can't think of one? It costs a little bit of money but so what, it's not like I renew it every year.
Pros: You do not need to have a driver's licence to prove your ID. Minors can prove their ID. You do not need to carry your passport around to prove your ID.
Personally I ditched my ID card once I got driver's licence - I practically need to carry it with me at all times anyways and it's (now) the same size as the ID card, eg. credit card sized.
As for otherwise proving your ID, you need a photographic ID to make purchase of >50 euros on debit card. And since I've never used a cheque in my life, that's pretty routine occasion.
Cars cost more and have worse average fuel efficiency than they did 20 years ago. But they're also a lot safer. If you want to sacrifice a bit of that safety in exchange for better value, a motorcycle (or some sort of motorcycle-ish microcar) might be a good choice for you.
If you call approximately 6-fold likelyhood of suffering fatal or debiliating injury "a bit". Circa 20-fold for new drivers. Tried to find statistic which says so, but apparently people who have analyzed bikers accidents like to only analyze breakdown among age groups, etc, not relative risk to driver..
Slashdot Mirror
So how about royalty, they've had a few centuries of selective breeding right? ... huh look at that, Prince Charles looks.. mighty.. not.. royal.
And you thought you shouldn't have sex with your cousin just because some book says it's immoral?
... or boot into a second "bare bones" installation of Windows on a different partition so that you can do maintenance on the primary Windows installation.
Well, theoretically, sure, but does XP even let you install a second copy on same machine? For sure the so-called command prompt you get with boot cd is so limited it's mostly useless.
Uses windows registry feature to delete file on reboot. Doesn't work if the malware looks for it.
On Windows, you cant delete a exec if its running..and most botnet execs fuck up things like the task manager and have backups of themselfs on your box.
Not to mention going to extreme lengths to avoid being wiped out, usually. Try to sneak in that "run during login" registry item to remove the offending "winlogon" registry item? Gone as soon as you hit enter (from your point of view).
Try to be even more clever and put another login item to run a batch file (or whatever) to remove/corrupt the offending dll? Not going to work, malware gets executed too early in the startup process.
Try to be clever and kill the dll while it's running? Bluescreen.
And that's assuming you have access to more advanced process monitor tools and good all around knowledge of some of the myriad ways you can be screwed by autostarting items. Obvious solution is not to run suspicious items but, hey, we all like those suspicious little "patches".
Pretty much the only ways to deal with crap like that is to either get purpose-made tool from AV company or get a linux boot CD with NTFS write access.
Doesn't help much when you want to share photos with your friends and parents..
Windows has color management support that goes far beyond sRGB. It is capable of doing color space conversions, and its printing subsystem does support this. It's up to the application to spec the source profiles of artwork, and to invoke the ICC support to do the conversion. All that said, Windows color management is crap. That's why all the commercial print products such as Adobe's stuff, disable it.
I may be wrong but I've been lead to believe the windows ICM converts the photo to sRGB for printing if it's enabled. So, yes, the end result IS printed properly, but it's printed in sRGB space so you lose all the extra gamut that presumably your camera and inkjet are capable of handling.
I would speculate the ICM behavior is because the manufacturers supply sRGB ICM profiles with their printers.
Incidentally, photoshop printing doesn't automagically bypass the windows ICM. At least not with Canon inkjet drivers. You get nice double profile conversion resulting in crappy colors unless you un-tick the driver ICM option.
Digital cameras can record colours outside sRGB, so if you ensure your workflow never enforces that constraint, you can end up with a file that can be printed using colours your monitor can't see.
Typically, the input file (usually a raw camera file) is transformed via a device profile (representing the camera's actual spectral response) into a working space (a device-independent space for editing). Whilst editing, the image is viewed using a transform to sRGB (or your display's output profile, if you've calibrated it), but this restriction is for viewing only and doesn't change the file. Then, when you print, the image is converted via a device profile for your printer to print to the extremes of its capabilities - which may exceed sRGB in some colours (e.g. cyan), and be even worse in others (e.g. pure blue).
Most 6 or 7 component inkjets can go well beyond sRGB gamut.
Life stops being simple and nice once you take that step, thought. With AdobeRGB for example, you cannot share any of your images with your friends or print them in commercial shops unless the recipient can handle color profiles properly. XP image preview actually can, but none of the browsers do.
True, you can change the profile but unless you've got full photoshop, it's more conversion steps as the freeware utilities that I'm aware of can only do TIFF and JPG.
2nd hurdle is actually getting the photos to print. You have to be able to bypass all windows color management (which uses sRGB) and use photoshop (or photoshop elements) to print, which needs to have the profile for your printer AND photo paper for things to work right.
As an end result, you *may* get images of a lagoon or something that has deeper hues your commercial print shop would print. But how many of images like that "ordinary" people have in the 1st place?
There are even wider gamuts as AdobeRGB still doesn't surpass what you can see. I think PhotoPro will show all the colors (reference) eye can see and in fact quite a lot it can't, since color vision is not nice and linear.
Bottom line is, unless you're absolutely sure what you're doing, stick with the sRGB! Going with AdobeRGB or similar will make your photos look WORSE unless the rest of the cain supports it.
Of course what they really should be doing is not using anything complicated like a real OS anyway and instead an EVM.
Sanity prevails at last.
As an PCB designer, it seems to me to be insane to use anything remotely as complicated as Linux or Windows CE here. It's a machine designed to do one thing and one thing only, it's not supposed to run your bloody torrent client in the background.
Kill the OS, put in some kind of bare-bones embedded OS, which has kernel memory footprint like 1kB if even that and write the damn application in assembler for another 0.5kB code.
Or, hell, nuke even the embedded OS and code the entire voting app in ASM from system boot code up. Sure it's bit 1980, but this is a VOTING MACHINE for god's sake.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information. Maybe useful to find general information about a topic and (if you're really lucky) some references to check more reputable sources.
The main problem with AC/DC Converters is that at higher power consumption, they typically become less efficient. This is partly due to the technologies involved. Switching power supplies are +90% efficient. However, they are solid state and do have a limit to how much power they can supply and still be cost effective. Higher power models require other, more traditional and less efficient converters. The converters can't get much more efficient any time soon. As the more efficient converters drop in price, you'll see them in cheaper applications. In the mean time, efficiency of the device itself is, for now, the best way to go, not in the converters.
.. AC/DC converter is usually always SMPS (Flyback or forward converter for low powered stuff, half-bridge or full-bridge types for electric tools and the like)) except maybe in high-end audio. Most decent PSUs do have power factor correction too, which doesn't actually make the supply any more efficient but provides much "nicer" load for the network.
IAASD (I am an SMPS designer)
As for the SMPS efficiency, many PC supplies for example are around 70-80% efficient. It takes actually great care to design >90% efficient PSU and requires all kinds of tricks to reach such figures such as storing energy from the filters and gate drivers and feeding it back to the system.
If you target 75% efficiency, you can get away with much more basic design that uses passive rectifying and turns electromagnetic noise into heat.. At the store you, Joe Consumer, always fork over for the "450W" mystery-PSU which costs 1/3rd of an actually well-designed and built unit (of course price is no guarantee it's been well designed..)
There are also techniques to extend output power range which is used for example in PC motherboards that have to supply silly current densities to today's processors. For example, 80A at 1.3V for Athlon 64 X2 4800, which is 110W. To reach such output they're probably using 2-phase (40A per phase) to 8-phase (10A per phase) DC/DC converters which have to run at very high efficiency as 20% of 110W = 22W, which is a lot for small semiconductors. So in your typical PC you usually have at least two SMPS circuits in series for the worst power hogs which are CPU and GPU. So for mom + pop 75% efficient PSU and maybe 90% efficient motherboard SMPS you're down to maybe 67,5% efficiency of that ~200W load your CPU and GPU generate while you're playing Half Life..
So the principal rationale of higher PSU efficiency isn't ecology at all but thermal management. You can cram 92% efficient DC/DC converter into much smaller package with much less aggressive cooling than 75% PSU. Just look at the big-ass 12cm fan at the power supply that sounds like a hairdryer..
Of course, parent is absolutely correct, Athlon X2 is much nicer about using power than processors from few years ago as it uses similar techniques with mobile processors such as reducing clock speeds and core voltages when you're reading slashdot and not using CPU much, unless you're calculating potential cancer-busting proteins in the background or something.
At 100 GHz the wavelength is 3 cm. This thing is operating at a frequency well above that at which it is easy/feasible to use a printed circuit board.
More like 3mm when we get down to it.
Basically you have to use balanced transmission lines such as LVDS and start learning how to define trace impedance for PCB. Oh and stop putting unrelated power/GND planes on same sections of the PCB..
Easy? No. Feasible? Oh definitely.
I thought media "PC" is called XBOX + mod + XBMC.
Microsoft STILL cannot figure out why it's great. They crippled xbox 360 media streaming effectively making it a non-feature.
Agreed - I just thank Zeus that we finally have a good ol' fashioned price war again - Both Intel and AMD have, for a year or two, just kept pushing prices up as though not in competition (which I suppose partially holds true - Intel didn't need to fight for business market share, and AMD didn't need to fight for the DIY'ers).
.. Little or no gains to be seen in FPS. However, replacing the 3D card was a real ballbreaker games performance-wise.
I remember the good old days when the fastest damn CPU you could buy could not run latest flight simulators and the like decently.
These days the CPU speed is fairly irrelevant. I went a while ago from XP 2400+ to X64 3000+ overclocked by about 45% (sic)
1) Yes, the EU can enforce the money. If MS doesn't pay, EU can hit them with sanctions (what do you think, how big is the EU part of MS revenue pool. Right, pretty relevant) and finally seize their physical assets. (Guess what, MS exists outside the US)
Why do you think there are so much "loan" spam? People just don't seem to have a concept of having their balls on the line if they default on their debts.
Sounds like a cracking idea to me!
Unfortunately, no. You can't turn a 31-year-old cruise liner as quickly as you can turn a 4 passenger ski-boat. Small companies succeed by agility; Large companies succeed by dieing.
Oh? I thought they do it by smashing through the small guys, sinking with the wake what they cannot crush and having CEO pop over to on-board helo to buy off any that survive.
you are right on the "someone's gonna die" level on tension (well known with eg. mooring lines), but it's going to be a manageable risk because it is already managed with ships of this size.
Depends on where it's going to break I suppose. If the root is engineered to be weaker than the rest, the cable recoil is mostly going to go up. You lose nice long expensive cable that way, of course. What was the going rate of seaman fatality for shipping companies again?
That is, the first US clinical trial. That would be, oh, decade behind the rest of the world?
Thus, it's honestly not any easier for us to switch from US to metric than it would be for, say, New Zealand to switch from metric to US.
That's not true. Metric kicks ass for all engineering and manufacturing purposes. Sure, for your average arts school graduate it wouldn't make much difference but you'd have revolt by engineers. (And chemists. And architects. And shipwrights)
Having volume/length/mass multiply/divide by 10 is amazingly convenient. Whether you deal in small distances like PCB designer or large ones like guys building railroads..
Heck, you guys invented a silly unit called "mil" which is 1/1000th inch just to have one reasonable unit of length. Too bad mile isn't 1000 inches or it might almost make sense.
Erh. CRT capable of displaying NICE 1600x1200 resolution is practically 21". Some 20" tubes can do that but that's pushing it.
They're not that "cheap" either. It's starting to be so that no tubes are made except for graphics professionals etc. You see big manufacturers stopping crt manufacturing..
I just checked big online component store and they have whopping 1 21" CRT on sale and 2 19" CRTs. Hundreds of LCDs, thought.
This can only be done with cryptographic hardware installed on every machine, and a new SMTP protocol. Sucks, doesn't it. Bye bye anonymity, but at least it would get rid of spam. Pick your poison.
There's this SPAM remedy boilerplate which would be appropriate here. However, I'm too lazy to look it up.
Short answer: Botnets send out majority of spam right now. Botnet pwned box will pass whatever origin query you may subject it to, right down to chirpily answering challenge/response type lookups. And most boxes are behind dynamic IP so your spam is coming from different IP every time you reboot your ADSL modem. And you can get hosed because the granny downstairs had same IP before you did!
So you need to eradicate spyware before pipe-dreaming of rooting up spam problem.
I still think sending high-profile spammers to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison is a decent alternative.
Most jobs I have applied for as an Electrical Engineer make it quite clear that overtime is not given and that you may be required to work 50 or 60 hr weeks
Oh boy. As an EE PCB/EMC/Circuit/system/whatever designer, I have to say that my 40 hours/week job at around $60k/year (Finnish wage in euros so given 1e = $1.22) just started sounding whole a lot more lucrative.
I get to work sane hours and get enough wage to get by.
I hate to post a blatant 'me too' but you've hit the nail on the head. I'm Canadian (no id cards) but I've lived in Indonesia for the last 15 years (id cards). I am vehemently opposed to the idea of id cards in principle. But... in 15 years have I noticed any problems or difficulties caused by them? No.
In principle they're awful, but in practice they hve been fine for me so far.
As a someone who lives where national ID card has been used for great long time (Finland) I would say -
Problems: Can't think of one? It costs a little bit of money but so what, it's not like I renew it every year.
Pros: You do not need to have a driver's licence to prove your ID. Minors can prove their ID. You do not need to carry your passport around to prove your ID.
Personally I ditched my ID card once I got driver's licence - I practically need to carry it with me at all times anyways and it's (now) the same size as the ID card, eg. credit card sized.
As for otherwise proving your ID, you need a photographic ID to make purchase of >50 euros on debit card. And since I've never used a cheque in my life, that's pretty routine occasion.
Cars cost more and have worse average fuel efficiency than they did 20 years ago. But they're also a lot safer. If you want to sacrifice a bit of that safety in exchange for better value, a motorcycle (or some sort of motorcycle-ish microcar) might be a good choice for you.
If you call approximately 6-fold likelyhood of suffering fatal or debiliating injury "a bit". Circa 20-fold for new drivers. Tried to find statistic which says so, but apparently people who have analyzed bikers accidents like to only analyze breakdown among age groups, etc, not relative risk to driver..
Passengers in small cars do not usually suffer serious injury after trivial collisions in traffic. Bikers do.