OOH! It's already here! It's called PowerPC. IBM makes these CPU chips that are zippy, but also generate about half the heat of similar-performing x86 chips.
The PowerPC 750GX is a -GREAT- CPU, it's got a modernized G3 core and 1MB full-speed on-die L2 cache. You can get one soon on an ATX board from PegasosPPC. They run at about 1GHz, but they are pretty quick. Heat dissipation stands at about 8 watts.
The Motorola 7447a and 7457 are also good CPUs, but they've got memory-starvation issues because they use the same old bus as the 750-series. I wouldn't bother unless you have altivec-dependent stuff to do (compression).
The IBM 970 is a lightning chip with 64-bitness and HyperTransport. It puts out about 40 watts at 2GHz, compared to over twice that for a similarly-beefy Pentium4.
The whole PowerPC line has some level of compatability with each other, and Linux runs on them all.
Hmm. I just read my post and realized that it didn't sound AT ALL like I meant it to.
What I meant to say was that the guy may have had the stereotype confirmed for him in a way that set him off and closed him off.
Another important thing is that I KNOW I don't have the authority to make sweeping generalizations, as evidenced by my:...I don't have a big-enough sample, I can say that my experience so far...
It's just been my experience, two-for-two in a set of five. Whatever, it's not like I'm about to shave my head and strap on boots, just prefer to work for christians (based on experience so far). I prefer to live with women too, because I've had good experiences so far compared to living with men, it doesn't make me sexist though.
As for the comment about the 'socially acceptable slurs', every culture has people who run around doing that. I lived with Indians for a while and they wouldn't stop cursing Pakistanis, my Armenian relatives still curse Turks, etc. What bothers me is that the climate in America right now tolerates the stereotypical Jewish contempt for Arabs, nobody bats an eye.
So I hope I cleared myself up a bit. I came off very different than I intended, and I was feeling a bit angry when I posted that.
I probably scared Jared real good too. (coworker, reads my posts sometimes)
I had to disengege my ethernet-crainial interface and drink with friends profusely. Now all I've got to show is a bunch of mostly-empty glasses of jungle-juice and a few used condoms.
Fuck this, it wasn't worth it. Bring salshdot back!!!
(btw, took 15 minutes to write this, as I am tooo intoxicated.)
I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, and I have oodles of Jewish friends. I will say that I will NEVER work for another jewish-owned comapny. Of the five jobs I've had the two working for Jews were the hardest to get money from.
One explained to me how I should be glad to have a job and he wouldn't pay overtime because he was 'ideologically opposed' to the idea, the other would cout hours if you filed realistic reimbursement forms and wouldn't pay contractual minimums for state-involved projects.
I'm still getting used to my boss telling me to get things reimbursed and to buy stuff on our budget.
So while I don't have a big-enough sample, I can say that my experience so far is that Jews, while great people, tend to be the ones who will wring their employees for every cent.
Also, I think many Jews have a 'socially acceptable' racism towards arabs and Muslims. I've never seen a Jew get chewed out for slurring an arab, but If I were to chime in and say something about 'niggers' people would kick me out on the street.
At least at this point in time, AGP would be a better choice.
Maybe _right now_, but in the near future having all cards and all boards running ONE kind of port just makes sense. If there's bandwidth, why not use it? It would also reduce the manufacturing costs on the chipset, motherboard, and video-card producers, because they wouldn't have to use as many different kinds of parts.
You'd be in the minority. I'm not aware of many people who think AGP caused any real "problems".
No, chipset makers have to add pins to their northbridges and design elaborate memory interconnects to feed AGP, and more to feed PCI. Killing AGP would be a step towards reducing the complexity of modern computers; it would be a step towards even smaller form-factors and lower power use. Having a single bus would reduce OS complexity and driver issues. Motherboards wouldn't have to add layers to their boards to accomodate the leads for AGP. It would make it easier to have multiple video cards as there would be a SLOT to put a second one, and it could be the same exact card as the one next to it. Eliminating the stupid use-main-memory-as-vram concept would ensure that even onboard GPUs had faster vram, and it would cut back on the issues caused by AGP apertures eating into system ram.
It's not like AGP video cards are hard to find (unlike the 66Mhz PCI video cards that you'd need
Right, but that's just because they're so popular TODAY. a switch to PCI Express would ultimately result in cheaper and more flexible computing. The beauty of my system is that I can put a NIC card in the video slot if I so desire, or a SCSI card, or whatever I wanted. With one type of slot I have more flexibility.
Um, in the near future PCI-X will REPLACE AGP. AGP was a need-based solution because PCI33@33 was just rolled-out and video was hosing the bus. The whole idea of PCI-X is that you can finally put all your devices back onto one port-type.
In my opinion AGP caused more trouble than it fixed. I've got a B&W G3 tower with a double-speed PCI port for the video card (same speed as AGP1) and It's better to have all general-purpose slots than a special one for video.
No, not like the G4 Cube, the cube was an iMac without the monitor. The thing I'm imagining is a small-form uniprocessor G5 box with one PCI-X slot, two 3.5" internal SATA drive bays, two RAM slots, onboard-everything, and a firewire-800 SuperDrive with built-in FW800 and FW->USB2 hub.
The video would be ADC-out, but DVI dongles are cheap (because ADC IS DVI with extra pins), and the thing would come with some sort of mounting to let it attach to the back of the new LCD monitors or be mounted on the underside of a desk.
All you'd have on the desk would be your monitor and the SuperDrive, which would have plugs for the keyboard and mouse (hence the firewire-USB2 hub inside the SuperDrive enclosure).
Hell, you could take it even another level: throw an iPod dock on the SuperDrive enclosure, and Apple's powered speaker port, and the WiFi slot. You'd have all your 'perhipherals' out on this nice upgradeable CD-ROM sized box on your desk, while the CPU sits in another little box behind the monitor or under the desk.
I agree, but what I was really trying to say was that the Power Mac lineup is too beefy. Several more would have sold to people I know if the machine was a reasonable size and weight.
I hope Apple realizes that there's a big market hiding between the Power Mac and iMac products.
Isn't it funny how SFF machiens are back in style? Several Macs would be considered SFF these days. Hell, I just puled a Quadra 660AV from the curb and it's a lot more compact than most PCs today.
I'd love to strangle the idiot who came up with the idea that everyone wanted six PCI slots, especially since integration has been getting better and more pervasive for the last decade.
I consider myself a geek, but my box is only using two slots of six right now (AGP and 1 PCI). I was actually looking for a micro-atx (3 PCI slots) board but none were available with the chipset I sought.
It would be nice if Apple came out with an SFF system with standard ports, or an SFF system that could operate withthird-party monitors but also came with a kit to mount on the rear of their own displays.
No, Imagine hiring a sysadmin who can push the updates automatically to all the boxes from his desk.
Imagine that this same sysadmin has a script that launches nessus against new MAC addresses on the network and puts vulnerable machines on a quarantine VLAN.
Imagine an IT department that is concerned with doing the job as efficiently as possible.
Imagine an IT department that is both lightly staffed, well-funded, and laid-back because so much is automated.
Imagine the cool stuff the people in this department could buy with the extra budget loot. I'm thinking that the Dell server racks could all be replaced by one SAN and an IBM bladecenter.
Well if the 'genetic' algorithms produce anything like me or my cat, you'll be waiting a LONG time for anything to get done. Four billion years of evolution and all I did today was lay in the sun.
I have to agree with cr0sh. You're thinking about things a bit too simplistically.
Imagine that hdparm HASN'T been set properly, your drive reads don't appear to be slow or hog the CPU, and you're happy. But when things get 'hairy' and your'e doing a full-blast copy and trying to play an MP3 (which only needs about 1MB/minute) things are getting all choked-up. I'll bet this wouldn't happen if...
hdparm -A1 -a64 -c1 -d1 -m16 -u1 -W1/dev/hda
(that reads:
enable hardware lookahead, enable 64-sector software precaching, enable 32-bit controller-cpu IO, enable DMS (less interrupts), move 16 sectors (8K) at a time instead of 1, unmask other IRQs while doing disk stuff (probably YOUR problem), and enable writes to be committed to the drive buffer instead of disk.
)
My guess is that your disk access is throwing a LOT of interrupts because you haven't set hdparm right and the sound card is starving for attention behind the wall of data. This wouldn't show up as an overtaxed drive or an overtaxed CPU but it WOULD affect your playback.
I've got an ancient 10GB IDE drive here and I can play MP3s back smoothly while opening OpenOffice.org AND copying files up to the server at 100Mbits/sec. You don't have 'scheduler' issues, your system is like a racecar running 87-octane gas.
Hmm. Interesting point about messing with things we aren't sure of yet. It sort of reminds me of the 'infinite imporbability drive' from the Hitchhiker's Guide series.
I'm imagining all the molecules in a cocktail waitress' panties simultaneously jumping a foot to the left at the party to celebrate the first quantum computer.
As an unofficial PETA activist I must ask you to stop planning to use ferrets as amunition for your sick weasel-guns.
Any attempt to use ferrets as weapons will be considered an act of murder and we will return the favor on behalf of our long slinkylike furry friends....Shooting ferrets from a railgun, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Sadistic bastards.
I got my sign for $5.10 on eBay. I love searching for the misspelled stuff.
I wish I had pics of my place posted online somewhere, but I keep it as clean as possible, I'm somewhat obsesive about the appearance of my pad.
The problem with the place is that the landlord really doesn't wat to FIX anything, so there's a lot of stuff wrong that's HIS problem, and there's little I can do for it. If he rebuilt the porch, fixed the 'water issues' and put up drywall instead of paneling the place would be a dream.
I rent out a finished basement apartment from a friend I met while interning in high school. I pay more than fair rent and all my own utilities. I'm the only one out of all my friends my age (i'm 21, most of my friends are 21-25) who has a place all to himself.
Actually, it's funny, because my Mom actually WANTS me to move back home so she'll have more hands to renovate the thing.
Anywho, you can see I'm sensitive to this sort of thing. I'm going to crawl into bed, I have to wake up for work in four hours.
I have a tritium-powered 'exit' sign that I use as a nightlight in my baseent apartment. Being in the basement means that if the power goes out I can't see a damned thing. The tritium-filled, phosphor-coated tubes in the plastic armor box are more than adequate to cast enough light on the room to find a flashlight.
Apparently I won't have to replace it for about 20 years! Also, if it does end up getting broken (which would take a direct sledgehammer hit by the looks of it) it would cost about $250K to clean up the house for habitation again, and I'd get a few chest x-rays' worth of curies before I got to the door.
Just so you know, I had the thing shipped to me across borders not too long ago, and it arrived on-time. I guess there's no radioactivity-detection in the air-mail chain yet.
Ahh, a social faux-pas. If you accidentally drop your cell phone into your beer the proper response is to act like it didn't even happen. Quickly but casually finish your beer, push the glass containing the cell phone towards the bartender and ask for another cold one. The bartender should bring your towel-dried phone back with the next round.
Now if a wedding ring falls into the beer, it's fair-game for anyone in your party to call "1-2-3-dibs!" whereupon you are socially obligated to give them the ring and drink for keeps.
1. You get the bill, or your insurance company does. Your insurance comapny has to work it out from there. It will be nice to watch the papers fly as huge auto-makers battle huge insurance conglomerates though. I assume that insurance will consider this a liability and charge extra for it for some time.
2. It probably deals badly with badly-acting cars. I know my car often leaps a foot or more when switching from reverse to drive, but I would also assume that if the car is far-enough out of tune the system will be deactivated to prevent fender-benders.
3. Apparently it chooses where to park by choosing the first spot LARGE ENOUGH TO FIT TWO CARS.
Isn't it amazing that the vast majority of people have no idea how to make their cars work for them like this? Most of my friends don't even understand that the auto transmission changes the crankshaft/axel ratio.
I learned that trick by accident, because I was a bicycle-nut. I used to have to ease off the pedals to shift without gnashing the chain, and the habit continued to the car.
I've noticed that my mileage spikes if I leave the oil in my car a bit too long. I drive a '94 Escort wagon with 155,000 miles on it, I average about 85 miles/day with a commute from Providence to Boston.
Anywho, since the car has so many miles on it, it leaks a bit of oil, I can't use 10w-30 because it tends to pour out if the engine gets too warm in Boston traffic. I use 20w-50 oil and I guess it loses some viscosity when it ages. My mileage goes from 30 to 35 mpg at about 2500 miles and I know I have to get my oil changed within the week.
I also see a spike if I'm low on transmission fluid, but I tend to 'feel' that first as it will 'kick' when shifting.
The two things I've been doing to save gas are to coax the auto-transmission into the lowest gear whenever possible by easing off the gas and letting it downshift, and by letting the car warm up for about two full minutes before driving. I live four blocks from the onramp, so letting my engine and transmission warm up before I'm moving 90MPH has been quite beneficial.
Is the Army also going to hire Jonathon Ives to design the look of the hypersonic misiles?
No, actually the reasoning behind the deal has to do with Apple's huge thirst for titanium and aluminum for their cases. The army has graciously offered to let Apple engineers scavenge the 'ghost yards' of retired aircraft for metal in exchange for a supercluster.
Also, the army is keen on developing Apple's 'firewire' into a viable weapons platform, the cables are expected to be 24 inches in diameter and spew 8000 trilobits of flaming death per second.
Slashdot Mirror
OOH! It's already here! It's called PowerPC. IBM makes these CPU chips that are zippy, but also generate about half the heat of similar-performing x86 chips.
The PowerPC 750GX is a -GREAT- CPU, it's got a modernized G3 core and 1MB full-speed on-die L2 cache. You can get one soon on an ATX board from PegasosPPC. They run at about 1GHz, but they are pretty quick. Heat dissipation stands at about 8 watts.
The Motorola 7447a and 7457 are also good CPUs, but they've got memory-starvation issues because they use the same old bus as the 750-series. I wouldn't bother unless you have altivec-dependent stuff to do (compression).
The IBM 970 is a lightning chip with 64-bitness and HyperTransport. It puts out about 40 watts at 2GHz, compared to over twice that for a similarly-beefy Pentium4.
The whole PowerPC line has some level of compatability with each other, and Linux runs on them all.
Happy Camping!
Hmm. I just read my post and realized that it didn't sound AT ALL like I meant it to.
...I don't have a big-enough sample, I can say that my experience so far...
What I meant to say was that the guy may have had the stereotype confirmed for him in a way that set him off and closed him off.
Another important thing is that I KNOW I don't have the authority to make sweeping generalizations, as evidenced by my:
It's just been my experience, two-for-two in a set of five. Whatever, it's not like I'm about to shave my head and strap on boots, just prefer to work for christians (based on experience so far). I prefer to live with women too, because I've had good experiences so far compared to living with men, it doesn't make me sexist though.
As for the comment about the 'socially acceptable slurs', every culture has people who run around doing that. I lived with Indians for a while and they wouldn't stop cursing Pakistanis, my Armenian relatives still curse Turks, etc. What bothers me is that the climate in America right now tolerates the stereotypical Jewish contempt for Arabs, nobody bats an eye.
So I hope I cleared myself up a bit. I came off very different than I intended, and I was feeling a bit angry when I posted that.
I probably scared Jared real good too. (coworker, reads my posts sometimes)
What is this 'meatspace' you speak of?
I had to disengege my ethernet-crainial interface and drink with friends profusely. Now all I've got to show is a bunch of mostly-empty glasses of jungle-juice and a few used condoms.
Fuck this, it wasn't worth it. Bring salshdot back!!!
(btw, took 15 minutes to write this, as I am tooo intoxicated.)
described Jews as "thieving, lying bastards."
I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, and I have oodles of Jewish friends. I will say that I will NEVER work for another jewish-owned comapny. Of the five jobs I've had the two working for Jews were the hardest to get money from.
One explained to me how I should be glad to have a job and he wouldn't pay overtime because he was 'ideologically opposed' to the idea, the other would cout hours if you filed realistic reimbursement forms and wouldn't pay contractual minimums for state-involved projects.
I'm still getting used to my boss telling me to get things reimbursed and to buy stuff on our budget.
So while I don't have a big-enough sample, I can say that my experience so far is that Jews, while great people, tend to be the ones who will wring their employees for every cent.
Also, I think many Jews have a 'socially acceptable' racism towards arabs and Muslims. I've never seen a Jew get chewed out for slurring an arab, but If I were to chime in and say something about 'niggers' people would kick me out on the street.
You mean PCI express. PCI-X is _not_ PCI Express.
My mistake. I was writing a quickie.
At least at this point in time, AGP would be a better choice.
Maybe _right now_, but in the near future having all cards and all boards running ONE kind of port just makes sense. If there's bandwidth, why not use it? It would also reduce the manufacturing costs on the chipset, motherboard, and video-card producers, because they wouldn't have to use as many different kinds of parts.
You'd be in the minority. I'm not aware of many people who think AGP caused any real "problems".
No, chipset makers have to add pins to their northbridges and design elaborate memory interconnects to feed AGP, and more to feed PCI. Killing AGP would be a step towards reducing the complexity of modern computers; it would be a step towards even smaller form-factors and lower power use. Having a single bus would reduce OS complexity and driver issues. Motherboards wouldn't have to add layers to their boards to accomodate the leads for AGP. It would make it easier to have multiple video cards as there would be a SLOT to put a second one, and it could be the same exact card as the one next to it. Eliminating the stupid use-main-memory-as-vram concept would ensure that even onboard GPUs had faster vram, and it would cut back on the issues caused by AGP apertures eating into system ram.
It's not like AGP video cards are hard to find (unlike the 66Mhz PCI video cards that you'd need
Right, but that's just because they're so popular TODAY. a switch to PCI Express would ultimately result in cheaper and more flexible computing. The beauty of my system is that I can put a NIC card in the video slot if I so desire, or a SCSI card, or whatever I wanted. With one type of slot I have more flexibility.
Um, in the near future PCI-X will REPLACE AGP. AGP was a need-based solution because PCI33@33 was just rolled-out and video was hosing the bus. The whole idea of PCI-X is that you can finally put all your devices back onto one port-type.
In my opinion AGP caused more trouble than it fixed. I've got a B&W G3 tower with a double-speed PCI port for the video card (same speed as AGP1) and It's better to have all general-purpose slots than a special one for video.
No, not like the G4 Cube, the cube was an iMac without the monitor. The thing I'm imagining is a small-form uniprocessor G5 box with one PCI-X slot, two 3.5" internal SATA drive bays, two RAM slots, onboard-everything, and a firewire-800 SuperDrive with built-in FW800 and FW->USB2 hub.
The video would be ADC-out, but DVI dongles are cheap (because ADC IS DVI with extra pins), and the thing would come with some sort of mounting to let it attach to the back of the new LCD monitors or be mounted on the underside of a desk.
All you'd have on the desk would be your monitor and the SuperDrive, which would have plugs for the keyboard and mouse (hence the firewire-USB2 hub inside the SuperDrive enclosure).
Hell, you could take it even another level: throw an iPod dock on the SuperDrive enclosure, and Apple's powered speaker port, and the WiFi slot. You'd have all your 'perhipherals' out on this nice upgradeable CD-ROM sized box on your desk, while the CPU sits in another little box behind the monitor or under the desk.
you'll find yourself randomly clicking on buttons and menu items while praying and cursing
You're the reason my bank statements were two days late last month, aren't you?
I agree, but what I was really trying to say was that the Power Mac lineup is too beefy. Several more would have sold to people I know if the machine was a reasonable size and weight.
I hope Apple realizes that there's a big market hiding between the Power Mac and iMac products.
Isn't it funny how SFF machiens are back in style? Several Macs would be considered SFF these days. Hell, I just puled a Quadra 660AV from the curb and it's a lot more compact than most PCs today.
I'd love to strangle the idiot who came up with the idea that everyone wanted six PCI slots, especially since integration has been getting better and more pervasive for the last decade.
I consider myself a geek, but my box is only using two slots of six right now (AGP and 1 PCI). I was actually looking for a micro-atx (3 PCI slots) board but none were available with the chipset I sought.
It would be nice if Apple came out with an SFF system with standard ports, or an SFF system that could operate withthird-party monitors but also came with a kit to mount on the rear of their own displays.
Thought I'd chime in and mention that Jobs gets paid $1/year. He does get 'taken care of' by Apple, but his pay is only $1.
And they went zero-debt recently, probably to make a headline on wall street to 'showcase' that Apple isn't in any fiscal trouble anymore.
No, Imagine hiring a sysadmin who can push the updates automatically to all the boxes from his desk.
Imagine that this same sysadmin has a script that launches nessus against new MAC addresses on the network and puts vulnerable machines on a quarantine VLAN.
Imagine an IT department that is concerned with doing the job as efficiently as possible.
Imagine an IT department that is both lightly staffed, well-funded, and laid-back because so much is automated.
Imagine the cool stuff the people in this department could buy with the extra budget loot. I'm thinking that the Dell server racks could all be replaced by one SAN and an IBM bladecenter.
Well if the 'genetic' algorithms produce anything like me or my cat, you'll be waiting a LONG time for anything to get done. Four billion years of evolution and all I did today was lay in the sun.
I have to agree with cr0sh. You're thinking about things a bit too simplistically.
/dev/hda
Imagine that hdparm HASN'T been set properly, your drive reads don't appear to be slow or hog the CPU, and you're happy. But when things get 'hairy' and your'e doing a full-blast copy and trying to play an MP3 (which only needs about 1MB/minute) things are getting all choked-up. I'll bet this wouldn't happen if...
hdparm -A1 -a64 -c1 -d1 -m16 -u1 -W1
(that reads:
enable hardware lookahead, enable 64-sector software precaching, enable 32-bit controller-cpu IO, enable DMS (less interrupts), move 16 sectors (8K) at a time instead of 1, unmask other IRQs while doing disk stuff (probably YOUR problem), and enable writes to be committed to the drive buffer instead of disk.
)
My guess is that your disk access is throwing a LOT of interrupts because you haven't set hdparm right and the sound card is starving for attention behind the wall of data. This wouldn't show up as an overtaxed drive or an overtaxed CPU but it WOULD affect your playback.
I've got an ancient 10GB IDE drive here and I can play MP3s back smoothly while opening OpenOffice.org AND copying files up to the server at 100Mbits/sec. You don't have 'scheduler' issues, your system is like a racecar running 87-octane gas.
Hmm. Interesting point about messing with things we aren't sure of yet. It sort of reminds me of the 'infinite imporbability drive' from the Hitchhiker's Guide series.
I'm imagining all the molecules in a cocktail waitress' panties simultaneously jumping a foot to the left at the party to celebrate the first quantum computer.
As an unofficial PETA activist I must ask you to stop planning to use ferrets as amunition for your sick weasel-guns.
...Shooting ferrets from a railgun, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Sadistic bastards.
Any attempt to use ferrets as weapons will be considered an act of murder and we will return the favor on behalf of our long slinkylike furry friends.
I got my sign for $5.10 on eBay. I love searching for the misspelled stuff.
I wish I had pics of my place posted online somewhere, but I keep it as clean as possible, I'm somewhat obsesive about the appearance of my pad.
The problem with the place is that the landlord really doesn't wat to FIX anything, so there's a lot of stuff wrong that's HIS problem, and there's little I can do for it. If he rebuilt the porch, fixed the 'water issues' and put up drywall instead of paneling the place would be a dream.
Hey, that's not fair!
I moved out of mom's place when I was 19!
I rent out a finished basement apartment from a friend I met while interning in high school. I pay more than fair rent and all my own utilities. I'm the only one out of all my friends my age (i'm 21, most of my friends are 21-25) who has a place all to himself.
Actually, it's funny, because my Mom actually WANTS me to move back home so she'll have more hands to renovate the thing.
Anywho, you can see I'm sensitive to this sort of thing. I'm going to crawl into bed, I have to wake up for work in four hours.
Oh, I am. Right now I have to fold it face-down to sleep if I've had a rough day. It should mellow out nicely over the next two decades. :-)
I have a tritium-powered 'exit' sign that I use as a nightlight in my baseent apartment. Being in the basement means that if the power goes out I can't see a damned thing. The tritium-filled, phosphor-coated tubes in the plastic armor box are more than adequate to cast enough light on the room to find a flashlight.
Apparently I won't have to replace it for about 20 years! Also, if it does end up getting broken (which would take a direct sledgehammer hit by the looks of it) it would cost about $250K to clean up the house for habitation again, and I'd get a few chest x-rays' worth of curies before I got to the door.
Just so you know, I had the thing shipped to me across borders not too long ago, and it arrived on-time. I guess there's no radioactivity-detection in the air-mail chain yet.
Ahh, a social faux-pas. If you accidentally drop your cell phone into your beer the proper response is to act like it didn't even happen. Quickly but casually finish your beer, push the glass containing the cell phone towards the bartender and ask for another cold one. The bartender should bring your towel-dried phone back with the next round.
Now if a wedding ring falls into the beer, it's fair-game for anyone in your party to call "1-2-3-dibs!" whereupon you are socially obligated to give them the ring and drink for keeps.
1. You get the bill, or your insurance company does. Your insurance comapny has to work it out from there. It will be nice to watch the papers fly as huge auto-makers battle huge insurance conglomerates though. I assume that insurance will consider this a liability and charge extra for it for some time.
2. It probably deals badly with badly-acting cars. I know my car often leaps a foot or more when switching from reverse to drive, but I would also assume that if the car is far-enough out of tune the system will be deactivated to prevent fender-benders.
3. Apparently it chooses where to park by choosing the first spot LARGE ENOUGH TO FIT TWO CARS.
Isn't it amazing that the vast majority of people have no idea how to make their cars work for them like this? Most of my friends don't even understand that the auto transmission changes the crankshaft/axel ratio.
I learned that trick by accident, because I was a bicycle-nut. I used to have to ease off the pedals to shift without gnashing the chain, and the habit continued to the car.
I've noticed that my mileage spikes if I leave the oil in my car a bit too long. I drive a '94 Escort wagon with 155,000 miles on it, I average about 85 miles/day with a commute from Providence to Boston.
Anywho, since the car has so many miles on it, it leaks a bit of oil, I can't use 10w-30 because it tends to pour out if the engine gets too warm in Boston traffic. I use 20w-50 oil and I guess it loses some viscosity when it ages. My mileage goes from 30 to 35 mpg at about 2500 miles and I know I have to get my oil changed within the week.
I also see a spike if I'm low on transmission fluid, but I tend to 'feel' that first as it will 'kick' when shifting.
The two things I've been doing to save gas are to coax the auto-transmission into the lowest gear whenever possible by easing off the gas and letting it downshift, and by letting the car warm up for about two full minutes before driving. I live four blocks from the onramp, so letting my engine and transmission warm up before I'm moving 90MPH has been quite beneficial.
Is the Army also going to hire Jonathon Ives to design the look of the hypersonic misiles?
No, actually the reasoning behind the deal has to do with Apple's huge thirst for titanium and aluminum for their cases. The army has graciously offered to let Apple engineers scavenge the 'ghost yards' of retired aircraft for metal in exchange for a supercluster.
Also, the army is keen on developing Apple's 'firewire' into a viable weapons platform, the cables are expected to be 24 inches in diameter and spew 8000 trilobits of flaming death per second.