The Beverly Hills crowd isn't quite large enough to make any sort of difference if they all went ought and bought $90K solar-electric car systems. Even those that have the $90K to spend are going to look at the EV1 (or equivilent) with its lack of horsepower, amenities, and style and turn their noses up at it. An LA socialite isn't going to be so crass as to spend $90K on a car and associated infrastructure that will just BARELY make it from Glendale to Irvine just to be cool. At least with their $60K UAV they have the ability to leave a trail of devastation in their wake.
Hybrids are a much much better solution right now than PV fueled electric cars. A hybrid is going to have a similar power output to a car of its same class and size but with a much smaller engine and much lower emission rates. The 2003 Civic hybrid will roll about 620 miles on a single tank of gas and can still keep up with its much less efficient all gas cousins. The University of Liege and Breuer Technical Development in Belgium stuck a VW Lupo engine (80+ mpg) on a parallel electric assist drivetrain and was able to garner 21-30% emission decreases over Euro III standards. Hybrid UAVs could easily make an appearance in the market with enough interest from consumers. Emissions and fuel economy would increase immensely with a minimal impact to the overall UAV road raping experience.
Hmmm. Let's have a look at the numbers to see if a PV rig is worth buying in conunction with an electric car. I really don't know so we both might learn something new today.
When all is said and done about 1000 watts of sunlight falls on a square meter of ground under optimal conditions. Since sunlight at most will only fall for 12 hours of the day and in the morning and evening the amount of sunlight hitting a PV panel is reduced a general rule of thumb for PV panels is to figure over the count of 12 hours the average output of a PV panel will be 42% of its maximum output. PV panels are pretty wasteful devices and for your average panel under great conditions you have to assume about 13% efficiency, 130 watts of 1000 per square meter. So if we work this out (.42 x 12 hours x 130W/m^2) we end up with 655W per day per square meter. We need to remember this number, it will be important later I believe.
The EV1's standard battery compliment is a 18.7kWh valve regulated lead acid battery assembly. The EV1 will go about 130 miles at 45mph on a single charge. In order for your PV setup to generate enough power to recharge your EV1 once a day you'll need 28.55 square meters of PV paneling plus inverters and batteries to store the power while your EV1 charges at night. Check out the pricing, a 12kW system even after California's $4/W rebate costs you over thirty six thousand dollars ($36,000+). Adding the cost of a 6kW and 12kW system to recharge your EV1 you're out more than $54,000 up front. Oh yeah, the EV1 costs $34,000 for the base model. That is $88,000 in expenses.
If you distribute that cost over 20 years at 130 miles a day it comes to 949,000 miles. Over 20 years that is $.09 per mile. Over 30 years (the absolute maximum lifetime of your PV panels and probably far beyond the life of your EV1), you get 1,423,500 miles at $.06 per mile.
Say you get a diesel car like a TDI Jetta and get say 50mpg out of it and you buy all your fuel up front (to make it fair). We'll put Diesel prices at $1.54 per gallon (the average price in the US as of Feb 4 2003). That is $.03 per mile.
In the end you see solar-electric is FAR more expensive in both the long term and short term. I intentionally leave out the cost of maintenance and other mid term costs. Neither the EV1 or the TDI Jetta is going to run for a million and a half miles without a metric assload of repairs and tuning. You still end up with a Diesel car costing a third as much over 20 years and half as much over 30 years. The solar-electric option has a lower long term ecological impact as the ecological cost of the PV and car construction is a one time thing where driving a Diesel is a continuous polluting process. Then again with batter replacements for the EV1 you're looking at some serious environmental impact. With the Jetta you can stick some new high tech catalytic converters on it and have emissions that are cleaner than the surrounding air in some cities.
If you need the self satisfaction of owning a PV system and an electric car and have almost ninety grand to plop down then your idea has merit. For the rest of the country and ostensibly world reality is a harsh mistress. Solar electric is still inefficient and expensive, far too much of both to gain truly wide acceptance in the near term.
If you can maintain an air of hype-proofness it is fairly easy to see how stupid the "Hydrogen Economy" ideas are in both the short term and long term. Hydrogen is merely an energy carrier a finicky one at that. Many of its proponents only see the end result, a car that spits out warm wet air, without fully realizing the infrastructure that warm wet air is generated with.
Diesel, especially biodiesel has a much better cost/benefit analysis but isn't as sexy as technology as hydrogen. Even the word Diesel fares ill in comparison to the dynamicism of hydrogen's syllibles. It also seems to me that the American public, three quarters of which live in urban areas, connotate Diesel with dirty and noisy MAC trucks and pubtrans buses. If they're a little more technical they probably instantly think of Diesel cars like the TDI Golf and Jetta with their 90hp-I-think-I-can-make-it-up-to-passing-speed engines.
What Diesel hybrid proponents ought to do is start up a massive test drive program. Give a couple people the keys to a Diesel hybrid for a week with a full tank. If more people see they can actually use freeway on-ramps effectively AND have most of the tank of gas left by the end of the week they'd see Diesel hybrids and hopefully Diesel engines in a much different light. Electric assist makes a huge difference in the car's feel, especially for those who shun anything that won't pop off a light like a Roman candle.
The Honda Dualnote concept car is an excellent example of this idea, the combustion engine charges an ultracapacitor while idling or braking. Said capacitor gives an extra umph (100hp worth) when accelerating. If you were to stick such a system on a high efficiency yet power deprived car like the TDI Lupo it'd make for a fair bit of go juice without expending a ton of gas juice. Citroën and Audi have shown that it is possible to make exceptionally clean burning Diesels which is promising for the Diesel-smells-like-poo opponents. Nissan's Gloria is making some great advancements using toroidal CVTs instead of conventional gearboxs.
These sorts of advances lend well to designing a really badass Diesel hybrid. From conception to fruition Diesels are going to be far cheaper than any hydrogen powered car for the next several decades. Diesel fuel is much easier to store and transport than pure hydrogen, it is more robust than methanol, and with biodiesel is renewable and is only pumping the CO2 back into the environment that was used to grow it.
Hype about hydrogen based utopian societies are the same sort of pie in the sky crap that has been fed to people about fusion power. It's payoff point is always somewhere out in the distant future where we all use transporters to get to work. Hydrogen COULD be viable as could nuclear fusion. They could be viable technologies at a point in the future but not now and not any time soon. Hyping these technologies up does little to fix any problems anyone has in the here and now which is where we live.
Hydrogen will be a good idea some day but unfortunately not today. Until then we ought to work towards improving what we have available to its most efficient state while working on the technology of next year. I personally think Diesel's time is due but clean and efficient gasoline engines would work just as well for me. I just want more cars on the road with that get 40+ miles per gallon. I'd really love to see 90+ miles to the gallon. The more fuel efficient our cars get the less dependent we are on the gas pump to lead functional lives. Three times the gas milage means a third of your current fuel expenses. I'm sure everyone in meat space can find a use for a couple hundred extra dollars left at the end of the year, for some a few thousand.
I can't agree that Palm (3Com) released a PDA that did what a PDA ought to have done. They released a glorified electronic rolodex with a pen rather than a miniscule keyboard. In the realm of personal organizers the Palms are amazing in their capability, in the realm of PDAs they don't live up to their task. I think the Newton did a much better job of being a digital assistant than the Palms ever have, until maybe very recently.
Without the ability to connect to periphrials the Palms were entirely dependent on a PC to get anything off the Pilot and into the real world. With the Newton you could write or type up a document, plug into a LocalTalk or IR capable printer and you were all set. You could also plug into a phone jack and send a fax to somebody. As Under Siege 2: Dark Territory taught us this could be a life saving feature. Rosetta/Paragraph was an equally important feature, at least in NOS 2.x. It really adjusted the Newton to work with you rather than the other way around. NOS 2.1's HWR is pretty good in my opinion because it can take my near illegible scribble and make use out of it.
Had Newton Inc. been around a while longer I think we would have seen small Pilot sized Newtons running on either system-on-a-chip ARM 710s or maybe even StrongARMs. An LC Newton was definitely in the works and working prototypes probably exist. IIRC the LC Newts were Pilot sized versions of the MP130 which was the pinnacle of the 1x0 line.
I agree about Palm's direction though. Had they NOT had the Newton to feel its way through the market they would have never gotten an accepted product out the door. They could sit back and watch Apple wade through its troubles and then make a fraction of the mistakes.
The point of my original comment wasn't to say teaching is hard, the point is you put up with alot of crap as one. You're also forced to deal with lots of things that don't fit into your job description like Linux administrator. A French teacher has little use for Linux and thus little inspiration to learn to use it, the same goes for an Algebra teacher. If you go and be a computer teacher more power to you but you're not going to be terribly up beat when you're penned in to teach a literature or language course. I've done some consulting for schools and this is what happens. A teacher who shows an ability to type is considered an expert and is thus made the head of the school's computer lab. The ability to use AOL does not a network administrator make. Said teacher may love to teach but is loath to run the school's computer lab.
Wow you taught...a single semester. Try it for a couple years and see how that goes. Try doing it for a couple years with it being your only source of income.
Time: several years from now Place: your future job
Coworker: Hey Tom how do you like your insultingly low "living" wage and a room full of monkeys throwing their feces at you all day long?
You: Well you see I don't like it very much, I'm much less interested in this job than I was several years ago.
Coworker: Well life is a bitch ain't it?
You: Well I would take my bachelor's degree and do something but I have a mortgage to pay and a car loan.
Coworker: Wow you're in a sticky wicket there aren't you buddy?
You: Yeah I suppose I am.
Boss: Hey Tom, because we're facing severe cuts due to ridiculous spending on pork barrel political projects we need you to repair the company's entire fleet of delivery vans. It doesn't matter you have no training or qualifications in this position we're going to froce you into it regardless. We've got you by the balls because we don't pay you enough to pay your bills and save a signifigant nest egg of liquid assets.
Tom: Wow this really sucks, I sure have no zeal for my job anymore.
Feces slinging monkey passing by on a skateboard: Tom is such a whiny bitch, he should have more zeal for his job. The fact that he doesn't is a shame.
NeXTSTEP cum OSX already has all this functionality. If you'd like to see more of this functionality in a Linux environment GNUStep would be a great place to start. Other than GNUStep I haven't seen any real OO environments for Linux/free OSes which is disappointing because I really think they are a cut above more traditional style desktop environments.
They're confusing the hell out of me then. All over the LIGO sites they're claiming to be looking at particular celestial objects, supernovae and black holes and such. Unless I read their stuff wrong they're trying to say they intend to look at particular types of objects to find gravity waves coming from them. Then again I don't see how any particular object can be focused on with these things so maybe they do indeed just want to see if they can find any gravity waves coming from anything.
I've been following LIGO for a long time and am pretty excited about the sort of data that is bound to come out of it. Having yet another type of observatory viewing different aspects of celestial events is ok in my book. The one thing I've not been able to understand about the detector is how it is aimed to look at a particular celestial object. I've got a decent understanding of interferometers being a laser loving lad but I'm at a loss figuring out how an individual event can be focused on.
I've been thinking maybe a particular object is flagged out of an optical catalogue then the total data chunk is parsed for waves that should be coming from that particular object. I'm imagining the detector as like a dipole antenna and having two of them a particular object is tracked using a sort of gravitational Doppler shift between the two (soon to be three) sites. Am I close or do I need a few more physics classes? Can anybody in the know shed some light (pun intended) on this problem for me?
Uh..do you have a history of eating paintchips or have some sort of clinical problem preventing you from making logical conclusions?
1. ADC is DVI with USB and power pins added. The AGP pinout spec has power pins facilitated, Apple's just the first motherboard manufacturer to make any use of this. ADC is fully compatible with DVI, it is just more convenient because it reduces wire clutter behind your computer.
2. Apple didn't specifically disable particular CD-ROMs from booting, It is the CD-ROM manufacturer screwing with the drives ATAPI firmware that prevents some drives from working.
3. There's no proprietary extensions for booting MacOS don't posit assumptions as facts. It has Forth modules that make booting pre-X versions of MacOS possible. There were just shortcuts that launched the OS8/9 bootloader. The OF command you're thinking of is mac-boot. Considering you can do what you will with OF modules you can make a linux-boot module if you so choose.
4. That is just absurd, the AirPort card is INTERNAL. Few if any PCMCIA card are designed to fit into an internal slot. The only thing Apple did to the Orinoco was to remove the built-in antenna to be able to hoot the card up to the system's antenna. How this is somehow evil and a sabotaging of the PCMCIA slot I don't see.
If you wanted to boot OSX on an IBM PPC machine you'd need to write your own drivers for the memory controller and other little odds and ends but the system itself would likely run just fine. There's nothing special OF does besides run the bootloader which is far from proprietary because I can launch Linux at boot time as well as MacOS.
You throw the monopoly moniker around far too freely like many of the slashdot ilk. A vertical monopoly where a product goes from conception to fruition under the aegis of a single company is entirely different from a horizontal monpoly where a single company owns all means for an industry to do business. Anyone ever saying a vertical monpoly is bad is being ridiculous and dense. Vertical monopolies can be avoided, if you don't buy from Apple you don't support their monopoly. If you don't buy from Sun you don't support their monopoly. However if you buy from HP you can't switch to Dell or Gateway to avoid Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft's monopoly stangles the industry, Apple's only strangles their small fraction of the market.
Then you go and bring up proprietary hardware, I'd really like to know what the hell in a Mac you think is so proprietary. Every Mac since the iMac has had OpenFirmware which lets you boot any OS you want to on a Mac. Older Macs had a MacROM but those have been dropped since the iMac. What is left that is proprietary? Hmmm, Bluetooth? No. Firewire? Nope. USB? Hmm not quite. AGP? Again no. PCI? Sorry. SDRAM? Try again.
What the hell is up with Safari and UBB? I can't seem to log onto many UBB powered sites using Safari, are there any special tricks to get this to work? I was hoping with this release I might be able to not use OW or IE to post to UBB boards but I guess I'll just have to wait a bit longer. This is pretty much the only real downside I've personally come across with Safari, everything else I've wanted to do it has worked fine and fast. Is there a actuallyWorkWithUBB flag in the plist I need to set or something?
I've tried everything available through Safari's interface including enabling popup windows, allowing cookies from everyone, and allowing every form of script and plug-in to run. So far I've had big fat zero luck. And yes I've submitted bug reports, including the page's source and any pertinent details of my particular setup.
Glide's problems were the icing on the cake for 3Dfx, not the cause of its troubles. Their Glide/OpenGl problems stemmed from the larger problem of the company wearing blinders with regard to their competition. They couldn't bring themselves to see nVidia and ATi were releasing chips that blew the Voodoo3 out of water. They seriously overestimated the loyalty of their customer base and the volitility of the market. They were competing in a market where a six month delay means a serious ass kicking. Now nVidia seems to be following suit, they have aggressive development strategies but they really seem to think their customers will stick with whatever crap they decide to throw them even if its six months late and under performing. This is why I draw parallels between 3Dfx and nVidia.
I've been thinking for a while that something like this combined with a combination satellite/digital radio receiver and GPS/map would work wonders at getting people around traffic jams. A lot of high congestion areas in urbanized counties have electronic traffic monitoring, if they'd go the next step and get that data out to everyone, there'd be a real change in the way people commute.
The way I see it digital/satellite radio is next to useless for music, you just get the same crap you find on the FM dial. Digital/satellite radio has a redeeming aspect in the fact it is a digital stream of information. In between packets carrying Britney Spears and Metalica you can stick useful data like say...freeway information. If traffic advisory stations broadcast easily parsed text streams inbetween their [digital] audio broadcasts a smart box in your car could pick out the text and parse it for display.
Since people looking down to read text advisories would end up being the sources of advisories themselves the computer could do the hard work for them. If you break up a particular freeway into arbitrary sections and in your text advisory say "101:57:32 101-405:10" (101 for the freeway, 57 for the 57th mile/section, 32 for the speed in mph and 101-405 for an interchange and 10 for the speed) the computer could change that section of the freeway on your simplified street map to being a dark red. The area you were going 75 on would be a nice bright green. It could even do you one better by figuring out via GPS which mile/section you were on and tell you approximatly how long until you got to the jam and possibly give you alternate surface routes past it. If you wanted it wouldn't be terribly difficult to have the computer just give you a verbal warning and alternate route suggestions.
If you have a decent number of drivers knowing the future road conditions they can be a little more careful when coming to a jam. There'd be less (in an ideal situation) screeching brakes because some jackass is suprised to see a line of tail lights. Also being as this stuff could use digital radio infrastructure which is on its way and not take up much more space or processing power in your card radio it'd be pretty convenient.
Ultimately a reduction in traffic jams is going to mean a reduction in injuries from them and much less environment impact from having half a googlplex of cars on the road. Current traffic advisories do a good job of giving you fair warning as long as you listen to a station that does regular enough advisories for them to be useful. They're also easily clocked out by playing a CD (and thus not listening to the radio). A digital system could play a CD or any radio station and still provide visual or audible warnings gathered from traffic services. It's no solution to traffic problems but in the long run might save a lot of lives, headaches, and gallons of black stuff.
If this rumor mongering is all true, as I'm not convinced, it is yet another eerie 3Dfx parallel attached to the GFFX (E3DP?). Since the Radeon 9700 was released I've been really anxious to see what nVidia was going to answer with in the form of the NV30. I'm not one to buy the high end obsolete within a week video cards but I really want to know what chip I'm going to see in discounted cards in six months.
I was seriously unimpressed with the GFFX. This is an odd feeling as new nVidia cards have in the past been truly impressive and something to lust after.
"I sense something. A presence I've not felt since..."
While 3Dfx was not in the exact same position as nVidia is market penetration wise and financially it seems nVidia is pulling a technological page from their book. The GFFX 5800 Ultra Megazord seems a great deal like the Voodoo 5. It is a power hungry beat of a video card that doesn't live up to all of the hype that's been surrounding it since August when the Radeon 9700 needed an answer by nVidia.
Of course the GFFX will improve and in six more months they'll have a GFFXMXKY that comes as the toy in a box of Count Chocula. Sharing many similarities with the Voodoo 5 isn't going to necessarily Doom the card (get it?) but it is giving ATi a huge shot in the arm. They've got a 5 month old card that performs about as well as nVidia's latest offering, that is something they haven't been able to boast before. All ATi has to do is not screw up and they will get back a bunch of users who abandoned them when the GeForce smoked the Radeons like fat chronic blunts with a mere driver upgrade.
Even though ATi has the advantage now I think nVidia will come back with a really strong chip PDQ. They aren't going to accept defeat because their card requires an onboard RTG to run decently. If ATi keeps their momentum going they could top even the next NV chip nVidia will release. Do I care one way or the other? Hell no. I don't want to see either of them lose out, I want as much competition as possible to I get more frames with excellent visual quality for the buck. It will be great to be able to enable all of Doom 3's visual effects with AA and still be able to play the game, especially after people like Raven or Rogue license the engine and build the next Jedi Knight or Alice with it.
AFAIK the Virtix Letterbox plug-in ought to allow you to stretch your movies back to their original 16:9 format. Letterbox normally just interpolates the 4:3 video but since the frames were originally 16:9 it ought to look pretty good after running the filter over the video. I think the Letterbox plug-in is still offered in the Virtix sample pack. If it is try it and see if it works.
Did you grow up under power lines or something? Apple's "monopoly" if you can even call it that is a vertical integration monopoly. Microsoft's OS monopoly is a horizontal monopoly. The only thing Apple can affect is its own product, if they say OSX comes on all Macs then OSX comes on all Macs. Does anyone have to care? No. Only Apple customers are affected. The same goes for Dell or HP's color schemes, if they say all their PCs will be black or smog brown does anyone have to care? Only Dell or HP customers. Each of these companies are selling THEIR product and can do as they please with it.
Microsoft is a horizontal monopoly in the PC market. They control an entire tier of the business. If they make a change to Windows do people care? They have to no matter if they are Dell, HP, or IBM customers. The fate of the PC market is in the hands of Microsoft, not Dell, HP, or Apple. What Microsoft says with regards to the PC industry goes.
If you're still having trouble here is another example. FoMoCo makes parts for Ford vehicles, not Chrystler vehicles. If FoMoCo did something with their products only Ford customers would have to care, Chrystler customers would not. Ford is vertically integrated in that respect. Chrystler is the same way with Mopar. If you think Ford is too restrictive with their products you can buy a car from another company not affiliated with Ford.
However if OPEC decides oil will cost X amount per barrel you have to care because no matter who made your car you need gasoline to run it. Railing against Ford because OPEC made gas prices soar would be ridiculous. Being angry their cars aren't more fuel efficient or something might be valid but not the simple fact gasoline is expensive. If you don't like the fact Apple sells an iPod with an OS buy from someone else. If they welded the iPod shut to prevent anyone from ever seeing the magic blue pixie dust that made it work you might have a valid concern. As of right now you're getting upset over a complete non-issue. If you want to throw the word monopoly around learn to use it properly.
NASA's been trying for years to get something new but they keep running into a smaller and smaller budget coupled with political problems. Because of the way NASA was chartered their budget is at the behest of Congressional commitees. People get on these commitees to grab gonvernment contracts for their constituants. The solid rocket boosters aren't shipped across the continent for efficiency. So unfortunately a smaller cheaper faster reusable launch vehicle will not be launched until the Shuttle is operationally useless. It makes members of budget commitees far too much money to get rid of until the very end of its operational lifetime.
You're forgetting that Cocoa and OpenStep are source compatible. OpenStep is a free specification, one that the GNU-Step is making decent progress reimplementing. If you want to write a cross platform app you can target it to the Cocoa/OpenStep API and have it be compatible on anything that will run GNU-Step. That was the original point of the OpenStep initiative was so enable an OS vendor to write their own OpenStep implementation and run source compatible apps. If your compiler supported fat binaries you could easily have a single executable that would run on just about any OpenStep host.
No Apple isn't about to release the source for Quartz or some of their more tightly held technologies, this however does not preclude you from writing open source applications that will run on both Linux and MacOS. For a large commercial company Apple's done a pretty good job with open source thus far. They've given code back to several open source projects including but not limited to enhancements to GCC and KHTML. They're also using a ton of open specifications in their products which makes it quite easy for you to make hetrogeneous Linux/MacOS environments work very well together.
I'm not sure your system purchasing comments make much sense either. You're saying a company shouldn't ever change platforms (to anything) because the move is expensive. Well duh. That however doesn't mean switching platforms whole hog or incrementally is a bad thing. Would you not want a company to consider migrating from Windows to Linux if Linux was a better proposition for them?
As for the hardware, it isn't the fastest or cheapest in the world but it lasts a pretty long time. Out of the box they're going to last a while but if you're so inclined you can upgrade them for a pretty decent price. I've seen more than a couple "obsolete" Macs with a G3 or G4 upgrade card running OSX without any problem. Just about any PCI Mac with a little tinkering will run OSX. Even without upgrading to OSX there's a ton of old Macs that are plenty usable.
You answered your own question. MacAmp Lite X's developers just gave up because they didn't think enough people were going to use it and buy it from them. That isn't Apple stifling innovation, it is a developer trying to sell a product in a competitive market and not having the wherewithal to keep up development in the face of real competition.
Apparently in some cases like MacAmp Lite X, Apple producing a competitive product will discourage developers. Whether that is their intention or not isn't something anyone but Apple can really answer. In other cases Apple's competition has spurned companies to work even harder. Avid is a pretty good example of this, their DV Xpress package is a direct competitor to FCP. With FCP's meteoric rise to popularity and OSX being a capable OS they decided that they didn't want the Mac-only FCP dominating DV XPress' market. Thus they released DV Xpress 3.5 on both Windows XP and OSX. Now video editing on OSX is at a great point because you've got DV Xpress and FCP competing for the same userbase, it is in the best interest to both companies to produce the mostest badass versions of their software they can to increase sales.
This point is what it comes down to, when you have competition you can either throw in the towel or try harder. Had MacAmp's developers made MacAmp Lite into a real powerhouse of a media player that picked up where iTunes failed they would have kept a decent sized user base. So to answer your question, no I don't think Apple is stifling innovation on anyone's part like Microsoft. It's up to people their programs compete with to make a better product. iTunes may be free but it isn't the end all be all of MP3 players. There's still room for an iTunes killer.
Uh, I don't think you've ever done purchasing in a corporate environment. In a small firm you might get away with it but a larger company would rather pack a machine up and send it off to La La land to get repaired. It isn't a technical challenge to replace the part but it is a red tape hassle. Companies don't want people on the clock driving around because they are liable if anything happens to them. Obviously there's exceptions where the person's job description includes driving around but computer techs rarely have this included.
It is also a political problem. If the tech manager is allowed to build a bunch of custom computer systems the computer illiterate in the company are at their mercy. Upper management is not going to buy a system that gives a middle manager complete control over like that. They'd rather spend more time/money buying from Compaq or IBM so any problem can be outsourced and the IT department gets to do as little as possible.
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The Beverly Hills crowd isn't quite large enough to make any sort of difference if they all went ought and bought $90K solar-electric car systems. Even those that have the $90K to spend are going to look at the EV1 (or equivilent) with its lack of horsepower, amenities, and style and turn their noses up at it. An LA socialite isn't going to be so crass as to spend $90K on a car and associated infrastructure that will just BARELY make it from Glendale to Irvine just to be cool. At least with their $60K UAV they have the ability to leave a trail of devastation in their wake.
Hybrids are a much much better solution right now than PV fueled electric cars. A hybrid is going to have a similar power output to a car of its same class and size but with a much smaller engine and much lower emission rates. The 2003 Civic hybrid will roll about 620 miles on a single tank of gas and can still keep up with its much less efficient all gas cousins. The University of Liege and Breuer Technical Development in Belgium stuck a VW Lupo engine (80+ mpg) on a parallel electric assist drivetrain and was able to garner 21-30% emission decreases over Euro III standards. Hybrid UAVs could easily make an appearance in the market with enough interest from consumers. Emissions and fuel economy would increase immensely with a minimal impact to the overall UAV road raping experience.
Hmmm. Let's have a look at the numbers to see if a PV rig is worth buying in conunction with an electric car. I really don't know so we both might learn something new today.
When all is said and done about 1000 watts of sunlight falls on a square meter of ground under optimal conditions. Since sunlight at most will only fall for 12 hours of the day and in the morning and evening the amount of sunlight hitting a PV panel is reduced a general rule of thumb for PV panels is to figure over the count of 12 hours the average output of a PV panel will be 42% of its maximum output. PV panels are pretty wasteful devices and for your average panel under great conditions you have to assume about 13% efficiency, 130 watts of 1000 per square meter. So if we work this out (.42 x 12 hours x 130W/m^2) we end up with 655W per day per square meter. We need to remember this number, it will be important later I believe.
The EV1's standard battery compliment is a 18.7kWh valve regulated lead acid battery assembly. The EV1 will go about 130 miles at 45mph on a single charge. In order for your PV setup to generate enough power to recharge your EV1 once a day you'll need 28.55 square meters of PV paneling plus inverters and batteries to store the power while your EV1 charges at night. Check out the pricing, a 12kW system even after California's $4/W rebate costs you over thirty six thousand dollars ($36,000+). Adding the cost of a 6kW and 12kW system to recharge your EV1 you're out more than $54,000 up front. Oh yeah, the EV1 costs $34,000 for the base model. That is $88,000 in expenses.
If you distribute that cost over 20 years at 130 miles a day it comes to 949,000 miles. Over 20 years that is $.09 per mile. Over 30 years (the absolute maximum lifetime of your PV panels and probably far beyond the life of your EV1), you get 1,423,500 miles at $.06 per mile.
Say you get a diesel car like a TDI Jetta and get say 50mpg out of it and you buy all your fuel up front (to make it fair). We'll put Diesel prices at $1.54 per gallon (the average price in the US as of Feb 4 2003). That is $.03 per mile.
In the end you see solar-electric is FAR more expensive in both the long term and short term. I intentionally leave out the cost of maintenance and other mid term costs. Neither the EV1 or the TDI Jetta is going to run for a million and a half miles without a metric assload of repairs and tuning. You still end up with a Diesel car costing a third as much over 20 years and half as much over 30 years. The solar-electric option has a lower long term ecological impact as the ecological cost of the PV and car construction is a one time thing where driving a Diesel is a continuous polluting process. Then again with batter replacements for the EV1 you're looking at some serious environmental impact. With the Jetta you can stick some new high tech catalytic converters on it and have emissions that are cleaner than the surrounding air in some cities.
If you need the self satisfaction of owning a PV system and an electric car and have almost ninety grand to plop down then your idea has merit. For the rest of the country and ostensibly world reality is a harsh mistress. Solar electric is still inefficient and expensive, far too much of both to gain truly wide acceptance in the near term.
If you can maintain an air of hype-proofness it is fairly easy to see how stupid the "Hydrogen Economy" ideas are in both the short term and long term. Hydrogen is merely an energy carrier a finicky one at that. Many of its proponents only see the end result, a car that spits out warm wet air, without fully realizing the infrastructure that warm wet air is generated with.
Diesel, especially biodiesel has a much better cost/benefit analysis but isn't as sexy as technology as hydrogen. Even the word Diesel fares ill in comparison to the dynamicism of hydrogen's syllibles. It also seems to me that the American public, three quarters of which live in urban areas, connotate Diesel with dirty and noisy MAC trucks and pubtrans buses. If they're a little more technical they probably instantly think of Diesel cars like the TDI Golf and Jetta with their 90hp-I-think-I-can-make-it-up-to-passing-speed engines.
What Diesel hybrid proponents ought to do is start up a massive test drive program. Give a couple people the keys to a Diesel hybrid for a week with a full tank. If more people see they can actually use freeway on-ramps effectively AND have most of the tank of gas left by the end of the week they'd see Diesel hybrids and hopefully Diesel engines in a much different light. Electric assist makes a huge difference in the car's feel, especially for those who shun anything that won't pop off a light like a Roman candle.
The Honda Dualnote concept car is an excellent example of this idea, the combustion engine charges an ultracapacitor while idling or braking. Said capacitor gives an extra umph (100hp worth) when accelerating. If you were to stick such a system on a high efficiency yet power deprived car like the TDI Lupo it'd make for a fair bit of go juice without expending a ton of gas juice. Citroën and Audi have shown that it is possible to make exceptionally clean burning Diesels which is promising for the Diesel-smells-like-poo opponents. Nissan's Gloria is making some great advancements using toroidal CVTs instead of conventional gearboxs.
These sorts of advances lend well to designing a really badass Diesel hybrid. From conception to fruition Diesels are going to be far cheaper than any hydrogen powered car for the next several decades. Diesel fuel is much easier to store and transport than pure hydrogen, it is more robust than methanol, and with biodiesel is renewable and is only pumping the CO2 back into the environment that was used to grow it.
Hype about hydrogen based utopian societies are the same sort of pie in the sky crap that has been fed to people about fusion power. It's payoff point is always somewhere out in the distant future where we all use transporters to get to work. Hydrogen COULD be viable as could nuclear fusion. They could be viable technologies at a point in the future but not now and not any time soon. Hyping these technologies up does little to fix any problems anyone has in the here and now which is where we live.
Hydrogen will be a good idea some day but unfortunately not today. Until then we ought to work towards improving what we have available to its most efficient state while working on the technology of next year. I personally think Diesel's time is due but clean and efficient gasoline engines would work just as well for me. I just want more cars on the road with that get 40+ miles per gallon. I'd really love to see 90+ miles to the gallon. The more fuel efficient our cars get the less dependent we are on the gas pump to lead functional lives. Three times the gas milage means a third of your current fuel expenses. I'm sure everyone in meat space can find a use for a couple hundred extra dollars left at the end of the year, for some a few thousand.
I can't agree that Palm (3Com) released a PDA that did what a PDA ought to have done. They released a glorified electronic rolodex with a pen rather than a miniscule keyboard. In the realm of personal organizers the Palms are amazing in their capability, in the realm of PDAs they don't live up to their task. I think the Newton did a much better job of being a digital assistant than the Palms ever have, until maybe very recently.
Without the ability to connect to periphrials the Palms were entirely dependent on a PC to get anything off the Pilot and into the real world. With the Newton you could write or type up a document, plug into a LocalTalk or IR capable printer and you were all set. You could also plug into a phone jack and send a fax to somebody. As Under Siege 2: Dark Territory taught us this could be a life saving feature. Rosetta/Paragraph was an equally important feature, at least in NOS 2.x. It really adjusted the Newton to work with you rather than the other way around. NOS 2.1's HWR is pretty good in my opinion because it can take my near illegible scribble and make use out of it.
Had Newton Inc. been around a while longer I think we would have seen small Pilot sized Newtons running on either system-on-a-chip ARM 710s or maybe even StrongARMs. An LC Newton was definitely in the works and working prototypes probably exist. IIRC the LC Newts were Pilot sized versions of the MP130 which was the pinnacle of the 1x0 line.
I agree about Palm's direction though. Had they NOT had the Newton to feel its way through the market they would have never gotten an accepted product out the door. They could sit back and watch Apple wade through its troubles and then make a fraction of the mistakes.
The point of my original comment wasn't to say teaching is hard, the point is you put up with alot of crap as one. You're also forced to deal with lots of things that don't fit into your job description like Linux administrator. A French teacher has little use for Linux and thus little inspiration to learn to use it, the same goes for an Algebra teacher. If you go and be a computer teacher more power to you but you're not going to be terribly up beat when you're penned in to teach a literature or language course. I've done some consulting for schools and this is what happens. A teacher who shows an ability to type is considered an expert and is thus made the head of the school's computer lab. The ability to use AOL does not a network administrator make. Said teacher may love to teach but is loath to run the school's computer lab.
Wow you taught...a single semester. Try it for a couple years and see how that goes. Try doing it for a couple years with it being your only source of income.
Time: several years from now
Place: your future job
Coworker: Hey Tom how do you like your insultingly low "living" wage and a room full of monkeys throwing their feces at you all day long?
You: Well you see I don't like it very much, I'm much less interested in this job than I was several years ago.
Coworker: Well life is a bitch ain't it?
You: Well I would take my bachelor's degree and do something but I have a mortgage to pay and a car loan.
Coworker: Wow you're in a sticky wicket there aren't you buddy?
You: Yeah I suppose I am.
Boss: Hey Tom, because we're facing severe cuts due to ridiculous spending on pork barrel political projects we need you to repair the company's entire fleet of delivery vans. It doesn't matter you have no training or qualifications in this position we're going to froce you into it regardless. We've got you by the balls because we don't pay you enough to pay your bills and save a signifigant nest egg of liquid assets.
Tom: Wow this really sucks, I sure have no zeal for my job anymore.
Feces slinging monkey passing by on a skateboard: Tom is such a whiny bitch, he should have more zeal for his job. The fact that he doesn't is a shame.
NeXTSTEP cum OSX already has all this functionality. If you'd like to see more of this functionality in a Linux environment GNUStep would be a great place to start. Other than GNUStep I haven't seen any real OO environments for Linux/free OSes which is disappointing because I really think they are a cut above more traditional style desktop environments.
They're confusing the hell out of me then. All over the LIGO sites they're claiming to be looking at particular celestial objects, supernovae and black holes and such. Unless I read their stuff wrong they're trying to say they intend to look at particular types of objects to find gravity waves coming from them. Then again I don't see how any particular object can be focused on with these things so maybe they do indeed just want to see if they can find any gravity waves coming from anything.
I've been following LIGO for a long time and am pretty excited about the sort of data that is bound to come out of it. Having yet another type of observatory viewing different aspects of celestial events is ok in my book. The one thing I've not been able to understand about the detector is how it is aimed to look at a particular celestial object. I've got a decent understanding of interferometers being a laser loving lad but I'm at a loss figuring out how an individual event can be focused on.
I've been thinking maybe a particular object is flagged out of an optical catalogue then the total data chunk is parsed for waves that should be coming from that particular object. I'm imagining the detector as like a dipole antenna and having two of them a particular object is tracked using a sort of gravitational Doppler shift between the two (soon to be three) sites. Am I close or do I need a few more physics classes? Can anybody in the know shed some light (pun intended) on this problem for me?
Uh..do you have a history of eating paintchips or have some sort of clinical problem preventing you from making logical conclusions?
1. ADC is DVI with USB and power pins added. The AGP pinout spec has power pins facilitated, Apple's just the first motherboard manufacturer to make any use of this. ADC is fully compatible with DVI, it is just more convenient because it reduces wire clutter behind your computer.
2. Apple didn't specifically disable particular CD-ROMs from booting, It is the CD-ROM manufacturer screwing with the drives ATAPI firmware that prevents some drives from working.
3. There's no proprietary extensions for booting MacOS don't posit assumptions as facts. It has Forth modules that make booting pre-X versions of MacOS possible. There were just shortcuts that launched the OS8/9 bootloader. The OF command you're thinking of is mac-boot. Considering you can do what you will with OF modules you can make a linux-boot module if you so choose.
4. That is just absurd, the AirPort card is INTERNAL. Few if any PCMCIA card are designed to fit into an internal slot. The only thing Apple did to the Orinoco was to remove the built-in antenna to be able to hoot the card up to the system's antenna. How this is somehow evil and a sabotaging of the PCMCIA slot I don't see.
If you wanted to boot OSX on an IBM PPC machine you'd need to write your own drivers for the memory controller and other little odds and ends but the system itself would likely run just fine. There's nothing special OF does besides run the bootloader which is far from proprietary because I can launch Linux at boot time as well as MacOS.
You throw the monopoly moniker around far too freely like many of the slashdot ilk. A vertical monopoly where a product goes from conception to fruition under the aegis of a single company is entirely different from a horizontal monpoly where a single company owns all means for an industry to do business. Anyone ever saying a vertical monpoly is bad is being ridiculous and dense. Vertical monopolies can be avoided, if you don't buy from Apple you don't support their monopoly. If you don't buy from Sun you don't support their monopoly. However if you buy from HP you can't switch to Dell or Gateway to avoid Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft's monopoly stangles the industry, Apple's only strangles their small fraction of the market.
Then you go and bring up proprietary hardware, I'd really like to know what the hell in a Mac you think is so proprietary. Every Mac since the iMac has had OpenFirmware which lets you boot any OS you want to on a Mac. Older Macs had a MacROM but those have been dropped since the iMac. What is left that is proprietary? Hmmm, Bluetooth? No. Firewire? Nope. USB? Hmm not quite. AGP? Again no. PCI? Sorry. SDRAM? Try again.
What the hell is up with Safari and UBB? I can't seem to log onto many UBB powered sites using Safari, are there any special tricks to get this to work? I was hoping with this release I might be able to not use OW or IE to post to UBB boards but I guess I'll just have to wait a bit longer. This is pretty much the only real downside I've personally come across with Safari, everything else I've wanted to do it has worked fine and fast. Is there a actuallyWorkWithUBB flag in the plist I need to set or something?
I've tried everything available through Safari's interface including enabling popup windows, allowing cookies from everyone, and allowing every form of script and plug-in to run. So far I've had big fat zero luck. And yes I've submitted bug reports, including the page's source and any pertinent details of my particular setup.
Command+[ and Command+] have always worked for forward and back. You sir are no professional.
Where do you get such wonderful toys?
Glide's problems were the icing on the cake for 3Dfx, not the cause of its troubles. Their Glide/OpenGl problems stemmed from the larger problem of the company wearing blinders with regard to their competition. They couldn't bring themselves to see nVidia and ATi were releasing chips that blew the Voodoo3 out of water. They seriously overestimated the loyalty of their customer base and the volitility of the market. They were competing in a market where a six month delay means a serious ass kicking. Now nVidia seems to be following suit, they have aggressive development strategies but they really seem to think their customers will stick with whatever crap they decide to throw them even if its six months late and under performing. This is why I draw parallels between 3Dfx and nVidia.
I've been thinking for a while that something like this combined with a combination satellite/digital radio receiver and GPS/map would work wonders at getting people around traffic jams. A lot of high congestion areas in urbanized counties have electronic traffic monitoring, if they'd go the next step and get that data out to everyone, there'd be a real change in the way people commute.
The way I see it digital/satellite radio is next to useless for music, you just get the same crap you find on the FM dial. Digital/satellite radio has a redeeming aspect in the fact it is a digital stream of information. In between packets carrying Britney Spears and Metalica you can stick useful data like say...freeway information. If traffic advisory stations broadcast easily parsed text streams inbetween their [digital] audio broadcasts a smart box in your car could pick out the text and parse it for display.
Since people looking down to read text advisories would end up being the sources of advisories themselves the computer could do the hard work for them. If you break up a particular freeway into arbitrary sections and in your text advisory say "101:57:32 101-405:10" (101 for the freeway, 57 for the 57th mile/section, 32 for the speed in mph and 101-405 for an interchange and 10 for the speed) the computer could change that section of the freeway on your simplified street map to being a dark red. The area you were going 75 on would be a nice bright green. It could even do you one better by figuring out via GPS which mile/section you were on and tell you approximatly how long until you got to the jam and possibly give you alternate surface routes past it. If you wanted it wouldn't be terribly difficult to have the computer just give you a verbal warning and alternate route suggestions.
If you have a decent number of drivers knowing the future road conditions they can be a little more careful when coming to a jam. There'd be less (in an ideal situation) screeching brakes because some jackass is suprised to see a line of tail lights. Also being as this stuff could use digital radio infrastructure which is on its way and not take up much more space or processing power in your card radio it'd be pretty convenient.
Ultimately a reduction in traffic jams is going to mean a reduction in injuries from them and much less environment impact from having half a googlplex of cars on the road. Current traffic advisories do a good job of giving you fair warning as long as you listen to a station that does regular enough advisories for them to be useful. They're also easily clocked out by playing a CD (and thus not listening to the radio). A digital system could play a CD or any radio station and still provide visual or audible warnings gathered from traffic services. It's no solution to traffic problems but in the long run might save a lot of lives, headaches, and gallons of black stuff.
If this rumor mongering is all true, as I'm not convinced, it is yet another eerie 3Dfx parallel attached to the GFFX (E3DP?). Since the Radeon 9700 was released I've been really anxious to see what nVidia was going to answer with in the form of the NV30. I'm not one to buy the high end obsolete within a week video cards but I really want to know what chip I'm going to see in discounted cards in six months.
I was seriously unimpressed with the GFFX. This is an odd feeling as new nVidia cards have in the past been truly impressive and something to lust after.
"I sense something. A presence I've not felt since..."
While 3Dfx was not in the exact same position as nVidia is market penetration wise and financially it seems nVidia is pulling a technological page from their book. The GFFX 5800 Ultra Megazord seems a great deal like the Voodoo 5. It is a power hungry beat of a video card that doesn't live up to all of the hype that's been surrounding it since August when the Radeon 9700 needed an answer by nVidia.
Of course the GFFX will improve and in six more months they'll have a GFFXMXKY that comes as the toy in a box of Count Chocula. Sharing many similarities with the Voodoo 5 isn't going to necessarily Doom the card (get it?) but it is giving ATi a huge shot in the arm. They've got a 5 month old card that performs about as well as nVidia's latest offering, that is something they haven't been able to boast before. All ATi has to do is not screw up and they will get back a bunch of users who abandoned them when the GeForce smoked the Radeons like fat chronic blunts with a mere driver upgrade.
Even though ATi has the advantage now I think nVidia will come back with a really strong chip PDQ. They aren't going to accept defeat because their card requires an onboard RTG to run decently. If ATi keeps their momentum going they could top even the next NV chip nVidia will release. Do I care one way or the other? Hell no. I don't want to see either of them lose out, I want as much competition as possible to I get more frames with excellent visual quality for the buck. It will be great to be able to enable all of Doom 3's visual effects with AA and still be able to play the game, especially after people like Raven or Rogue license the engine and build the next Jedi Knight or Alice with it.
Who?
AFAIK the Virtix Letterbox plug-in ought to allow you to stretch your movies back to their original 16:9 format. Letterbox normally just interpolates the 4:3 video but since the frames were originally 16:9 it ought to look pretty good after running the filter over the video. I think the Letterbox plug-in is still offered in the Virtix sample pack. If it is try it and see if it works.
Did you grow up under power lines or something? Apple's "monopoly" if you can even call it that is a vertical integration monopoly. Microsoft's OS monopoly is a horizontal monopoly. The only thing Apple can affect is its own product, if they say OSX comes on all Macs then OSX comes on all Macs. Does anyone have to care? No. Only Apple customers are affected. The same goes for Dell or HP's color schemes, if they say all their PCs will be black or smog brown does anyone have to care? Only Dell or HP customers. Each of these companies are selling THEIR product and can do as they please with it.
Microsoft is a horizontal monopoly in the PC market. They control an entire tier of the business. If they make a change to Windows do people care? They have to no matter if they are Dell, HP, or IBM customers. The fate of the PC market is in the hands of Microsoft, not Dell, HP, or Apple. What Microsoft says with regards to the PC industry goes.
If you're still having trouble here is another example. FoMoCo makes parts for Ford vehicles, not Chrystler vehicles. If FoMoCo did something with their products only Ford customers would have to care, Chrystler customers would not. Ford is vertically integrated in that respect. Chrystler is the same way with Mopar. If you think Ford is too restrictive with their products you can buy a car from another company not affiliated with Ford.
However if OPEC decides oil will cost X amount per barrel you have to care because no matter who made your car you need gasoline to run it. Railing against Ford because OPEC made gas prices soar would be ridiculous. Being angry their cars aren't more fuel efficient or something might be valid but not the simple fact gasoline is expensive. If you don't like the fact Apple sells an iPod with an OS buy from someone else. If they welded the iPod shut to prevent anyone from ever seeing the magic blue pixie dust that made it work you might have a valid concern. As of right now you're getting upset over a complete non-issue. If you want to throw the word monopoly around learn to use it properly.
NASA's been trying for years to get something new but they keep running into a smaller and smaller budget coupled with political problems. Because of the way NASA was chartered their budget is at the behest of Congressional commitees. People get on these commitees to grab gonvernment contracts for their constituants. The solid rocket boosters aren't shipped across the continent for efficiency. So unfortunately a smaller cheaper faster reusable launch vehicle will not be launched until the Shuttle is operationally useless. It makes members of budget commitees far too much money to get rid of until the very end of its operational lifetime.
You're forgetting that Cocoa and OpenStep are source compatible. OpenStep is a free specification, one that the GNU-Step is making decent progress reimplementing. If you want to write a cross platform app you can target it to the Cocoa/OpenStep API and have it be compatible on anything that will run GNU-Step. That was the original point of the OpenStep initiative was so enable an OS vendor to write their own OpenStep implementation and run source compatible apps. If your compiler supported fat binaries you could easily have a single executable that would run on just about any OpenStep host.
No Apple isn't about to release the source for Quartz or some of their more tightly held technologies, this however does not preclude you from writing open source applications that will run on both Linux and MacOS. For a large commercial company Apple's done a pretty good job with open source thus far. They've given code back to several open source projects including but not limited to enhancements to GCC and KHTML. They're also using a ton of open specifications in their products which makes it quite easy for you to make hetrogeneous Linux/MacOS environments work very well together.
I'm not sure your system purchasing comments make much sense either. You're saying a company shouldn't ever change platforms (to anything) because the move is expensive. Well duh. That however doesn't mean switching platforms whole hog or incrementally is a bad thing. Would you not want a company to consider migrating from Windows to Linux if Linux was a better proposition for them?
As for the hardware, it isn't the fastest or cheapest in the world but it lasts a pretty long time. Out of the box they're going to last a while but if you're so inclined you can upgrade them for a pretty decent price. I've seen more than a couple "obsolete" Macs with a G3 or G4 upgrade card running OSX without any problem. Just about any PCI Mac with a little tinkering will run OSX. Even without upgrading to OSX there's a ton of old Macs that are plenty usable.
You answered your own question. MacAmp Lite X's developers just gave up because they didn't think enough people were going to use it and buy it from them. That isn't Apple stifling innovation, it is a developer trying to sell a product in a competitive market and not having the wherewithal to keep up development in the face of real competition.
Apparently in some cases like MacAmp Lite X, Apple producing a competitive product will discourage developers. Whether that is their intention or not isn't something anyone but Apple can really answer. In other cases Apple's competition has spurned companies to work even harder. Avid is a pretty good example of this, their DV Xpress package is a direct competitor to FCP. With FCP's meteoric rise to popularity and OSX being a capable OS they decided that they didn't want the Mac-only FCP dominating DV XPress' market. Thus they released DV Xpress 3.5 on both Windows XP and OSX. Now video editing on OSX is at a great point because you've got DV Xpress and FCP competing for the same userbase, it is in the best interest to both companies to produce the mostest badass versions of their software they can to increase sales.
This point is what it comes down to, when you have competition you can either throw in the towel or try harder. Had MacAmp's developers made MacAmp Lite into a real powerhouse of a media player that picked up where iTunes failed they would have kept a decent sized user base. So to answer your question, no I don't think Apple is stifling innovation on anyone's part like Microsoft. It's up to people their programs compete with to make a better product. iTunes may be free but it isn't the end all be all of MP3 players. There's still room for an iTunes killer.
Uh, I don't think you've ever done purchasing in a corporate environment. In a small firm you might get away with it but a larger company would rather pack a machine up and send it off to La La land to get repaired. It isn't a technical challenge to replace the part but it is a red tape hassle. Companies don't want people on the clock driving around because they are liable if anything happens to them. Obviously there's exceptions where the person's job description includes driving around but computer techs rarely have this included.
It is also a political problem. If the tech manager is allowed to build a bunch of custom computer systems the computer illiterate in the company are at their mercy. Upper management is not going to buy a system that gives a middle manager complete control over like that. They'd rather spend more time/money buying from Compaq or IBM so any problem can be outsourced and the IT department gets to do as little as possible.