You know, it's funny... the last 3 PCs I'd bought were from brick-and-mortar stores, and 2 were HPs (the other was an Acer). I like the look-and-feel of HP laptops, and my mom liked their slim desktop cases. Until recently, I had felt that HP had better prices than Dell as well.
But today I just ordered a new Dell laptop. The reason? It's *so freakin' cheap*... I got an Athlon 64 X2 TL-60, 1gb DDR2, SATA 80gb, 15.4" glossy screen, DVD/CDRW, 9-cell battery, yadda... for $595 with taxes (http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/733198). The closest thing from HP/Compaq was this Pavilion from CompUSA for about $560 after taxes and rebates, but it has half the RAM and a slower TL-50 processor, as well as being heavier, although it does have DVD+-RW and S-Video. And I loathe mail in rebates.
When did Dell stop being the "premium" brand and switch places with HP?? I haven't bought a laptop in a while, and I'm quite surprised to see Dell competing agressively on price!
I like CompUSA much better than BB. In my hometown of East Lansing, MI, there are Best Buy, Circuit City, and CompUSA.
Best Buy is huge and flashy, often crowded, always overpriced for small things like cables and flash drives and blank CDs. And its employees are annoying and ignorant. Product selection at Circuit City isn't as good as Best Buy, but they had very good prices on music CDs, so sometimes I would go there.
By comparison, CompUSA is *much* more focused on computers as opposed to all other digital electronics. They have a great selection and very good prices. They carry store brands of blank CDs and jump drives, and they have a lot of sales to get you in the door.
Not to mention the fact that the Secret Service, local police, and air traffic will obviously be communicating somehow. Police frequencies are well-known and unlikely to be jammed... why wouldn't terrorists just make their remote control detonators listen on those frequencies?
But you can only launch the smallest of gliders without a powered aircraft to tow them (hang gliders). And you can only stay aloft if you follow the direction that thermal air currents are taking you. And they can't carry much weight. So, lots of fun, but not exactly what I'd call a practical flying machine:-P
'see preview image regardless if seller payed for it or not'
Umm... has anyone actually tried this?? I downloaded the toolbar and now I can't see any item preview images in Firefox!! Maybe eBay is blocking it already?
Actually, being an ATI fan, I hope NVidia doesn't release open source drivers. ATI will get a lot of goodwill with this, at the very least, and at most, if Dell's experience with Linux is good, perhaps they'll get more sales. Go ATI.:)
I'm sorry, but that's a really stupid attitude, since you're a *consumer* of their products. You benefit from your favorite company's *innovation*, not from their sales figures.
Hoping that your favorite company's competition continues to fail basically ensures that your favored products start to suck... without NVidia and Intel at nipping at its heels, I can assure you that ATI cards would stagnate.
For example, I am an AMD fan when it comes to processors. I like the value of their mid-range offerings, I like HyperTransport, I like their innovation in the 64-bit area, and I consider them more friendly to open source. But does that mean I want Intel to suck? Far from it!! I want Intel and AMD to fight each other tooth and nail. I rejoice at the low-power Core 2 Duo processors, knowing it will force AMD to come up with something better. I delight in the price wars that have forced AMD to discount its processors, allowing me to buy a dual-core 64-bit Socket AM2 processor for $60 from Newegg.
The way I see it, I want my favorite products to encounter incessant and BRUTAL competition... and to triumph through innovation.
Having solid drivers isn't just "an edge case". Go install the default ATI or Nvidia driver on a recent linux distro then upgrade it to a non open source one from the company. It's like day and night. I noticed a huge difference between having a default driver vs company made one, silly things like dragging a console with transparent background is no longer a pain, it's smooth. The desktop feels fast and I don't even have any 3d desktop installed.
Agreed... this is why I was excited about possibly having open-source drivers, and posted this article. My current box has onboard NVidia, and a low-end ATI discrete PCIe card... frankly, I can't wait for *one* of them to have open drivers. Although using the binary drivers improves 3D performance and a lot of strange display bugs, as you point out, it's a huge pain to keep them up-to-date with kernel upgrades since they can't be bundled with the main kernel. I don't like putting a big binary blob in my kernel, which by all reports is out-of-date with respect to a lot of other kernel subsystems, and may open up security holes.
I don't do 3D anything (word processing, programming, web browsing mainly), but baseline unaccelerated SVGA is definitely *not* acceptable: 2D graphics acceleration is necessary for a smooth and productive desktop experience. The open-source 2D acceleration is actually pretty good at this point, but of course it simply DOES NOT WORK with a lot of the latest ATI cards in particular.
The current pace of open-source driver development is positively glacial, largely because most of the people who have sufficient documentation to easily improve the drivers are under NDA. Read this incredibly frustrating blog entry from a developer who's under NDA with ATI... using only a few hundred lines of code, he has patched the open-source Radeon driver to support most of the newer ATI cards... but ATI has spun its wheels for months without allowing him to release the code.
Bingo. Here's one particularly good quote from "Wiki is not paper" (emphasis mine):
The purpose of a normal encyclopedia is to provide the reader a brief overview of the subject, while a reference book or text book can explain the details. Wikipedia can do both. Because Wikipedia is not paper, it can provide summaries of all subjects of interest and also provide exhaustive detail on those subjects, conveniently linked, categorized, and searchable for readers who want more detail.
Ideal Wikipedia articles ought to include introductory material for lay people and detailed information for specialists who want more. In fact, if you look at the Biology or Physics articles which have been chosen as Featured Articles (based on a consensus that they are of very high quality), you will find that these do an excellent job of achieving this goal; they target a broad audience AND provide depth.
Of course, since Wikipedia is effectively unlimited in space, and is growing rapidly, not all articles are up to that high standard yet. The important thing to me is that it seems to be quickly and consistently improving.
Frankly, I don't understand what the Wired article has against the mitochondrial DNA and fluid dynamics articles... I am not a specialist in either and had no problems understanding either one. I found them pithy, precise, and concise. The other thing his excerpts omit is the fundamentally cross-linked nature of wikipedia: if you don't understand a word like "continuum" (which the author complained about), you can just click on it and get a more thorough explanation on Wikipedia. With related information so easily accessible, it's less important to define every single related term in an introductory paragraph.
Yes, it's largely a BIOS problem. BIOS is a freaking travesty of junk 20-year-old code zealously protected by a evil, backward-looking cabal of motherboard and BIOS vendors. It's slow and nonstandardized and often buggy, and it needlessly initializes lots of hardware that's going to be reinitialized by the operating system anyway. Of course, it would be great if we were all running LinuxBIOS, like the OLPC is. It can go from power-on to kernel load in about 1 second, and is completely modular and customizable. Oh, and it can boot Windows and xBSD and probably OSX too. But unfortunately, the chipset and motherboard vendors mostly don't release their docs, so the odds that your desktop mobo is supported by LinuxBIOS are sadly very small.
All that being said... with modern Linux kernels (2.6.1+ I believe) you can mount partitions based on the UUIDs stored in the partition table (e.g. 8F3B6029A471238F), rather than by what particular interface BIOS sez they're connected to (e.g./dev/sdg1 or/dev/hda1). This goes a long way to making it easy to install Linux distros on portable drives.
With Ubuntu Edgy or Feisty, you *can* simply install Linux to a USB hard disk (I've done it without a hitch). It will look for the hard disk partitions based on UUID rather than/dev/whatever, so it won't get confused when you move it from computer to computer. Unfortunately you will still have to figure out how to make each computer boot from USB in the first place, because BIOS IS SO FREAKING GHETTO!
Today. Tomorrow's set of hardware may break when someone decides that the code would be prettier if it were completely rewritten. The lack of a kernel debugger compounds the problem. And believe me, hardware vendors are bitching long and loud about it every day, but the attitude of the Linux crowd has been to preach at them about open source. Even if they're right in some greater sense, they're still screwing the vendors when they don't even try to keep ABI's stable in a supposedly "stable" branch.
Of course Linux has pretty much done away with the pretense of a stable branch now. Not what I call progress. I think Sun would have to fire all of its release engineers to get Solaris as unstable as Linux's hardware support.
Yeah, you have a good point. Keeping up hardware support with a changing ABI is a bitch. Although, it *does* have the advantage of allowing the kernel devs to continuously modernize the ABI, so they don't need to leave old ugly hacks and warts in place. Makes the design a lot more flexible I'd say.
It seems to me that if that's the main gripe with the Linux kernel... why not create a fork that focuses on ABI stability? If enough developers join it, there could be a real competition. A couple years down the line, we'd have good evidence of which one pays off more in terms of hardware support and overall performance: ABI stability, or the freedom to make sweeping changes in the kernel design?
Basically what I'm saying is... what does Solaris bring to the table that *couldn't* be done with Linux, or would be harder to do with Linux? The example of ABI stability seems to be mainly one of developer preference, rather than a reflection of the quality of current Linux and Solaris kernel code...
That's pretty neat, thanks! I'd never heard of Nexenta before. So basically it's the kernel+libc from Solaris, with the Debian userland...
But, uhm, is there any real evidence that the Solaris kernel is actually *better* than the Linux kernel? The Linux kernel definitely supports a LOT more hardware. Although Solaris is seen as more heavy duty by a lot of IT folks, I'm not sure if there's a good reason for this besides long-time familiarity.
... Viagra ads that loudly mock guys who glance nervously at them. And maybe add a little image recognition. Then your billboard can shout out, "Hey everybody, that bald guy in the suit over there can't get it up. Hahaha!" Nothing like a little peer pressure to get somebody to buy your product:-)
If the guy who heads SQL Server development at Microsoft gets hit by a bus, there will probably be a big glitch in its development too. The only difference is that no one knows who that guy is, or if he really gives a crap about the product.
If my admittedly brief experience in the software industry counts for anything, open source development is *less* centered on individual project leaders than closed source development. The only difference is that the open source leaders are a lot more visible, vocal, and reachable... because you don't have to go through layers of PR and lawyers and Vice Presidents of Customer Relations in order to reach them.
In high school, a bunch of my friends were in a CS class together. As their final project, they made a Rogue-like game in which our swim coach was a level boss, I was a random monster (and a rather weak one at that), and another friend was the final boss of the game. I think the dungeon layout may have been vaguely based on our school. The weapons were things like paper clips, binders, and lunch trays.
It was a humorous, hilarious game. I wonder if it would have got my friends in "you might be a terrorist" trouble these days.:-(
No individual extortionist wants to actually expend the resources to make good on his threat... but all extortionists recognize that if NO ONE carries out their threats, they will have no power over the victims.
Got some nuclear research you'd like to do but don't have the resources to create a super computer? rent a botnet!
Funny, but unlikely I think.
Botnets wouldn't be all that good for supercomputing, except maybe of highly parallelizable problems (voluntary networks like SETI@home already work on those). Botnets don't have the fast communication links between nodes which are vital to the performance of most supercomputers... which often incorporate fancy network technologies like Infiniband or Fiber Channel or even just good ol' 100/1000-MBit ethernet.
As I see it, the main advantage of botnets is their massive outgoing network bandwidth: ten thousand desktops with broadband, averaging conservatively 5 kB/s outbound, gives a wopping 50 MB/s. A commodity computer can EASILY spit out 50 MB of email per second with some intelligent software... but *paying for* the bandwidth to actually send it that fast would be absolutely prohibitive. That's the real reason spammers use botnets.
(Of course, there's also the fact that botnets are a lot harder to isolate and blacklist than a single server.)
Exactly. Encryption protects the data, it doesn't protect the device at all. Unless the device is totally useless without the data, and even then it only deters smart thieves.
Has anybody ever considered WHY so many iPods get stolen?
I think it's because people wear them like big flashy pieces of jewelry. I see lots of people with their iPods strapped to their upper arms, prominently attached to their belts, clipped to backpack straps, etc... and of course they all have the telltale white earphones.
We're talking about a very sought-after and yet common product worth several hundred dollars, and people enthusiastically flaunt them all over the place. Those who carry cash, jewelry, important documents, and weapons often go to great lengths to be discreet... but this has somehow totally escaped the iPod herd. Every iPod "holster" seems designed to display the thing as prominently as possible.
It's basically just dumb marketing and dumb consumers. Expensive electronics != fashion accessory.
Actually, according to the article, Todd Goldman has a bunch of underlings who come up with ideas and sketches and bring them to him, where he tweaks them a bit to produce a finished product.
Pretty pathetic as far as creative art goes, but it does provide some plausible excuse for the blatant copying of the "Dear God..." drawing. Basically, he blames the underling for stealing the bunny drawing. In any case, it suggests that Todd Goldman gets the credit although his underlings do most of the work, evidently.
It looks like he plagiarized a TON of other stuff, though, and I think he's being a total jackass about the whole thing.
otoh a hybrid with a fully electric drivechain will have the engine and generator sized exclusively for producing electricity and a decent battery based storage system to allow use of the engine at its most efficiant operating point.
Yes, good point.
Lessee... what's the total storage capacity of the batteries in a hybrid car. According to Wikipedia, the Prius has a 168-cell NiMH battery pack, giving 202 V and let's say 2 Amp-hour per cell if they're anything like off-the-shelf NiMH cells. So that's about 400 W-hours of total energy stored. Or enough to power a 60 W bulb for 7 hours, basically.
Not a whole lot of stored energy, but if coupled to an efficient electric generator I can see how it's a good portable power plant!
The article says he was just married - this guy is a war profiteer vulture, I hope the next article I read about him is how his car ran over an IED, possibly winning him the 2007 Darwin Award, a big component of which of course is that he can not breed and will be weeded out of the gene pool.
Hmmm... as far as I can tell from the article, he's one of the most productive and useful people in Iraq these days. Might not be the nicest guy or have the purest motives... but I'd say competence is what's most lacking there. I'd vote for him. And the other guy Tyler too, why hasn't he been tapped as the US chief of Iraqi reconstruction?
I'm totally fucking serious too. You hear about some of the incompetent bungling idiots running US operations in Iraq, and these guys both sound like they'd bring a lot to the job.
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You know, it's funny... the last 3 PCs I'd bought were from brick-and-mortar stores, and 2 were HPs (the other was an Acer). I like the look-and-feel of HP laptops, and my mom liked their slim desktop cases. Until recently, I had felt that HP had better prices than Dell as well.
... I got an Athlon 64 X2 TL-60, 1gb DDR2, SATA 80gb, 15.4" glossy screen, DVD/CDRW, 9-cell battery, yadda... for $595 with taxes (http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/733198). The closest thing from HP/Compaq was this Pavilion from CompUSA for about $560 after taxes and rebates, but it has half the RAM and a slower TL-50 processor, as well as being heavier, although it does have DVD+-RW and S-Video. And I loathe mail in rebates.
But today I just ordered a new Dell laptop. The reason? It's *so freakin' cheap*
When did Dell stop being the "premium" brand and switch places with HP?? I haven't bought a laptop in a while, and I'm quite surprised to see Dell competing agressively on price!
I like CompUSA much better than BB. In my hometown of East Lansing, MI, there are Best Buy, Circuit City, and CompUSA.
Best Buy is huge and flashy, often crowded, always overpriced for small things like cables and flash drives and blank CDs. And its employees are annoying and ignorant. Product selection at Circuit City isn't as good as Best Buy, but they had very good prices on music CDs, so sometimes I would go there.
By comparison, CompUSA is *much* more focused on computers as opposed to all other digital electronics. They have a great selection and very good prices. They carry store brands of blank CDs and jump drives, and they have a lot of sales to get you in the door.
Not to mention the fact that the Secret Service, local police, and air traffic will obviously be communicating somehow. Police frequencies are well-known and unlikely to be jammed... why wouldn't terrorists just make their remote control detonators listen on those frequencies?
Seems like "security theater" to me...
Oh, all right :-) I guess since someone flew a balloon around the world, I have to concede!
But you can only launch the smallest of gliders without a powered aircraft to tow them (hang gliders). And you can only stay aloft if you follow the direction that thermal air currents are taking you. And they can't carry much weight. So, lots of fun, but not exactly what I'd call a practical flying machine :-P
Umm... has anyone actually tried this?? I downloaded the toolbar and now I can't see any item preview images in Firefox!! Maybe eBay is blocking it already?
Uh huh, because flying machines don't require any kind of rotating mechanism supported by bearings.
This is honestly the funniest thing I've ever read on slashdot. Wish I had mod points...
Those "thousands of lines of Unix intellectual property" that SCO claimed were in the Linux kernel. Hmmmm... :-)
I'm sorry, but that's a really stupid attitude, since you're a *consumer* of their products. You benefit from your favorite company's *innovation*, not from their sales figures.
Hoping that your favorite company's competition continues to fail basically ensures that your favored products start to suck... without NVidia and Intel at nipping at its heels, I can assure you that ATI cards would stagnate.
For example, I am an AMD fan when it comes to processors. I like the value of their mid-range offerings, I like HyperTransport, I like their innovation in the 64-bit area, and I consider them more friendly to open source. But does that mean I want Intel to suck? Far from it!! I want Intel and AMD to fight each other tooth and nail. I rejoice at the low-power Core 2 Duo processors, knowing it will force AMD to come up with something better. I delight in the price wars that have forced AMD to discount its processors, allowing me to buy a dual-core 64-bit Socket AM2 processor for $60 from Newegg.
The way I see it, I want my favorite products to encounter incessant and BRUTAL competition... and to triumph through innovation.
Agreed... this is why I was excited about possibly having open-source drivers, and posted this article. My current box has onboard NVidia, and a low-end ATI discrete PCIe card... frankly, I can't wait for *one* of them to have open drivers. Although using the binary drivers improves 3D performance and a lot of strange display bugs, as you point out, it's a huge pain to keep them up-to-date with kernel upgrades since they can't be bundled with the main kernel. I don't like putting a big binary blob in my kernel, which by all reports is out-of-date with respect to a lot of other kernel subsystems, and may open up security holes.
I don't do 3D anything (word processing, programming, web browsing mainly), but baseline unaccelerated SVGA is definitely *not* acceptable: 2D graphics acceleration is necessary for a smooth and productive desktop experience. The open-source 2D acceleration is actually pretty good at this point, but of course it simply DOES NOT WORK with a lot of the latest ATI cards in particular.
The current pace of open-source driver development is positively glacial, largely because most of the people who have sufficient documentation to easily improve the drivers are under NDA. Read this incredibly frustrating blog entry from a developer who's under NDA with ATI... using only a few hundred lines of code, he has patched the open-source Radeon driver to support most of the newer ATI cards... but ATI has spun its wheels for months without allowing him to release the code.
Ideal Wikipedia articles ought to include introductory material for lay people and detailed information for specialists who want more. In fact, if you look at the Biology or Physics articles which have been chosen as Featured Articles (based on a consensus that they are of very high quality), you will find that these do an excellent job of achieving this goal; they target a broad audience AND provide depth.
Of course, since Wikipedia is effectively unlimited in space, and is growing rapidly, not all articles are up to that high standard yet. The important thing to me is that it seems to be quickly and consistently improving.
Frankly, I don't understand what the Wired article has against the mitochondrial DNA and fluid dynamics articles... I am not a specialist in either and had no problems understanding either one. I found them pithy, precise, and concise. The other thing his excerpts omit is the fundamentally cross-linked nature of wikipedia: if you don't understand a word like "continuum" (which the author complained about), you can just click on it and get a more thorough explanation on Wikipedia. With related information so easily accessible, it's less important to define every single related term in an introductory paragraph.
Yes, it's largely a BIOS problem. BIOS is a freaking travesty of junk 20-year-old code zealously protected by a evil, backward-looking cabal of motherboard and BIOS vendors. It's slow and nonstandardized and often buggy, and it needlessly initializes lots of hardware that's going to be reinitialized by the operating system anyway. Of course, it would be great if we were all running LinuxBIOS, like the OLPC is. It can go from power-on to kernel load in about 1 second, and is completely modular and customizable. Oh, and it can boot Windows and xBSD and probably OSX too. But unfortunately, the chipset and motherboard vendors mostly don't release their docs, so the odds that your desktop mobo is supported by LinuxBIOS are sadly very small.
/dev/sdg1 or /dev/hda1). This goes a long way to making it easy to install Linux distros on portable drives.
/dev/whatever, so it won't get confused when you move it from computer to computer. Unfortunately you will still have to figure out how to make each computer boot from USB in the first place, because BIOS IS SO FREAKING GHETTO!
All that being said... with modern Linux kernels (2.6.1+ I believe) you can mount partitions based on the UUIDs stored in the partition table (e.g. 8F3B6029A471238F), rather than by what particular interface BIOS sez they're connected to (e.g.
With Ubuntu Edgy or Feisty, you *can* simply install Linux to a USB hard disk (I've done it without a hitch). It will look for the hard disk partitions based on UUID rather than
Yeah, you have a good point. Keeping up hardware support with a changing ABI is a bitch. Although, it *does* have the advantage of allowing the kernel devs to continuously modernize the ABI, so they don't need to leave old ugly hacks and warts in place. Makes the design a lot more flexible I'd say.
It seems to me that if that's the main gripe with the Linux kernel... why not create a fork that focuses on ABI stability? If enough developers join it, there could be a real competition. A couple years down the line, we'd have good evidence of which one pays off more in terms of hardware support and overall performance: ABI stability, or the freedom to make sweeping changes in the kernel design?
Basically what I'm saying is... what does Solaris bring to the table that *couldn't* be done with Linux, or would be harder to do with Linux? The example of ABI stability seems to be mainly one of developer preference, rather than a reflection of the quality of current Linux and Solaris kernel code...
That's pretty neat, thanks! I'd never heard of Nexenta before. So basically it's the kernel+libc from Solaris, with the Debian userland...
But, uhm, is there any real evidence that the Solaris kernel is actually *better* than the Linux kernel? The Linux kernel definitely supports a LOT more hardware. Although Solaris is seen as more heavy duty by a lot of IT folks, I'm not sure if there's a good reason for this besides long-time familiarity.
... Viagra ads that loudly mock guys who glance nervously at them. And maybe add a little image recognition. Then your billboard can shout out, "Hey everybody, that bald guy in the suit over there can't get it up. Hahaha!" Nothing like a little peer pressure to get somebody to buy your product :-)
Big frickin' deal...
If the guy who heads SQL Server development at Microsoft gets hit by a bus, there will probably be a big glitch in its development too. The only difference is that no one knows who that guy is, or if he really gives a crap about the product.
If my admittedly brief experience in the software industry counts for anything, open source development is *less* centered on individual project leaders than closed source development. The only difference is that the open source leaders are a lot more visible, vocal, and reachable... because you don't have to go through layers of PR and lawyers and Vice Presidents of Customer Relations in order to reach them.
In high school, a bunch of my friends were in a CS class together. As their final project, they made a Rogue-like game in which our swim coach was a level boss, I was a random monster (and a rather weak one at that), and another friend was the final boss of the game. I think the dungeon layout may have been vaguely based on our school. The weapons were things like paper clips, binders, and lunch trays.
:-(
It was a humorous, hilarious game. I wonder if it would have got my friends in "you might be a terrorist" trouble these days.
This is sort of a game theory problem.
No individual extortionist wants to actually expend the resources to make good on his threat... but all extortionists recognize that if NO ONE carries out their threats, they will have no power over the victims.
Funny, but unlikely I think.
Botnets wouldn't be all that good for supercomputing, except maybe of highly parallelizable problems (voluntary networks like SETI@home already work on those). Botnets don't have the fast communication links between nodes which are vital to the performance of most supercomputers... which often incorporate fancy network technologies like Infiniband or Fiber Channel or even just good ol' 100/1000-MBit ethernet.
As I see it, the main advantage of botnets is their massive outgoing network bandwidth: ten thousand desktops with broadband, averaging conservatively 5 kB/s outbound, gives a wopping 50 MB/s. A commodity computer can EASILY spit out 50 MB of email per second with some intelligent software... but *paying for* the bandwidth to actually send it that fast would be absolutely prohibitive. That's the real reason spammers use botnets.
(Of course, there's also the fact that botnets are a lot harder to isolate and blacklist than a single server.)
Exactly. Encryption protects the data, it doesn't protect the device at all. Unless the device is totally useless without the data, and even then it only deters smart thieves.
Has anybody ever considered WHY so many iPods get stolen?
I think it's because people wear them like big flashy pieces of jewelry. I see lots of people with their iPods strapped to their upper arms, prominently attached to their belts, clipped to backpack straps, etc... and of course they all have the telltale white earphones.
We're talking about a very sought-after and yet common product worth several hundred dollars, and people enthusiastically flaunt them all over the place. Those who carry cash, jewelry, important documents, and weapons often go to great lengths to be discreet... but this has somehow totally escaped the iPod herd. Every iPod "holster" seems designed to display the thing as prominently as possible.
It's basically just dumb marketing and dumb consumers. Expensive electronics != fashion accessory.
Bingo. It's amazing how this post has already gathered about 5 threads of dimwits flaming each other over this very simple point.
Actually, according to the article, Todd Goldman has a bunch of underlings who come up with ideas and sketches and bring them to him, where he tweaks them a bit to produce a finished product.
Pretty pathetic as far as creative art goes, but it does provide some plausible excuse for the blatant copying of the "Dear God..." drawing. Basically, he blames the underling for stealing the bunny drawing. In any case, it suggests that Todd Goldman gets the credit although his underlings do most of the work, evidently.
It looks like he plagiarized a TON of other stuff, though, and I think he's being a total jackass about the whole thing.
Yes, good point.
Lessee... what's the total storage capacity of the batteries in a hybrid car. According to Wikipedia, the Prius has a 168-cell NiMH battery pack, giving 202 V and let's say 2 Amp-hour per cell if they're anything like off-the-shelf NiMH cells. So that's about 400 W-hours of total energy stored. Or enough to power a 60 W bulb for 7 hours, basically.
Not a whole lot of stored energy, but if coupled to an efficient electric generator I can see how it's a good portable power plant!
Hmmm... as far as I can tell from the article, he's one of the most productive and useful people in Iraq these days. Might not be the nicest guy or have the purest motives... but I'd say competence is what's most lacking there. I'd vote for him. And the other guy Tyler too, why hasn't he been tapped as the US chief of Iraqi reconstruction?
I'm totally fucking serious too. You hear about some of the incompetent bungling idiots running US operations in Iraq, and these guys both sound like they'd bring a lot to the job.