Yes, PowerStrip runs under Windows. However, it can just as easily output X modelines as it can set resolutions for Windows. Therefore, you can simply dual-boot any OS that uses X and a Windows (whatever you happen to have), use PowerStrip to setup the resolution under Windows, and copy that modeline over to X just fine.
Not at all. But you need to deserve it first. What if this paper had been released by a russian hacker? Does it make any difference that MIT is involved? It seems so!
Uh... huh? When did Microsoft buy Adobe? Oh yeah, that's right -- they didn't. Now you're judging Microsoft based on Adobe's actions. I don't think there's anything else to say, here.
Well sonney, come to the Nothern Teritory (Aus). We've got pleny a roads without those pesky signs and as an added bonus most of them are gravel and have multi trailer road trains on them moving at around 160K/h.
Ouch! Can you say "your paint job is fucked over to hell and back"? I don't think even StonGard will save you there!
I could see them adding keys to things like controllers, memory expansions, anything like that so you would have to buy microsoft approved game pads. Oh the horror of not being able to use a playstation adapter to use my dualshock(best freakin controller ever) on other systems.
Yeah, and? Welcome to the late 1980s, where Nintendo requires any game or peripheral sold to work with their Nintendo Entertainment System must be approved by Nintendo (okay, so they didn't have any way to prevent unauthorized games and periphs, but this is called "the advancement of technology over 15+ years"). In otherwords, big deal. It's old hat that game console manufacturers want to be able to control the peripherals and games made for their system, for a two-fold reason. Primarily, there's the licensing fees associated with getting authorized. This is good, because it gets money to the console maker, which means they have more money to work on the next version, and have an incentive to actually continue to support the console. (blah blah capitalism is bad blah blah blah socialism r00ls d00dnutz blah blah blah.) Second, it's a form of quality control. Okay, sure there are still bad games and peripherals that are released for consoles, but the quality of even the worst game or peripheral is astounding compared to the quality of a lot of games and such Back In The Day (tm) when Atari (will the real Atari please stand up? No, GT Interactive, sit back down, dammit) was still around and had no such approval system. (Check out ClassicGaming.com (a member of the Gamespy network) some time. I recall them doing at least one article on terrible old games.) I for one prefer that a console manufacturer require that they approve games and peripherals, so that I can be reasonably sure that at the very least, the game/periph will work with my console, even if it's not a great game or periph.
As far as using your Dual Shock on other systems (guh. Those controllers are two damned small and pointy to be comfortable. You must have tiny hands), wouldn't it stand to reason that if there were demand for such a thing (and apparently there is, though I can't fathom why), and Microsoft required that the peripheral transmit an authorized key to be allowed to work, then some entrepenuerial company would develop said adaptor (done) and get it approved by Microsoft so that they can transmit a valid key to the console. Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft isn't vindictive. They wouldn't kill such a peripheral out of spite. In fact, if it helped them sell consoles and games, they'd authorize it immediately. It's called "good business".
For them to come out and openly state that they will allow it to be published serves only to make them appear ever more powerful to the general public, in that they make the subtle claim of having power over free speech.
The article said:
Microsoft told Huang and Abelson that while it might prefer that the paper not be published, it would be inappropriate to ask MIT to withhold the paper.
It seems to me that "it would be inappropriate to ask MIT to withhold the paper" is quite a bit different than "we'll allow you to publish the paper". Microsoft did the Right Thing (tm), in that they recognized that Huang's paper can and should be published without restraint due to the principles of Free Speech. Is it so hard to give kudos where kudos are deserved, even when it's a company that you "hate" ("hate" is rather strong, don't you think? but oh well...)? Why must you try to make Microsoft look bad even when they've done good? If Redhat (for example. Or Sun, or any other Slashdot-favorite company) had done the same thing, you'd be lauding them for doing the Right Thing (tm) by saying it's "inappropriate" to block this, even though they could legally block the paper (hey, it's not just Microsoft that has that kind of power). Then again, if Redhat/Sun/Oracle/IBM/whoever had actually said, "We'll allow you to publish this, even though we could block it legally," I bet you'd still be crazy nuts happy about it without trying to say that they're doing so only to make themselves look stronger.
Re:must...avoid...reality tv...
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The Sims Survivor
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· Score: 2, Informative
Oh yeah, HBO is so great. I know so many people who swear by that puke fest of a show, Sex in the City.
You mean people watch Sex in the City? Huh. No, I suggest HBO for the real quality stuff, like Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and the occasional mini-series (Band of Brothers was awesome). Right, so you're saying, "Pay for HBO? Just for a Sunday night line-up? What am I going to watch the rest of the week?" Not a problem. That goes to the rest of my post -- get out of the house! Or read a book (I'm reading A Secret Histroy, the first volume in the book of Ash). Hell, if you have to be geeky, go write some code. Point being, there's a ton of better things to do than watch TV (yeah, like I'm one to talk, considering what I've spent on my entertainment center. but until AT&T Broadband starts broadcasting HD content, it's pretty much a waste as far as TV goes. Much better for DVDs and my HTPC).
I'm proud to say I've seen only 1/2 an episode of survivor and no other reality tv shows for one simple reason...they suck.
As much as I agree with you that reality TV shows are a waste of time, can you truly say they "suck" without having seen a fair representation of them? No, 1/2 of an episode of Survivor doesn't count. As with any good argument against something, you generally need to have an understanding of what you're arguing against. (ie, I've seen a number of different "reality" shows, from the originals like Real World, to Survivor, to Survivor copies like Boot Camp. I think they suck, but had I not seen a number of episodes from several different shows, could I fairly say that?)
They've already been penetrated most of primetime, and I'm running out of ripped episodes of GOOD shows like Futurama and Family Guy.
Consider reading a book, going outside, playing a video game, etc. There's no reason you have to watch TV. And if you do have to watch TV (say, from some bizarre and rare medical disorder), do yourself a favor and get HBO. You'll be glad you did.
Moral of the story? Buy your PS3 a year after it comes out. That'll be when the games finally start getting good.
So, 2005? 2006? The PS3 is just Sony's current way of doing to the XBox/GameCube what they did to the Dreamcast last generation -- say you've got your "next generation" machine almost ready, even though it's 2+ years out, and encourage people to wait for that rather than buy what's available now. That's fine, if you don't mind waiting years for something that won't be anything near what they hype. If instead you like to play games because it's fun, then buy the system(s) with the games you like, and don't worry about what's coming next. When it gets here, it'll get here. Until then, just have fun.
I suppose there's some kind of IR kludge that could have the PC send remote-control signals to the DirecTV box, but that's no where near as seemless as the DirecTV-Tivo box itself. Is there some kind of hardwired control system that anyone knows of?
Per Tivo's website, you can connect a normal Tivo to a DirecTV box via an RS232 port for channel changing. Unfortunately, there's no such thing for cable boxes. That's why Tivo has what's called an "IR Blaster", which basically is an IR emitter that you setup in front of the cable box's IR receiver, and the Tivo will send out the proper IR signals.
If anyone happens to have any recommendations on IR blasters for a PC, let me know, because I'm going to need one eventually.
Whether I maximized the TV display on the PC or output the video (either via composite or s-video) to my 34cm or 68cm TV, the quality was simply YUCK. Very soft, poor colour reproduction, and pathetic bleeding of bright parts of the image (which I clearly see demonstrated in screenshots of other TV card reviews).
Well, there's you're problem. You're using inferior methods of connecting to your TV. Please note: non-HDTV users (with or without an HD tuner, doesn't matter) can skip this comment.
If you want to get good quality output on a TV from a PC, you need to get a VGA to Component transcoder. Some people may be able to use a vga to rgb breakout cable instead (component is YPrPb (3 connections), rgb is RGBHV (5 connections). most HDTVs will have at least component, and may also have RGB. Either will work, depending on what inputs your TV has). Using a transcoder, a Radeon 7500, and PowerStrip (to set "odd" resolutions, like 848x480p, or 960x540p, or 1920x1080i), I get very good output from my HTPC (hand-built Home Theater PC) on my Mitsubishi 46807 (46" 16x9 HD-compatible (ie, no HD tuner) rear-projection TV). In fact, the only degradation that I can see is something I had before -- AT&T broadband only offers digital STBs with composite and RF output. That means my TV image quality is capped by the quality of the composite output (not to mention the quality of the cable broadcast itself, which isn't too hot to begin with), and not by the quality of the signal between my PC and my TV. Never mind the fact that Motorola makes DCT-2000s with s-video and TOSLink optical audio outputs, so I could get a slightly better picture and much better audio (dolby digital 5.1, where available). AT&T doesn't offer them, and won't let me buy my own. grumble grumble.
Mod up the parent. Microsoft's DirectShow makes it dead simple to write the core functionality for any PVR (well, assuming of course that you have some form of video input, like a TV tuner, and that hardware has proper drivers, which all modern hardware should have). Use DirectShow to do the "hard" part (pause live tv, capture to a file, etc) so you can dedicate more time to the fit&finish work, like integrating a channel listing.
You can also do even fancier stuff, like render DirectShow to a texture and use that in a 3D scene with Direct3D. Microsoft has a sample app that renders three video feeds to a cube. Pretty sweet.
Everyone knows that MySQL is not a good choice for heavy lifting, it's much better for lightweight applications where you have a simple database with lots of SELECTs and not much updating. Get used to it. Why must you force it to fit a different mold as well?
The original poster is not the one trying to make MySQL be something it's not. If "everyone" knows that MySQL is not good for "heavy lifting" (by which I assume you mean a complex data set, lots of writes, the need for strict relationship management, etc), then why does "everyone" seem to want to use it just for that? Slashdot is arguably "heavy lifting" (okay, the data set may not be very complex, but there's a lot of it, and there's a lot of writes), yet it uses MySQL. As well, about once a day or so, Slashdot has database-related problems. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Why must you force it to fit a different mold as well? The reason many of those features were left out is because they resulted in design decisions that slowed the thing down.
Or so the MySQL team tries to justify those decisions, right up to the point where they finally support one of those features. Then, it's suddenly a necessary feature and won't affect performance too much. If the MySQL team would just be honest and admit they didn't implement a given feature because they didn't want to, didn't know how to, didn't have time to, or a design flaw prevented them from doing so, then I wouldn't have a problem. However, they try to justify not including various features (say, transactions) by telling the developers that you can easily code around the problem in your client-side code (even insinuating that it's better to do so!). That's just wrong.
Many people don't care about setting up a fancy RDBMS, they just want a few tables that they can easily commit to and select from, like a glorified Berkely DB. What's wrong with that?
Absolutely nothing, but don't be naive. You know there are tons of people out there trying to use MySQL for things it wasn't designed to do (look at Slashdot as a prime example, or check out some of the past Ask Slashdot questions, or look at Freshmeat.net, etc. There are even people using MySQL for financial applications! Yikes!). The moment someone has to think about how they will get at their data without using a subselect when a subselect would be the natural way to do so, or has to code their own transaction/rollback support in their client (not such a big deal now, since at least one MySQL table type has transaction support), or has to enforce relationships in their own code because MySQL doesn't properly do foreign keys, or has to fake triggers, and so on, then it's time to ditch MySQL and go with something bigger/better.
Re:You can get better than KVM for little more mon
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USB KVMs Compared
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· Score: 3, Insightful
KVMs are good, and they certainly have a variety of specialized uses, but they're not versatile enough, in my opinion. For example, in situations where two computer might need to both be used at once. What do you do then?
Buy another keyboard, mouse, and monitor. That's not a problem KVMs were designed to fix. Think instead about the server room full of machines. Now, what do you do if/when you actually have to access one of those directly (ie, from the console, not over the LAN) (don't focus on the wrong part here. There are reasons you may need to directly access the console, like say your NIC died, or you're in the process of installing the OS. The reason here doesn't matter, what matters is that there are reasons why you would need to access the console directly rather than via ssh or vnc or X or terminal server or whatever)? Wheel out the cart with the monitor and keyboard? Or just go sit down at the station where you already have the monitor, keyboard, and mouse setup, with all the machines connected to Cybex KVM switches (the heavy-duty server room KVM switches are quite a bit different than the 2-port or 4-port switches you'll use at your desktop)? With the latter option, you never have to dig around behind a machine for the cables, or try to get back there to plug in that monitor on the cart. Just hit the hotkey, pick the machine you need to access, and you're there at the console.
Re:USB? What about the UXGA?
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USB KVMs Compared
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Forget USB, I want a KVM that doesn't make my video cards output look like crap on my LCD... Why don't the manufacturers care about video quality at 1600x1200??? Just because I want to run multiple machines from one keyboard / LCD, doesn't mean that I'm running at VGA resolutions...
Try buying a quality KVM? I don't know about on LCD monitors (I haven't found a good-sized UXGA monitor in a comfortable price range for me, yet), but my 2pt IOGear USB KVM does 1600x1200 just fine on my 19" monitor, and the Cybex I use at work (not USB, unfortunately) does just as well on the 21" I have at work. Sure, if you're using a 5 year old KVM, you're probably not going to get very good video (unless you paid a lot of money 5 years ago). These days, you got ripped off if your KVM can't handle that.
Then again, things may be different when outputting on an LCD monitor (and I haven't seen any DVI-capable KVMs yet, so you can't mux the digital signal anyway, for the hihger-end LCDs).
It's probably a good thing that barriers to entry on Freshmeat or Sourceforge aren't high at all. It really only takes a half an hour or so of wild hacking and the time to write up the mission objective, but before you get too dismissive, remember that absolutely every piece of software once existed in that form. Freshmeat just makes the avoidance of what might be real dumb ideas or implementations more public and transparent. Worth mentioning in comparison is what happened over the last two years or so in the commercial world, where over a trillion dollars was lost in dotcom and related technology ventures based on dumb or unworkable premises. Where is any of that software now?
I'll agree that it's good to see the "failed" software projects (for whatever definition of "failed" you wish to use). As well, perhaps you may just find some useful code in one of those anyway. However, I was mostly commenting on the fact that a large majority of those projects are "failed" because they never came to fruition. A project that's started, makes a good start at the "interesting" bits of code, and then just dies off is "failed" in my book. Anyway, as far as the dot-bombs go, I've been working under the impression that there really wasn't that much software produced by them. IE, rather than getting some nice cheap office space somewhere in an office park, some not-quite-top-of-the-line PCs for the employees, and cranking out good software, most of these dot-bombs rented out premium office space, had to to buy the best of the best in equipment, and ran out of money before they could do too much more than put up a fancy web page. Sure, there were some legitimate companies that did have some nice software (Be, as in your example, though I would be reticent to refer to them as a dot-com. They didn't even so much get caught by the collapsing bubble as they did by not really having a useful target market -- anything Be could do, Windows and MacOS could do adequately enough to not mandate switching. But let's not get into that argument...).
It's nice to be able to pop a floppy in and reboot when you do something like misconfigure a kernel or (OOPS!) forget to edit/etc/lilo.conf after installing a correctly configured kernel.
And that's why, when upgrading your kernel, it makes sense to keep at least the previous kernel around (I get lazy, and end up with five or ten old kernels hanging around). Of course, this then requires you use a proper naming convention (vmlinuz.old and vmlinuz just don't cut it -- what version was vmlinuz.old? what version is vmlinuz?). I personally prefer the convention of vmlinuz-kernel.version.number-any-importan-patches -buildnumber, so I end up with things like vmlinuz-2.2.19-brfw-3 (kernel 2.2.19, with the bridge forwarding backport patch, third attempt at compiling this set of code). Now, just add a new stanza in lilo.conf and re-run lilo. If for some reason you forgot to add that stanza, no worries -- you didn't overwrite the old vmlinuz (or, well, vmlinuz-2.2.19-brfw-2:), and so lilo will have no problems booting back to your previous kernel so you can do things properly. Sure, this naming convention can get ugly (vmlinuz-2.4.18-acN-xfs-preempt-somethingelse-anot herpatch-andmore-15, or something similar), but at least it's verbose so you actually know what that kernel is at a glance (vmlinuz.old, zImage.old, or bzImage.old just doesn't give you any information at all, except that the image is "old").
Proper process in this scenario means no need to keep that floppy.
As for journals... does anybody read them? I have to admit that I've never really participated in them, although I do get the occasional message when one of my "friends" (in the SlashCode sense) posts a journal entry.
I think journals tend to be rather hit or miss. In general, it seems that the more controvesial the topic, the more participation you get (assuming reasonable "advertising" measures, like linking it in your sig and getting others to do the same). I think RMS is a controversial enough topic that if you can present a well-written journal (and all signs point to "Yes" here), and can get the word out, then a good discussion may follow. Of course, you'll probably get trolled, but with luck you'll get a good discussion going.
If you're a little leary about Slashdot's journal system (with good reason, since journals here aren't very well publicized, might I suggest you consider developing a diary (or even submitting an editorial) over at Kuro5hin instead? The community aspect there seems a bit stronger, and for whatever reason K5 seems to have much fewer trolls than Slashdot. Slashdot would be a more appropriate forum for a discussion of RMS (and correlating topics, such as the GPL), but K5 may be a friendly home for such a discussion.
Well, I'm not too worried about that. I used to be capped, but with the recent changes, who can tell? I just want to keep my +2 bonus so I can spread my message to a wider audience.;-)
Yeah, I figured. I posted that in jest, playing on your "karma dropping" running joke.:)
Excellent post! You've presented a good argument in a rational manner. For what it's worth, I agree with you. I read through (most of) your other post, and I'd like to see you develop these posts into a journal entry designed to stimulate discussion about "Free" software, RMS's methods, intellectual property rights, and so forth.
I hope you don't lose too much karma from the Hmoderators who disagree with your argument.
I think a more effective way to "evangelize" open source projects is to emphasize the superiority of the development model for human creativity projects.
I think the key concept here is "creativity"(1). Perhaps the open source development model (typically defined as being a loosely-collected group of developers working together via some collaborative medium such as the internet, for fun and not necessarily profit) works well for projects that can be said to be "creative", but unfortunately 99.995%(2) of all software projects are not what I would consider "creative". They may be reimplimentations of something that's already been done (say, a media player, or a word processor, or a text editor, or a compiler, or...), though they may be adding new concepts and capabilities. They may also be just plain drudgery (specialized software for an accounting firm, for example). Are these projects "creative"? Depends. I'd probably say "no", for the majority of them, but you may have a different opinion. As well, even where "creative" applications are concerned, a majority of the code is boring code that needs to be written but is more busy work than anything else. In general (and there are exceptions to this, of course), most open source developers prefer to focus on the more "fun" parts of the software rather than doing the various menial tasks that need to be done(3). This is understandable, because if you're not getting paid to do this, you're doing it in your spare time. Why would you want to spend your spare time doing something boring when you could be out doing something else instead?
Anyway, on to my point. What I'm getting at here is that the open source development process is not necessarily superior to more traditional proprietary development processes, nor is there an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that it may be. For every successful open source project out there that can be held up as a shining example of the open source development process, there are hundreds of projects languishing under the model, with little or no "external" (ie, outside the initial author or group of authors) development or bug reporting, and a whole lot of these projects have only gotten so far as implementing some of their cool ideas and just get bogged down when they get into the other 80% or so of the code that's not "cool"(4). At least as far as proprietary software is concerned, you can be reasonably sure that the boring parts will get done as well as the interesting parts, because there is incentive to do the boring work (ie, a paycheck).
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1. For "creativity", I'm using the definition of the base "creative" as "Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative", and not the more broad "Having the ability or power to create".
2. I'm making up my statistics, but the actual numbers are not important. What is important is that the number is large. It may be 75%, or 83%, or 99%, but it's still a large majority.
3. Prime example: the addition of fairly useless "fun" things to Mozilla, like Chatzilla, at a point in time where development resources would've been better spent fixing bugs aiming towards a 1.0 release. Yeah, yeah, Mozilla did finally release their 1.0 version, but the fact still stands that many of the contributing developers apparently were more concerned with writing "cool code" than with fixing bugs.
4. Check Freshmeat or SourceForge (SourceForge is much worse about this than Freshmeat) some time and see all the stagnant open source projects that have never gone anywhere, nor ever will. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of them. Temper the successes of each Linux, Apache, FreeBSD, or other high-profile open source project by the failures of all of those projects. Note that I'm not saying the ratio is any better in the proprietary world (though if I had to guess, I'd say it is), but at least with proprietary software there's some form of motivation aside from "This'd be cool".
That whole site is a great site. If even a few people start fighting their traffic tickets rather than rolling over and letting the government pooch screw them, the system will get out of whack. When it's no longer profitable to ticket for speed, speeding tickets will be seldom written.
BTW, nice Porker (sorry, good natured humor, our nickname for a Porsche).
Interesting, I've not heard that nickname before. Out of curiosity, what car do you drive? (referring to your other post.) (not so I can rip on it or anything, I'm just interested in what other performance cars people drive.)
What would be really nice though is if that person driving 80mph was driving 60mph instead, so no one would be colliding at all.
Or if that person driving 60mph was driving 80mph instead, so no one would be colliding at all. Here is a link you may want to consider reading. Pay particular attention to #5 (when the speed limit is increased to be closer to the 85th percentile, the 99th percentile is more likely to slow down a bit and comply) and numbers 7 and 8 (where in accident rates increased when speed limits were lowered, and decreased when the limits were raised). And most importantly, check #10 -- 86% of all "speed-related" fatalities involve alcohol, or in other words are "drunk driving-related", and not "speed-related".
As you've pointed out, though, you have a fast car and are not interested in syncing your speed with the speed everyone's *supposed* to be going, and would rather set a bar for everyone else. Thanks for being so considerate... your attitude is what makes this country great.
Sorry, but you've got it backwards. I don't set the speed other people drive, I simply drive the speed I'm comfortable with on a given stretch of road (while I'm capable of going 100mph relatively safely, I'm not comfortable doing so in most places). In general, I'm usually slower than "average". For example, on my daily commute the speed limit is 60mph. Well, most people drive that between 65 and 75mph. Generally, I'm somewhere between 65mph and 68mph (70 when passing). Just because my car can go fast doesn't mean I drive it fast all the time.
Hmm. This suggests an interesting new social philosophy. If you make people follow rules, you're punishing them. Most people don't need rules, because they have enough common sense not to abuse their freedom. So, it shouldn't be against the law to rob banks. After all, only a few are greedy enough to try to take all the money, and we shouldn't punish all the sensible people who only steal money when they absolutely need to.
Bad analogy. Traffic laws are completely different than laws against robbing a bank (for starters, while a traffic ticket is technically considered a misdemeanor criminial offense, a bank robbery is usually at least a felony, and often under federal jurisdiction. apples and oranges). You're arguing that if one rule or one set of rules is wrong or bad or pointless, then all rules should be the same. Let's turn this around, then shall we? How do you feel about the DMCA? Don't like it, do you? Well, if robbing a bank is illegal, and you think there should be a law against it, then obviously (by your argument) the DMCA is good and just. "But wait!" you say. The DMCA is evil! It's bad! It's just plain wrong! Well, how about this: "Put simply, the 85th percentile speed is the speed at which most people drive. BUT... most limits are lower than this number by about 10 MPH." (from here, summarizing from here) Does that mean that speed limits are bad, or wrong? They're obviously designed to hinder motorists and line the pockets of local governments (tin-foil hat alert!).
So let's recap. The DMCA is wrong, and shouldn't be a law. Current speed limits are wrong, and should be adjusted correctly. So that must mean that it should be okay to rob a bank, right?
The fact that your car is designed to be operable at a hig speed doesn't mean it's safe to do so. There is nothing in that nicely designed car that is going to do anything about the reduced reaction time that you have when you're you're travelling that fast.
You're right, just because my car can do 150mph doesn't mean it's safe for me to do so. Nor is it safe for me to drive at 120mph, or possibly even 100mph. But I disagree that it's not safe for me to drive at 80mph. My car handles better than at least 75% of the cars on the road here (because 75% of the cars here are SUVs). However, that's not even all of it. Assuming I was in the same bog standard SUV everybody seems to drive, I would still be a much safer driver than the soccer moms out there who aren't paying attention to driving. When I drive, that's it -- I'm driving. I'm not messing with my hair, putting on make-up, eating a cheeseburger, drinking coffee, reading the morning paper, trying to keep the brats in the back under control, or anything else. I'm driving. I may hit the radio once in a while, but generally I don't even do that -- I pop in a CD, and let it play through. Point? It's not just the car, nor just the physical ability to react. It's the driver. What the driver is doing matters, and if that driver isn't paying attention, s/he is a danger at ANY speed.
As for the car failing at higher speeds? I doubt that the poster was really meaning to say that, say, the car was going to disintegrate because it's being driven at 80 as opposed to 60 mph. But hitting potholes at 80 is certainly going to do more damage than hitting it at 60. It may not cause an accident but the damage is still done. (I'm guessing that maybe you replace your shocks sooner than many people.) And I'd sure as hell hate having to react to a blowout at 80 mph. Even a blowout at 60 would quite possibly result in an accident.
I understand the original poster didn't mean that the car literally disintegrates out from underneath you once you hit that magic 80mph speed. However, he did imply that going that fast causes a much higher amount of wear and tear. That's true, on economy cars (like a 3-cyl Geo Metro), or older cars in disrepair, or the popular SUV/Jeep/big trucks on the road these days that were never meant for street driving. However, that's not true for most any modern car. A Honda Civic and a Ferarri Modena 360 can both handle 80mph with about the same amount of wear and tear. That's not justification to drive that fast, but that wasn't my point. My point there was to kill the argument that driving 80mph is bad for your car (100mph, sure. 80mph, no). As far as recovering from a blowout, you said it yourself -- that's dangerous even within the legal limit. All I can say there is that my car won't roll over on me and kill me because of a blowout.
People who think driving at high speeds is just as safe as it is at slower speeds are delusional. If you want to drive 80 mph on a regular basis, please move to Nevada. Perhaps your Boxter will feel right at home on the roads there.
I've got a great website for you to read. The relevant link is here, though you may find the rest interesting as well (not my site, but very informative, and a good read).
Let me just finish by saying several things.
I'm not saying that I speed all the time. I do speed. You do, too (don't lie). Also, I generally don't try to make justifications for speeding aside from "sometimes it's fun". It doesn't matter if I'm late to work (mmm, flex time). It doesn't matter if I don't make it to McD's before they close. And if I'm late meeting friends, they'll understand (usually, they're the ones that are late).
I'm not condoning drunk driving. You drink and drive, you get what's coming to you. I know my limits, and I don't drive when I feel I'm even close to them. Taxis and friends are good. DUIs are bad.
I'm not talking about speeding in residential areas, here. When I say "80mph", I'm generally talking about a stretch of interstate that's usually "limited" between 60mph and 75mph. I'm not talking about doing 80 in a 35mph zone. That's just stupid.
Oh, and thanks for the picture of the car, especially for the ones of the plates. If I ever see you going 80, I'll put my cell phone to use... because hey, if you get enough tickets for speeding you'll have a 0% chance of killing me with that thing... and that's good odds. Slow the fuck down.
First off, there were no plates in those pictures. Look again. Given the dealership name, you may be able to determine a vicinity of where I am, but you will not be able to find out who I am. Second, I didn't say I speed. Occasionally, I do, but more importantly I keep situational awareness while I drive, and know that if necessary, I have enough power in my car to get me out of a bad situation. However, to reiterate, speed doesn't kill. It's that crash at the end. But seriously, it's not going too fast that's the problem. It's going too fast for your reactions. Maybe at 120mph I'll be going too fast for reactions, but not at 80mph (there's such a thing as going too fast for conditions, but that does not imply speeding. You can be going too fast for conditions and still be under the speed limit). Now, if I were a soccer mom, driving her SUV with three bratty kids in the back yelling and screaming, trying to put on make-up on the way to some extracurricular activity for the young'uns, not paying attention where I'm driving, then going even 60mph on a 60mph road would be too fast because I have no situational awareness. You have to know where everybody is on the road. More, you have to be able to anticipate what they are going to do. Being a defensive driver doesn't mean you go 55mph in a 60mph zone. It means you know what's going on around you, and have left yourself an escape route (ie, you leave room in front of you for breaking, you don't let others ride your blind spot, etc. I don't mean an escape route for running from cops. That's just stupid).
Then again, go ahead and believe what you will. When average traffic speed is faster than what you're doing, even if that speed is faster than the legal limit, then you are the danger, not those around you. Why? Well, for one thing, somebody driving 80mph hitting you from behind when you're going 60mph is going to do more damage than if they hit somebody doing 78mph (relative speeds -- the first is a collision at 20mph, the other is at 2mph. calculate your kinetic energy). For another, you're an unknown quantity. If you're unwilling to follow traffic speeds (as illegal as those speeds may be, though no cop will pull you over for going over the speed limit when everybody else is doing the same -- or if they do, you have a pretty good court case. No, you can't just go in and say "But I was doing the same speed as everybody else." It takes a little more ingenuity, but if you're in such a situation, there's no reason why you shouldn't get out of the ticket. Hint: speed limits are supposed to be based on what's called the "85th percentile", but usually aren't, and surveys are often infrequently done. Look it up. That should get you started with a good defense), then who knows what else you'll do? I can predict the guy passing me going 80mph, I can predict the guy ahead of me going 70mph, I can even predict what the big semi is going to do, but it's much more difficult to predict what you'll be doing at 15mph below me and everyone else.
Speed doesn't kill? Yet every time they enforce the speed limit on 17 the death rate plummets.
You're drawing the wrong conclusion here. The death rate doesn't go down because speeds decrease. It goes down because people are paying more attention to the road. When you're on the road and see a cop, sure, you slow down. But what else do you do? Right, you pay attention more. You're not going to be reading the morning paper while driving, because you're trying to keep an eye on where that cop is (and by doing so, you're getting information on where everybody else is, as well). Speed doesn't kill, but inattentive driving does.
Apply some basic science and logic! The faster you drive, the harder it is to control your car. The faster you go, the more little strains you put on that complicated machine you're driving, the more likely you'll throw a rod or blow a tire, or get brake fade at an inopportune moment. The faster you go, the more distance you have to use up while responding to the unexpected. And of course, the faster you go, the more kinetic energy to use up in the form of bent metal and broken bodies when you do collide with something.
My car was designed to handle 80mph speeds with no problems at all. Your car probably was designed that way as well. About the only vehicles that you shouldn't drive that fast in are things like Jeeps, trucks, or SUVs that were designed for off-roading (and thus have big nubs on their tires, and high centers of gravity, and basically are built for endurance rather than speed). Saying that you're making your car more likely to fail by going 10 or 20mph over the speed limit is silly. If you're breezing along at 120mph, then sure (most cars definitely are not designed for that). But you've been talking about the 80mph range (say, 75-90 or so). Not only are those speeds well within the range of your car's tolerances (again, unless you fall into the above category, or are driving some 10 year old beater that's not been properly maintained), but the effects of an impact at those speeds are not appreciably different than an impact at 60mph. Yeah, yeah, there's more kinetic energy, and whatever else, but that doesn't really matter after a certain point. There's a limit at which point the increase in kinetic energy doesn't matter anymore, because you're already going to be dead.
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Yes, PowerStrip runs under Windows. However, it can just as easily output X modelines as it can set resolutions for Windows. Therefore, you can simply dual-boot any OS that uses X and a Windows (whatever you happen to have), use PowerStrip to setup the resolution under Windows, and copy that modeline over to X just fine.
Uh ... huh? When did Microsoft buy Adobe? Oh yeah, that's right -- they didn't. Now you're judging Microsoft based on Adobe's actions. I don't think there's anything else to say, here.
Ouch! Can you say "your paint job is fucked over to hell and back"? I don't think even StonGard will save you there!
Yeah, and? Welcome to the late 1980s, where Nintendo requires any game or peripheral sold to work with their Nintendo Entertainment System must be approved by Nintendo (okay, so they didn't have any way to prevent unauthorized games and periphs, but this is called "the advancement of technology over 15+ years"). In otherwords, big deal. It's old hat that game console manufacturers want to be able to control the peripherals and games made for their system, for a two-fold reason. Primarily, there's the licensing fees associated with getting authorized. This is good, because it gets money to the console maker, which means they have more money to work on the next version, and have an incentive to actually continue to support the console. (blah blah capitalism is bad blah blah blah socialism r00ls d00dnutz blah blah blah.) Second, it's a form of quality control. Okay, sure there are still bad games and peripherals that are released for consoles, but the quality of even the worst game or peripheral is astounding compared to the quality of a lot of games and such Back In The Day (tm) when Atari (will the real Atari please stand up? No, GT Interactive, sit back down, dammit) was still around and had no such approval system. (Check out ClassicGaming.com (a member of the Gamespy network) some time. I recall them doing at least one article on terrible old games.) I for one prefer that a console manufacturer require that they approve games and peripherals, so that I can be reasonably sure that at the very least, the game/periph will work with my console, even if it's not a great game or periph.
As far as using your Dual Shock on other systems (guh. Those controllers are two damned small and pointy to be comfortable. You must have tiny hands), wouldn't it stand to reason that if there were demand for such a thing (and apparently there is, though I can't fathom why), and Microsoft required that the peripheral transmit an authorized key to be allowed to work, then some entrepenuerial company would develop said adaptor (done) and get it approved by Microsoft so that they can transmit a valid key to the console. Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft isn't vindictive. They wouldn't kill such a peripheral out of spite. In fact, if it helped them sell consoles and games, they'd authorize it immediately. It's called "good business".
You said:
The article said:
It seems to me that "it would be inappropriate to ask MIT to withhold the paper" is quite a bit different than "we'll allow you to publish the paper". Microsoft did the Right Thing (tm), in that they recognized that Huang's paper can and should be published without restraint due to the principles of Free Speech. Is it so hard to give kudos where kudos are deserved, even when it's a company that you "hate" ("hate" is rather strong, don't you think? but oh well ...)? Why must you try to make Microsoft look bad even when they've done good? If Redhat (for example. Or Sun, or any other Slashdot-favorite company) had done the same thing, you'd be lauding them for doing the Right Thing (tm) by saying it's "inappropriate" to block this, even though they could legally block the paper (hey, it's not just Microsoft that has that kind of power). Then again, if Redhat/Sun/Oracle/IBM/whoever had actually said, "We'll allow you to publish this, even though we could block it legally," I bet you'd still be crazy nuts happy about it without trying to say that they're doing so only to make themselves look stronger.
You mean people watch Sex in the City? Huh. No, I suggest HBO for the real quality stuff, like Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and the occasional mini-series (Band of Brothers was awesome). Right, so you're saying, "Pay for HBO? Just for a Sunday night line-up? What am I going to watch the rest of the week?" Not a problem. That goes to the rest of my post -- get out of the house! Or read a book (I'm reading A Secret Histroy, the first volume in the book of Ash). Hell, if you have to be geeky, go write some code. Point being, there's a ton of better things to do than watch TV (yeah, like I'm one to talk, considering what I've spent on my entertainment center. but until AT&T Broadband starts broadcasting HD content, it's pretty much a waste as far as TV goes. Much better for DVDs and my HTPC).
As much as I agree with you that reality TV shows are a waste of time, can you truly say they "suck" without having seen a fair representation of them? No, 1/2 of an episode of Survivor doesn't count. As with any good argument against something, you generally need to have an understanding of what you're arguing against. (ie, I've seen a number of different "reality" shows, from the originals like Real World, to Survivor, to Survivor copies like Boot Camp. I think they suck, but had I not seen a number of episodes from several different shows, could I fairly say that?)
Consider reading a book, going outside, playing a video game, etc. There's no reason you have to watch TV. And if you do have to watch TV (say, from some bizarre and rare medical disorder), do yourself a favor and get HBO. You'll be glad you did.
So, 2005? 2006? The PS3 is just Sony's current way of doing to the XBox/GameCube what they did to the Dreamcast last generation -- say you've got your "next generation" machine almost ready, even though it's 2+ years out, and encourage people to wait for that rather than buy what's available now. That's fine, if you don't mind waiting years for something that won't be anything near what they hype. If instead you like to play games because it's fun, then buy the system(s) with the games you like, and don't worry about what's coming next. When it gets here, it'll get here. Until then, just have fun.
Per Tivo's website, you can connect a normal Tivo to a DirecTV box via an RS232 port for channel changing. Unfortunately, there's no such thing for cable boxes. That's why Tivo has what's called an "IR Blaster", which basically is an IR emitter that you setup in front of the cable box's IR receiver, and the Tivo will send out the proper IR signals.
If anyone happens to have any recommendations on IR blasters for a PC, let me know, because I'm going to need one eventually.
(emphasis added by me)
Well, there's you're problem. You're using inferior methods of connecting to your TV. Please note: non-HDTV users (with or without an HD tuner, doesn't matter) can skip this comment.
If you want to get good quality output on a TV from a PC, you need to get a VGA to Component transcoder. Some people may be able to use a vga to rgb breakout cable instead (component is YPrPb (3 connections), rgb is RGBHV (5 connections). most HDTVs will have at least component, and may also have RGB. Either will work, depending on what inputs your TV has). Using a transcoder, a Radeon 7500, and PowerStrip (to set "odd" resolutions, like 848x480p, or 960x540p, or 1920x1080i), I get very good output from my HTPC (hand-built Home Theater PC) on my Mitsubishi 46807 (46" 16x9 HD-compatible (ie, no HD tuner) rear-projection TV). In fact, the only degradation that I can see is something I had before -- AT&T broadband only offers digital STBs with composite and RF output. That means my TV image quality is capped by the quality of the composite output (not to mention the quality of the cable broadcast itself, which isn't too hot to begin with), and not by the quality of the signal between my PC and my TV. Never mind the fact that Motorola makes DCT-2000s with s-video and TOSLink optical audio outputs, so I could get a slightly better picture and much better audio (dolby digital 5.1, where available). AT&T doesn't offer them, and won't let me buy my own. grumble grumble.
Mod up the parent. Microsoft's DirectShow makes it dead simple to write the core functionality for any PVR (well, assuming of course that you have some form of video input, like a TV tuner, and that hardware has proper drivers, which all modern hardware should have). Use DirectShow to do the "hard" part (pause live tv, capture to a file, etc) so you can dedicate more time to the fit&finish work, like integrating a channel listing.
You can also do even fancier stuff, like render DirectShow to a texture and use that in a 3D scene with Direct3D. Microsoft has a sample app that renders three video feeds to a cube. Pretty sweet.
The original poster is not the one trying to make MySQL be something it's not. If "everyone" knows that MySQL is not good for "heavy lifting" (by which I assume you mean a complex data set, lots of writes, the need for strict relationship management, etc), then why does "everyone" seem to want to use it just for that? Slashdot is arguably "heavy lifting" (okay, the data set may not be very complex, but there's a lot of it, and there's a lot of writes), yet it uses MySQL. As well, about once a day or so, Slashdot has database-related problems. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Or so the MySQL team tries to justify those decisions, right up to the point where they finally support one of those features. Then, it's suddenly a necessary feature and won't affect performance too much. If the MySQL team would just be honest and admit they didn't implement a given feature because they didn't want to, didn't know how to, didn't have time to, or a design flaw prevented them from doing so, then I wouldn't have a problem. However, they try to justify not including various features (say, transactions) by telling the developers that you can easily code around the problem in your client-side code (even insinuating that it's better to do so!). That's just wrong.
Absolutely nothing, but don't be naive. You know there are tons of people out there trying to use MySQL for things it wasn't designed to do (look at Slashdot as a prime example, or check out some of the past Ask Slashdot questions, or look at Freshmeat.net, etc. There are even people using MySQL for financial applications! Yikes!). The moment someone has to think about how they will get at their data without using a subselect when a subselect would be the natural way to do so, or has to code their own transaction/rollback support in their client (not such a big deal now, since at least one MySQL table type has transaction support), or has to enforce relationships in their own code because MySQL doesn't properly do foreign keys, or has to fake triggers, and so on, then it's time to ditch MySQL and go with something bigger/better.
Buy another keyboard, mouse, and monitor. That's not a problem KVMs were designed to fix. Think instead about the server room full of machines. Now, what do you do if/when you actually have to access one of those directly (ie, from the console, not over the LAN) (don't focus on the wrong part here. There are reasons you may need to directly access the console, like say your NIC died, or you're in the process of installing the OS. The reason here doesn't matter, what matters is that there are reasons why you would need to access the console directly rather than via ssh or vnc or X or terminal server or whatever)? Wheel out the cart with the monitor and keyboard? Or just go sit down at the station where you already have the monitor, keyboard, and mouse setup, with all the machines connected to Cybex KVM switches (the heavy-duty server room KVM switches are quite a bit different than the 2-port or 4-port switches you'll use at your desktop)? With the latter option, you never have to dig around behind a machine for the cables, or try to get back there to plug in that monitor on the cart. Just hit the hotkey, pick the machine you need to access, and you're there at the console.
Try buying a quality KVM? I don't know about on LCD monitors (I haven't found a good-sized UXGA monitor in a comfortable price range for me, yet), but my 2pt IOGear USB KVM does 1600x1200 just fine on my 19" monitor, and the Cybex I use at work (not USB, unfortunately) does just as well on the 21" I have at work. Sure, if you're using a 5 year old KVM, you're probably not going to get very good video (unless you paid a lot of money 5 years ago). These days, you got ripped off if your KVM can't handle that.
Then again, things may be different when outputting on an LCD monitor (and I haven't seen any DVI-capable KVMs yet, so you can't mux the digital signal anyway, for the hihger-end LCDs).
I'll agree that it's good to see the "failed" software projects (for whatever definition of "failed" you wish to use). As well, perhaps you may just find some useful code in one of those anyway. However, I was mostly commenting on the fact that a large majority of those projects are "failed" because they never came to fruition. A project that's started, makes a good start at the "interesting" bits of code, and then just dies off is "failed" in my book. Anyway, as far as the dot-bombs go, I've been working under the impression that there really wasn't that much software produced by them. IE, rather than getting some nice cheap office space somewhere in an office park, some not-quite-top-of-the-line PCs for the employees, and cranking out good software, most of these dot-bombs rented out premium office space, had to to buy the best of the best in equipment, and ran out of money before they could do too much more than put up a fancy web page. Sure, there were some legitimate companies that did have some nice software (Be, as in your example, though I would be reticent to refer to them as a dot-com. They didn't even so much get caught by the collapsing bubble as they did by not really having a useful target market -- anything Be could do, Windows and MacOS could do adequately enough to not mandate switching. But let's not get into that argument ...).
And that's why, when upgrading your kernel, it makes sense to keep at least the previous kernel around (I get lazy, and end up with five or ten old kernels hanging around). Of course, this then requires you use a proper naming convention (vmlinuz.old and vmlinuz just don't cut it -- what version was vmlinuz.old? what version is vmlinuz?). I personally prefer the convention of vmlinuz-kernel.version.number-any-importan-patches -buildnumber, so I end up with things like vmlinuz-2.2.19-brfw-3 (kernel 2.2.19, with the bridge forwarding backport patch, third attempt at compiling this set of code). Now, just add a new stanza in lilo.conf and re-run lilo. If for some reason you forgot to add that stanza, no worries -- you didn't overwrite the old vmlinuz (or, well, vmlinuz-2.2.19-brfw-2 :), and so lilo will have no problems booting back to your previous kernel so you can do things properly. Sure, this naming convention can get ugly (vmlinuz-2.4.18-acN-xfs-preempt-somethingelse-anot herpatch-andmore-15, or something similar), but at least it's verbose so you actually know what that kernel is at a glance (vmlinuz.old, zImage.old, or bzImage.old just doesn't give you any information at all, except that the image is "old").
Proper process in this scenario means no need to keep that floppy.
I think journals tend to be rather hit or miss. In general, it seems that the more controvesial the topic, the more participation you get (assuming reasonable "advertising" measures, like linking it in your sig and getting others to do the same). I think RMS is a controversial enough topic that if you can present a well-written journal (and all signs point to "Yes" here), and can get the word out, then a good discussion may follow. Of course, you'll probably get trolled, but with luck you'll get a good discussion going.
If you're a little leary about Slashdot's journal system (with good reason, since journals here aren't very well publicized, might I suggest you consider developing a diary (or even submitting an editorial) over at Kuro5hin instead? The community aspect there seems a bit stronger, and for whatever reason K5 seems to have much fewer trolls than Slashdot. Slashdot would be a more appropriate forum for a discussion of RMS (and correlating topics, such as the GPL), but K5 may be a friendly home for such a discussion.
Yeah, I figured. I posted that in jest, playing on your "karma dropping" running joke. :)
Excellent post! You've presented a good argument in a rational manner. For what it's worth, I agree with you. I read through (most of) your other post, and I'd like to see you develop these posts into a journal entry designed to stimulate discussion about "Free" software, RMS's methods, intellectual property rights, and so forth.
I hope you don't lose too much karma from the Hmoderators who disagree with your argument.
I think the key concept here is "creativity"(1). Perhaps the open source development model (typically defined as being a loosely-collected group of developers working together via some collaborative medium such as the internet, for fun and not necessarily profit) works well for projects that can be said to be "creative", but unfortunately 99.995%(2) of all software projects are not what I would consider "creative". They may be reimplimentations of something that's already been done (say, a media player, or a word processor, or a text editor, or a compiler, or ...), though they may be adding new concepts and capabilities. They may also be just plain drudgery (specialized software for an accounting firm, for example). Are these projects "creative"? Depends. I'd probably say "no", for the majority of them, but you may have a different opinion. As well, even where "creative" applications are concerned, a majority of the code is boring code that needs to be written but is more busy work than anything else. In general (and there are exceptions to this, of course), most open source developers prefer to focus on the more "fun" parts of the software rather than doing the various menial tasks that need to be done(3). This is understandable, because if you're not getting paid to do this, you're doing it in your spare time. Why would you want to spend your spare time doing something boring when you could be out doing something else instead?
Anyway, on to my point. What I'm getting at here is that the open source development process is not necessarily superior to more traditional proprietary development processes, nor is there an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that it may be. For every successful open source project out there that can be held up as a shining example of the open source development process, there are hundreds of projects languishing under the model, with little or no "external" (ie, outside the initial author or group of authors) development or bug reporting, and a whole lot of these projects have only gotten so far as implementing some of their cool ideas and just get bogged down when they get into the other 80% or so of the code that's not "cool"(4). At least as far as proprietary software is concerned, you can be reasonably sure that the boring parts will get done as well as the interesting parts, because there is incentive to do the boring work (ie, a paycheck).
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1. For "creativity", I'm using the definition of the base "creative" as "Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative", and not the more broad "Having the ability or power to create".
2. I'm making up my statistics, but the actual numbers are not important. What is important is that the number is large. It may be 75%, or 83%, or 99%, but it's still a large majority.
3. Prime example: the addition of fairly useless "fun" things to Mozilla, like Chatzilla, at a point in time where development resources would've been better spent fixing bugs aiming towards a 1.0 release. Yeah, yeah, Mozilla did finally release their 1.0 version, but the fact still stands that many of the contributing developers apparently were more concerned with writing "cool code" than with fixing bugs.
4. Check Freshmeat or SourceForge (SourceForge is much worse about this than Freshmeat) some time and see all the stagnant open source projects that have never gone anywhere, nor ever will. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of them. Temper the successes of each Linux, Apache, FreeBSD, or other high-profile open source project by the failures of all of those projects. Note that I'm not saying the ratio is any better in the proprietary world (though if I had to guess, I'd say it is), but at least with proprietary software there's some form of motivation aside from "This'd be cool".
That whole site is a great site. If even a few people start fighting their traffic tickets rather than rolling over and letting the government pooch screw them, the system will get out of whack. When it's no longer profitable to ticket for speed, speeding tickets will be seldom written.
Interesting, I've not heard that nickname before. Out of curiosity, what car do you drive? (referring to your other post.) (not so I can rip on it or anything, I'm just interested in what other performance cars people drive.)
Or if that person driving 60mph was driving 80mph instead, so no one would be colliding at all. Here is a link you may want to consider reading. Pay particular attention to #5 (when the speed limit is increased to be closer to the 85th percentile, the 99th percentile is more likely to slow down a bit and comply) and numbers 7 and 8 (where in accident rates increased when speed limits were lowered, and decreased when the limits were raised). And most importantly, check #10 -- 86% of all "speed-related" fatalities involve alcohol, or in other words are "drunk driving-related", and not "speed-related".
Sorry, but you've got it backwards. I don't set the speed other people drive, I simply drive the speed I'm comfortable with on a given stretch of road (while I'm capable of going 100mph relatively safely, I'm not comfortable doing so in most places). In general, I'm usually slower than "average". For example, on my daily commute the speed limit is 60mph. Well, most people drive that between 65 and 75mph. Generally, I'm somewhere between 65mph and 68mph (70 when passing). Just because my car can go fast doesn't mean I drive it fast all the time.
Bad analogy. Traffic laws are completely different than laws against robbing a bank (for starters, while a traffic ticket is technically considered a misdemeanor criminial offense, a bank robbery is usually at least a felony, and often under federal jurisdiction. apples and oranges). You're arguing that if one rule or one set of rules is wrong or bad or pointless, then all rules should be the same. Let's turn this around, then shall we? How do you feel about the DMCA? Don't like it, do you? Well, if robbing a bank is illegal, and you think there should be a law against it, then obviously (by your argument) the DMCA is good and just. "But wait!" you say. The DMCA is evil! It's bad! It's just plain wrong! Well, how about this: "Put simply, the 85th percentile speed is the speed at which most people drive. BUT... most limits are lower than this number by about 10 MPH." (from here, summarizing from here) Does that mean that speed limits are bad, or wrong? They're obviously designed to hinder motorists and line the pockets of local governments (tin-foil hat alert!).
So let's recap. The DMCA is wrong, and shouldn't be a law. Current speed limits are wrong, and should be adjusted correctly. So that must mean that it should be okay to rob a bank, right?
You're right, just because my car can do 150mph doesn't mean it's safe for me to do so. Nor is it safe for me to drive at 120mph, or possibly even 100mph. But I disagree that it's not safe for me to drive at 80mph. My car handles better than at least 75% of the cars on the road here (because 75% of the cars here are SUVs). However, that's not even all of it. Assuming I was in the same bog standard SUV everybody seems to drive, I would still be a much safer driver than the soccer moms out there who aren't paying attention to driving. When I drive, that's it -- I'm driving. I'm not messing with my hair, putting on make-up, eating a cheeseburger, drinking coffee, reading the morning paper, trying to keep the brats in the back under control, or anything else. I'm driving. I may hit the radio once in a while, but generally I don't even do that -- I pop in a CD, and let it play through. Point? It's not just the car, nor just the physical ability to react. It's the driver. What the driver is doing matters, and if that driver isn't paying attention, s/he is a danger at ANY speed.
I understand the original poster didn't mean that the car literally disintegrates out from underneath you once you hit that magic 80mph speed. However, he did imply that going that fast causes a much higher amount of wear and tear. That's true, on economy cars (like a 3-cyl Geo Metro), or older cars in disrepair, or the popular SUV/Jeep/big trucks on the road these days that were never meant for street driving. However, that's not true for most any modern car. A Honda Civic and a Ferarri Modena 360 can both handle 80mph with about the same amount of wear and tear. That's not justification to drive that fast, but that wasn't my point. My point there was to kill the argument that driving 80mph is bad for your car (100mph, sure. 80mph, no). As far as recovering from a blowout, you said it yourself -- that's dangerous even within the legal limit. All I can say there is that my car won't roll over on me and kill me because of a blowout.
I've got a great website for you to read. The relevant link is here, though you may find the rest interesting as well (not my site, but very informative, and a good read).
Let me just finish by saying several things.
First off, there were no plates in those pictures. Look again. Given the dealership name, you may be able to determine a vicinity of where I am, but you will not be able to find out who I am. Second, I didn't say I speed. Occasionally, I do, but more importantly I keep situational awareness while I drive, and know that if necessary, I have enough power in my car to get me out of a bad situation. However, to reiterate, speed doesn't kill. It's that crash at the end. But seriously, it's not going too fast that's the problem. It's going too fast for your reactions. Maybe at 120mph I'll be going too fast for reactions, but not at 80mph (there's such a thing as going too fast for conditions, but that does not imply speeding. You can be going too fast for conditions and still be under the speed limit). Now, if I were a soccer mom, driving her SUV with three bratty kids in the back yelling and screaming, trying to put on make-up on the way to some extracurricular activity for the young'uns, not paying attention where I'm driving, then going even 60mph on a 60mph road would be too fast because I have no situational awareness. You have to know where everybody is on the road. More, you have to be able to anticipate what they are going to do. Being a defensive driver doesn't mean you go 55mph in a 60mph zone. It means you know what's going on around you, and have left yourself an escape route (ie, you leave room in front of you for breaking, you don't let others ride your blind spot, etc. I don't mean an escape route for running from cops. That's just stupid).
Then again, go ahead and believe what you will. When average traffic speed is faster than what you're doing, even if that speed is faster than the legal limit, then you are the danger, not those around you. Why? Well, for one thing, somebody driving 80mph hitting you from behind when you're going 60mph is going to do more damage than if they hit somebody doing 78mph (relative speeds -- the first is a collision at 20mph, the other is at 2mph. calculate your kinetic energy). For another, you're an unknown quantity. If you're unwilling to follow traffic speeds (as illegal as those speeds may be, though no cop will pull you over for going over the speed limit when everybody else is doing the same -- or if they do, you have a pretty good court case. No, you can't just go in and say "But I was doing the same speed as everybody else." It takes a little more ingenuity, but if you're in such a situation, there's no reason why you shouldn't get out of the ticket. Hint: speed limits are supposed to be based on what's called the "85th percentile", but usually aren't, and surveys are often infrequently done. Look it up. That should get you started with a good defense), then who knows what else you'll do? I can predict the guy passing me going 80mph, I can predict the guy ahead of me going 70mph, I can even predict what the big semi is going to do, but it's much more difficult to predict what you'll be doing at 15mph below me and everyone else.
You're drawing the wrong conclusion here. The death rate doesn't go down because speeds decrease. It goes down because people are paying more attention to the road. When you're on the road and see a cop, sure, you slow down. But what else do you do? Right, you pay attention more. You're not going to be reading the morning paper while driving, because you're trying to keep an eye on where that cop is (and by doing so, you're getting information on where everybody else is, as well). Speed doesn't kill, but inattentive driving does.
My car was designed to handle 80mph speeds with no problems at all. Your car probably was designed that way as well. About the only vehicles that you shouldn't drive that fast in are things like Jeeps, trucks, or SUVs that were designed for off-roading (and thus have big nubs on their tires, and high centers of gravity, and basically are built for endurance rather than speed). Saying that you're making your car more likely to fail by going 10 or 20mph over the speed limit is silly. If you're breezing along at 120mph, then sure (most cars definitely are not designed for that). But you've been talking about the 80mph range (say, 75-90 or so). Not only are those speeds well within the range of your car's tolerances (again, unless you fall into the above category, or are driving some 10 year old beater that's not been properly maintained), but the effects of an impact at those speeds are not appreciably different than an impact at 60mph. Yeah, yeah, there's more kinetic energy, and whatever else, but that doesn't really matter after a certain point. There's a limit at which point the increase in kinetic energy doesn't matter anymore, because you're already going to be dead.