The prius has an Atkinson cycle engine, basicly similar to otto that nearly all gasoline engines use, but differant valve timing. It results in the higher efficency, but looses lots of torque, which is then made up for with the electric motor.
Yes, trains are series, but they have no energy storage, but the reason for being series is as you stated, more so cause they don't want to have a multispeed transmission and clutches, plus you can start from zero with a motor, it just makes it way easier and reliable, you could do it with a conventional drive, it would just kinda suck.
Far as this system, well it's a joke. I'm curious how they are going to have any decent control, plus it's so small it won't much matter. To do regen you would have to have a manual transmission and once you push the clutch in say coming to a stop you loose the regen.
There is a lot of control involved with hybrids, and sizing of parts. A universal setup like this just isn't going to work good. It looks like a company hoping on the current trends to make a quick buck. If someone was to do it right they would pick a very common vehicle and develope a proper system for it. I know people who want to convert a vehicle to a hybrid, i'm one of them. But then we have also built them for years and know how to go about it. And one thing is for sure, your not going to do it on the cheap. If it's cheap, it's not going to be a very good design since proper batteries, controllers, drive motors/generators and interfacing hardware is not cheap. 10-20 grand to do one right. And see a real good end result.
I'll go with that. I frankly thing they are just as bad. Doesn't matter which is worse they are both bad.
That said I have fond memories of trying to eat hamburgers and have a drink while driving our truck which was manual and had no cup olders so the drink was between my legs and such. Not a great idea. But at least I was willing to accept a mess in the truck verse wrecking. I think many would rather risk a wreck then have to tell the person they will call back when they get in traffic.
I belive in a few places it is ilegal to drive and eat at the same time. Since that is probably more dangerous then talking on a phone since people tend to take hands off a wheel a lot to do it and balance things and so forth, or look for that missing buritto. I don't want people smoking and driving either. Once again less hands on the wheel, plus the fuckers throwing the buts out the window. Or when in traffic you have their smoke coming back and having to breath it.
These laws are good. No matter how good you think you are a cell phone is a distraction. For one, it means you don't have both hands on the wheel in most cases, and the other hand tends to suck at do the rest while your talking. Plus your brain is simply thinking harder when dealing with a phone. Way more so then when a person is in the car talking to you, since you tend to pause and take care of the driving first. Also people are plenty of a distraction when driving. I know people who shouldn't be allowed to opperate a car when other are in it, and shouldn't be allowed to be a passenger since they don't know when to shut up and pay attention.
Every minor little accident or close call I have seen in the last 5 years had one common theme, a cell phone. I've been nearly hit by people 3 times in the last 5 years while walking, all were talking on cell phones. I was near clipped yesterday when a person switched lanes at the last second cause they were to distracted talking on a cell phone (not the first time that has happened). I've watch many people pop over curbs making aturn while talking on a cell phone cause they couldn't see do to the phone blocking head movement and vision, plus they couldn't turn the wheel right with one hand wheel apparently. One dragged her car across a telephone pole. Now it's nice and flat on the side, that was an expensive call.
There is no possible way talking on a phone does not impair you in some way, the fact it is one more thing you are doing proves that. Now some people probably can fully well deal with a phone and drive at the same time, well great. They also tend to be the ones that are smart enought to pull over to talk, or keap it short instead of yaking about what they did today.
Even if you can drive just fine talking on one, you should be happy to see action being taken since people obviously can't handle it at once. This really won't effect many people unjustly. I for one would gladly not be allowed to talk on a phone while driving if it ment the mass population who can't do this now can't do it. Less people to fear.
Topography doesn't change very much, and if your talking someplace like Nebraska, I can pretty much draw you a topo map without any work at all, A blank sheet of paper probably has all the info for most of Nebraska.
When I took a class on controls a few years ago there was a class project you had to do, build something that you would control. Could be anything. One of the things the prof wouldn't let us do is this. It had been done so many times before and had a couple etch-a-sketches sitting in the cabinent with motors allready on them.
This is something students have probably done for such projects for 15 years.
Indeed, I had a roommate(s) with those phones and they would use them where they are talking out loud. Anoying as all hell and could be heard through the whole apartment. And worse was the damn beep they made, and he would leave the phone there and it would beep for hours shoving it under a pile of clothes and shutting his room door didn't help much.
The phones seam to work good, but they are anoying as hell. He had it mainly for work (in construction) and it seams like a good idea for that, but god damn is it anoying.
gas weights ~7 lbs per gallon, and a typical car has a tank of around 13-15 gallons, so thats around 100lbs or so. odds are you don't drain the tank everytime, so you might only be changing the weight like 50 lbs. Thats not really much to notice, and won't make much of a differance, you can make that kind of differance with some groceries. Or worse someone rides in your car for a bit, thats a big differance.
Yes some weight changes you will notice. I notice the differance when a person gets in the car with me. The car only weights 2500lbs, so a 200lb person makes a big differance especialy cause it's manual so you really feel it in the shifts. Had 900lbs or so of people in it once (max rating is 1000) and boy can you feel that:)
I do exactly this, write the trip and total miles on the recepit and toss it in the consol, every now and then take them in and plug them in my spreed sheet. And I too try to do the math in my head while leaving the station.
I've tracked everything for my car from day one, every fill up, oil change, parking ticket....
I put it in a excel sheet and track everything. It's great cause you can track what your doing and how you have effected things. Say differances from changing sparkplugs and such. Also makes it easy to do a lifetime cost per mile (factoring everything, car, fuel, insurance...). Think i'm at 1.30 a mile so far, but i've only put a few thousand on it.
Also if and when I sell it I can hand the next person the files and they know exactly how it was cared for and have some history on it to know if something comes up.
That is not your mileage. What the computer is telling you is a number from a look up table in the cars computer for roughly that throttle position and speed and gear. Its not a real time calculation, and many things can cause it to be very differant from the look up table. Some cars have very poor implementation of this and when you say let off the gas going down a hill will tell you some crazy number like 90mpg. which is not right, aside from maybe for an instant, but hardly something to base the performance of the car from.
But that number will closely match the EPA number, cause guess where the info for that look up table came from? The EPA test that determined the cars Mileage rating.
Yes, this is obvious since it's the whole point of a hybrid like the prius. It takes less energy to drive slow (like in city driving). And you loose your energy in city driving from all the stop and go and idling at stops. A prius doesn't waste power idling, and gains the power back when braking. So it will get better mileage city, thats the whole idea. Hybrids don't do well on highway driving do to energy losses. For driving down the highway a conventional drivetrain is best. When it comes to high mileage on mildhybrids like the insight it's because it's light and areodynamic, not because it's a hybrid.
Everyones mileage will vary. This is for one very good reason. The mileage of your car is determined on a chassis dynometer running the federal driving cycles for city and highway. The current cycle is the LA77 I belive. That would be a cycle designed in 1977 as if you were driving around in Los Angeles California. So every car is based of a very set driving. Obviously no one will ever drive just like this. Some peoples driving will get poor mileage some great just on their routes they drive.
The other factor is indeed how you drive. I drive very agressively, but at the same time I get good mileage. Why is this? Well largly because I have worked on projects getting getting highmileage for years, Futuretruck. I understand what the car is doing and what to do to run it where I can get the best mileage. And often if your driving right, you will get good mileage, since making the most of your car and its potential is a very similar thing to how to get good mileage, conserving energy and so forth. Its not how powerful your car is, it's how you drive. A professional driver can roast a fool even when driving much less of a car then the fool.
Also driving a POS car with no power for years got me good at making the most with little power, so now I don't need to use it all to do what people do with more power. People are often shocked with how my car performs when with me driving, and they have the same car.
The driving cycle the gov uses is just simply out of date, but even a upgrade won't fix the problem do to as stated, people drive differant in differant places. If you live in the mountains on dirt roads, well your won't do as good. But if you live in kansas and your area is paved, your going to do better.
Also as car become more varried in what they can do and their drive trains, (gasoline with an auto, vs say a powersplit hybrid with a turbodiesel) the model is going to be harder to fit.
Also models vary so much. Look at any one model but then look at how much you can change with options. You can had 500+ lbs to an SUV just optioning it from the base to the top end with all the power features and such. So even in a model you get lots of differance, even if the engine and tranny are the same.
And yes I'm sure many people will say my 19xx gets this many miles per gallon but my new one gets far worse. Yes this is true, but thats because makers have tossed mileage for emissions, which is a very good thing, and in doing that cost some mileage (aside from CO2 the other emissions are not directly linked to mileage, sometimes you hurt mileage to reduce emissions). Also new cars are so much safer to do more structure and such. Your 80s Japanesse cars were tin cans, they had to add a lot of weight to make it safe.
Things also apply to trucks vs cars. Most people who buy a truck/suv find that it gets better mileage then listed, few will get under 20mpg, just that the fed test isn't freindly to trucks, and some people are just morons and can't drive a truck and get good mileage. But for that there is the inverse and people who drive econobox's and don't get crap for mileage and no where near what it's listed to get.
If you get in mid 20s mpg with anything, be ok with that, into the 30s, great. For most people the differance doesn't relate to much money saved. Hell, if you buy a bottle of water out of machine, or a coffee at starbucks everyday you wasted more money then the differance in your cost driving to work that day.
Yeah, at least you won't be like the people last year trying to move in and they weren't even finished. Northbrook is right through the woods from were I was. Good to hear they hardwired them. Copped Beech II was pretty well insulated, also kept noise down pretty good. except from a in the apartment standpoint. Make a sound on the top floor you will hear it in the basement. The Northbrook ones look a bit nicer then the copperbeech ones. Good luck there.
I lived in copper beech II on west arron dr. I lived there for 2 years. In the second year they included the internet service and tried to do it wirelessly for all the buildings there by having one connection then putting antenas on all the buildings. For those who tried it, it rarely worked, and was massively slow.
They may have got smart and finaly hardwired it like some of their other location. Or maybe you arn't living at the same one.
Overall Copperbeech isn't to bad, nice places, clean, but they are piss poor built, last year like 40 some units leaked. But they are pretty good about getting things taken care of, but sometimes they suck. Not much differant then other places. Right now they are over the limit at getting out deposit back, grr. I'd be pissed at them for one thing, while happy they did good at something else.
The bandwidth limit is hardly new, that kicked in a few years ago, right before everything collapsed with napster. I remember not even being able to check my email for hours because the whole network was hosed then. On top of people going nuts with napster and such, the connections for some buildings was just plain terrible in my case Beaver Hall, after I left they did some upgrades. Things are no were near as bad as they got at one point. The whole building basicly would have no internet for hours at a time.
The internet was pretty much slow as hell from spring of 2000 onward, it wasn't to bad when i started in 99, but from there, it was all over. Even on a good day the whole time I was there, it was rarely much faster then being on a phone modem.
Yeah apartment is great with cable modem, just be ready to curse Adelphia instead, and if you by chance live at copperbeech don't even think of using the free wireless, just bite the bullet and get normal adelphia cable service. Cause otherwise you won't have internet.
reminds me, fuckers haven't given us out deposit back.
Yes, but this takes time, unless things have changed, I went through this before and it was about a 4 day wait for rescom (or whatever they call themselves now) to change things. Also when I was oncampus you could not move to a differant room, the only way that happened is if you moved. So you were fixed to a room for the year, unless you went through the couple day wait. Maybe they have changed things now (been over 2 years since I was on campus).
I'm wondering after it crash lands and burst into flames, does the pilot got a good walk figured out for walking away from it? You know, nice pair of shades, a "I'm the man walk", maybe a nice soundtrack, and of course the all american thumbs up and smile.
So they made a icon for something that people might happen to have on their system. People often have files on their computer even though the app that uses it is not on the computer. Apple may have at the minimum wanted to have a icon in their instead of some default one. And if i remember correctly it looks just like the MP3 and AAC on, all they did is changed 3 letters. Not a hard thing to do, cheaper to do it up now then have to go back later and make one.
Also I think iTunes plays Oggs, but that doesn't lead much to thinking the iPod will play them anytime soon.
Re:Still use it sometimes..
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Eh, it's also very useful to people who type a lot, you often find times when you need to put things in all caps, it's still plenty useful.
Now there is plenty of keys i never use. like the ALT key, aside from CTRL ALT DEL back in the win98 days I have never used it. I don't need 2 ctrl keys, i never used Home PGUP PgDn End Ins Pause/Break, Scroll Lock. Actualy I hate the Page keys on my coolermaster keyboard since they put them on the edge of the main keypad so i hit them all the time when going for the enter key.
There is lots of near dead keys on keyboards now. Unless you are a CLI person, or all about Keyboard short cuts. but most people have moved to GUIs and use their mouse. So keys just sit doing nothing. Even F keys have some use, but they are rarely used.
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The prius has an Atkinson cycle engine, basicly similar to otto that nearly all gasoline engines use, but differant valve timing. It results in the higher efficency, but looses lots of torque, which is then made up for with the electric motor.
Yes, trains are series, but they have no energy storage, but the reason for being series is as you stated, more so cause they don't want to have a multispeed transmission and clutches, plus you can start from zero with a motor, it just makes it way easier and reliable, you could do it with a conventional drive, it would just kinda suck.
Far as this system, well it's a joke. I'm curious how they are going to have any decent control, plus it's so small it won't much matter. To do regen you would have to have a manual transmission and once you push the clutch in say coming to a stop you loose the regen.
There is a lot of control involved with hybrids, and sizing of parts. A universal setup like this just isn't going to work good. It looks like a company hoping on the current trends to make a quick buck. If someone was to do it right they would pick a very common vehicle and develope a proper system for it. I know people who want to convert a vehicle to a hybrid, i'm one of them. But then we have also built them for years and know how to go about it. And one thing is for sure, your not going to do it on the cheap. If it's cheap, it's not going to be a very good design since proper batteries, controllers, drive motors/generators and interfacing hardware is not cheap. 10-20 grand to do one right. And see a real good end result.
I'll go with that. I frankly thing they are just as bad. Doesn't matter which is worse they are both bad.
That said I have fond memories of trying to eat hamburgers and have a drink while driving our truck which was manual and had no cup olders so the drink was between my legs and such. Not a great idea. But at least I was willing to accept a mess in the truck verse wrecking. I think many would rather risk a wreck then have to tell the person they will call back when they get in traffic.
I belive in a few places it is ilegal to drive and eat at the same time. Since that is probably more dangerous then talking on a phone since people tend to take hands off a wheel a lot to do it and balance things and so forth, or look for that missing buritto. I don't want people smoking and driving either. Once again less hands on the wheel, plus the fuckers throwing the buts out the window. Or when in traffic you have their smoke coming back and having to breath it.
These laws are good. No matter how good you think you are a cell phone is a distraction. For one, it means you don't have both hands on the wheel in most cases, and the other hand tends to suck at do the rest while your talking. Plus your brain is simply thinking harder when dealing with a phone. Way more so then when a person is in the car talking to you, since you tend to pause and take care of the driving first. Also people are plenty of a distraction when driving. I know people who shouldn't be allowed to opperate a car when other are in it, and shouldn't be allowed to be a passenger since they don't know when to shut up and pay attention.
Every minor little accident or close call I have seen in the last 5 years had one common theme, a cell phone. I've been nearly hit by people 3 times in the last 5 years while walking, all were talking on cell phones. I was near clipped yesterday when a person switched lanes at the last second cause they were to distracted talking on a cell phone (not the first time that has happened). I've watch many people pop over curbs making aturn while talking on a cell phone cause they couldn't see do to the phone blocking head movement and vision, plus they couldn't turn the wheel right with one hand wheel apparently. One dragged her car across a telephone pole. Now it's nice and flat on the side, that was an expensive call.
There is no possible way talking on a phone does not impair you in some way, the fact it is one more thing you are doing proves that. Now some people probably can fully well deal with a phone and drive at the same time, well great. They also tend to be the ones that are smart enought to pull over to talk, or keap it short instead of yaking about what they did today.
Even if you can drive just fine talking on one, you should be happy to see action being taken since people obviously can't handle it at once. This really won't effect many people unjustly. I for one would gladly not be allowed to talk on a phone while driving if it ment the mass population who can't do this now can't do it. Less people to fear.
Topography doesn't change very much, and if your talking someplace like Nebraska, I can pretty much draw you a topo map without any work at all, A blank sheet of paper probably has all the info for most of Nebraska.
When I took a class on controls a few years ago there was a class project you had to do, build something that you would control. Could be anything. One of the things the prof wouldn't let us do is this. It had been done so many times before and had a couple etch-a-sketches sitting in the cabinent with motors allready on them.
This is something students have probably done for such projects for 15 years.
Oh wow, a company that had to make some complicated software decided to go for 90% of the market place.
seriously, don't tell me your complaining.
And maybe it will work under WINE.
thats because your running closer to WOT. Thats what you want to be doing, since a throttle by definition is a energy waster.
I didn't look at that site, but Trucks do have better brakes then cars in the sense they are much bigger and more powerful.
This was finaly a good post. You should have added in there that Ford should still keap making 2000 Taurus. Just to further complete things.
Belive me, I would have loved to. If it was someone i didn't like/would never see again it would have been tempting.
I didn't dare mess with buttons, like i know what the heck they do.
I'm in general a nice guy. I would bury it,and leave a note on his computer about it.
Indeed, I had a roommate(s) with those phones and they would use them where they are talking out loud. Anoying as all hell and could be heard through the whole apartment. And worse was the damn beep they made, and he would leave the phone there and it would beep for hours shoving it under a pile of clothes and shutting his room door didn't help much.
The phones seam to work good, but they are anoying as hell. He had it mainly for work (in construction) and it seams like a good idea for that, but god damn is it anoying.
gas weights ~7 lbs per gallon, and a typical car has a tank of around 13-15 gallons, so thats around 100lbs or so. odds are you don't drain the tank everytime, so you might only be changing the weight like 50 lbs. Thats not really much to notice, and won't make much of a differance, you can make that kind of differance with some groceries. Or worse someone rides in your car for a bit, thats a big differance.
:)
Yes some weight changes you will notice. I notice the differance when a person gets in the car with me. The car only weights 2500lbs, so a 200lb person makes a big differance especialy cause it's manual so you really feel it in the shifts. Had 900lbs or so of people in it once (max rating is 1000) and boy can you feel that
I do exactly this, write the trip and total miles on the recepit and toss it in the consol, every now and then take them in and plug them in my spreed sheet. And I too try to do the math in my head while leaving the station.
I've tracked everything for my car from day one, every fill up, oil change, parking ticket....
I put it in a excel sheet and track everything. It's great cause you can track what your doing and how you have effected things. Say differances from changing sparkplugs and such. Also makes it easy to do a lifetime cost per mile (factoring everything, car, fuel, insurance...). Think i'm at 1.30 a mile so far, but i've only put a few thousand on it.
Also if and when I sell it I can hand the next person the files and they know exactly how it was cared for and have some history on it to know if something comes up.
That is not your mileage. What the computer is telling you is a number from a look up table in the cars computer for roughly that throttle position and speed and gear. Its not a real time calculation, and many things can cause it to be very differant from the look up table. Some cars have very poor implementation of this and when you say let off the gas going down a hill will tell you some crazy number like 90mpg. which is not right, aside from maybe for an instant, but hardly something to base the performance of the car from.
But that number will closely match the EPA number, cause guess where the info for that look up table came from? The EPA test that determined the cars Mileage rating.
Yes, this is obvious since it's the whole point of a hybrid like the prius. It takes less energy to drive slow (like in city driving). And you loose your energy in city driving from all the stop and go and idling at stops. A prius doesn't waste power idling, and gains the power back when braking. So it will get better mileage city, thats the whole idea. Hybrids don't do well on highway driving do to energy losses. For driving down the highway a conventional drivetrain is best. When it comes to high mileage on mildhybrids like the insight it's because it's light and areodynamic, not because it's a hybrid.
Everyones mileage will vary. This is for one very good reason. The mileage of your car is determined on a chassis dynometer running the federal driving cycles for city and highway. The current cycle is the LA77 I belive. That would be a cycle designed in 1977 as if you were driving around in Los Angeles California. So every car is based of a very set driving. Obviously no one will ever drive just like this. Some peoples driving will get poor mileage some great just on their routes they drive.
The other factor is indeed how you drive. I drive very agressively, but at the same time I get good mileage. Why is this? Well largly because I have worked on projects getting getting highmileage for years, Futuretruck. I understand what the car is doing and what to do to run it where I can get the best mileage. And often if your driving right, you will get good mileage, since making the most of your car and its potential is a very similar thing to how to get good mileage, conserving energy and so forth. Its not how powerful your car is, it's how you drive. A professional driver can roast a fool even when driving much less of a car then the fool.
Also driving a POS car with no power for years got me good at making the most with little power, so now I don't need to use it all to do what people do with more power. People are often shocked with how my car performs when with me driving, and they have the same car.
The driving cycle the gov uses is just simply out of date, but even a upgrade won't fix the problem do to as stated, people drive differant in differant places. If you live in the mountains on dirt roads, well your won't do as good. But if you live in kansas and your area is paved, your going to do better.
Also as car become more varried in what they can do and their drive trains, (gasoline with an auto, vs say a powersplit hybrid with a turbodiesel) the model is going to be harder to fit.
Also models vary so much. Look at any one model but then look at how much you can change with options. You can had 500+ lbs to an SUV just optioning it from the base to the top end with all the power features and such. So even in a model you get lots of differance, even if the engine and tranny are the same.
And yes I'm sure many people will say my 19xx gets this many miles per gallon but my new one gets far worse. Yes this is true, but thats because makers have tossed mileage for emissions, which is a very good thing, and in doing that cost some mileage (aside from CO2 the other emissions are not directly linked to mileage, sometimes you hurt mileage to reduce emissions). Also new cars are so much safer to do more structure and such. Your 80s Japanesse cars were tin cans, they had to add a lot of weight to make it safe.
Things also apply to trucks vs cars. Most people who buy a truck/suv find that it gets better mileage then listed, few will get under 20mpg, just that the fed test isn't freindly to trucks, and some people are just morons and can't drive a truck and get good mileage. But for that there is the inverse and people who drive econobox's and don't get crap for mileage and no where near what it's listed to get.
If you get in mid 20s mpg with anything, be ok with that, into the 30s, great. For most people the differance doesn't relate to much money saved. Hell, if you buy a bottle of water out of machine, or a coffee at starbucks everyday you wasted more money then the differance in your cost driving to work that day.
Yeah, at least you won't be like the people last year trying to move in and they weren't even finished. Northbrook is right through the woods from were I was. Good to hear they hardwired them. Copped Beech II was pretty well insulated, also kept noise down pretty good. except from a in the apartment standpoint. Make a sound on the top floor you will hear it in the basement. The Northbrook ones look a bit nicer then the copperbeech ones. Good luck there.
I lived in copper beech II on west arron dr. I lived there for 2 years. In the second year they included the internet service and tried to do it wirelessly for all the buildings there by having one connection then putting antenas on all the buildings. For those who tried it, it rarely worked, and was massively slow.
They may have got smart and finaly hardwired it like some of their other location. Or maybe you arn't living at the same one.
Overall Copperbeech isn't to bad, nice places, clean, but they are piss poor built, last year like 40 some units leaked. But they are pretty good about getting things taken care of, but sometimes they suck. Not much differant then other places. Right now they are over the limit at getting out deposit back, grr. I'd be pissed at them for one thing, while happy they did good at something else.
The bandwidth limit is hardly new, that kicked in a few years ago, right before everything collapsed with napster. I remember not even being able to check my email for hours because the whole network was hosed then. On top of people going nuts with napster and such, the connections for some buildings was just plain terrible in my case Beaver Hall, after I left they did some upgrades. Things are no were near as bad as they got at one point. The whole building basicly would have no internet for hours at a time.
The internet was pretty much slow as hell from spring of 2000 onward, it wasn't to bad when i started in 99, but from there, it was all over. Even on a good day the whole time I was there, it was rarely much faster then being on a phone modem.
Yeah apartment is great with cable modem, just be ready to curse Adelphia instead, and if you by chance live at copperbeech don't even think of using the free wireless, just bite the bullet and get normal adelphia cable service. Cause otherwise you won't have internet.
reminds me, fuckers haven't given us out deposit back.
Yes, but this takes time, unless things have changed, I went through this before and it was about a 4 day wait for rescom (or whatever they call themselves now) to change things. Also when I was oncampus you could not move to a differant room, the only way that happened is if you moved. So you were fixed to a room for the year, unless you went through the couple day wait. Maybe they have changed things now (been over 2 years since I was on campus).
No, sounds like Mike Savage to me, just differant form of death.
Actualy your comment was just plain stupid, but your head is probably up your ass, so you'll probably never read any responses.
I'm wondering after it crash lands and burst into flames, does the pilot got a good walk figured out for walking away from it? You know, nice pair of shades, a "I'm the man walk", maybe a nice soundtrack, and of course the all american thumbs up and smile.
So they made a icon for something that people might happen to have on their system. People often have files on their computer even though the app that uses it is not on the computer. Apple may have at the minimum wanted to have a icon in their instead of some default one. And if i remember correctly it looks just like the MP3 and AAC on, all they did is changed 3 letters. Not a hard thing to do, cheaper to do it up now then have to go back later and make one.
Also I think iTunes plays Oggs, but that doesn't lead much to thinking the iPod will play them anytime soon.
Eh, it's also very useful to people who type a lot, you often find times when you need to put things in all caps, it's still plenty useful.
Now there is plenty of keys i never use. like the ALT key, aside from CTRL ALT DEL back in the win98 days I have never used it. I don't need 2 ctrl keys, i never used Home PGUP PgDn End Ins Pause/Break, Scroll Lock. Actualy I hate the Page keys on my coolermaster keyboard since they put them on the edge of the main keypad so i hit them all the time when going for the enter key.
There is lots of near dead keys on keyboards now. Unless you are a CLI person, or all about Keyboard short cuts. but most people have moved to GUIs and use their mouse. So keys just sit doing nothing. Even F keys have some use, but they are rarely used.
nah, they will got right to 60x2==120gig or some crazy shit. Just to mess with people. "Gen 4 iPod:now with RAID 0"