Actually, these are exactly what people mean when they say hybrids. They are gasoline vehicles which store excess energy in a large battery to power an electrical motor which assists in acceleration.
I think a true hybrid would be a car that runs primarily on electrical power, but switches to gas when the battery gets low or it needs to generate more power due to high speeds. I've heard of cars like this, and I thought that this was how the hybrids in question worked.
You've had it backwards all along. Hybrid cars are not electic cars assisted by a gas motor, they are gas cars assisted by an electric motor.
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Go Joe!
You're saying that "pure research" would have likely been more effective at producing the advantages that came from the space program.
Did you read my post, or just rush through skimming it to start flaming me?
Because I never said that.
What I did say is, if you are going to accurately tout the net gain of space exploration, you need to subtract the opporunity cost of spending the resources to do so.
Yes, we got velcro and pens that write upside-down. Hooray. What did we miss out on?
The funny thing is, yeah OS X has expanded *nix use, but not in a way that people will need this book.
I have a UNIX cert, and know what I'm doing on many flavors of *nix. I'm proud to say (as I push my glasses up the bridge of my nose) that I have vi skillz.
I have not opened the command prompt on any of my OS X systems in over a year.
When I was doing it, over a year ago, it was to ssh to a Linux web server that I used to have.
Once you get used to harnessing the full potential of OS X, bash becomes as redundant as... well... vi.
I was in the same position as those friends of yours at this time last year. I had an XP box which was being used for nothing other than CoH. When Wow came out, I installed it on my Mac, cancelled my CoH subscription, and got rid of the my last remaining Windows system.
City of Villains looks cool, but the only way Cryptic is ever getting me back is by releasing Mac versions of their games.
some how or another, you still have to generate that electricity to keep the battery charged, whether by gas, oil, coal, or some other method.
As I understand it, hybrid electric motors are almost never charged externally from power utility generators. They get their charge from a combination of engine power and regenerative breaking. The battery is simply storing excess power from a gas-running car, allowing higher overall fuel economy.
In other words, they run on gas just like most other cars, except they are able to run on less gas per payload*distance*speed.
It's similar to saying the world's space programs have all been a total economic waste and reaching that conclusion by eliminating all of the economic side effects that have resulted from the technology that went into those space programs.
But advocates for space exploration make the same mistake in the other direction.
They talk about Tang, Velcro, Medical monitoring systems, etc., but ignore the opportunity cost. What if that same money was spent on pure research, rather than solving one huge engineering problem, and applying that solution? What benifits would it have brought to mankind if all those NASA scientists were working for a government research project to, for example, find cleaner alternatives for energy generation?
For all we know, if we didn't dedicate ourselves to the "space race" during the 1960s, we could have all been driving hybrid cars like the Prius by 1970, instead of just starting to seriously look at them now.
For that matter, what if all that money was left floating around in the economy? Could the "national mailaise" of the Carter years have been averted, or at least dampened to the point that we wouldn't have had to wait until Reagan's second term to finally dispel the myth of the "misery index"?
Still well below your "$1000 - minimum", and three inches bigger than the 27" screen you set as your benchmark.
These sets have been getting cheaper very quickly, and will continue to do so. Within another couple years, pretty much all big CRT's will probably be HD sets.
the only real winner after a hybrid purchase is the environment.
Oddly, this particular analysis is only looking the economic factor, which anybody who's ever priced out a hyrbrid knows that owning a gasoline car is still cheaper.
It would be interesting to see a similar paper on Total Environmental Impact.
Gas-only cars burn more gasoline, which means not only more pollution from the car's exhaust, but also more demand for oil refineries.
A hybrid car requires less gas, but it also has a massive battery which will need to be disposed of safely in a few years. What would it be like to manage the disposal of these batteries if there was suddenly tens of millions of such cars driving around?
I'm sure things would still favor the hybrid by a pretty good margin, in spite of issues like this, but it would be interesting to see a complete comparison. (One that is not from somebody trying to sell us on the idea of owning a hybrid.)
Low box spec requirements and cross-platform support for Mac users.
There are a lot of MMORPG's out there, but only one that lets me log in to the same account and enjoy good gameplay with an old Duron PC or an iBook, depending whether I'm at a desk or in a coffee shop somewhere.
Okay, most gamers don't have Macs, but many gamers have at least one or two friends who do, and WoW is the only MMORPG out there where they can game with those friends.
Also, WoW looks great on high-end system, but scales down very nicely on modest systems. There's a lot to be said for that, when the value of this type of game is directly tied to getting a vast network of players involved.
You're talking the difference between spending $150 for a standard and $1000 (minimum - All those sub $1000 sets have no tuner) for a set in the 27" range.
Bzzzt!
I Froogled it: Samsung has a 30" HDTV, with HD built-in tuner, for just over $600. There are 27" sets to be had for considerably less (in the $450 range.)
Sure, you gotta go over $1000 if you insist on flat-panel or projectors, but that's true of SDTV systems too.
(or would be, if anybody still made high-end SD sets anymore.)
The cost of living where I currently am (Twin Cities) is far lower than a lot of parts of the country. If you live on either coast, you'd probably come out way ahead on the deal by moving.
But yes, I was born in Minnesota... but this is far from the only region which Qwest (or some other carrier who doesn't stiff broadband customers with unwanted extras) reaches.
Sorry to hear you live in such a shitty place. Good luck.
Indeed, and why should they? Targeting your product at people who don't like to spend money is a fool's game. Better to price something as you think it is worth.
Five of the top ten richest people in America are heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, so there's clearly money in selling inexpensive crap to cheapskates.
However, you are correct that Apple can make plenty of money by selling to a well-off niche. I can't fault them for it, because I'm part of that niche. I have one mac running my music studio, another running my projection screen media room, an iPod for listening to music when I'm jogging, and an iBook that I use for damn near everything else I do. Apple has raked in thousands of dollars from me over the last couple years, and I'm not even one of their "high end" customers.
(and, FWIW, I don't regret a penny of what I've spent on it all. I'm currently on the fence about buying another Mac for an upcoming project I'd like to do. They make computers which are good enough to make me not mind the higher cost. If I were a broke kid just out of college, I suppose I'd be trying to do all this stuff with AMD boxen running Linux or something, but I'm no longer in a place in my life where I consider that kind of futzing around to be fun, and I'm happy to pay the premium which lets me avoid it all.)
BS.....WoW has done so much better because it's...are you ready for this?...A MUCH BETTER GAME.
"BS" is a little strong. Mac support is clearly a factor in the success of WoW.
Taking myself as an example, I think that City of Heroes is a much better game than World of Warcraft, but my CoH account is long cancelled and my WoW account is still active for one reason and one reason only: cross-platform PC/Mac support.
I can play WoW with both my Mac-owning and PC-owning friends. I even know a married couple who play it together on a regular basis, the wife on a PC, the husband on a Mac.
I realize my circle of friends is possibly not a representative sample, but I can assure you that the Mac client does matter to some people.
EQ2 was not even discussed as an option among most of us back when WoW and EQ2 were emerging, because the PC owners knew they would not be able to play it with the Mac owners.
Because a main viewing room size HDTV costs $1000+ and a decent CRT costs $200-300.
So get a CRT-based HDTV.
A quick Froogle search reveals that you can get a nice Samsung 30" HDTV for about $600, built-in HD tuner and all. The same monitor without the tuner can be had for a mere $450. I'm willing to bet that a more aggressive search could reveal even better deals than that.
So, why exactly would anybody want to waste $300 on a TV that will be completely obsolete in a couple years, when less than a grand buys a TV that will remain useful for the entire life of the tube?
They would like you to buy a $2000 tower every 3-5 years, and then buy OS upgrades every year and a half or so at $130 a pop.
And so far, they've been providing enough value with thier OS to get a lot of Mac users to agree to exactly that.
Apple appears to have very little interest in appealing to people who run Linux (or pirated Windows) on $300 AMD systems. If you don't have enough use for a Mac to at least justify the cost of a Mac mini plus yearly upgrades, then OS X is not for you
Not only that, but the entire summary is about what we already knew, that OS X is not likely to be available for commodity PC's.
Yes, thanks for being the 159th person to point that out. Now, did you find out anything new, surprising and/or useful by playing around with your unsupported hack of OSx86 on your Toshiba laptop?
I didn't ask why anybody would buy a non HD console. I asked why anybody, in this day and age, would buy a new non HD TV set for their main viewing room.
Another year or two, and you probably won't even be able to even if you did want one.
Thank you for being the first person to reply to my query with anything more interesting then groupthink pissing and moaning about how evil the record labels are.
I'm not sure you idea would work, but it's an interesting proposed solution to a problem that most people have clearly not put much thought into.
Slashdot Mirror
And how, exactly, does the fact that they're donating money indicate that they're not in it for the publicity?
He didn't say it wasn't publicity. He said it wasn't FREE publicity.
Red Hat is not getting free publicity. They are buying publicity for two million dollars. That's pretty fucking far from free.
Then again, Red Hat has been stretching the definition of "free" in a lot of ways over the last couple years, heh.
4 people carpooling 50 miles in a Prius.
Four adult Americans? Plan on tying two of them to the hood?
oh. So these aren't true hybrids, then.
Actually, these are exactly what people mean when they say hybrids. They are gasoline vehicles which store excess energy in a large battery to power an electrical motor which assists in acceleration.
I think a true hybrid would be a car that runs primarily on electrical power, but switches to gas when the battery gets low or it needs to generate more power due to high speeds. I've heard of cars like this, and I thought that this was how the hybrids in question worked.
You've had it backwards all along. Hybrid cars are not electic cars assisted by a gas motor, they are gas cars assisted by an electric motor.
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Go Joe!
You're saying that "pure research" would have likely been more effective at producing the advantages that came from the space program.
Did you read my post, or just rush through skimming it to start flaming me?
Because I never said that.
What I did say is, if you are going to accurately tout the net gain of space exploration, you need to subtract the opporunity cost of spending the resources to do so.
Yes, we got velcro and pens that write upside-down. Hooray. What did we miss out on?
Good stuff - opportunity cost = actual value.
The funny thing is, yeah OS X has expanded *nix use, but not in a way that people will need this book.
I have a UNIX cert, and know what I'm doing on many flavors of *nix. I'm proud to say (as I push my glasses up the bridge of my nose) that I have vi skillz.
I have not opened the command prompt on any of my OS X systems in over a year.
When I was doing it, over a year ago, it was to ssh to a Linux web server that I used to have.
Once you get used to harnessing the full potential of OS X, bash becomes as redundant as... well... vi.
I was in the same position as those friends of yours at this time last year. I had an XP box which was being used for nothing other than CoH. When Wow came out, I installed it on my Mac, cancelled my CoH subscription, and got rid of the my last remaining Windows system.
City of Villains looks cool, but the only way Cryptic is ever getting me back is by releasing Mac versions of their games.
some how or another, you still have to generate that electricity to keep the battery charged, whether by gas, oil, coal, or some other method.
As I understand it, hybrid electric motors are almost never charged externally from power utility generators. They get their charge from a combination of engine power and regenerative breaking. The battery is simply storing excess power from a gas-running car, allowing higher overall fuel economy.
In other words, they run on gas just like most other cars, except they are able to run on less gas per payload*distance*speed.
It's similar to saying the world's space programs have all been a total economic waste and reaching that conclusion by eliminating all of the economic side effects that have resulted from the technology that went into those space programs.
But advocates for space exploration make the same mistake in the other direction.
They talk about Tang, Velcro, Medical monitoring systems, etc., but ignore the opportunity cost. What if that same money was spent on pure research, rather than solving one huge engineering problem, and applying that solution? What benifits would it have brought to mankind if all those NASA scientists were working for a government research project to, for example, find cleaner alternatives for energy generation?
For all we know, if we didn't dedicate ourselves to the "space race" during the 1960s, we could have all been driving hybrid cars like the Prius by 1970, instead of just starting to seriously look at them now.
For that matter, what if all that money was left floating around in the economy? Could the "national mailaise" of the Carter years have been averted, or at least dampened to the point that we wouldn't have had to wait until Reagan's second term to finally dispel the myth of the "misery index"?
Hard to say.
Still well below your "$1000 - minimum", and three inches bigger than the 27" screen you set as your benchmark.
These sets have been getting cheaper very quickly, and will continue to do so. Within another couple years, pretty much all big CRT's will probably be HD sets.
the only real winner after a hybrid purchase is the environment.
Oddly, this particular analysis is only looking the economic factor, which anybody who's ever priced out a hyrbrid knows that owning a gasoline car is still cheaper.
It would be interesting to see a similar paper on Total Environmental Impact.
Gas-only cars burn more gasoline, which means not only more pollution from the car's exhaust, but also more demand for oil refineries.
A hybrid car requires less gas, but it also has a massive battery which will need to be disposed of safely in a few years. What would it be like to manage the disposal of these batteries if there was suddenly tens of millions of such cars driving around?
I'm sure things would still favor the hybrid by a pretty good margin, in spite of issues like this, but it would be interesting to see a complete comparison. (One that is not from somebody trying to sell us on the idea of owning a hybrid.)
Sure, but they didn't try anything new
Low box spec requirements and cross-platform support for Mac users.
There are a lot of MMORPG's out there, but only one that lets me log in to the same account and enjoy good gameplay with an old Duron PC or an iBook, depending whether I'm at a desk or in a coffee shop somewhere.
Okay, most gamers don't have Macs, but many gamers have at least one or two friends who do, and WoW is the only MMORPG out there where they can game with those friends.
Also, WoW looks great on high-end system, but scales down very nicely on modest systems. There's a lot to be said for that, when the value of this type of game is directly tied to getting a vast network of players involved.
You're talking the difference between spending $150 for a standard and $1000 (minimum - All those sub $1000 sets have no tuner) for a set in the 27" range.
Bzzzt!
I Froogled it: Samsung has a 30" HDTV, with HD built-in tuner, for just over $600. There are 27" sets to be had for considerably less (in the $450 range.)
Sure, you gotta go over $1000 if you insist on flat-panel or projectors, but that's true of SDTV systems too.
(or would be, if anybody still made high-end SD sets anymore.)
a huge minority huh? is that like a definite maybe?
No, silly, it's like Star Jones.
Damn. Diet Coke all over my keyboard.
You deserve both of the "Funny" mod points the parent post got.
The cost of living where I currently am (Twin Cities) is far lower than a lot of parts of the country. If you live on either coast, you'd probably come out way ahead on the deal by moving.
But yes, I was born in Minnesota... but this is far from the only region which Qwest (or some other carrier who doesn't stiff broadband customers with unwanted extras) reaches.
Sorry to hear you live in such a shitty place. Good luck.
Indeed, and why should they? Targeting your product at people who don't like to spend money is a fool's game. Better to price something as you think it is worth.
Five of the top ten richest people in America are heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, so there's clearly money in selling inexpensive crap to cheapskates.
However, you are correct that Apple can make plenty of money by selling to a well-off niche. I can't fault them for it, because I'm part of that niche. I have one mac running my music studio, another running my projection screen media room, an iPod for listening to music when I'm jogging, and an iBook that I use for damn near everything else I do. Apple has raked in thousands of dollars from me over the last couple years, and I'm not even one of their "high end" customers.
(and, FWIW, I don't regret a penny of what I've spent on it all. I'm currently on the fence about buying another Mac for an upcoming project I'd like to do. They make computers which are good enough to make me not mind the higher cost. If I were a broke kid just out of college, I suppose I'd be trying to do all this stuff with AMD boxen running Linux or something, but I'm no longer in a place in my life where I consider that kind of futzing around to be fun, and I'm happy to pay the premium which lets me avoid it all.)
BS... ..WoW has done so much better because it's...are you ready for this?...A MUCH BETTER GAME.
"BS" is a little strong. Mac support is clearly a factor in the success of WoW.
Taking myself as an example, I think that City of Heroes is a much better game than World of Warcraft, but my CoH account is long cancelled and my WoW account is still active for one reason and one reason only: cross-platform PC/Mac support.
I can play WoW with both my Mac-owning and PC-owning friends. I even know a married couple who play it together on a regular basis, the wife on a PC, the husband on a Mac.
I realize my circle of friends is possibly not a representative sample, but I can assure you that the Mac client does matter to some people.
EQ2 was not even discussed as an option among most of us back when WoW and EQ2 were emerging, because the PC owners knew they would not be able to play it with the Mac owners.
I want a card/board game that will engage me in intelligent conversation...
/. folks already read Megatokyo.
Jeez, why don't you just insist on a robot girl as a dating sim accessory* while you are at it?
*Spare me the wiki link. Most
Because a main viewing room size HDTV costs $1000+ and a decent CRT costs $200-300.
So get a CRT-based HDTV.
A quick Froogle search reveals that you can get a nice Samsung 30" HDTV for about $600, built-in HD tuner and all. The same monitor without the tuner can be had for a mere $450. I'm willing to bet that a more aggressive search could reveal even better deals than that.
So, why exactly would anybody want to waste $300 on a TV that will be completely obsolete in a couple years, when less than a grand buys a TV that will remain useful for the entire life of the tube?
No you don't.
At least, not if you are getting Qwest DSL (as I am.) It's available with or without voice service.
They would like you to buy a $2000 tower every 3-5 years, and then buy OS upgrades every year and a half or so at $130 a pop.
And so far, they've been providing enough value with thier OS to get a lot of Mac users to agree to exactly that.
Apple appears to have very little interest in appealing to people who run Linux (or pirated Windows) on $300 AMD systems. If you don't have enough use for a Mac to at least justify the cost of a Mac mini plus yearly upgrades, then OS X is not for you
...yet.
Not only that, but the entire summary is about what we already knew, that OS X is not likely to be available for commodity PC's.
Yes, thanks for being the 159th person to point that out. Now, did you find out anything new, surprising and/or useful by playing around with your unsupported hack of OSx86 on your Toshiba laptop?
I didn't ask why anybody would buy a non HD console. I asked why anybody, in this day and age, would buy a new non HD TV set for their main viewing room.
Another year or two, and you probably won't even be able to even if you did want one.
Because you can watch the Sopranos is HD if you have HD Digital cable, which costs extra... and pay for the "premium" HBO subscription on top of that.
At those costs, I think I'll limp along with the DVD's for the one or two shows I like which are not broadcast for free.
Thank you for being the first person to reply to my query with anything more interesting then groupthink pissing and moaning about how evil the record labels are.
I'm not sure you idea would work, but it's an interesting proposed solution to a problem that most people have clearly not put much thought into.
-Good enough meaning marketable enough? (Ashley Simpson) or talented enough?(but not young and pretty enough)
Meaning marketable enough. I thought I made that fairly clear in my post.