You assume I don't understand the causes behind people going hungry, when there is no evidence whatsoever in any of my posts that I don't.
Well, one has to make assumptions since you refuse to actually make an unambiguous point. And there is a lot of evidence that you don't understand the causes, since you implied that people should be doing something other than SETI to feed Somalians. And then you came out and said... "Where did I claim I had an answer?"
How does the fact that I argue that SETI is a waste of time necessarily imply that I know the exact details of what everybody should be doing?
So then if you don't know what people should be doing, then why do you expect everyone else to know what they should be doing, other than SETI (or whatever hobby)? You brought up the Somalians. Can you back it up?
Where did I go into specifics at all about what should be done, as opposed to what is certainly a waste of time and people?
*sigh* [RM101 runs his fingers through his hair] You haven't. That's why I asked. But it's a lot easier to metaphorically wave your hands around and act affronted rather than actually answer my questions, isn't it?
The comment that you try to pass off as a "theory", so as to be able to attack me (due to your lack of justifications), is obviously hyperbolic. Any reasonable person can see that.
Again you dodge the point. You espoused the theory. Can you back it up with facts and logic, or is emotionalism the extent of your debating skills?
What when your only viable means of obtaining the food you need to survive one more day is asking somebody else who has more than she needs to unconditionally give you some?
You can ask all you want. And guess what? That's why there are private charity groups to help people.
But that's not what you implied. You imply that there is a fundamental human right to be fed by others. There is a difference between someone demanding food and taking it against someone's will, and "asking" for food.
WTF? So you don't believe that eating is a fundamental human right?
Eating is a fundamental human right. The opportunity to earn food for oneself is a fundamental human right. One man demanding another man to supply him with food is not.
Really?!?! God, I've been soooo confused all these years!!!
Yes, you have been. You are looking at the surface effect, rather than examining the cause.
Why is it, then, that a sizable portion of the US population is food-insecure?
Food "insecure"? What does that mean? Point me to a news story about someone dying of starvation in the US. You can't. If someone chooses to go hungry, then that's the choice they've made. We are literally surrounded by free food, free food stamps and welfare. Not to mention that, ahem, if someone wants an actual *job* it's trivial to find one.
And where the fuck did I advocate "dumping food and money"? Point out the exact fucking words.
You've said that geeks should be doing something other than SETI. Since you apparently have the answer of what people should do, and it doesn't require anyone giving up any food or money, I would be most interested in hearing it. You've already posted some, er, theory that saving energy will feed third world people. I would be interested to hear exactly how that works as well -- specifically.
And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving; yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia.
Quite frankly, you show a very naive understanding of the problem. Third world people do not starve because of a lack of food, they starve because a) their government is corrupt, and/or b) they do not have sufficient capitalism.
Dumping food and dumping money has been tried over and over and guess what? It doesn't work, because it doesn't get to the people who need it, and what does get there, doesn't solve the fundamental problem.
The solution is to help the people overthrow their government. But unfortunately, we have too many people like yourself singing "we are the world" rather than facing the fact that politics and economics have to change to solve the problem permanently.
Bottom line, those people have to fix their own problems. We can't just wring our hands and magically cause problems to go away. But hey, at least you will look good to your friends.
At the same time, the IE guys are sitting there with the people who wrote the operating system in the next cubicle. Not only that but IE is even DIRECTLY INTEGRATED INTO THE OS.
So what? The slowness of Netscape is totally unrelated to the fact that it is not as integrated as IE. The reason Netscape is slow is because of its crappy HTML renderer, particularly its incredibly bad table processing.
Put it this way: What would integration buy you? It's not any faster to execute the drawing primitives and fonts into a window. Their is no excuse to take several SECONDS to render a page that happens to have a lot of tables.
Death at 40 is much more common today than ever -- mass environmental pollution & reliance on synthetic food additives have increased early death from cancer. Just one example of your poor reasoning ability.
Er, no, sorry. People are living far longer than ever before. Food "additives" do not cause cancer. Of course, you don't even bother to define which additive you're talking about... oh, I see, ANY additive causes cancer, right?
That is why IE became such a better browser, because Netscape could not justify spending the half billion dollars on development and promotion of their browser when sales of the browser had been cut off as a revenue stream.
What??? A half-a-BILLION dollars to develop a browser? 500 MILLION dollars? That's 10,000 man years of development money! Good lord man! How complicated do you think a browser is? Maybe when you factor in "promotion", but they already dominated the industry! How much promotion do you need when you have(had) 90%+ of the market?
The reason Netscape sucked is not a lack of money, it's a lack of organization and priority. They should have ripped out the HTML engine a long time ago and rewritten it, and that would have solved most of the problems (ESPECIALLY the table processing which is the biggest source of bugs and slowness).
To be honest, I blame Andreeson's engineering inexperience. A seasoned engineering director would have known when the code base had gotten out of hand, and rewritten it rather than piling on feature after feature, and dooming it to be the unstable piece of junk that it is.
I could point out too that Opera continues to exist as a for-money browser. Netscape gave away the game. If they had just made a better product, they could have survived. And in fact, they could have made some good money in the embedded device market as well.
They attribute the lack of support for Netscape products to its lack of standards compliance, NOT the fact that Microsoft used unlawful monopoly tactics to bully it out of the market.
OK, I can't let this pass. Face reality: Netscape lost not because of Microsoft's strong-arm tactics (which were there, of course), but because the browser simply sucked. IE has been so much better since version 3.2 that it's ridiculous. Netscape has always been an incredibly slow, buggy browser, and remains so to this day.
If Netscape had really had a superior product, I would have some sympathy for them. But the only reason they had any marketshare at all is because they were first. Netscape would have died with or without the strong-arm tactics -- and deservedly so.
Does anyone have recommendations for backup units? Anyone know of any good low-cost solutions? I'm having enough trouble deciding how to backup 5-10 gigs, much less 60!
I recently bought one of those amazingly inexpensive Sony Superstations, which I was pretty pleased with, except I've had 2 tapes out of 6 fail in the last 6 months of use. On the other hand, I live 2 blocks from the beach, and the environment is incredibly hostile to computer equipment.
Your friend must have used static ram for the main memory - the dynamic ram of that era was very tricky to use...
We never got into it that deeply. I only saw it once, I was over at his house and did kind of a "hey, that's neat". I had a TRS-80 at home, so the sight of this mess of components doing primitive stuff wasn't that impressive to me at the time.
What sort of power supply did your friend use?
I don't know, but it may not have required a switching power supply. I built an RCA CDP-1802 system from a kit (made famous in the Aug 1976 issue of Pop Elec.) and I just bolted a transformer to it, and that was it. Worked perfectly.
I wonder where your friend bought his components?
Here in So Cal, we had a lot of hobbyist electronics stores, so parts were less of a problem than you might think. Although, I think I had to mail-order a couple parts when I was building my '1802 mark 1 (my first attempt was to follow a schematic, my second attempt was to buy the kit -- that's why I became a software engineer.:) ).
did he write the assembly language for the control program in his onboard EPROM?
I would think he would have written a primitive control program in assembly, which wouldn't have been a huge deal (hacking in assembly was much more common back then). I'm not sure how he bootstrapped it, though. He may have used an EPROM, or he may have toggled it in. The 1802 had a mode whereby you could manually enter hex values directly into memory. I recall a lot of the very early computer kits had similar, toggle-switch-based systems. I'm speculating, but I doubt it was very sophisticated.
Video monitors of that era were almost all NTSC -
My 1802 kit used a television in 1977, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was something similar.
As I remember Steve Ciarcia of byte magazine was writing about his 6809 design at about that time.
For all I know, he used one of Ciarcia's designs. I doubt that he designed the whole thing himself. There where a lot of articles floating around about building your own computer (particularly in Pop Elec.), so it's not as if it was a total dark-art.
It's amazing how so many young, seemingly independent-minded people can stand to dress so much alike.
Well, I'm 35, so my days of dressing "just to be different" are over.
Actually, I think a better question is why "young, seemingly independent-minded people" feel the need wear wacky stuff just to "prove" their independence. Wearing stuff just to be different is just as bad as wearing stuff just to be the same.
I avoid the "trendy" departments like the plague. I like nice, classic styles.
Also please remember that it is one thing to take a VLSI subsection like a modern multifunction chip and glue it to a processor, and something entirely different to have to create those functions in TTL like Wozniac did with his GCR circuitry for the floppy drive on the Apple II.
I don't mean to minimize what Woz accomplished; clearly he did a lot of custom circuitry that wasn't "off the shelf". My only point is that the original poster made it sound like Woz built the whole processor out of TTL or something. There were a lot of hobbyists in those days building homebrew computers, and it really only took a handful of chips.
Still, going from a homebrew to a full-blown production unit is a big step, and I give the Woz all the props that are due.
By the way, your friend also had unusual talent, the proof of that would have been to walk around on the streets trying to find anyone else who could do what he could do.
He was only a high school student. He was certainly bright, but I wouldn't call him a genius. He basically took a 6809, bolted some ram to it (which barely (didn't?) required a memory controller), and I think a primitive video chip and keyboard chip. My memory is failing me, but I think he used either a proto-board or wirewrap. There really weren't that many chips involved.
With all due respect to The Woz, it wasn't that hard to homebrew your own computer. It wasn't that uncommon in the hardware hacker world. It seems like every issue of Popular Electronics had a "build your own microprocessor!" article. The 6502, Z80 and 6809 made it pretty easy to hook up support chips, and there was lots of documentation available. I had a friend back in 1980 who hacked together a simple 6809 system in a couple of weekends.
Remember, we're talking about 1-2 MHz microprocessors. What makes it a lot harder today are the high clock rates, which makes timing problems really hard to solve without modern test equipment.
This translates to everything from Art, to the Ivory trade, to minerals in mines, to oil.
This is what tells me that you don't understand my point. Ivory is NOT like oil, although minerals in mines are. The difficulty in getting Ivory does not get much higher as the supply dwindles, compared to oil. In other words, the last elephant is as easy to kill as the first elephant, although it gets harder to find (travel and search expense increase). However, in the case of oil and minerals, it gets MUCH more expensive to pull it out of the ground as a well depletes. Most wells are not abandoned because of lack of oil, they are abandoned because it gets too expensive to pump it out.
Speaking of mines, here's a factoid. The greatest gold/silver mine in the world called The Mother Lode in Nevada still has most of its gold and silver. The problem is that the cost of getting it out of the mine exceeds the value of the gold/silver. In fact, they almost started it up again when gold prices went super high in the 70s.
You seem to think that if oil goes to, say, $1000/barrell, that will make every speculator go out and pump as much as possible so they can rake in that $1000. Sorry, but demand is the other part of that equation. If oil gets that expensive, it's a simple cost-benefit analysis to convert a machine to use alternative fuels. Will that alt fuel be as good as gas? Maybe not, but at $50/gallon, they will figure out how to use them.
Hey, how about a drunk driver in a Ford Extrusion, eh? Most drunk drivers are middle aged - not young people - and are more likely to be in a SUV, I'd assume.
First of all, most accidents are caused by young people. Why do you think insurance is so much higher for them? Second, you make my point for me. If some drunk is driving an SUV, then my family and I better be driving one, too (hopefully bigger and stronger).
You burn clean, but you burn a lot of a resource we only have another 20-40 years left of. Bully for you. You should be ashamed to drive something that gets under 20MPG.
This is one of the things that bug me. People have no understanding of economics. Here's a fact... we have an infinite number of years of oil left. That's right: infinite. You know why? Because as it runs out, it gets more and more expensive to pull out of the ground. When the cost rises above alternative fuels, then the alternatives will be used. We will NEVER run out of oil, only cheap oil.
Not to mention that last I heard we had > 100 years of known oil reserves.
I think it was a '90 or thereabouts. I don't know; I'm a little wary of these hybrid vehicles. The more parts, the more things that can fail. The idea of having two full-blown motor systems just seems like a recipe for expensive repairs. Granted, diesels tend to be pretty hardy motors, but...
I think it's going to be pretty tough to beat total cost of ownership of a good ol' 4 stroke, gasoline engine.
500,000 more barrels of oil for us greedy, whiny Americans
Why do some people feel that I should feel guilty for cheap gas? As far as I'm concerned, gas cannot be too cheap. One of the freedoms that people don't give enough credit is the freedom of cheap transportation.
Ugh. Have you ever owned a diesel? I have -- a diesel Mercedes. It's the worst car I've ever owned.
First of all, the performance was absolutely atrocious. I actually got rid of the car because I was afraid to change lanes. I had so little acceleration that there was no room for error.
But the most obnoxious thing was the noise. It was incredibly loud and clanky, which unfortunately is an attribute of diesels. I remember actually being embarrased when I pulled up to a fast food drive-up window, which was enclosed, and having trouble hearing the people.
Diesel? NEVER again. They are good for trucks where you need pulling power, but they're absolutely miserable for a regular car.
I'm not soccer mom, but will be a soccer dad in about 5-8 years. My reason for having an SUV is simple: I will survive a collision. I drive safely, so odds are some drunk idiot is going to crash into me. If they do, I intend to win the battle. As far as I'm concerned, the heavier the better.
If you want to drive your featherweight deathbox, be my guest, but do me a favor and keep your judgements to yourself. It's called "freedom".
And by the way, it does not "kill the environment". Today's cars burn extremely.
Huh! I checked the StarOffice web site, and you're right. I'm pretty sure it started out life as trying to be a pure Java application. I didn't realize that even Sun had given up on that.
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You assume I don't understand the causes behind people going hungry, when there is no evidence whatsoever in any of my posts that I don't.
Well, one has to make assumptions since you refuse to actually make an unambiguous point. And there is a lot of evidence that you don't understand the causes, since you implied that people should be doing something other than SETI to feed Somalians. And then you came out and said... "Where did I claim I had an answer?"
How does the fact that I argue that SETI is a waste of time necessarily imply that I know the exact details of what everybody should be doing?
So then if you don't know what people should be doing, then why do you expect everyone else to know what they should be doing, other than SETI (or whatever hobby)? You brought up the Somalians. Can you back it up?
Where did I go into specifics at all about what should be done, as opposed to what is certainly a waste of time and people?
*sigh* [RM101 runs his fingers through his hair] You haven't. That's why I asked. But it's a lot easier to metaphorically wave your hands around and act affronted rather than actually answer my questions, isn't it?
The comment that you try to pass off as a "theory", so as to be able to attack me (due to your lack of justifications), is obviously hyperbolic. Any reasonable person can see that.
Again you dodge the point. You espoused the theory. Can you back it up with facts and logic, or is emotionalism the extent of your debating skills?
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What when your only viable means of obtaining the food you need to survive one more day is asking somebody else who has more than she needs to unconditionally give you some?
You can ask all you want. And guess what? That's why there are private charity groups to help people.
But that's not what you implied. You imply that there is a fundamental human right to be fed by others. There is a difference between someone demanding food and taking it against someone's will, and "asking" for food.
--
WTF? So you don't believe that eating is a fundamental human right?
Eating is a fundamental human right. The opportunity to earn food for oneself is a fundamental human right. One man demanding another man to supply him with food is not.
--
Really?!?! God, I've been soooo confused all these years!!!
Yes, you have been. You are looking at the surface effect, rather than examining the cause.
Why is it, then, that a sizable portion of the US population is food-insecure?
Food "insecure"? What does that mean? Point me to a news story about someone dying of starvation in the US. You can't. If someone chooses to go hungry, then that's the choice they've made. We are literally surrounded by free food, free food stamps and welfare. Not to mention that, ahem, if someone wants an actual *job* it's trivial to find one.
And where the fuck did I advocate "dumping food and money"? Point out the exact fucking words.
You've said that geeks should be doing something other than SETI. Since you apparently have the answer of what people should do, and it doesn't require anyone giving up any food or money, I would be most interested in hearing it. You've already posted some, er, theory that saving energy will feed third world people. I would be interested to hear exactly how that works as well -- specifically.
--
And insisting in doing SETI is inhuman. I mean, enough of the people in *our* planet are starving; yet all these self-described geeks would rather find out if there's life in another planet than see if there's still life in Somalia.
Quite frankly, you show a very naive understanding of the problem. Third world people do not starve because of a lack of food, they starve because a) their government is corrupt, and/or b) they do not have sufficient capitalism.
Dumping food and dumping money has been tried over and over and guess what? It doesn't work, because it doesn't get to the people who need it, and what does get there, doesn't solve the fundamental problem.
The solution is to help the people overthrow their government. But unfortunately, we have too many people like yourself singing "we are the world" rather than facing the fact that politics and economics have to change to solve the problem permanently.
Bottom line, those people have to fix their own problems. We can't just wring our hands and magically cause problems to go away. But hey, at least you will look good to your friends.
--
At the same time, the IE guys are sitting there with the people who wrote the operating system in the next cubicle. Not only that but IE is even DIRECTLY INTEGRATED INTO THE OS.
So what? The slowness of Netscape is totally unrelated to the fact that it is not as integrated as IE. The reason Netscape is slow is because of its crappy HTML renderer, particularly its incredibly bad table processing.
Put it this way: What would integration buy you? It's not any faster to execute the drawing primitives and fonts into a window. Their is no excuse to take several SECONDS to render a page that happens to have a lot of tables.
--
Death at 40 is much more common today than ever -- mass environmental pollution & reliance on synthetic food additives have increased early death from cancer. Just one example of your poor reasoning ability.
Er, no, sorry. People are living far longer than ever before. Food "additives" do not cause cancer. Of course, you don't even bother to define which additive you're talking about ... oh, I see, ANY additive causes cancer, right?
And you talk about his reasoning ability?
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That is why IE became such a better browser, because Netscape could not justify spending the half billion dollars on development and promotion of their browser when sales of the browser had been cut off as a revenue stream.
What??? A half-a-BILLION dollars to develop a browser? 500 MILLION dollars? That's 10,000 man years of development money! Good lord man! How complicated do you think a browser is? Maybe when you factor in "promotion", but they already dominated the industry! How much promotion do you need when you have(had) 90%+ of the market?
The reason Netscape sucked is not a lack of money, it's a lack of organization and priority. They should have ripped out the HTML engine a long time ago and rewritten it, and that would have solved most of the problems (ESPECIALLY the table processing which is the biggest source of bugs and slowness).
To be honest, I blame Andreeson's engineering inexperience. A seasoned engineering director would have known when the code base had gotten out of hand, and rewritten it rather than piling on feature after feature, and dooming it to be the unstable piece of junk that it is.
I could point out too that Opera continues to exist as a for-money browser. Netscape gave away the game. If they had just made a better product, they could have survived. And in fact, they could have made some good money in the embedded device market as well.
--
They attribute the lack of support for Netscape products to its lack of standards compliance, NOT the fact that Microsoft used unlawful monopoly tactics to bully it out of the market.
OK, I can't let this pass. Face reality: Netscape lost not because of Microsoft's strong-arm tactics (which were there, of course), but because the browser simply sucked. IE has been so much better since version 3.2 that it's ridiculous. Netscape has always been an incredibly slow, buggy browser, and remains so to this day.
If Netscape had really had a superior product, I would have some sympathy for them. But the only reason they had any marketshare at all is because they were first. Netscape would have died with or without the strong-arm tactics -- and deservedly so.
--
Does anyone have recommendations for backup units? Anyone know of any good low-cost solutions? I'm having enough trouble deciding how to backup 5-10 gigs, much less 60!
I recently bought one of those amazingly inexpensive Sony Superstations, which I was pretty pleased with, except I've had 2 tapes out of 6 fail in the last 6 months of use. On the other hand, I live 2 blocks from the beach, and the environment is incredibly hostile to computer equipment.
--
Your friend must have used static ram for the main memory - the dynamic ram of that era was very tricky to use...
We never got into it that deeply. I only saw it once, I was over at his house and did kind of a "hey, that's neat". I had a TRS-80 at home, so the sight of this mess of components doing primitive stuff wasn't that impressive to me at the time.
What sort of power supply did your friend use?
I don't know, but it may not have required a switching power supply. I built an RCA CDP-1802 system from a kit (made famous in the Aug 1976 issue of Pop Elec.) and I just bolted a transformer to it, and that was it. Worked perfectly.
I wonder where your friend bought his components?
Here in So Cal, we had a lot of hobbyist electronics stores, so parts were less of a problem than you might think. Although, I think I had to mail-order a couple parts when I was building my '1802 mark 1 (my first attempt was to follow a schematic, my second attempt was to buy the kit -- that's why I became a software engineer. :) ).
did he write the assembly language for the control program in his onboard EPROM?
I would think he would have written a primitive control program in assembly, which wouldn't have been a huge deal (hacking in assembly was much more common back then). I'm not sure how he bootstrapped it, though. He may have used an EPROM, or he may have toggled it in. The 1802 had a mode whereby you could manually enter hex values directly into memory. I recall a lot of the very early computer kits had similar, toggle-switch-based systems. I'm speculating, but I doubt it was very sophisticated.
Video monitors of that era were almost all NTSC -
My 1802 kit used a television in 1977, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was something similar.
As I remember Steve Ciarcia of byte magazine was writing about his 6809 design at about that time.
For all I know, he used one of Ciarcia's designs. I doubt that he designed the whole thing himself. There where a lot of articles floating around about building your own computer (particularly in Pop Elec.), so it's not as if it was a total dark-art.
--
It's amazing how so many young, seemingly independent-minded people can stand to dress so much alike.
Well, I'm 35, so my days of dressing "just to be different" are over.
Actually, I think a better question is why "young, seemingly independent-minded people" feel the need wear wacky stuff just to "prove" their independence. Wearing stuff just to be different is just as bad as wearing stuff just to be the same.
I avoid the "trendy" departments like the plague. I like nice, classic styles.
--
The Gap makes shitty clothes
What's wrong with The Gap? I mean, it's not Ralph Lauren or anything, but they have decent stuff at reasonable prices.
--
Also please remember that it is one thing to take a VLSI subsection like a modern multifunction chip and glue it to a processor, and something entirely different to have to create those functions in TTL like Wozniac did with his GCR circuitry for the floppy drive on the Apple II.
I don't mean to minimize what Woz accomplished; clearly he did a lot of custom circuitry that wasn't "off the shelf". My only point is that the original poster made it sound like Woz built the whole processor out of TTL or something. There were a lot of hobbyists in those days building homebrew computers, and it really only took a handful of chips.
Still, going from a homebrew to a full-blown production unit is a big step, and I give the Woz all the props that are due.
By the way, your friend also had unusual talent, the proof of that would have been to walk around on the streets trying to find anyone else who could do what he could do.
He was only a high school student. He was certainly bright, but I wouldn't call him a genius. He basically took a 6809, bolted some ram to it (which barely (didn't?) required a memory controller), and I think a primitive video chip and keyboard chip. My memory is failing me, but I think he used either a proto-board or wirewrap. There really weren't that many chips involved.
--
With all due respect to The Woz, it wasn't that hard to homebrew your own computer. It wasn't that uncommon in the hardware hacker world. It seems like every issue of Popular Electronics had a "build your own microprocessor!" article. The 6502, Z80 and 6809 made it pretty easy to hook up support chips, and there was lots of documentation available. I had a friend back in 1980 who hacked together a simple 6809 system in a couple of weekends.
Remember, we're talking about 1-2 MHz microprocessors. What makes it a lot harder today are the high clock rates, which makes timing problems really hard to solve without modern test equipment.
--
Hey, if you're going to pull out the seven syllable words, at least get them right!
--
This translates to everything from Art, to the Ivory trade, to minerals in mines, to oil.
This is what tells me that you don't understand my point. Ivory is NOT like oil, although minerals in mines are. The difficulty in getting Ivory does not get much higher as the supply dwindles, compared to oil. In other words, the last elephant is as easy to kill as the first elephant, although it gets harder to find (travel and search expense increase). However, in the case of oil and minerals, it gets MUCH more expensive to pull it out of the ground as a well depletes. Most wells are not abandoned because of lack of oil, they are abandoned because it gets too expensive to pump it out.
Speaking of mines, here's a factoid. The greatest gold/silver mine in the world called The Mother Lode in Nevada still has most of its gold and silver. The problem is that the cost of getting it out of the mine exceeds the value of the gold/silver. In fact, they almost started it up again when gold prices went super high in the 70s.
You seem to think that if oil goes to, say, $1000/barrell, that will make every speculator go out and pump as much as possible so they can rake in that $1000. Sorry, but demand is the other part of that equation. If oil gets that expensive, it's a simple cost-benefit analysis to convert a machine to use alternative fuels. Will that alt fuel be as good as gas? Maybe not, but at $50/gallon, they will figure out how to use them.
--
As I was saying about people who don't understand economics...
just like we never ran out of carrier pigeons.. and we'd never run out of buffalo,..
Last I checked, you don't have to pull carrier pigeons or buffalo out of the ground.
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Hey, how about a drunk driver in a Ford Extrusion, eh? Most drunk drivers are middle aged - not young people - and are more likely to be in a SUV, I'd assume.
First of all, most accidents are caused by young people. Why do you think insurance is so much higher for them? Second, you make my point for me. If some drunk is driving an SUV, then my family and I better be driving one, too (hopefully bigger and stronger).
You burn clean, but you burn a lot of a resource we only have another 20-40 years left of. Bully for you. You should be ashamed to drive something that gets under 20MPG.
This is one of the things that bug me. People have no understanding of economics. Here's a fact... we have an infinite number of years of oil left. That's right: infinite. You know why? Because as it runs out, it gets more and more expensive to pull out of the ground. When the cost rises above alternative fuels, then the alternatives will be used. We will NEVER run out of oil, only cheap oil.
Not to mention that last I heard we had > 100 years of known oil reserves.
--
I think it was a '90 or thereabouts. I don't know; I'm a little wary of these hybrid vehicles. The more parts, the more things that can fail. The idea of having two full-blown motor systems just seems like a recipe for expensive repairs. Granted, diesels tend to be pretty hardy motors, but...
I think it's going to be pretty tough to beat total cost of ownership of a good ol' 4 stroke, gasoline engine.
--
500,000 more barrels of oil for us greedy, whiny Americans
Why do some people feel that I should feel guilty for cheap gas? As far as I'm concerned, gas cannot be too cheap. One of the freedoms that people don't give enough credit is the freedom of cheap transportation.
--
Ugh. Have you ever owned a diesel? I have -- a diesel Mercedes. It's the worst car I've ever owned.
First of all, the performance was absolutely atrocious. I actually got rid of the car because I was afraid to change lanes. I had so little acceleration that there was no room for error.
But the most obnoxious thing was the noise. It was incredibly loud and clanky, which unfortunately is an attribute of diesels. I remember actually being embarrased when I pulled up to a fast food drive-up window, which was enclosed, and having trouble hearing the people.
Diesel? NEVER again. They are good for trucks where you need pulling power, but they're absolutely miserable for a regular car.
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I'm not soccer mom, but will be a soccer dad in about 5-8 years. My reason for having an SUV is simple: I will survive a collision. I drive safely, so odds are some drunk idiot is going to crash into me. If they do, I intend to win the battle. As far as I'm concerned, the heavier the better.
If you want to drive your featherweight deathbox, be my guest, but do me a favor and keep your judgements to yourself. It's called "freedom".
And by the way, it does not "kill the environment". Today's cars burn extremely.
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AFAIK, most of SO is written in C++.
Huh! I checked the StarOffice web site, and you're right. I'm pretty sure it started out life as trying to be a pure Java application. I didn't realize that even Sun had given up on that.
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...and as a bonus, think of how it would irritate McNealy if this was done. Heh heh... it would be beautiful.
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