I think one of the most exciting is for locating online conversations by geographic proximity
Cos yeah - that's a good idea. I can see it now:
* NiceMan (dirtyoldman_1945@dsl4-ak.anyisp.com) has joined #teenchat NiceMan> Hello little girl, would you like to see my puppies? Jenny> you have puppees? can I see them?
I'm fairly convinced you're wrong. I'm almost certain that the emissions requirements in Europe are actually harsher than in the US. Most of our new cars carry catalytic converters so I'm not sure what this "extra equipment" that you're talking about is.
The main reason for better performance in Europe is simply our better fuel. Our normal fuel over here is 95 octane, and 98+ octane fuel is available if you want it (eg Shell Optimax). American fuel tends to be 85-87 octane - I'm not sure if you can get high-octane fuels like Optimax in the US. If you try and put 95 octane fuel in an American car I'm sure you'll find it will perform the same as the European model (providing the timings are set up to cope with high-octane fuel).
CNN/Reuters: News reports have filtered out early this morning that US forces have swooped on an Iraqi Primary School and detained 6th Grade teacher Mohammed Al-Hazar. Sources indicate that, when arrested, Al-Hazar was in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square and a calculator. US President George W Bush argued that this was clear and overwhelming evidence that Iraq indeed possessed weapons of maths instruction.
Sorry, I couldn't find any references to this article in the US media... I wonder why...
I quote:
...the US pilot apparently failed to recognise that their tanks were a British make, with special coalition identification aids and even a large Union flag on another machine in the five-vehicle convoy.
...and another:
"Combat is what I've been trained for. I can command my vehicle. I can keep it from being attacked. What I have not been trained to do is look over my shoulder to see whether an American is shooting at me."
I mean, loads of people in all countries all joke about Americans firing on their own and on their allies, but this is getting ridiculous. American's even supplied aids to the British to put on their vehicles "so you don't get shot" but they're still shooting at us.
I think I'm right in saying that more British soldiers have died as a result of US friendly fire than they have by being shot by Iraqis.
According to the American War Library, the number of friendly fire casualties involving the U.S. military has gone up dramatically: Second World War (21 per cent of all casualties), Korea (18 per cent), Vietnam (39 per cent) and Gulf War (49 per cent).
Isn't there anything someone can do to improve on this situation? It seems the US pilots have aids to prevent this, but they're too trigger happy to actually use them.
If you mod this as flamebait, then you haven't read the linked articles and haven't realised that this is a genuine problem and not some kind of war propaganda.
I love the way that everyone is just flaming Microsoft, without any knowledge at all of what Palladium is or what the Nexus is or what the implications are of the system. I'm glad I'm not an open source sheep...
I vote GSM. On a worldwide scale, it's more prevailant and that means there's more hardware floating about that could be donated to Iraq. I'm sure millions of people must have a spare GSM phone/charger lying around that they wouldn't mind being shipped to Iraq (or similar causes). I expect US/UK will probably set up an organisation to run some kind of phones-for-oil relationship with Iraq (that's a good thing BTW).
I think it's the only drive of it's class around and should be compared to 10,000 RPM SCSI drives rather than ATA drives. I can't find any other 10,000 RPM Serial ATA drives anywhere... The price is probably loaded because of it's uniqueness - it'll go down with time I'm sure. Besides - if it's fast enough that you no longer need to buy a RAID array to edit your video - then you'll have made a saving.
It'd be nice if, instead of this webbased system, there was a company that I just used as my mail exchange (MX) provider and they filtered out the junk and viruses and relayed all the real mail to my *real* MX machine.
Ok, I'd have to be a bit tech savvy and know how to reassign the MX records for the domains I want protected, but it would suit companies or tech savvy users much more than any kind of installed software would.
Does anyone know of any companies that offer this service?
No I confess - it was an old Seagate Cheetah 10K. It was most unpleasant.
If you want quiet/fast drives anyone (normal ATA) I highly recommend the Western Digital JB range (8mb cache versions). You can hardly hear them and they seem to be very quick compared to my IBM equivalent. It might be psychological though - now that I don't get a grinding noise everytime I do something, everything seems much quicker:)
> Get the Cheetah 15k.3 and you'll never look back!
Warning: Never put Seagate Cheetah drives where there are people. They sound like a circular saw trying to cut though a piece of reinforced concrete. Really not a very nice sound. At all.
How about someone making a hard drive that isn't going to give up after a year?
I think I have a solution for you - or rather Western Digital do. It's 10,000 RPM, 5.2ms average seek time, SerialATA 150, 1.2 million hours MTBF, and a 5 year warranty! With those stats, it should really fly if they've put some effort into the controller...
It hasn't been released yet, but I'm going to wait and see what the reviews say before upgrading my machine - it looks good on paper.
Just because an SUV is big, doesn't mean it's a gas guzzler, just FYI. My Grand Cherokee got approximately 20-25 MPG
I'm confused - you're saying that as though you think 20-25 MPG is OK. I regard 35-40 MPG as quite bad and I'm probably going to change something more efficient next time round. Something like a VW Golf 1.9L diesel-turbo has excellent performance (130BHP, 0-60 in 8.6 seconds) and pretty good fuel consumption - 52.3 mpg combined. But there are cars around which will do 70mpg or more - and they're normal town cars - not concept models. 20-25mpg is really bad!
It's designed by Ford by teams in the UK and Germany and is built in factories around Europe. It has nothing to do with America whatsoever! It's entirely European. I'm surprised you can even buy the Focus in the US.
Oops sorry - yeah that's 1530Kg. Still - it's a lot heavier than any car I've ever seen.
0-60 in how many minutes?
17 seconds for the standard version, 11 seconds for the Smart Roadster - the same as a Buick. Admittedly 17 seconds is slow - but I'm picking the most extreme example I could find.
Another example - the UK's best selling car (ie, real world - everyone's got one). 1.8L Ford Focus 0-60 9.2 seconds. 40mpg.
Another example: 1.8L Lotus Elise - 0-60 5.7 seconds. That's fast - really fast - and it does it with only 118bhp. 40mpg.
A Camaro needs a 5.7L V8 (320 bhp) engine to do 0-60 in 5.3 seconds. Three times bigger and only marginally better performance. I guarantee you that a Camaro is slower round a circuit than an Elise. You must practially need to stop that thing to get it to go around a corner compared to an Elise. It weighs 1500kg compared to the Elise's 685kg. I can't find any stats for the MPG. I presume this is because they're too unethical to print.
Anyway - you get my general point - I think the US could use fuel more efficiently than it currently does without causing anyone any hassle. In fact probably most countries could - I'm not pretending the UK is perfect but it's close;)
I strongly disagree. I don't know whether you have them over there but in Europe (Italy especially) the Smart Car is increasingly popular. It has a 599cc engine (yes 0.6 liter) and that easily gives it enough power to wizz around town and do 90mph on a motorway. Their new sports roadster also has this engine, but turbo charged and has perfectly adequate performance as it only weighs 790kg. Thousands of people in London/Paris/Rome have these cars and it just goes to show it's a very good little car.
By comparison, the Buick Century weighs 3368kg (nearly 3.4 metric tons!) and has a 3.1L V6 engine which for some unknown reason, only produces a relatively pathetic 170BHP (easily achievable with a 1.8L VVTL engine like the one fitted as standard to a Totota Celica 190). Guess how fast it is? Answer: About as fast as the Smart Car above. 0-60 time = 11 seconds for both. It uses TRIPLE the amount of fuel for urban driving! I regard the Buick Century to be a typical American car, and if all your cars are like this, I'm surprised you want drive anywhere! I dread to think what would happen if you wanted to bring something like a Mustang or Camaro to the UK.... You'd be spending thousands of pounds a year on just the fuel.
I say again: if your car needs and engine bigger than about 1.6L for everyday use, then you don't know how to design cars. No normal person needs an engine bigger than this if they drive on normal roads.
I can't believe that Americans on here are complaining about fuel prices when they pay the least amount for fuel of any country that I can find data for.
In the UK (and I think in most of Europe) we pay UKP 0.80/liter for fuel. That's USD 1.24/liter or USD 4.72 / US gallon. I'm not sure what you guys actually pay, but I bet it's nothing like as much as 4.72/gallon.
It now costs me UKP 40 (USD 62) to fill my Ford Focus with fuel and that's only good for 300 miles.
Perhaps if they didn't all drive massively heavy cars with enormous engines they'd reduce pollution and them themselves money. They'd also end up with nicer cars which don't handle like tanks and require notice in writing to stop in time for pedestrians. I've only driven a couple of American cars (a Buick Centry and an Oldsmobile Sierra Cutlass or something - scuse if I've got the names wrong) and they were both extremely heavy/slow (despite massive 3 liter V6 engines!) and handled unbelieveably badly compared to my Focus. No wonder you have such slow speed limits; There's no way of safely controlling the average 'yank-tank' when it gets much beyond 50-60 mph. My Focus handles fine upto about 100mph. Even at 120mph it seemed fairly stable - I just wouldn't want to try turning much at that speed:)
I'm sure you'd have more fun driving if you had ligher more efficent cars. You'd also lose your status as the biggest polluter of the planet per capita by quite a long way.
Nick...
Re:Why would anyone mod this up even a point?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
They didn't mod it up - posts start at 2 if you have good Karma.
I thought it was amusing and I searched for "all your base" in the thread and found nothing, so I posted. I apologise. Change your settings so you don't see level 2 posts if you're really concerned. Slashdot is configurable for a reason. You can even remove the karma bonus applied to posts like mine if you don't like the idea that some posts might be at 2 by default.
I'm still looking for the "Suppress Duplicates" option though. I can't find that fscking thing anywhere...
#iraq Saddam: What happen? Uday: Someone set up us the bomb. Saddam: Main screen turn on! Bush: How are you gentlemen!! All your base are belong to us. Blair: You have no chance to survive make your time. Saddam: Ha Ha Ha Ha...
Believe it or not, Microsoft has had more than one security flaw in it's operating systems (just like Linux!!). This isn't the same bug as the one mentionned yesterday. Duh!
Had you read the article, or indeed, any of the previous comments, you'd have realised that you're as dumb as someone who wants to bomb Iraq for Oil.
> it's possible to adjust the SA signal geographically, so they could > degrade the signal in the middle east without changing anything in > north america. This is the first step that seems logical.
Wrong way round I think?! They probably don't care about the accuracy of GPS in the middle east - everyone over there has military GPS systems that are unaffected by it. They presumably want to slew off the accuracy in the US so that GPS guided bombs aimed at US targets are thrown off slightly. Having said that - that would only be useful against bombs designed to knock out small buildings/bridges etc as throwing a chemical weapon off course by 80m wouldn't make any useful difference whatsoever.
Nick...
"truly full color"
on
Thin, Flat LEDs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How can it be "truely full color" and "make any color possible" when it's only got normal red green and blue LED technology to work with? Although you can mix up quite a lot of colours with these three, you're still fairly limited in what you can produce in terms of the full gamut of the eye. For example, monitors (also obviously using RGB) can only display a certain set of colours that you can see in real life. It can't display a shade of red that's verging on infra red for example, or an extremely deep purple that's almost ultra-violet. It can only display colours which it can "mix" out of red green and blue ie colours which have a wavelength higher than the wavelengh of the red channel and lower than the wavelengh of the blue channel - and even those will be limited by the quality of those individual colours.
Nick... PS: I speak English English from England, so sorry if me spelling colour correctly offends you:)
OK, slashdot has the most sophisticated moderation system I've ever seen with hundreds of users contributing to the moderation of articles every day, just to make sure we only have to read the comments that are worth reading.
Only slashdot admins then go and post the entire article twice within minutes - thus undoing the work of hundreds of moderators.
I wish there was a way to moderate the *parent* article down:
-1 Flamebait
-1 Redundant etc...:)
All this moderation, but they can't spare ONE person to say if the article is a dupe or not. Notice how slashdot is the *ONLY* news site that has this dupe problem... This is mainly caused because a lot of the articles aren't news - they're from months ago, so the editors need to have a good memory.
Slashdot Mirror
Cos yeah - that's a good idea. I can see it now:
* NiceMan (dirtyoldman_1945@dsl4-ak.anyisp.com) has joined #teenchat
NiceMan> Hello little girl, would you like to see my puppies?
Jenny> you have puppees? can I see them?
I'm fairly convinced you're wrong. I'm almost certain that the emissions requirements in Europe are actually harsher than in the US. Most of our new cars carry catalytic converters so I'm not sure what this "extra equipment" that you're talking about is.
The main reason for better performance in Europe is simply our better fuel. Our normal fuel over here is 95 octane, and 98+ octane fuel is available if you want it (eg Shell Optimax). American fuel tends to be 85-87 octane - I'm not sure if you can get high-octane fuels like Optimax in the US. If you try and put 95 octane fuel in an American car I'm sure you'll find it will perform the same as the European model (providing the timings are set up to cope with high-octane fuel).
Nick...
CNN/Reuters: News reports have filtered out early this morning that US
forces have swooped on an Iraqi Primary School and detained 6th Grade
teacher Mohammed Al-Hazar. Sources indicate that, when arrested, Al-Hazar
was in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square and a calculator.
US President George W Bush argued that this was clear and overwhelming
evidence that Iraq indeed possessed weapons of maths instruction.
Americans are still bombing allies as usual. This one seems even more stupid than the plethora of those before him:
BBC Article
The Independent (newspaper) article
Sorry, I couldn't find any references to this article in the US media... I wonder why...
I quote:
I mean, loads of people in all countries all joke about Americans firing on their own and on their allies, but this is getting ridiculous. American's even supplied aids to the British to put on their vehicles "so you don't get shot" but they're still shooting at us.
I think I'm right in saying that more British soldiers have died as a result of US friendly fire than they have by being shot by Iraqis.
I quote from an article on canada.com:
Isn't there anything someone can do to improve on this situation? It seems the US pilots have aids to prevent this, but they're too trigger happy to actually use them.
If you mod this as flamebait, then you haven't read the linked articles and haven't realised that this is a genuine problem and not some kind of war propaganda.
I love the way that everyone is just flaming Microsoft, without any knowledge at all of what Palladium is or what the Nexus is or what the implications are of the system. I'm glad I'm not an open source sheep...
Nick...
I vote GSM. On a worldwide scale, it's more prevailant and that means there's more hardware floating about that could be donated to Iraq. I'm sure millions of people must have a spare GSM phone/charger lying around that they wouldn't mind being shipped to Iraq (or similar causes). I expect US/UK will probably set up an organisation to run some kind of phones-for-oil relationship with Iraq (that's a good thing BTW).
Nick...
> Not too cheap for a 36 GB ATA drive...
I think it's the only drive of it's class around and should be compared to 10,000 RPM SCSI drives rather than ATA drives. I can't find any other 10,000 RPM Serial ATA drives anywhere... The price is probably loaded because of it's uniqueness - it'll go down with time I'm sure. Besides - if it's fast enough that you no longer need to buy a RAID array to edit your video - then you'll have made a saving.
Nick...
It'd be nice if, instead of this webbased system, there was a company that I just used as my mail exchange (MX) provider and they filtered out the junk and viruses and relayed all the real mail to my *real* MX machine.
Ok, I'd have to be a bit tech savvy and know how to reassign the MX records for the domains I want protected, but it would suit companies or tech savvy users much more than any kind of installed software would.
Does anyone know of any companies that offer this service?
Nick...
No I confess - it was an old Seagate Cheetah 10K. It was most unpleasant.
:)
If you want quiet/fast drives anyone (normal ATA) I highly recommend the Western Digital JB range (8mb cache versions). You can hardly hear them and they seem to be very quick compared to my IBM equivalent. It might be psychological though - now that I don't get a grinding noise everytime I do something, everything seems much quicker
Nick...
> Get the Cheetah 15k.3 and you'll never look back!
Warning: Never put Seagate Cheetah drives where there are people. They sound like a circular saw trying to cut though a piece of reinforced concrete. Really not a very nice sound. At all.
Nick...
I think I have a solution for you - or rather Western Digital do. It's 10,000 RPM, 5.2ms average seek time, SerialATA 150, 1.2 million hours MTBF, and a 5 year warranty! With those stats, it should really fly if they've put some effort into the controller...
It hasn't been released yet, but I'm going to wait and see what the reviews say before upgrading my machine - it looks good on paper.
They have a press release here.
Nick...
Toms Hardware also has posted a review of this Serial ATA drive.
Summary: "Extremely High Performance, Excessively Short Warranty Period"
Nick...
I'm confused - you're saying that as though you think 20-25 MPG is OK. I regard 35-40 MPG as quite bad and I'm probably going to change something more efficient next time round. Something like a VW Golf 1.9L diesel-turbo has excellent performance (130BHP, 0-60 in 8.6 seconds) and pretty good fuel consumption - 52.3 mpg combined. But there are cars around which will do 70mpg or more - and they're normal town cars - not concept models. 20-25mpg is really bad!
Nick...
What a huge load of bullshit.
It's designed by Ford by teams in the UK and Germany and is built in factories around Europe. It has nothing to do with America whatsoever! It's entirely European. I'm surprised you can even buy the Focus in the US.
Idiot.
Why the hell would I say that my Ford Focus is an American car?! That would be a total lie.
It's designed by Ford by teams in the UK and Germany and has nothing to do with America whatsoever - it's entirely European. Thankfully.
Nick...
17 seconds for the standard version, 11 seconds for the Smart Roadster - the same as a Buick. Admittedly 17 seconds is slow - but I'm picking the most extreme example I could find.
Another example - the UK's best selling car (ie, real world - everyone's got one).
1.8L Ford Focus 0-60 9.2 seconds. 40mpg.
Another example:
1.8L Lotus Elise - 0-60 5.7 seconds. That's fast - really fast - and it does it with only 118bhp. 40mpg.
A Camaro needs a 5.7L V8 (320 bhp) engine to do 0-60 in 5.3 seconds. Three times bigger and only marginally better performance. I guarantee you that a Camaro is slower round a circuit than an Elise. You must practially need to stop that thing to get it to go around a corner compared to an Elise. It weighs 1500kg compared to the Elise's 685kg. I can't find any stats for the MPG. I presume this is because they're too unethical to print.
Anyway - you get my general point - I think the US could use fuel more efficiently than it currently does without causing anyone any hassle. In fact probably most countries could - I'm not pretending the UK is perfect but it's close
Nick...
I strongly disagree. I don't know whether you have them over there but in Europe (Italy especially) the Smart Car is increasingly popular. It has a 599cc engine (yes 0.6 liter) and that easily gives it enough power to wizz around town and do 90mph on a motorway. Their new sports roadster also has this engine, but turbo charged and has perfectly adequate performance as it only weighs 790kg. Thousands of people in London/Paris/Rome have these cars and it just goes to show it's a very good little car.
By comparison, the Buick Century weighs 3368kg (nearly 3.4 metric tons!) and has a 3.1L V6 engine which for some unknown reason, only produces a relatively pathetic 170BHP (easily achievable with a 1.8L VVTL engine like the one fitted as standard to a Totota Celica 190). Guess how fast it is? Answer: About as fast as the Smart Car above. 0-60 time = 11 seconds for both. It uses TRIPLE the amount of fuel for urban driving! I regard the Buick Century to be a typical American car, and if all your cars are like this, I'm surprised you want drive anywhere! I dread to think what would happen if you wanted to bring something like a Mustang or Camaro to the UK.... You'd be spending thousands of pounds a year on just the fuel.
I say again: if your car needs and engine bigger than about 1.6L for everyday use, then you don't know how to design cars. No normal person needs an engine bigger than this if they drive on normal roads.
Nick...
I can't believe that Americans on here are complaining about fuel prices when they pay the least amount for fuel of any country that I can find data for.
:)
In the UK (and I think in most of Europe) we pay UKP 0.80/liter for fuel. That's USD 1.24/liter or USD 4.72 / US gallon. I'm not sure what you guys actually pay, but I bet it's nothing like as much as 4.72/gallon.
It now costs me UKP 40 (USD 62) to fill my Ford Focus with fuel and that's only good for 300 miles.
Perhaps if they didn't all drive massively heavy cars with enormous engines they'd reduce pollution and them themselves money. They'd also end up with nicer cars which don't handle like tanks and require notice in writing to stop in time for pedestrians. I've only driven a couple of American cars (a Buick Centry and an Oldsmobile Sierra Cutlass or something - scuse if I've got the names wrong) and they were both extremely heavy/slow (despite massive 3 liter V6 engines!) and handled unbelieveably badly compared to my Focus. No wonder you have such slow speed limits; There's no way of safely controlling the average 'yank-tank' when it gets much beyond 50-60 mph. My Focus handles fine upto about 100mph. Even at 120mph it seemed fairly stable - I just wouldn't want to try turning much at that speed
I'm sure you'd have more fun driving if you had ligher more efficent cars. You'd also lose your status as the biggest polluter of the planet per capita by quite a long way.
Nick...
They didn't mod it up - posts start at 2 if you have good Karma.
I thought it was amusing and I searched for "all your base" in the thread and found nothing, so I posted. I apologise. Change your settings so you don't see level 2 posts if you're really concerned. Slashdot is configurable for a reason. You can even remove the karma bonus applied to posts like mine if you don't like the idea that some posts might be at 2 by default.
I'm still looking for the "Suppress Duplicates" option though. I can't find that fscking thing anywhere...
Nick...
#iraq
Saddam: What happen?
Uday: Someone set up us the bomb.
Saddam: Main screen turn on!
Bush: How are you gentlemen!! All your base are belong to us.
Blair: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Saddam: Ha Ha Ha Ha...
It's not a dupe. RTFA!
Believe it or not, Microsoft has had more than one security flaw in it's operating systems (just like Linux!!). This isn't the same bug as the one mentionned yesterday. Duh!
Had you read the article, or indeed, any of the previous comments, you'd have realised that you're as dumb as someone who wants to bomb Iraq for Oil.
Nick...
> it's possible to adjust the SA signal geographically, so they could
> degrade the signal in the middle east without changing anything in
> north america. This is the first step that seems logical.
Wrong way round I think?! They probably don't care about the accuracy of GPS in the middle east - everyone over there has military GPS systems that are unaffected by it. They presumably want to slew off the accuracy in the US so that GPS guided bombs aimed at US targets are thrown off slightly. Having said that - that would only be useful against bombs designed to knock out small buildings/bridges etc as throwing a chemical weapon off course by 80m wouldn't make any useful difference whatsoever.
Nick...
How can it be "truely full color" and "make any color possible" when it's only got normal red green and blue LED technology to work with? Although you can mix up quite a lot of colours with these three, you're still fairly limited in what you can produce in terms of the full gamut of the eye. For example, monitors (also obviously using RGB) can only display a certain set of colours that you can see in real life. It can't display a shade of red that's verging on infra red for example, or an extremely deep purple that's almost ultra-violet. It can only display colours which it can "mix" out of red green and blue ie colours which have a wavelength higher than the wavelengh of the red channel and lower than the wavelengh of the blue channel - and even those will be limited by the quality of those individual colours.
:)
Nick...
PS: I speak English English from England, so sorry if me spelling colour correctly offends you
Ancient News For Nerds. Stuff That Doesn't Matter Anymore.
That's from fscking 1995! Slashdot is going severely downhill recently with it's quality of article selection. That article doesn't even look real.
Oh well, maybe when it gets reposted later today I'll be in a better mood to read it.
Nick...
OK, slashdot has the most sophisticated moderation system I've ever seen with hundreds of users contributing to the moderation of articles every day, just to make sure we only have to read the comments that are worth reading.
:)
Only slashdot admins then go and post the entire article twice within minutes - thus undoing the work of hundreds of moderators.
I wish there was a way to moderate the *parent* article down:
-1 Flamebait
-1 Redundant
etc...
All this moderation, but they can't spare ONE person to say if the article is a dupe or not. Notice how slashdot is the *ONLY* news site that has this dupe problem... This is mainly caused because a lot of the articles aren't news - they're from months ago, so the editors need to have a good memory.
Nick...