Which is why the RoHS requirements were a BAD idea. We should be mandating recycling of the solder, not using a shittier one that causes devices to fail faster. I bet if someone sat down and figured up how much extra waste is being created by the shitty solder it is more than offsetting any gains to the environment by cutting down the lead content. (...) Maybe all the bloggers out there and engineers ought to start raising a fit and pointing out that it is having the opposite effect on the environment than what was intended. Because I know that I personally having been tossing a whole lot more E-waste since the RoHS requirements came into play.
Absolutely. And hybrid cars which save a little on fuel but won't last as long as a regular car because they're more complicated and therefore more expensive to troubleshoot. And front-load washing machines, which save a little water but have the same problems as hybrid cars. And compact fluorescent light bulbs which save a little operating energy, but at what price to the manufacturing and recycling energy? (Hey, my tungsten lightbulbs aren't wasteful anyway; I live in a northern climate so the heat they throw off still reduces the time my furnace has to run!)
It's a crock. I care about not wasting. I care about not making a mess of the planet. And I think that's the vast majority of people. But when you have people who are so rabid about the subject that they feel the need to call themselves "environmentalists", they're usually sufficiently scientifically ignorant that they're overtly dangerous to the health of the planet.
I have one like that at work. He jumps up and down and yells about how we're killing the planet. Let's see...
He bitches at me because I have a 1970 Dodge Dart, which isn't "environmentally friendly". My Slant-6 powered Dodge Dart gets 25MPG; his new Ford Focus gets 30MPG. He drives 35km round trip to work every day because he lives in the suburbs, while I walk to work most days and drive my Dart entirely as a pleasure car.
He thinks I'm a horrible person when I shop, because I reuse the plastic grocery bags I pull out of my pocket, while he gets fresh paper every time.
I got him to sign the petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide. I explained that dihydrogen monoxide was one of the most commonly-used industrial coolants and it can now be found in lakes, rivers, and every living creature on the planet. So he signed it.
Probably everyone here can think of some examples of inferior products that have remained dominant despite the appearance of superior alternatives, and also examples of the reverse.
Well, how about the one cited in the original post which implies that Betamax failed in the marketplace because it was NEWER than the already-entrenched VHS? What kills me is when the newer product is inferior and still manages to replace the incumbent.
Sony was first to market with Betamax (1975) versus JVC's VHS (1977). Beta was technically superior in every way except recording time per cassette. And worse, Beta was slightly more expensive (both cassettes and machines) than VHS, mostly Sony's greater licensing charges on the superior format.
OTOH, I'm pretty sure Qwerty has the first-to-market win over Dvorak - I've fixed Qwerty typewriters which were over 100 years old - but damn it, ANYTHING is better than Qwerty. Qwerty was, quite literally, designed with the goal of being the slowest layout possible - early typewriters weren't fast enough to keep up with fast typists.
You can also encode images into base64, don't know how big an image it would take before you hit the 1MB limit, but it's possible.
No attachments. An attachment is just a UUE or base64 text block inside an e-mail; if attachments aren't allowed, those won't get through the mail server. Some other encoding method, as non-standard as possible, must be devised so that you can fly under the radar and TX/RX binaries as text.
I have not-so-fond memories of being on the 'Net back in the late 1980s, and having to MANUALLY encode/decode UUE or base64 files. It was an absolute joy when the first e-mail clients with automatic UUE/base64 ("attachment") handling appeared.
ROT13 a base64 and create a header which calls it "random text good luck charm 72" or something else? I dunno. Get creative. Hell, probably any filters on the mail server aren't all that sophisticated - they can't really look for anything more than fixed string lengths or UUE/base64 headers, as the actual data is pseudorandom. It might be as simple as deleting the header on send and recreating it on receive.
Forget about the internet, email, wikipedia etc.They'll all still be there when you're done.
I dunno about that...
HTML will have been entirely replaced with Flash applications. E-mail will have been completely over-run with spam (rather than just totally, as things are now). All ISPs will employ traffic shaping to the point that downloading the latest Knoppix image will take forever. And if Jimmy Wales' recent plea is to be believed, Wikipedia will be gone, probably sold to Microsoft.
I was only gone for a little over a year, and I did note ALL these things when I got back online.
If I were a television manufacturer, I would have already colluded with other television manufacturers to produce units that would spontaneously fail after 2 and a half years.
Gold Star (now LG - "Lucky Gold Star", not "Life's Good" as they claim) used to be infamous among electronics service techs for powering everything from the CRT filament to the audio stages from the flyback transformer. Crank up the volume too loud and for too long, fry the audio amplifier, which overloads the flyback, which takes out the horizontal output transistor. Now you have a dead TV and a service bill more than it would cost to replace the set.
They did that a *long* time ago. The days of 20+ year lifespans from TV sets are long gone. It's like the days of the 20+-year-old Maytag washer.
(In other news, I have a Sony Trinitron KV-1710 from 1975, and a KV-1926 from 1988, both of which still work perfectly. My first color TV was a 1970 Admiral Solar Color, which I had until 1996. But I see lots of newer sets (2-5 years old) at the curb.)
Which is why I recognized Video Toaster (for Commodore Amiga) fonts in that video. I worked with Toasters for years in the broadcasting field. Apparently, DOS 5 was too cool for the world's first video workstation.
Amiga persecution complex? You bet. In 1991, I could do real-time overlays of video from different sources, and still got less Guru Meditation Errors than the BSoDs I got from any version of DOS/Windows up to Windows 2000.
In my day, I saved up for a year, delivering papers in the rain, to buy a board for a video display that gave me 40 columns x 16 rows. And that felt like sheer luxury!
My first computer was a 1981 Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. 40 columns in text mode. That was my main platform until, believe it or not, 1992. I was very fluent in TMS9900 Assembly, and could make that machine sit up and bark. And yes, I bought it for myself, in grade school, delivering newspapers. In wintertime, too. In Ottawa, Canada. Anyone who has endured a winter in Ottawa can understand why I am very attached to that machine and still have it.
I used my Digital LA-36 "teletype" (not made by TeleType, but same idea) both as a printer and as a terminal for my first Internet connection (1990! Yes, I was on the Internet before DNS, WWW, and Yahoo! My first e-mail address was cj157@carleton.UUCP) because I could actually get a full 80 columns on regular paper, 132 on wide carriage paper. My modem was a hand-me-down 110 baud.
80 columns is comfy for me, but I can understand the desire for more. I think I'll always stick with 80/132, though - anytime I'm coding, I like to do it through a shell-based editor on my original 1976 DEC VT-100. It's got a nice keyboard and there isn't a taskbar full of distractions.
This is one of the most brilliant things I've ever read on Slashdot.
Of course, I've always done it - chatted with her, heard the gossip, heard the upcoming meetings, etc. - I was being friendly because she was someone I work with; I liked her and valued her. But never even given a second thought to her power. And you're absolutely right.
Every time I needed the boardroom, I got it. Every time I was swamped, she'd have just "happened by" the old LaserJet III in accounting to peel a label out of the fuser. And every time the general manager was in a bad mood, she called me up about something mundane (in retrospect, transparently mundane) and managed to drop it into the conversation.
This is a serious question: since virtually all energy comes from the sun, and we have an extensive infrastructure for transporting electricity as well as extensive technology for storing electricity,
We don't have an extensive infrastructure for transporting electricity. The grid is already stressed quite badly - witness the California electricity crisis a few years ago. Power lines are running at nearly peak capacity, as are distribution transformers, etc. Add more? Not going to be easy, since there's that whole "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome affecting everything from transmission lines to substations to generating plants.
Storing electricity? No. Not alternating current. AC cannot be stored. DC would be great in some ways, but because of voltage drop caused by the resistance of power lines, electricity really needs to be transmitted at high voltages... turning that high voltage into something useful to the consumer requires a transformer, which only operates on AC. This is all high school science stuff.
Until the superconductor becomes a practical reality, DC power distribution is a pipe dream, except for very specialized applications. (ie. Vancouver Island gets its power as DC, because an inverter turning DC to AC wastes less power than the capacitive reactance of an underwater cable carrying AC.)
why are we wasting time on road-side turbines and hydrogen fuel?
Hydrogen is silly. It's not a fuel, it's an energy storage device like a battery. If you get 1kW of energy from burning hydrogen, it's because you expended 1kW (plus inefficiencies) somehow separating those little hydrogen atoms from the molecules which they were a part of. Now, where did you get that 1kW of energy? Not from hydrogen.
Never mind what a car accident involving a hydrogen-powered car is going to look like, but that's another story.
it seems silly to me to research hydrogen or whatever scheme Shell and BP (who are completely unbiased research firms) propose rather than leverage existing technology until they provide a real solution.
Shell and BP and whatever are not in the oil business. They're in the profit business. And no matter what new energy sources are devised, they will be involved. They're looking at alternative fuels that they can profitably provide. No one is interested in selling a fuel which isn't profitable; if cars which ran on compressed air were practical, they'd put in compressors. If cars which run on batteries were practical, they'd put in charging stations. Both exist, of course, but neither technology is sufficiently practical to encourage mass adoption.
Wouldn't it make sense to say that all parking lots should be covered at least partially by solar panels? This would not only add juice to the grid but help reduce the local heating problem with asphalt, reduce temperatures inside cars (thus reducing energy used to cool them), and provide a convenient place to plug them in.
A car parked atop such a parking lot would still get warm, as this magical electricity-generating asphalt you've discovered probably isn't capable of enveloping the car and dissuading the sun's rays from penetrating the glass... is it?
IFF* such a technology as photovoltaic asphalt were invented, was economical feasible, and wasn't fraught with liabilities like toxic chemicals, you'd be onto something. Power back onto the grid? Sure, through an inverter. Convenient electrical recharging points? Absolutely.
Oh, wait... Your idea was to build a structure over the parking lot and adorn said structure with solar cells. Okay. Economic feasibility of said structure? Non-infinite lifespan of solar cells? Cloudy days? All that taken into account? I'm sure if it made sense to use the real estate that way, Wal*Mart would already be doing it to reduce the electric bills their stores pay - and as a PR move.
Would it cause to much pollution to make that many panels? Are electric cars truly that much more expensive? Or are lobbyists once
I think the cost of turbine repair or replacement after the inevitable accidents would be enough to make this proposal uneconomical.
Okay, but if I hit something with my car, my insurance company is liable to pay for the damages. Even if it's public property. Now, if we add expensive turbines along the length of the roadway, the insurance companies will be on the hook for repair costs, which will inevitably be passed on to motorists.
Never mind the physics - which will cause anyone with more than two IQ points to rub together to immediately dismiss such a folly - this simply becomes another hidden tax on driving.
But that would mean that our political leaders were just serving the ends of the pharmaceutical companies, not the American people or the law. And surely that can't be the case, not with our noble leaders and their "family values," "character," and such.
Ayuh! AIDS is a disease of them homa-sexuals. We, uh, we, uh, cannot support the treatin' of them homa-sexuals with them there immoral and decadent perversions^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlifestyles. If uh, if uh, they was copyin' Aspirin, which saves God-fearin' Christian folk from headaches, we could turn a blind eye in the name of charity.
(1) they overheat in closed fixtures
More so than incandescents, which are notoriously inefficient and VERY hot.
The difference is that incandescents actually need to run hot (that whole incandescence thing...) while CFLs have electronic ballasts, which, like most solid-state electronics, do not like heat. Having said that, a fixture which is rated for 60W tungsten will easily handle 60W CFL (about 240W equivalent in tungsten). The fixture won't be the problem - it wouldn't get any warmer than with a regular 60W tungsten bulb - but the electronics in the ballast won't be happy at regular tungsten temperatures. Unlike a regular tungsten bulb, a CFL also adds fuel in the form of plastics and other parts in the ballast. Overheated ballast = fire risk. The ballast should never be more than warm to the touch.
and why the hell are these "green" bulbs sold in plastic blister packs?
I wouldn't be surprised if it has something to do with safely transporting them because of their mercury content. This is a good question though since most of the incandescent bulbs I have purchased come in cardboard containers with little or no extra packaging.
Good point re. Hg containment. The other issue is one of cost (and environmentalism). These bulbs are still novelties to most consumers, and they'll want to open them to play with them and see if they fit in a standard lamp fixture. Then they'll put the package they've just opened back on the shelf and take an unopened package. Having worked a time in retail for a large home improvement store, I can assure you that a substantial portion of the opened packages will never be sold, even if the product inside is perfectly fine. They then get written off and discarded. The plastic blister packs therefore save the retailer and manufacturer money, and save the environment from the waste of new bulbs being chucked because they're in open packages. A 6-pack of Philips CFLs is down to under $10 in Ottawa, Canada. The market in CFLs is cutthroat, and therefore a cost-benefit analysis would suggest that $0.25-$0.50 worth of blister packs saves more than 1 in 20 to 1 in 40 packages from the dumpster (or else it wouldn't pay for itself). Anecdotally, I suspect the number of 6-packs which would be destroyed in simple cardboard packaging to be a lot higher, probably on the order of 1 in 5. Therefore, counterintuitive as it may seem, the horrible plastic blister packs save a lot of bulbs from going to the landfill brand new, and therefore more than offsets the packaging's environmental damage.
My biggest fear is that we're simply shifting energy consumption to the manufacturing/disposal part of the product lifecycle
Oh, absolutely we are. Crack open a CFL sometime, take a look at the ballast. In a Philips 24W (about 100W tungsten equivalent) I found two integrated circuits, a bunch of discrete semiconductors (mostly diodes), an inductor, a transformer, and about ten electrolytic capacitors... all stuffed onto a tiny PC board with lead solder connections. Manufacturing energy? Non-negligible. Recycling? Separating all those different materials would be a nightmare. And this is to say nothing of the out-of-sight, out-of-mind production of the mercury-filled arc tubes, conveniently occurring in third-world countries with no laws.
If the manufacturers really cared about saving the planet - or if environmentalists were actually intelligent enough to know what they're talking about - they'd demand that the ballast and the arc tube (the spiral) be fitted with standard connectors, so that I can reuse a good ballast with a new bulb, brand be damned. As it is, as a safety measure, the ballasts tend to be designed to fail catastrophically when the arc tube is worn out, rather than to let the bulb flicker until you get around to changing the tube (like normal fluorescents).
I don't hate fluorescent lighting. I think it's great. But compact fluourescents (otherwise known as "self-ballasting") are a manufacturing and disposal nightmare, at least as much due to the integrated ballast as the mercury in the arc tube.
(and why the hell are these "green" bulbs sold in plastic blister packs?).
Ha! You've clearly never worked retail. I hate those packages too, but they're there because every idiot will want to open the package to see if the light bulb base will fit into his oh-so-special-bought-it-at-Wal*Mart-in-1997 table lamp. The package could have a flashing neon sign saying that, "Yes, Lester, this light bulb will fit into the table lamp you, YES YOU, bought at Wal*Mart ten years ago!" and our intrepid Les would still need to open the package, test it in his lamp, then put the open package back on the shelf and pick up a still-sealed package. With these horrible packages, retailers at least have the satisfaction of knowing that attempting to open with package without proper tools (ie. in the store) will likely result in a painful cut.
During a stint at a large home improvement chain, I'd occasionally see red marks on the shelf or floor where someone had demonstrated a blister-package opening technique where one hand was used to support the package while a pocket knife was used to puncture it.
What impresses me is that the detector can select output from one screen over all others. In the New Scientist article, Kuhn pulls a screen from 25 meters away at a public conference. How many other screens were around and how was this selection achieved? Would a possible countermeasure be to have a second screen playing white noise (or some other noise generator) nearby?
A couple of things would work here. For one thing, an extremely directional Yagi antenna - they're the classic rooftop TV antenna; a long horizontal bar with a number of elements at 90 degrees to the main bar. They provide high gain only in the direction they're pointed; the gain and directionality both increase with the number of elements. And they're extremely easy to precisely tune to a given frequency.
The other trick would be to use a highly frequency-selective receiver. As an example, I have a Motorola-built Collins-designed Cold War era CIA/NSA surveillance radio - the R-390/URR. These things were so good that they were classified as top secret until the late 1960s. (See history.) Now, tuning this thing to your local AM radio station is a neat experience - it actually takes about thirty (yes, 30!) turns of the fine tuning dial to go from one end of your local radio station to the other. With this sort of frequency selectivity, you could very easily filter out adjacent machines... no two crystals are ever exactly perfect (issues from mechanical imprecision to different operating temperatures), and therefore no two horizontal sync signals produced by a video card will ever be at exactly the same frequency. Therefore...
It would've been MUCH more interesting... to see what sort of innovative things people did using Amiga's fancy hardware -- especially since this is in the HARDWARE category and n...
Three words:
Newtek Video Toaster
I worked in television at the time, and I'll tell you that the damned things revolutionized broadcasting. That cute animated logo for the 6 o'clock news was a mere static card with trumpet fanfare before the Video Toaster.
At least before the price cuts, there was simply no way I would even consider an AMD CPU, after Intel got Core 2 Duo up and running.
Why even consider Intel? They're only relevant for the same reason as Micro$oft - right place, right time, and then gave IBM fellatio. (I especially love the claim that Intel invented the microprocessor. TI was at least two years ealier, but that's a story left to judicious reading of Wikipedia.)
Fat and stupid CISC design. Little Endian. Built a modern architecture on a house of cards (64k page limit). x86 interrupt handling could only be improved by a 14-year-old with a soldering iron and a box of relays. It's as gross and as much of a hatchet-job as Windows: Stupid, ugly, and so mass-produced that we're stuck with it.
AMD could double their prices, and there'd still be some people (like me) who would happily choose the organization which copied an asinine design for commercial purposes... instead of the organization which was responsible for the mess to begin with.
Never mind me, though. Intel might be perfectly right... hell, they might even employ a non-retard or two. It's just that I've been forced to program in assembly for their nightmares - it ain't exactly a TMS9900 or a Motorola 68000.
and the street price for 16 MB of RAM in 1980 would have been...what, exactly?
Probably about the same cost as filling up the address space on a modern 64-bit AMD...
Part of the reason the 68000 remains so popular (embedded controllers, etc) is because it was designed intelligently: flat address space, big endian, useful instruction set. A lot like the TMS9900, but Motorola marketed it better.
You DO know that plants resperate (consume oxygen) in a process that is distinct from their phtosynthetic (oxygen producing) process.. right? Or did you think they didn't need to break down sugars in order to sustain themselves?
No, actually. Plants merely consume CO2, sunlight and water. They produce life-sustaining sugars, and how they actually combust those sugars is their own problem! That is their place in life, it is not up to humans to kill them by withholding nutritious carbon dioxide! Fuck those assholes who say that there isn't enough freshwater because of plants! You are should join PETP! We save the plants! Even if you're an uncircumcised European, we might even be able to help YOU!
(While we abhor the cruelty to the fungal ecosystem under your foreskin, but due to medical and legal advice, we do suggest that you wash under it at least every six to eight months. Frequency should increase if you're likely to receive fellatio.)
Why is it cool to "destroy" an old car from the thirties to make a hotrod, but uncool to "destroy" antique typewriters and an M?
It isn't. Restorations are always cooler than "hot rods". OTOH, most hot rods are now using aftermarket body panels on aftermarket frames, so the only thing 192x or 193x about them is their reproduction frames - in other words, it's a $INSERT_DATE_OF_ASSEMBLY 1932-model Ford. The original body panels are getting to the point where they're worth far more as the original pieces than as "hot rod" fodder.
Ignoring that, though, for some reason the rod is still worth more than the original history. That kills me. I'd rather have an original 4-cylinder flathead 1932 Ford A which peaks out at 26MPH than a Ford A with a shaved roof, Bondo everywhere, velvet seats and a Chevy 350. If you like technological history, the real experience is the original. It was slow, it was clanky, and it was uncomfortable... just like a TRS-80. And its current value is nostalgics who like to celebrate how far we've come - even a crappy econobox like a Honda Civic could blow rings around it. Fortunately, rodders are usually afraid of rust repairs, so the original pieces usually end up getting repaired for the real cars, reproductions go to the rods. That wasn't the situation as recently as the 1970s, though.
get a laundry bag that's meant to hold delicate fabrics in the washer. A small mesh bag, about the size of a plastic grocery bag, is easy to find at a box store and more often use
Good point. I actually own somewhere between two and three Maytag washing machines (depends on how you count my stockpile of parts!) so I've never had a problem. BTW, one washer is for clothing (and IBM M keys), the other is for shop rags. The newer one, RAG_WASH (no IP address yet), was built in 1975 and cleans oily rags from when I've been working on a car. For me, a lost keycap under the agitator appears when my roommate washes her undies - in an apartment setting, even with a baggie, it may be lost. Careful.
What religious people seem to fail to comprehend is that atheism is not a religious belief, it is the lack of religious belief. So there is no reason for an atheist to get all political or freaked out if it turns out that there is a biological basis for religion.
I can't say I'm really an atheist - because e^(i*pi)+1=0 brings together too many scientifically observable facets of the Universe for me to believe it could be accidental. Organized religion absolutely disgusts me, with its fervent brainwashing, hypocrisy, and other multitude flaws. But I'll tell you something else - kick an evangelical in the balls and he'll say "Praise Thee Jesus" and smile an even broader smile. I envy the simple joy that must come with that brainwashing. If contentment were as simple as just drinking the Kool-Aid...
That sheep (even with someone sufficiently self-righteous and shameless to call himself "a pastor", note the true meaning of the word!) will never be me, however - I'm not content in life, but I get through it with a mathematical truth which is orders of magnitude more improbable than a winning lottery ticket. I don't know identity or the motivation of Whatever made e^(i*pi)+1=0, but it's the one religious article I carry about in my Toolkit Of Emotional Survival (Or A Reasonable Facsimile Thereof) (tm reg'd 2007).
There's a reason it's called God's Equation. There's too much meaning to those five simple constants all coming together like that.
Genetically flawed to believe in Something, PhD Math, or genetically blessed? I'm unsure. It seems it has been a survival trait in my case, since that little hope that there's reason to life has pulled me through some of my darkest days. And that's a "religion" based exclusively on the cold hard and provable truth of mathematics. Okay, it's a survival trait, but is it a blessing? I'm not a happy camper, can't really say I've ever been - therefore blessing is out the window, though survival trait remains something else.
Again, and even as a scientifically-educated homo (and the evangelicals would have us burned at the stake because they refuse to believe what I jerk off about is as genuine as what they jerk off about), I do have to confess an admiration to the evangelicals: their belief ("truth" in quotes since they can't prove it the way I can prove mine) is warm and fuzzy; mine is about as warm as "The answer to life, the universe and everything is 42." Oh great, that helps a lot... I guess I'll understand 42 sometime within the next 50 years or so.
Being a limp wristed heathen DOES have advantages.
Some obvious, some not.
I'm gay, but I'm a beer-drinking NASCAR-watching guy who has had a car engine in his living room - and we mean a real car, not some prissy little four-cylinder transverse-mount crap. Lemme tell you, there's nothing like:
Having a "straight" guy clumsily hit on you because he thinks you're "normal". I know they're gay at least partially because if straight guys were really that inept, the human race would have died out centuries ago.
Having someone bash "that limp-wristed faggot in accounting" in front of you, and because you fly beneath the radar, being able to say, "bah, he doesn't bother me... I mean, when did you choose what you jerk off about? I doubt it's any different for the homos." The usual reply to that is a confused pause and then the lightbulb of inspiration... "I didn't.. I just always liked girls... Oh... Hey, you still up to coming over and helping me change the clutch in my F-150?"
So being a non-limp-wristed homo has its advantages, too. By the way, I like the femmy guys. So if you are one and can compile a Linux kernel, drop me a message.
As for the heathen bit, all I know is that e^(i*pi)+1=0. That's so weirdly coincidental, bringing together so much of the Universe in one super-elegant expression, that I have a hard time believing it's accidental. But organized religion? No thanks.
This is in addition to the natural difficulties of the subject, who can say for sure what is happening in such a big place as the earth?
More to the point, we've only been observing weather in any sort of scientific way for just a little over a century. Much evidence does point to warming cycles happening on a long period, over centuries - think of the frequency of ice ages. Our observations have been for but the blink of an eye. And I would bet that's all that is happening now.
Remember too that a mere 20 years ago, the big worry was global cooling, again caused by human pollution (this time blocking out the sun). Predictions of an impending ice age were running rampant. I seem to remember it being on the cover of TIME sometime in the mid 1980s.
The science behind all this is in its infancy, and it's a subject ideal for fanning anti-capitalist flames about how evil the automotive and energy companies are.
Having said that, of course, careful resource utilization is important. I don't think a hybrid car is the answer - more complicated, meaning more expensive to fix, meaning less likely to be fixed as it ages, meaning accelerated replacement cycle, meaning more coal to smelt the steel, meaning arguably no net environmental benefit. Buy an SUV, but only if you need one. Buy a truck, but only if you need one. Otherwise, stick with a small car, maintain it well, and plan on keeping it for 20+ years. Can it be done? Absolutely. My first car was a 1980 Chevette. I bought it for $200 in 1992, spent about $500 in repairs over 8 years, sold it for $1000, and I know it was still on the road in 2005. And though it didn't need an emissions test (too old), I got one anyway, just to see if it needed anything - timing, vacuum leaks, ignition, etc. - after all, fuel is expensive, and a poorly-tuned car wastes it. In 1998, my then 18-year-old 'Vette passed the test for a 1987 model.
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Which is why the RoHS requirements were a BAD idea. We should be mandating recycling of the solder, not using a shittier one that causes devices to fail faster. I bet if someone sat down and figured up how much extra waste is being created by the shitty solder it is more than offsetting any gains to the environment by cutting down the lead content. (...) Maybe all the bloggers out there and engineers ought to start raising a fit and pointing out that it is having the opposite effect on the environment than what was intended. Because I know that I personally having been tossing a whole lot more E-waste since the RoHS requirements came into play.
Absolutely. And hybrid cars which save a little on fuel but won't last as long as a regular car because they're more complicated and therefore more expensive to troubleshoot. And front-load washing machines, which save a little water but have the same problems as hybrid cars. And compact fluorescent light bulbs which save a little operating energy, but at what price to the manufacturing and recycling energy? (Hey, my tungsten lightbulbs aren't wasteful anyway; I live in a northern climate so the heat they throw off still reduces the time my furnace has to run!)
It's a crock. I care about not wasting. I care about not making a mess of the planet. And I think that's the vast majority of people. But when you have people who are so rabid about the subject that they feel the need to call themselves "environmentalists", they're usually sufficiently scientifically ignorant that they're overtly dangerous to the health of the planet.
I have one like that at work. He jumps up and down and yells about how we're killing the planet. Let's see...
Probably everyone here can think of some examples of inferior products that have remained dominant despite the appearance of superior alternatives, and also examples of the reverse.
Well, how about the one cited in the original post which implies that Betamax failed in the marketplace because it was NEWER than the already-entrenched VHS? What kills me is when the newer product is inferior and still manages to replace the incumbent.
Sony was first to market with Betamax (1975) versus JVC's VHS (1977). Beta was technically superior in every way except recording time per cassette. And worse, Beta was slightly more expensive (both cassettes and machines) than VHS, mostly Sony's greater licensing charges on the superior format.
OTOH, I'm pretty sure Qwerty has the first-to-market win over Dvorak - I've fixed Qwerty typewriters which were over 100 years old - but damn it, ANYTHING is better than Qwerty. Qwerty was, quite literally, designed with the goal of being the slowest layout possible - early typewriters weren't fast enough to keep up with fast typists.
You can also encode images into base64, don't know how big an image it would take before you hit the 1MB limit, but it's possible.
No attachments. An attachment is just a UUE or base64 text block inside an e-mail; if attachments aren't allowed, those won't get through the mail server. Some other encoding method, as non-standard as possible, must be devised so that you can fly under the radar and TX/RX binaries as text.
I have not-so-fond memories of being on the 'Net back in the late 1980s, and having to MANUALLY encode/decode UUE or base64 files. It was an absolute joy when the first e-mail clients with automatic UUE/base64 ("attachment") handling appeared.
ROT13 a base64 and create a header which calls it "random text good luck charm 72" or something else? I dunno. Get creative. Hell, probably any filters on the mail server aren't all that sophisticated - they can't really look for anything more than fixed string lengths or UUE/base64 headers, as the actual data is pseudorandom. It might be as simple as deleting the header on send and recreating it on receive.
Forget about the internet, email, wikipedia etc.They'll all still be there when you're done.
I dunno about that...
HTML will have been entirely replaced with Flash applications. E-mail will have been completely over-run with spam (rather than just totally, as things are now). All ISPs will employ traffic shaping to the point that downloading the latest Knoppix image will take forever. And if Jimmy Wales' recent plea is to be believed, Wikipedia will be gone, probably sold to Microsoft.
I was only gone for a little over a year, and I did note ALL these things when I got back online.
I've always believed that it is better to regret having done something than to regret having not done it.
That's how I feel about circumcision. Two days of pain gives a lifetime of really liking silk boxer shorts.
If I were a television manufacturer, I would have already colluded with other television manufacturers to produce units that would spontaneously fail after 2 and a half years.
Gold Star (now LG - "Lucky Gold Star", not "Life's Good" as they claim) used to be infamous among electronics service techs for powering everything from the CRT filament to the audio stages from the flyback transformer. Crank up the volume too loud and for too long, fry the audio amplifier, which overloads the flyback, which takes out the horizontal output transistor. Now you have a dead TV and a service bill more than it would cost to replace the set.
They did that a *long* time ago. The days of 20+ year lifespans from TV sets are long gone. It's like the days of the 20+-year-old Maytag washer.
(In other news, I have a Sony Trinitron KV-1710 from 1975, and a KV-1926 from 1988, both of which still work perfectly. My first color TV was a 1970 Admiral Solar Color, which I had until 1996. But I see lots of newer sets (2-5 years old) at the curb.)
Hey, DOS 5 was cool
Which is why I recognized Video Toaster (for Commodore Amiga) fonts in that video. I worked with Toasters for years in the broadcasting field. Apparently, DOS 5 was too cool for the world's first video workstation.
Amiga persecution complex? You bet. In 1991, I could do real-time overlays of video from different sources, and still got less Guru Meditation Errors than the BSoDs I got from any version of DOS/Windows up to Windows 2000.
In my day, I saved up for a year, delivering papers in the rain, to buy a board for a video display that gave me 40 columns x 16 rows. And that felt like sheer luxury!
My first computer was a 1981 Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. 40 columns in text mode. That was my main platform until, believe it or not, 1992. I was very fluent in TMS9900 Assembly, and could make that machine sit up and bark. And yes, I bought it for myself, in grade school, delivering newspapers. In wintertime, too. In Ottawa, Canada. Anyone who has endured a winter in Ottawa can understand why I am very attached to that machine and still have it.
I used my Digital LA-36 "teletype" (not made by TeleType, but same idea) both as a printer and as a terminal for my first Internet connection (1990! Yes, I was on the Internet before DNS, WWW, and Yahoo! My first e-mail address was cj157@carleton.UUCP) because I could actually get a full 80 columns on regular paper, 132 on wide carriage paper. My modem was a hand-me-down 110 baud.
80 columns is comfy for me, but I can understand the desire for more. I think I'll always stick with 80/132, though - anytime I'm coding, I like to do it through a shell-based editor on my original 1976 DEC VT-100. It's got a nice keyboard and there isn't a taskbar full of distractions.
Say good morning to the receptionist.
This is one of the most brilliant things I've ever read on Slashdot.
Of course, I've always done it - chatted with her, heard the gossip, heard the upcoming meetings, etc. - I was being friendly because she was someone I work with; I liked her and valued her. But never even given a second thought to her power. And you're absolutely right.
Every time I needed the boardroom, I got it. Every time I was swamped, she'd have just "happened by" the old LaserJet III in accounting to peel a label out of the fuser. And every time the general manager was in a bad mood, she called me up about something mundane (in retrospect, transparently mundane) and managed to drop it into the conversation.
Yvonne, I miss you.
This is a serious question: since virtually all energy comes from the sun, and we have an extensive infrastructure for transporting electricity as well as extensive technology for storing electricity,
We don't have an extensive infrastructure for transporting electricity. The grid is already stressed quite badly - witness the California electricity crisis a few years ago. Power lines are running at nearly peak capacity, as are distribution transformers, etc. Add more? Not going to be easy, since there's that whole "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome affecting everything from transmission lines to substations to generating plants.
Storing electricity? No. Not alternating current. AC cannot be stored. DC would be great in some ways, but because of voltage drop caused by the resistance of power lines, electricity really needs to be transmitted at high voltages... turning that high voltage into something useful to the consumer requires a transformer, which only operates on AC. This is all high school science stuff.
Until the superconductor becomes a practical reality, DC power distribution is a pipe dream, except for very specialized applications. (ie. Vancouver Island gets its power as DC, because an inverter turning DC to AC wastes less power than the capacitive reactance of an underwater cable carrying AC.)
why are we wasting time on road-side turbines and hydrogen fuel?
Hydrogen is silly. It's not a fuel, it's an energy storage device like a battery. If you get 1kW of energy from burning hydrogen, it's because you expended 1kW (plus inefficiencies) somehow separating those little hydrogen atoms from the molecules which they were a part of. Now, where did you get that 1kW of energy? Not from hydrogen.
Never mind what a car accident involving a hydrogen-powered car is going to look like, but that's another story.
it seems silly to me to research hydrogen or whatever scheme Shell and BP (who are completely unbiased research firms) propose rather than leverage existing technology until they provide a real solution.
Shell and BP and whatever are not in the oil business. They're in the profit business. And no matter what new energy sources are devised, they will be involved. They're looking at alternative fuels that they can profitably provide. No one is interested in selling a fuel which isn't profitable; if cars which ran on compressed air were practical, they'd put in compressors. If cars which run on batteries were practical, they'd put in charging stations. Both exist, of course, but neither technology is sufficiently practical to encourage mass adoption.
Wouldn't it make sense to say that all parking lots should be covered at least partially by solar panels? This would not only add juice to the grid but help reduce the local heating problem with asphalt, reduce temperatures inside cars (thus reducing energy used to cool them), and provide a convenient place to plug them in.
A car parked atop such a parking lot would still get warm, as this magical electricity-generating asphalt you've discovered probably isn't capable of enveloping the car and dissuading the sun's rays from penetrating the glass... is it?
IFF* such a technology as photovoltaic asphalt were invented, was economical feasible, and wasn't fraught with liabilities like toxic chemicals, you'd be onto something. Power back onto the grid? Sure, through an inverter. Convenient electrical recharging points? Absolutely.
Oh, wait... Your idea was to build a structure over the parking lot and adorn said structure with solar cells. Okay. Economic feasibility of said structure? Non-infinite lifespan of solar cells? Cloudy days? All that taken into account? I'm sure if it made sense to use the real estate that way, Wal*Mart would already be doing it to reduce the electric bills their stores pay - and as a PR move.
Would it cause to much pollution to make that many panels? Are electric cars truly that much more expensive? Or are lobbyists once
I think the cost of turbine repair or replacement after the inevitable accidents would be enough to make this proposal uneconomical.
Okay, but if I hit something with my car, my insurance company is liable to pay for the damages. Even if it's public property. Now, if we add expensive turbines along the length of the roadway, the insurance companies will be on the hook for repair costs, which will inevitably be passed on to motorists.
Never mind the physics - which will cause anyone with more than two IQ points to rub together to immediately dismiss such a folly - this simply becomes another hidden tax on driving.
But that would mean that our political leaders were just serving the ends of the pharmaceutical companies, not the American people or the law. And surely that can't be the case, not with our noble leaders and their "family values," "character," and such.
Ayuh! AIDS is a disease of them homa-sexuals. We, uh, we, uh, cannot support the treatin' of them homa-sexuals with them there immoral and decadent perversions^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlifestyles. If uh, if uh, they was copyin' Aspirin, which saves God-fearin' Christian folk from headaches, we could turn a blind eye in the name of charity.
(1) they overheat in closed fixtures
More so than incandescents, which are notoriously inefficient and VERY hot.
The difference is that incandescents actually need to run hot (that whole incandescence thing...) while CFLs have electronic ballasts, which, like most solid-state electronics, do not like heat. Having said that, a fixture which is rated for 60W tungsten will easily handle 60W CFL (about 240W equivalent in tungsten). The fixture won't be the problem - it wouldn't get any warmer than with a regular 60W tungsten bulb - but the electronics in the ballast won't be happy at regular tungsten temperatures. Unlike a regular tungsten bulb, a CFL also adds fuel in the form of plastics and other parts in the ballast. Overheated ballast = fire risk. The ballast should never be more than warm to the touch.
and why the hell are these "green" bulbs sold in plastic blister packs?
I wouldn't be surprised if it has something to do with safely transporting them because of their mercury content. This is a good question though since most of the incandescent bulbs I have purchased come in cardboard containers with little or no extra packaging.
Good point re. Hg containment. The other issue is one of cost (and environmentalism). These bulbs are still novelties to most consumers, and they'll want to open them to play with them and see if they fit in a standard lamp fixture. Then they'll put the package they've just opened back on the shelf and take an unopened package. Having worked a time in retail for a large home improvement store, I can assure you that a substantial portion of the opened packages will never be sold, even if the product inside is perfectly fine. They then get written off and discarded. The plastic blister packs therefore save the retailer and manufacturer money, and save the environment from the waste of new bulbs being chucked because they're in open packages. A 6-pack of Philips CFLs is down to under $10 in Ottawa, Canada. The market in CFLs is cutthroat, and therefore a cost-benefit analysis would suggest that $0.25-$0.50 worth of blister packs saves more than 1 in 20 to 1 in 40 packages from the dumpster (or else it wouldn't pay for itself). Anecdotally, I suspect the number of 6-packs which would be destroyed in simple cardboard packaging to be a lot higher, probably on the order of 1 in 5. Therefore, counterintuitive as it may seem, the horrible plastic blister packs save a lot of bulbs from going to the landfill brand new, and therefore more than offsets the packaging's environmental damage.
My biggest fear is that we're simply shifting energy consumption to the manufacturing/disposal part of the product lifecycle
Oh, absolutely we are. Crack open a CFL sometime, take a look at the ballast. In a Philips 24W (about 100W tungsten equivalent) I found two integrated circuits, a bunch of discrete semiconductors (mostly diodes), an inductor, a transformer, and about ten electrolytic capacitors... all stuffed onto a tiny PC board with lead solder connections. Manufacturing energy? Non-negligible. Recycling? Separating all those different materials would be a nightmare. And this is to say nothing of the out-of-sight, out-of-mind production of the mercury-filled arc tubes, conveniently occurring in third-world countries with no laws.
If the manufacturers really cared about saving the planet - or if environmentalists were actually intelligent enough to know what they're talking about - they'd demand that the ballast and the arc tube (the spiral) be fitted with standard connectors, so that I can reuse a good ballast with a new bulb, brand be damned. As it is, as a safety measure, the ballasts tend to be designed to fail catastrophically when the arc tube is worn out, rather than to let the bulb flicker until you get around to changing the tube (like normal fluorescents).
I don't hate fluorescent lighting. I think it's great. But compact fluourescents (otherwise known as "self-ballasting") are a manufacturing and disposal nightmare, at least as much due to the integrated ballast as the mercury in the arc tube.
(and why the hell are these "green" bulbs sold in plastic blister packs?).
Ha! You've clearly never worked retail. I hate those packages too, but they're there because every idiot will want to open the package to see if the light bulb base will fit into his oh-so-special-bought-it-at-Wal*Mart-in-1997 table lamp. The package could have a flashing neon sign saying that, "Yes, Lester, this light bulb will fit into the table lamp you, YES YOU, bought at Wal*Mart ten years ago!" and our intrepid Les would still need to open the package, test it in his lamp, then put the open package back on the shelf and pick up a still-sealed package. With these horrible packages, retailers at least have the satisfaction of knowing that attempting to open with package without proper tools (ie. in the store) will likely result in a painful cut.
During a stint at a large home improvement chain, I'd occasionally see red marks on the shelf or floor where someone had demonstrated a blister-package opening technique where one hand was used to support the package while a pocket knife was used to puncture it.
What impresses me is that the detector can select output from one screen over all others. In the New Scientist article, Kuhn pulls a screen from 25 meters away at a public conference. How many other screens were around and how was this selection achieved? Would a possible countermeasure be to have a second screen playing white noise (or some other noise generator) nearby?
A couple of things would work here. For one thing, an extremely directional Yagi antenna - they're the classic rooftop TV antenna; a long horizontal bar with a number of elements at 90 degrees to the main bar. They provide high gain only in the direction they're pointed; the gain and directionality both increase with the number of elements. And they're extremely easy to precisely tune to a given frequency.
The other trick would be to use a highly frequency-selective receiver. As an example, I have a Motorola-built Collins-designed Cold War era CIA/NSA surveillance radio - the R-390/URR. These things were so good that they were classified as top secret until the late 1960s. (See history.) Now, tuning this thing to your local AM radio station is a neat experience - it actually takes about thirty (yes, 30!) turns of the fine tuning dial to go from one end of your local radio station to the other. With this sort of frequency selectivity, you could very easily filter out adjacent machines... no two crystals are ever exactly perfect (issues from mechanical imprecision to different operating temperatures), and therefore no two horizontal sync signals produced by a video card will ever be at exactly the same frequency. Therefore...
It would've been MUCH more interesting ... to see what sort of innovative things people did using Amiga's fancy hardware -- especially since this is in the HARDWARE category and n...
Three words:
Newtek Video Toaster
I worked in television at the time, and I'll tell you that the damned things revolutionized broadcasting. That cute animated logo for the 6 o'clock news was a mere static card with trumpet fanfare before the Video Toaster.
But they've already been discussed here.
At least before the price cuts, there was simply no way I would even consider an AMD CPU, after Intel got Core 2 Duo up and running.
Why even consider Intel? They're only relevant for the same reason as Micro$oft - right place, right time, and then gave IBM fellatio. (I especially love the claim that Intel invented the microprocessor. TI was at least two years ealier, but that's a story left to judicious reading of Wikipedia.)
Fat and stupid CISC design. Little Endian. Built a modern architecture on a house of cards (64k page limit). x86 interrupt handling could only be improved by a 14-year-old with a soldering iron and a box of relays. It's as gross and as much of a hatchet-job as Windows: Stupid, ugly, and so mass-produced that we're stuck with it.
AMD could double their prices, and there'd still be some people (like me) who would happily choose the organization which copied an asinine design for commercial purposes... instead of the organization which was responsible for the mess to begin with.
Never mind me, though. Intel might be perfectly right... hell, they might even employ a non-retard or two. It's just that I've been forced to program in assembly for their nightmares - it ain't exactly a TMS9900 or a Motorola 68000.
and the street price for 16 MB of RAM in 1980 would have been...what, exactly?
Probably about the same cost as filling up the address space on a modern 64-bit AMD...
Part of the reason the 68000 remains so popular (embedded controllers, etc) is because it was designed intelligently: flat address space, big endian, useful instruction set. A lot like the TMS9900, but Motorola marketed it better.
As a limp-wristed bi myself... Where were you when I was still dating?
Hello... How is your boyfriend? Can I watch? ;)
You DO know that plants resperate (consume oxygen) in a process that is distinct from their phtosynthetic (oxygen producing) process.. right? Or did you think they didn't need to break down sugars in order to sustain themselves?
No, actually. Plants merely consume CO2, sunlight and water. They produce life-sustaining sugars, and how they actually combust those sugars is their own problem! That is their place in life, it is not up to humans to kill them by withholding nutritious carbon dioxide! Fuck those assholes who say that there isn't enough freshwater because of plants! You are should join PETP! We save the plants! Even if you're an uncircumcised European, we might even be able to help YOU!
(While we abhor the cruelty to the fungal ecosystem under your foreskin, but due to medical and legal advice, we do suggest that you wash under it at least every six to eight months. Frequency should increase if you're likely to receive fellatio.)
Why is it cool to "destroy" an old car from the thirties to make a hotrod, but uncool to "destroy" antique typewriters and an M?
It isn't. Restorations are always cooler than "hot rods". OTOH, most hot rods are now using aftermarket body panels on aftermarket frames, so the only thing 192x or 193x about them is their reproduction frames - in other words, it's a $INSERT_DATE_OF_ASSEMBLY 1932-model Ford. The original body panels are getting to the point where they're worth far more as the original pieces than as "hot rod" fodder.
Ignoring that, though, for some reason the rod is still worth more than the original history. That kills me. I'd rather have an original 4-cylinder flathead 1932 Ford A which peaks out at 26MPH than a Ford A with a shaved roof, Bondo everywhere, velvet seats and a Chevy 350. If you like technological history, the real experience is the original. It was slow, it was clanky, and it was uncomfortable... just like a TRS-80. And its current value is nostalgics who like to celebrate how far we've come - even a crappy econobox like a Honda Civic could blow rings around it. Fortunately, rodders are usually afraid of rust repairs, so the original pieces usually end up getting repaired for the real cars, reproductions go to the rods. That wasn't the situation as recently as the 1970s, though.
get a laundry bag that's meant to hold delicate fabrics in the washer. A small mesh bag, about the size of a plastic grocery bag, is easy to find at a box store and more often use
Good point. I actually own somewhere between two and three Maytag washing machines (depends on how you count my stockpile of parts!) so I've never had a problem. BTW, one washer is for clothing (and IBM M keys), the other is for shop rags. The newer one, RAG_WASH (no IP address yet), was built in 1975 and cleans oily rags from when I've been working on a car. For me, a lost keycap under the agitator appears when my roommate washes her undies - in an apartment setting, even with a baggie, it may be lost. Careful.
What religious people seem to fail to comprehend is that atheism is not a religious belief, it is the lack of religious belief. So there is no reason for an atheist to get all political or freaked out if it turns out that there is a biological basis for religion.
I can't say I'm really an atheist - because e^(i*pi)+1=0 brings together too many scientifically observable facets of the Universe for me to believe it could be accidental. Organized religion absolutely disgusts me, with its fervent brainwashing, hypocrisy, and other multitude flaws. But I'll tell you something else - kick an evangelical in the balls and he'll say "Praise Thee Jesus" and smile an even broader smile. I envy the simple joy that must come with that brainwashing. If contentment were as simple as just drinking the Kool-Aid...
That sheep (even with someone sufficiently self-righteous and shameless to call himself "a pastor", note the true meaning of the word!) will never be me, however - I'm not content in life, but I get through it with a mathematical truth which is orders of magnitude more improbable than a winning lottery ticket. I don't know identity or the motivation of Whatever made e^(i*pi)+1=0, but it's the one religious article I carry about in my Toolkit Of Emotional Survival (Or A Reasonable Facsimile Thereof) (tm reg'd 2007).
There's a reason it's called God's Equation. There's too much meaning to those five simple constants all coming together like that.
Genetically flawed to believe in Something, PhD Math, or genetically blessed? I'm unsure. It seems it has been a survival trait in my case, since that little hope that there's reason to life has pulled me through some of my darkest days. And that's a "religion" based exclusively on the cold hard and provable truth of mathematics. Okay, it's a survival trait, but is it a blessing? I'm not a happy camper, can't really say I've ever been - therefore blessing is out the window, though survival trait remains something else.
Again, and even as a scientifically-educated homo (and the evangelicals would have us burned at the stake because they refuse to believe what I jerk off about is as genuine as what they jerk off about), I do have to confess an admiration to the evangelicals: their belief ("truth" in quotes since they can't prove it the way I can prove mine) is warm and fuzzy; mine is about as warm as "The answer to life, the universe and everything is 42." Oh great, that helps a lot... I guess I'll understand 42 sometime within the next 50 years or so.
Being a limp wristed heathen DOES have advantages. Some obvious, some not.
I'm gay, but I'm a beer-drinking NASCAR-watching guy who has had a car engine in his living room - and we mean a real car, not some prissy little four-cylinder transverse-mount crap. Lemme tell you, there's nothing like:
So being a non-limp-wristed homo has its advantages, too. By the way, I like the femmy guys. So if you are one and can compile a Linux kernel, drop me a message.
As for the heathen bit, all I know is that e^(i*pi)+1=0. That's so weirdly coincidental, bringing together so much of the Universe in one super-elegant expression, that I have a hard time believing it's accidental. But organized religion? No thanks.
This is in addition to the natural difficulties of the subject, who can say for sure what is happening in such a big place as the earth?
More to the point, we've only been observing weather in any sort of scientific way for just a little over a century. Much evidence does point to warming cycles happening on a long period, over centuries - think of the frequency of ice ages. Our observations have been for but the blink of an eye. And I would bet that's all that is happening now.
Remember too that a mere 20 years ago, the big worry was global cooling, again caused by human pollution (this time blocking out the sun). Predictions of an impending ice age were running rampant. I seem to remember it being on the cover of TIME sometime in the mid 1980s.
The science behind all this is in its infancy, and it's a subject ideal for fanning anti-capitalist flames about how evil the automotive and energy companies are.
Having said that, of course, careful resource utilization is important. I don't think a hybrid car is the answer - more complicated, meaning more expensive to fix, meaning less likely to be fixed as it ages, meaning accelerated replacement cycle, meaning more coal to smelt the steel, meaning arguably no net environmental benefit. Buy an SUV, but only if you need one. Buy a truck, but only if you need one. Otherwise, stick with a small car, maintain it well, and plan on keeping it for 20+ years. Can it be done? Absolutely. My first car was a 1980 Chevette. I bought it for $200 in 1992, spent about $500 in repairs over 8 years, sold it for $1000, and I know it was still on the road in 2005. And though it didn't need an emissions test (too old), I got one anyway, just to see if it needed anything - timing, vacuum leaks, ignition, etc. - after all, fuel is expensive, and a poorly-tuned car wastes it. In 1998, my then 18-year-old 'Vette passed the test for a 1987 model.