SUVs aren't better haulers, they just look less dorky than minivans. If you need to haul HEAVY stuff or tow a trailer you'd be better with a truck. If you needed an enclosed space you'd get a full-sized van like a Sprinter or a Savanna or an Econoline. If you need versatility you'd get a minivan like a Caravan.
SUVs are a compromise in every way--they have the inconvenient added height and low fuel economy of a truck, but can barely replace a station wagon for cargo volume. SUVs are basically just cool to look at and nothing else, for the vast majority of people. The SUV won't go exinct, but in the future far less of them will be around. Maybe 10 percent of SUVs are used for what they'd be good for; hauling people and cargo that has to be kept out of the elements through rought terrain.
Do people speed more in smaller cars than in large SUVs It's actually the opposite; people who drive SUVs tend to drive them faster than those who drive small economy cars. This is because the higher driving position in the SUV tends to make one feel like they are moving slower than if you sat closer to the ground. Drive 100 km/h in a Chrysler Neon, then go for a 100 km/h drive in a Dodge Durango, then tell me which "feels" faster.
Are people more likely to switch lanes more quickly in smaller cars than in large ones? SUVs, trucks and vans have larger blind spots; it is easier to make an unsafe lane change in those vehicles than in a small car, which might not even be as tall as the beltline of the larger vehicles. It happens fairly frequently where a large SUV sideswipes low, small car to its right because the SUV driver has failed to check the right rear-viw mirror, or the mirror is improperly adjusted and does not show the area of the road immediately to the right of the vehicle.
Smaller cars also accelerate faster than SUVs, so at intersections the small cars will be the first into the intersection after a light turns green. Small SPORTS cars might, but economy cars accelerate at similar rates. To make matters worse, SUVs have longer stopping distances. This is also a very common scenario (and I was an actual victim of this scenario, with a full sized pickup truck): A small car has stopped, either for a red light or due to traffic congestion. The vehicle behind is following a bit too close and cannot stop as quickly as the car in front, leading to a rear-end collision.
The study referenced in the parent of your post is indeed one showing correlation, but others have indeed studies causation, and the results, as you can see, are interesting and maybe a bit disturbing: Drivers ingrained with car-driving habits behind the wheels of what are in fact trucks may come out of accidents in better shape, but they actually get themselves into MORE accidents, which partially, if not totally, cancels out the safety benefits of size and weight.
I hardly think a 145hp engine classifies as a 'monster' My, times have changed. The base engine for the first Ford Mustang was all of 100 horsepower, and here we have an econobox "compact" with 145 HP. That is about the same power output as the base CAMARO had in the 1970s. Sure, those cars could be had with much more powerful engines, but we are talking about BASE MODELS here. I understand that 145HP or more might be what the "rice rocket" crowd wants, but where is the REAL "econobox" offering, an adequate 100HP engine that delivers superior efficiency?
SUV's don't "win" in a collision merely becasue they are heavier, it has a great deal to do with their size, specifically their height. Low, small cars tend to "submarine" under SUVs, rendering safety measures such as crumple zones ineffective. In the vast majority of accidents, the lack of mass and momentum is not the primary reason for fatality; the size difference comes into play more in specific situations such as a car being pinned between an SUV and a building or other immovable object.
Large vehicles could be made much lighter--Large SUVs and light trucks are the most technologically backward vehicles on the road today--They still employ big heavy body-on-frame design one might have seen in the 1950s. You could still make large vehicles but make fundamental design changes to dramatically reduce the weight. A lightened SUV or truck would retain the height advantage over smaller vehicles and still obtain fuel savings.
I think the implications are not as bad as all that. If it looks like enforcing the treaty would cause undue harm or expense, Canada won't ratify it under such onerous terms.
Remember that though treaties are used by lobbyists to do end-runs around the laws of various countries, treaties cannot escape ratification by signing nations. Ratification still has to be voted on in the commons and given Royal Assent to be put into law before they can be enforced in Canada.
Sometimes that isn't even enough. The Kyoto treaty was ratified, then pretty much ignored by the Liberal government of the time, the Liberal government following it and the present Conservative government.
I don't even think a draconian copyright treaty would even get as far as Kyoto. Canada has been under some degree of pressure for a decade to "update" its copyright law to include DMCA-like provisions. It isn't an issue that resonates with the electorate like the environment, the Industry and Heritage committees have reviewed copyright law ad-nauseum, and copyright reform bills have died on the order paper.
With it being a minority government run by a Conservative party that can only claim to live up to the name by the slimmest of margins as it tries to lure voters with policies scattershot all over the centre and right of the ideological spectrum, and a Liberal party with no principles to speak of and an ineffectual leader yet very eager to dig up all the dirt it can, I cannot see the government stepping up and pushing through a contentious copyright bill that would outlaw all forms of P2P (something even legitimate content providers are toying with, including the CBC--so such a law would even make criminals out of government-owned institutions).
Yes, anyone who tries to purchase a commodity and sell it for profit deserves eternal damnation. All excess capital should be put into a government controlled "fund", like social security. Down with profits! Corporations are not commodities, but anyways...No need to go through the trouble of gettin gthe gov't involved, the free market will damn him to hell all on its own eventually--it nearly did when the junk bond craze bit him in the ass in the 80s.
Anyways, enjoy your $4/gal gas, courtesy of commodity speculators. Don't worry though, that bubble will too deflate and cause a few billions in writedowns, and that ought to right things again.
Take over, oust lazy shitheads at the helm, make a stagnant, potentially capable and profitable company work again..
That'd be great, but Icahn's track record isn't exactly universally altruistic. Rumours of MSFT's interest in eliminating Yahoo as a competitor--most easily done via takeover--abounded for years. Icahn's interest clearly isn't in making Yahoo better, it is basically large-scale speculation or a "big flip".
Yahoo is targeted because he thinks MSFT is a motivated buyer, but YHOO is reluctant to sell out, and shareholders were not assertive with management (Yahoo is helf mostly by sleepy institutional investors and a smattering of retail stockholders). Icahn has the means to become the single biggest shareholder so he can wake up sleepy pension funds and bully management around to make a quick profit. He doesn't care about the company, or ultimately about other investors. OTOH, Jerry Yang and every other intelligent person who knows hoe the industry works KNOWS taht Yahoo would simply dissolve once purchased by MSFT. Employees know that means big layoffs ahead, and a huge shift in technology and corporate culture that would drive away even more. Long-term shareholders know that a takeover likely makes YHOO dead money--best would be to cash out of any MSFT shares received in payment because the most likely outcome is that the quick profit/increase in valuation will evapourate in 1 to 2 years at most.
Really, it's laughable to think that yahoo as a company, or its employees, would see any meaningful, lasting benefit from being absorbed by MSFT. Historically, it has been shown that is not the case.
You realize that these are the people who put up the money for the company...without whom, there would be no company. They're entitled to be greedy. It's their company. You realise that the directors are informed people with a vested interest in the further continuance and growth of a company. They are there not only to "maximise shareholder value" but to act as "sober second thought" against potential "mob rule" by shareholders that are either ignorant or greedy. Without THEM there would probably be no Yahoo today either. Without them Yahoo would probably have sold themselves to MSFT years ago and thousands would have been without jobs and we'd all have one less choice on the market.
Without Jerry Yang, or thousands of Yahoo employees there'd be no Yahoo either. Do you not think they're also "entitled to be greedy" too? I think so. Also keep in mind that Icahn is leading this crusade. Icahn didn't "put up the money for the company" to help start and nurture and grow the company. Icahn set his "corporate raider bastard" target on Yahoo LONG after it came to prominence, and bought up millions of shares with the full intention of flipping them to MSFT.
Not only is Icahn NOT responsible for Yahoo's existence, it is full intention to END Yahoo's existence. That is his modus operandi: March into a public company using loads of capital and credit, start scheming to out all the directors and replace them with his cronies, start throwing the lawsuits around until he gets his way, then evicerate the company and sell off its guts to the highest bidder.
I don't have all that much love for Yahoo, but I'd have to say that my distaste for pushy, selfish corporate raiders exceeds whatever beef I've ever had with Yahoo, and even Microsoft.
Yep. Shareholders like Carl Icanh. I hear he took a payday loan to buy his yacht and now is behind on the mortgage payments. Not exactly--it's more like he bought a slightly run-down house (Yahoo) using a sub-prime loan with the intention of flipping it, but the city planner (Yang) refused the development permit to do an addition, and now he is upside-down in his mortgage and the only potential buyer (MSFT) keeps reducing his offer.
That sad sack of Sh!t Carl can go to hell with all the rest of the greedy real-estate speculators who lost their shirts in the subprime meltdown.
Yeah. That will have been worth it, when in 2010, Yahoo! shareholders realise their $11.00 per share. It all depends on your perspective. Yes, it WILL be worth it for Yahoo EMPLOYEES and USERS. On the other hand, Yahoo SHAREHOLDERS are understandably unhappy. Yahoo shareholders that are angry are upset because they wanted a way to jump ship and make a boatload of money...pure greed. A buyout would hurt Yahoo employss, Yahoo users and the industry as a whole. It would make the AOL/TW and Daimler/Chrysler mergers look like a raging success.
If it came as a surprise to anyone that Yahoo's founders and high-level managers have an antipathy towards MSFT then they must've been living in a cave, or are total morons. From Yahoo's inception there has been little love for MSFT--if they ever cooperated it was grudgingly, in their own self interest. There is a cultural gap bigger than the Grand Canyon there.
It doesn't help that there is a giant impedance mismatch when it comes to technology and infrastructure. A Netcraft search is telling: Yahoo is almost universally FreeBSD, and what is left is Linux. Yahoo has ZERO Microsoft in their data centres. MSFT, of course, is almost universally Windows Server.
Remember what happened to Hotmail when MSFT bought it? They ripped out all the FreeBSD over the first couple of years, subjecting users to regular periodic disruptions. "To hell with users, we eat our own dogfood dammit!". Not only that, I'd say most of the hotmail employees were abandoned too--wandered away or pushed out.
Hotmail still exists today as a cornerstone to MSFT's "Live" initiative and is probably the biggest webmail provider out there so it wasn't all bad of course, but there is a difference here: MSFT had no webmail service of note before buying Hotmail. In the case of Yahoo, what have they got that MSFT doesn't have? They both have an IM platform and client, a search portal, webmail, advertising services, etc...except NONE of Yahoo's runs on MSFT technology! Within 2 years, the yahoo portal will be gone, the IM client will be gone, the webmail will be gone, everything will be gone. Yahoo is coveted for its customer base and advertising presence. It'll live for awhile as "MS Yahoo! Live" for awhile then it'll be gone. It's employees will be gone. It'll be a footnote in history.
It doesn't matter all that much to me; I have no great love for either company and think they both offer mediocre service and crappy software. However, if Yahoo's directors and Yang himself care about the company and really believe it would grow, they've made the right decision to resist a buyout by MSFT. You'd have to be a fool to think there'd be anything of substance left of Yahoo after MSFT slayed them and feasted upon the corpse. Some of us would cheer to see that, but I'm betting the founder, directors and loyal employees would understandably NOT want to see that.
Anyways, who is to say that Yahoo shareholders would be better off with the MSFT shares tossed their way in a buyout? Right now, I'd say NEITHER stock is going anywhere exiting in the next 2 years. By the way, if you just go by the charts, Yahoo did the right thing; in the past year, YHOO has lost just over 9 percent, but MSFT has lost over 10 percent. If you extend where things have been out to 2010, if you think YHOO is heading towards $11, then MSFT will probably be $10.50.
Why didn't they put in a lightweight weather vane with a small fan? Actually a vane and fan is inferior for this particular purpose. This "rock on a string" can be used to determine both direction and intensity of winds just as well, plus it is lighter and mechanically less complex than a vane and fan--important in the very cold and dusty environment on Mars. The rotating parts would more easily wear, freeze or seize up more easily in such an environment.
With the rock you can basically gauge the initial wind, but once it starts swinging If a wind is sustained the rock would not swing. Furthermore sensors and computer analysis of the motion can provide more information than you would think. Without restricted degrees of movement this instrument can determine wind directions on different planes (vs just one with a weather vane) and the swinging can be used to figure out the size and direction of gusts, and could even detect "eddies" or small tornadoes, updrafts, etc. Can't do that as well with a weather vane.
The government is pretty likely to listen on this matter. Net neutrality isn't a particularly ideological issue, though there are some interesting political issues to consider:
1. There are Liberal and NDP members of parliament attending and speaking at the rally. The Conservatives hold the most seats in the commons, however if these two other parties presented a bill on opposition day and voted as a bloc it would pass with little to no support from Conservative members, as we have a minority government situation with no established coalition.
2. The conservatives may not have officially endorsed "net neutrality" but they do not oppose it either; their policy platform is silent on the issue. However, historically the current government has been significantly more receptive to changing the CRTC's regulatory regime than the Liberals have ever been. for example the Conservatives have broght foreward regulatory changes mandating phone number portability, cellphone tower sharing and a wireless auction this month that allocates a certain amount of licenses to new entrants in the market. Bell, Telus and Rogers all protested the terms of the auction because they "interfered with the free market" (Canadian wireless is a free market? HA! Yeah, right!). Interestingly, the Liberals also denounced the auction and cellphone tower sharing provisions. The Liberals are for Net Neutrality maybe, but they have NEVER advocated "wireless neutrality" and Liberal policies have allowed the wireless market to stagnate to "third world" status. So, if the Liberals support Net Neutrality, it wouldn't be hard at all to get Prentice and oter Conservative MPs to support it.
3. Bell Canada is of course the biggest motivation for the push to net neutrality with their throttling shenanigans. Bell has been most vocal in opposing changes in regulations that favour new entrants into their markets and is also the most "vertically integrated" of the major players. They've not been very supportive of this Conservative government, and the government is not very sympathetic to their "plight" either. Because they lack effective lobbying in this government, policy is more likely to follow popular opinion rather than lobbyist opinion.
It is also important to note that even if no changes are made to reguilations that Canada has wuite a "neutral net" already. Under already implemented regulations broadband providers, by law, MUST provide identical service to their wholesalers/resellers/third parties that they offer to retail customers directly. When the Bell complaint was investigated it turned out that Bell's own end customers were subjected to the same bandwidth throttling as the wholesale/resellers were.
Bell is in fact having a difficult time in being an ISP recently. They are losing revenue badly due to very inept management decisions and because they have now got a reputation for being the poorest of all the broadband providers in Canada. Aside from the news of the throttling, there was also a newsmagazine show called "Marketplace" that looked at Bell customer complaints and did a comparison with Telus and Shaw. The results were extremely embarassing to Bell as it demonstrated that their competition was much faster, sometimes 2 or 3 times faster.
Unlike the cellphone market, ISPs are in fact more competitive in Canada, and have historically offered better service and lower prices than found in the US, so while I would very much like to see a formal "net neutrality" policy in Canada to protect what is slowly eroding competition, the situation is not nearly as bad as it is in the US.
STARTING smoking is a lifestyle choice - one which is often made at an age where you're too young and headstrong to know better.
That argument has no merit at all unless you happen to have been a smoker for something like 30 years, and happened to have started at a time when people still didn't fully appreciate the health consequences of smoking. When I was "young and headstrong" in the 1980s and 1990s WE ALL NEW BETTER. Even the kids who did start smoking knew it was bad for you, and knew it was addictive, but it was "cool" to be rebellious and do stupid things. That doesn't mean we should be let out of our responsibility to deal with consequences of doing stupid things.
As someone who is a smoker and has tried many times to quit, I do NOT feel that I have control over it without medical aids.
Well, then, use the medical aids man! You made a bed when you started smoking that you must now lie in. You have a choice no matter what you say--REALLY try quitting (medical aids and all), or dealing with having to shiver outside in the rain during some smoke breaks, having smelly breath and clothes, paying more for insurance and extra tobacco taxes.
That effectively puts it in the "disease" category (as another poster has pointed out).
Total crap. It isn't a disease it is an addiction. You don't have a tumour that makes you HAVE to smoke or you'll die. There is no virus or bacteria that forces you to suck on a burning stick of tobacco or drink alcohol or inhale white powder. You made a choice to get hooked and you can make a choice to try to get out of it. If you aren't TRYING to get "un-hooked" then you are still making an unhealthy lifestyle choice. So long as you try (and you have, so don't give up) you are making a responsible choice that should be (and sometimes is) rewarded with incentives by insurance companies and the rest.
I will very soon be seeing a doctor to get something prescribed, since the "over the counter" stuff helps somewhat, but not enough.
I have seen (known personally in fact) cancer patients and those with emphysema using oxygen who were still lighting up--I know it is tough. In both those cases they actually quit, even though the doctors said it was too late. In the lung cancer victim's case she wanted to live long enough to see her grandchild. In the latter case it was because the oxygen was an explosion hazard and the doctor said that she could cause an explosion and kill herself or her daughter while lighting a cigarette. They were "hard core addicts" like yourself, but given proper motivation ANYONE can quit. I applaud you for making the meaningful effort--though I support "discrimination against smokers" I also thing people should be encouraged and rewarded for making the effort to become non-smokers, even if they are struggling to do so.
I apologise if I appeared unsympathetic to those who are more strongly addicted to smoking than most--those who are in your situation aren't the ones that I have a problem with. The topic is somewhat personal for me as well, as I have lost more than one close family member to tobacco-related cancer. Actually being there beside someone you care about whilst they die brings about a lot of emotion--it has been many years now, but it still angers me when an unapologetic, "proud smoker" spouts some claptrap about "smokers' rights" because they can't smoke in their favourite eatery anymore or had to pay extra for insurance, or a rental car, or hotel room, because they smoke. Smoking is not a "right" and deserves no protection. Starting smoking is a foolish lifestyle choice and, as you've found out, one with a pretty steep price.
The article you reference is about a proposed ban on hiring smokers for government jobs in Sarasota county. It is indeed a colossally dumb idea as proposed because it is not practical to enforce and the benefits of fewer sick days taken or lower claims is considerably smaller than the lost opportunities to hire the most qualified people. However I am firmly in support of the ability to "discriminate against smokers".
In fact, it is (rightly) common practice amongst medical and home insurance providers already to charge extra premiums to policy holders who smoke, and to deny coverage/claims to those who falsely declare themselves non-smokers in cases where smoking is at the root cause of the claim. That is the way it should be, and there should be no law preventing individuals or institutions from continuing the practice.
It is not inconsistent to support something like GINA and also support the freedom to discriminate in favour of non-smokers because the latter is a lifestyle choice, and the former, GINA, in my opinion is at its heart an update of laws against racial discrimination.
People aren't born with cigarettes in their mouths, and not only are we not forced to smoke, we have been told for decades that smoking is an unhealthy lifestyle choice that's best not even started. I cannot comprehend why anyone in this day and age would want to start up a smoking habit knowing what a totally stupid idea it is. Smokers deserve to pay more for (or be denied) insurance and pay a large "stupid tax" on tobacco. I think it is their right to be stupid and do stupid things, but I also believe that those who exercise their right to do stupid, destructive things should bear the full responsibility to cover the costs incurred.
Conversely, in this day and age, we know a lot about genetics to predict, to some degree of accuracy, if we are pre-disposed to health issues, yet we are quite far from being able to reliably create genetically perfect beings yet. In short, it is impossible for us to make any significant choices in our genetic makeup. In that respect discrimination based on genetic markers is on par with discrimination based on gender or race, so GINA is right in line with the spirit of the US constitution.
The Coleco one is a bit disingenuous though, because the floppy discs you used weren't the standard method of storage that came with it
Fair criticism to be sure, but compare this to ADAM's contemporaries: Commodore 64, Apple IIe, Atari 800XL, Tandy CoCo II, Sinclair Spectrum, Amstrad CPC...list goes on. NONE of these machines even had a standard floppy drive marketed as an option, much less as standard equipment so ADAM still wins out in that respect. At least the CPC had a standard drive INTERFACE so a third party device could be plugged in and software modified to support the drive, however, as the competition of the day goes, I'd still say Coleco took the best approach of all of them by offering an official plug'n'play option that used the same track-and-sector configuration originally used on the IBM PC.
I've heard that although the system was derived from the standard audio cassette, the special tapes used weren't identical- perhaps they used a nonstandard tape formulation?
The cassette was identical to a normal audio cassette with only one exception: there were two holes drilled into the face of the cassette housing in the upper corners (the whole is drilled into the areas where the voids are when you break off cassette write-protect tabs). This mod was there for two reasons: to prevent people from trying to see if standard cassettes would work, and to prevent them from being inserted on "side b" since the heads wrote across the entire width of the tape at once (making the tapes 256kbyte "single sided" media in a sense).
As for the tape formulation, there was nothing special about them--they're equivalent to "hi-fi" chromium-formulated audio tapes. Word got out that TDK audio tapes had very nearly identical frequency response to Coleco's tapes and they became a favourite for those "orphaned users" who couldn't find Coleco's official tapes and made their own.
and the drives ran at a higher speed than ordinary audio cassettes.
Not only that, the data transfer rate for a Coleco TAPE was faster than for a Commodre 64 DISK;-)
So I don't know if it would be possible to even transfer the signal by digitising it via a standard cassette player.
I don't know of any software similar to what I've seen for Speccy's and such, where you take a WAV of the tape and process it into the binary image, for the ADAM, but it should be feasible.
The tape drives were a bit of a boneheaded idea, but unlike 3" floppies and waferdrives and such, they at least used media *physically* compatible with commonplace equipment. The biggest boner of all was that Coleco tape drives were INCAPABLE OF FORMATTING NEW MEDIA! This meant that you had to obtain pre-formatted tapes from somewhere (merely drilling the homes won't work--the tapes needed to be formated like a floppy).
So, what do you do when Coleco stops making formatted tapes? You format them yourself...using your stereo's tape deck to dub from an original tape! You needed a high-end 2-tape deck and had to fiddle with equalisers to get a proper result, but once you figured out the right settings it worked just fine! It did of course help to have a high-speed dubber because thought the ADAM could read all the blocks on a tape in just over 4 minutes, they took 60 minutes to play in a normal tape deck.
given that a dubbing audio deck could be used to format tapes, I cannot see how, with a bit of work, similar equipemnt couldn't be hooked to the line-in of your PC to digitise ADAM tapes too.
As for the ST... yeah, the IBM compatibility was a nice touch, but I'd rather have the extra storage space (880K vs. 720K) of my Amiga floppies.
Therein lies the trap: you get more capacity but at the cost of interoperability. For all the work of using extra device handlers/utilities/etc to get files on a PC floppy with less capacity you probably only did this when you NEEDED to..so now you're left with all your Amiga stuff on unreadable floppies and jus
Amiga and Macs could use PC format floppies too, so that's not an issue.
The original Macs could NOT use IBM-formatted floppies. It wasn't until 1988 that Apple brought out the SuperDrive, and then only on higher-end Mac II machines. It took another year to be able to get it as an option on the SE and they weren't the most common option until the 1990s. In addition to needing the SuperDrive you also needed "PC Exchange" to make a disk that worked on an IBM.
Amiga was in a similar boat, though the Amiga hardware was more standard. There, you needed a third-party, non-standard device handler and with that you lost the increased capacity and capabilities of the Amiga file system.
Because Macs and Amigas had such a disincentive for using a standard, the vast majority of data ended up on proprietary-format media and have thus made moving data after-the-fact quite an ordeal, whereas in the case of my Atari ST and Coleco ADAM I was able to create images for emulation without extra hardware or software of any kind.
I agree at the time that the native formats seemed appealing and were technically superior, but in the end standards based, open designs have proven to have the ultimate advantage.
You can plug PC 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 drive on an Amstrad, they use the same interface!
Yup--Amstrad was one of the makers of oddball "semi-standard" PCs. It had standard serial ports that others like Atari and Commodore seemed averse to using on their 8-bit home computer lines (probably because they wanted to make it a hassle to use third-party peripherals--basically buy aour stuff, or buy an overpriced adapter to plug in standard stuff).
Amstrad CPCs not only had the same floppy controller and interface as the IBM PC, it also used the same 6845 video display processor as well (which is why it had CGA-like graphics, and the added 16-colour low-res mode like the Tandy 1000 series and PCJr). Sound was identical to the MSX-based computers. They basically cherry-picked here and there.
Too bad the use of a non-standard form factor drive with the standard connector had to happen though. What's this guy going to do with the old discs now? Fortunately for myself, I purchased a floppy drive for my Coleco ADAM the first opportunity I could because the modified cassette tapes were not all that reliable and they were hard to find. As a result all my old stuff ended up on floppies.
The Coleco floppy drive had a non-standard ADAMNet interface (ADAMNet worked just like USB but slower--you could plug the keyboard into the back of the disk drive, or the front "keyboard" port, or swap the floppy and keyboard wires and the damn thing would work). More importantly though, the disks were normal 5.25" floppies FORMATTED TO A STANDARD 160KB FORMAT READABLE ON IBM PCs. Eighteen years after we got the ADAM I was able to scrounge up a leftover 5.25" floppy drive, put it in my Linux box and use DD to make images of the floppies that work perfect with emulators!
Interestingly Atari kind of migrated towards less-proprietary architecture with its ST line too--ST computers had standard serial and parallel ports, and it used 3.5" floppies with a variant of FAT formatting that was readable on IBM PC drives.
I was laughed at by Commodore and Apple fans for going with "toy" Coleco and Atari computers, but in a sense I got the last laugh, because I ended up with computers that had amongst the most easily recoverable media of all those computers of that era. So why did I choose the Coleco and Atari ST computers back then? Becasue both could be easily made to run a variant of CP/M, including popular apps like Wordstar.
VB.NET isn't BASIC, it is C# without semicolons and braces. Never mind the whether or not the complexity level is different, is so far removed from classic BASIC that VB.NET is just a bunch of letters that used to be an abbreviation for a product that replaced BASIC.
Hmm...I think there's a Perl contest in here somewhere, make a one-line/short Perl/regexp script that converts between C# and VB. Extra points for making it look like pretty ASCII art.
There is a difference between "strongly encouraged" and "required". Until it is required then it is not going to change much
When a Dell or a Walmart "strongly encourage" that a supplier does something it is akin to the mafia "strongly encouraging" that the local Italian eatery "purchase its security services". Suppliers who ignore such customers' "encouragement" tend to disappear.
The only way a supplier can ignore such encouragement and survive is if they are significantly larger than the customer and can absorb the loss of the customer. Microsoft is probably the only such supplier in the industry at the moment...and look at what has happened to them: Vista sales plod along, XP will not die and MSFT has had to bend over and take it from their big OEM customers who insist on (big shock here) offering end users what they ask for (XP installed in machines after the product's end-of-life).
This is beyond warm-and-fuzzy feel-good stuff, and bigger than just Linux. Computer vendors want open drivers because they've been burned in the past with closed drivers. I think Dell, HP, Lenovo really hate having to sell a product that is full of software over which they have no control. If AMD or NVidia or Intel or Broadcomm...or whoever...supply them with crappy driver guess who gets to be on the front line supporting the crap? It isn't the aforementioned suppliers, it is the PC vendor. The end user bought from the PC vendor, and ultimately they call the PC vendor's support.
In most other industries, having such lack of transparency from suppliers would be unheard of. I think system builders are starting to realise how outrageous it is that suppliers have the upper hand in controlling the design and flow of information. They will insist in having a certain level of knowledge on how the supplied subsystems work so they can build a product that competes at a quality level competitive with Apple.
The linux community tries in a lot of aspect to stray far far away from Windows out of principle yet fail to impliment the things Microsoft actually got right.
This is historically incorrect.
When Linus started making his kernel Windows NT was a new, unproven kernel and DOS and windows was a joke. Linus was familiar with UNIX and Minix in his academic background and built what he knew. The GNU software that completes the picture started as part of an effort to create Free replacements for UNIX software that was rapidly becoming closed.
The "Linux community" doesn't purposely try to be different from Windows because of its hate for Microsoft. From the start, GNU and Linux aspired to work like UNIX and be compliant with standards like POSIX. Not only were DOS and Windows less familiar to the interested parties, Microsoft products made no strategic effort to be compliant with any proper standard back in the day.
Also, it would be nice if you could give some examples of what MSFT *got right* that Linux-based OSes fail to implement (apparently "on principle"). Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE and the like all adopted the "automatic update" model amongst some other Microsoft advances.
The typical user should not have to open up a term window to install a program. It should be click and guide you through the rest. That was always my biggest complaint.
What are you talking about? I haven't opened a terminal window to install a software package on my desktop for years now! It isn't hard to find a "beginner's wizard" for installing software packages either--you can do it right from the GNOME equivalent of the start menu. Is it perfecet? No, but it's actually better than windows already--it is only different, and the biggest issue is that people are lazy and don't want to re-learn. It is a big reason Apple still has a small market share too.
Anyways, I find if you try to imitate the familiar you run into more frustrations than if you just try to make things work logically. If it looks different then users' expectations will be different. There are multiple XP-themed KDE desktop linux setups out there and none of them gained traction like GNOME-based Ubuntu that looks like nothing else in particular, except perhaps vaguely Mac-like. They suffer from an "uncanny-valley" sort of problem--they look so familiar, that when an imperfection is found it has an amplified, more jarring negative effect on the user.
Interestingly, that is a problem Vista has had--even more so than XP had. People expect the same, see somewhat the same, and then they are presented with messed up control panel dialogues, UAC, and so on and get extremely annoyed. It has proven more irritating to users than the dramatic win3.x to win9x transition.
Given that, I say forget about anti-MS "principles" AND brain-dead imitation. I think that Ubuntu, GNOME and even KDE 4 have not made great efforts at mimicking MSFT in their default behaviour and appearance to their benefit. It's easier to compete when you stand on your own.
Except the food prices and insatiable demand has had nothing whatever to do with biofuels. It has EVERYTHING to do with politics and speculation.
* China is rapidly moving towards intensive farming techniques, and in doing so has run up the cost of raw materials, from steel to potash, for several years now, to the point that it costs more to make food all over the world.
* To make matters worse, southeast asian countries (China and India again, notably) are hoarding feedstocks...for for FOOD, not fuel...which takes a lot of supply off the global market.
* Speculative investors are hoarding futures contracts--they buy the rights to vast amounts of grain or other commodities and are holding until technical indicators signal "sell"...except with everyone hoarding foodstocks the market is quite illiquid and prices continue to ratchet upwards. So, no sell signal for now.
The most critical commodities right now, oddly enough, are feedstocks that are rarely or never used to make biofuel: Wheat and rice. Overall, ALL food commodities are skyrocketing, and biofuel doesn't play a significant role anywhere at all, save for a minor effect on the US corn market..and, well, Americans are far too overstuffed on corn-derived foodstuffs already and could stand to go on a diet.
What is happening now in the markets is not sustainable and is not indicative of a trend. It is the next bubble--the air came out of real-estate and sub-prime credit bubbles straight into commodities (food/agriculture especially). As soon as the end of this year, or perhaps in a couple of years, can't say for sure, this bubble too will pop, when big silos of expensive grain sit for long enough and people stop bidding on such huge asking prices. With the way things are now, it is foolish to try to do any long-term economic feasibility studies of biofuels.
Not only is Ethanol shortsighted it is exactly the wrong direction for us to take. For "us" as in the "USA" perhaps? It really depends on the source material and if it is readily available.
Ethanol can be derived from a multitude of sources, most of which are not used for human consumption, and many of which would not result in destruction of sensitive ecosystems. For example, if we invested in cellulose-sourced ethanol production we could make huge amounts of ethanol fuel without using much more land at all. Humans only eat a small fraction of the mass of a corn stalk--the rest gets cut down, ploughed under, burned, etc...there is more there than required to maintain soil fertility.
On the biodiesel side, there are waste products ranging from plant-based industrial lubricants to french fry grease that could be recycled into fuel, that now are just thrown away.
Aren't the "Reuse and Recycle" R's still important anymore?
Ethanol is taken from food sources and results in local, regional and, as it increases in popularity, global increases in food prices as well as predictable food shortages. The current demand for food commodities to be used in biofuels at this point is absolutely miniscule and has no substantial impact on food prices whatsoever. The current problem is 99 percent due to hoarding by large nations like China and India. Most producers of southeast asia are under export bans right now--they are behaving like they always have, employing knee-jerk, ham-fisted centrally-planned measures in reaction to global markets. It temporarily patches over a short term crisis but it magnifies the long term/global problem.
Besides the inefficiencies of transporting the raw materials, the finished product CANNOT be piped due to the inherent water in the ethanol rusting/corroding the pipes. So, the only means of transportation is truck, train or barge -- fossil fuel transportation systems. Except that you are wrong--ethanol-blended petrol is already transported bia pipeline, and there are proposals to construct ethanol pipelines alone strategic routes. Also, a sizeable chunk of crude used in the US is delivered via ocean-going tankers that consume several gallons to the mile in fossil fuel. Local distribution of gasoline is already via truck too in most cases.
Then there is the matter of all these studies assuming that for some reason the equipment involved in the manufacture and distribution of biofuels would never run on biofuels themselves. Would it not make sense to employ delivery trucks that ran on biodiesel to deliver the biodiesel?
I really don't see wha tthe big deal is. An energy source is an energy source, whether or not it is edible or comes from a plant or is dug out of the ground or from splitting atoms. Seems to me that biofuel is much more benign than some of the alternatives, so why not explore all options? Ultimately, though the source of energy is an important consideration, what is most important is EFFICIENCY. I don't think ethanol is quite there yet (biodiesel is closer), but I see no reason why we shouldn't pursue the technology further. Any means of safely and efficiently extracting energy for useful work is good.
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Mr. Reiser, is that you? Perhaps you should have used the "seat removal as a means to increase fuel economy defence" and you'd have had better luck.
SUVs aren't better haulers, they just look less dorky than minivans. If you need to haul HEAVY stuff or tow a trailer you'd be better with a truck. If you needed an enclosed space you'd get a full-sized van like a Sprinter or a Savanna or an Econoline. If you need versatility you'd get a minivan like a Caravan.
SUVs are a compromise in every way--they have the inconvenient added height and low fuel economy of a truck, but can barely replace a station wagon for cargo volume. SUVs are basically just cool to look at and nothing else, for the vast majority of people. The SUV won't go exinct, but in the future far less of them will be around. Maybe 10 percent of SUVs are used for what they'd be good for; hauling people and cargo that has to be kept out of the elements through rought terrain.
The study referenced in the parent of your post is indeed one showing correlation, but others have indeed studies causation, and the results, as you can see, are interesting and maybe a bit disturbing: Drivers ingrained with car-driving habits behind the wheels of what are in fact trucks may come out of accidents in better shape, but they actually get themselves into MORE accidents, which partially, if not totally, cancels out the safety benefits of size and weight.
SUV's don't "win" in a collision merely becasue they are heavier, it has a great deal to do with their size, specifically their height. Low, small cars tend to "submarine" under SUVs, rendering safety measures such as crumple zones ineffective. In the vast majority of accidents, the lack of mass and momentum is not the primary reason for fatality; the size difference comes into play more in specific situations such as a car being pinned between an SUV and a building or other immovable object.
Large vehicles could be made much lighter--Large SUVs and light trucks are the most technologically backward vehicles on the road today--They still employ big heavy body-on-frame design one might have seen in the 1950s. You could still make large vehicles but make fundamental design changes to dramatically reduce the weight. A lightened SUV or truck would retain the height advantage over smaller vehicles and still obtain fuel savings.
I think the implications are not as bad as all that. If it looks like enforcing the treaty would cause undue harm or expense, Canada won't ratify it under such onerous terms.
Remember that though treaties are used by lobbyists to do end-runs around the laws of various countries, treaties cannot escape ratification by signing nations. Ratification still has to be voted on in the commons and given Royal Assent to be put into law before they can be enforced in Canada.
Sometimes that isn't even enough. The Kyoto treaty was ratified, then pretty much ignored by the Liberal government of the time, the Liberal government following it and the present Conservative government.
I don't even think a draconian copyright treaty would even get as far as Kyoto. Canada has been under some degree of pressure for a decade to "update" its copyright law to include DMCA-like provisions. It isn't an issue that resonates with the electorate like the environment, the Industry and Heritage committees have reviewed copyright law ad-nauseum, and copyright reform bills have died on the order paper.
With it being a minority government run by a Conservative party that can only claim to live up to the name by the slimmest of margins as it tries to lure voters with policies scattershot all over the centre and right of the ideological spectrum, and a Liberal party with no principles to speak of and an ineffectual leader yet very eager to dig up all the dirt it can, I cannot see the government stepping up and pushing through a contentious copyright bill that would outlaw all forms of P2P (something even legitimate content providers are toying with, including the CBC--so such a law would even make criminals out of government-owned institutions).
Anyways, enjoy your $4/gal gas, courtesy of commodity speculators. Don't worry though, that bubble will too deflate and cause a few billions in writedowns, and that ought to right things again.
Take over, oust lazy shitheads at the helm, make a stagnant, potentially capable and profitable company work again..
That'd be great, but Icahn's track record isn't exactly universally altruistic. Rumours of MSFT's interest in eliminating Yahoo as a competitor--most easily done via takeover--abounded for years. Icahn's interest clearly isn't in making Yahoo better, it is basically large-scale speculation or a "big flip".
Yahoo is targeted because he thinks MSFT is a motivated buyer, but YHOO is reluctant to sell out, and shareholders were not assertive with management (Yahoo is helf mostly by sleepy institutional investors and a smattering of retail stockholders). Icahn has the means to become the single biggest shareholder so he can wake up sleepy pension funds and bully management around to make a quick profit. He doesn't care about the company, or ultimately about other investors. OTOH, Jerry Yang and every other intelligent person who knows hoe the industry works KNOWS taht Yahoo would simply dissolve once purchased by MSFT. Employees know that means big layoffs ahead, and a huge shift in technology and corporate culture that would drive away even more. Long-term shareholders know that a takeover likely makes YHOO dead money--best would be to cash out of any MSFT shares received in payment because the most likely outcome is that the quick profit/increase in valuation will evapourate in 1 to 2 years at most.
Really, it's laughable to think that yahoo as a company, or its employees, would see any meaningful, lasting benefit from being absorbed by MSFT. Historically, it has been shown that is not the case.
Without Jerry Yang, or thousands of Yahoo employees there'd be no Yahoo either. Do you not think they're also "entitled to be greedy" too? I think so. Also keep in mind that Icahn is leading this crusade. Icahn didn't "put up the money for the company" to help start and nurture and grow the company. Icahn set his "corporate raider bastard" target on Yahoo LONG after it came to prominence, and bought up millions of shares with the full intention of flipping them to MSFT.
Not only is Icahn NOT responsible for Yahoo's existence, it is full intention to END Yahoo's existence. That is his modus operandi: March into a public company using loads of capital and credit, start scheming to out all the directors and replace them with his cronies, start throwing the lawsuits around until he gets his way, then evicerate the company and sell off its guts to the highest bidder.
I don't have all that much love for Yahoo, but I'd have to say that my distaste for pushy, selfish corporate raiders exceeds whatever beef I've ever had with Yahoo, and even Microsoft.
That sad sack of Sh!t Carl can go to hell with all the rest of the greedy real-estate speculators who lost their shirts in the subprime meltdown.
Wonder of the litigious YAHOO shareholders ever see past their own noses too...
If it came as a surprise to anyone that Yahoo's founders and high-level managers have an antipathy towards MSFT then they must've been living in a cave, or are total morons. From Yahoo's inception there has been little love for MSFT--if they ever cooperated it was grudgingly, in their own self interest. There is a cultural gap bigger than the Grand Canyon there.
It doesn't help that there is a giant impedance mismatch when it comes to technology and infrastructure. A Netcraft search is telling: Yahoo is almost universally FreeBSD, and what is left is Linux. Yahoo has ZERO Microsoft in their data centres. MSFT, of course, is almost universally Windows Server.
Remember what happened to Hotmail when MSFT bought it? They ripped out all the FreeBSD over the first couple of years, subjecting users to regular periodic disruptions. "To hell with users, we eat our own dogfood dammit!". Not only that, I'd say most of the hotmail employees were abandoned too--wandered away or pushed out.
Hotmail still exists today as a cornerstone to MSFT's "Live" initiative and is probably the biggest webmail provider out there so it wasn't all bad of course, but there is a difference here: MSFT had no webmail service of note before buying Hotmail. In the case of Yahoo, what have they got that MSFT doesn't have? They both have an IM platform and client, a search portal, webmail, advertising services, etc...except NONE of Yahoo's runs on MSFT technology! Within 2 years, the yahoo portal will be gone, the IM client will be gone, the webmail will be gone, everything will be gone. Yahoo is coveted for its customer base and advertising presence. It'll live for awhile as "MS Yahoo! Live" for awhile then it'll be gone. It's employees will be gone. It'll be a footnote in history.
It doesn't matter all that much to me; I have no great love for either company and think they both offer mediocre service and crappy software. However, if Yahoo's directors and Yang himself care about the company and really believe it would grow, they've made the right decision to resist a buyout by MSFT. You'd have to be a fool to think there'd be anything of substance left of Yahoo after MSFT slayed them and feasted upon the corpse. Some of us would cheer to see that, but I'm betting the founder, directors and loyal employees would understandably NOT want to see that.
Anyways, who is to say that Yahoo shareholders would be better off with the MSFT shares tossed their way in a buyout? Right now, I'd say NEITHER stock is going anywhere exiting in the next 2 years. By the way, if you just go by the charts, Yahoo did the right thing; in the past year, YHOO has lost just over 9 percent, but MSFT has lost over 10 percent. If you extend where things have been out to 2010, if you think YHOO is heading towards $11, then MSFT will probably be $10.50.
The government is pretty likely to listen on this matter. Net neutrality isn't a particularly ideological issue, though there are some interesting political issues to consider:
1. There are Liberal and NDP members of parliament attending and speaking at the rally. The Conservatives hold the most seats in the commons, however if these two other parties presented a bill on opposition day and voted as a bloc it would pass with little to no support from Conservative members, as we have a minority government situation with no established coalition.
2. The conservatives may not have officially endorsed "net neutrality" but they do not oppose it either; their policy platform is silent on the issue. However, historically the current government has been significantly more receptive to changing the CRTC's regulatory regime than the Liberals have ever been. for example the Conservatives have broght foreward regulatory changes mandating phone number portability, cellphone tower sharing and a wireless auction this month that allocates a certain amount of licenses to new entrants in the market. Bell, Telus and Rogers all protested the terms of the auction because they "interfered with the free market" (Canadian wireless is a free market? HA! Yeah, right!). Interestingly, the Liberals also denounced the auction and cellphone tower sharing provisions. The Liberals are for Net Neutrality maybe, but they have NEVER advocated "wireless neutrality" and Liberal policies have allowed the wireless market to stagnate to "third world" status. So, if the Liberals support Net Neutrality, it wouldn't be hard at all to get Prentice and oter Conservative MPs to support it.
3. Bell Canada is of course the biggest motivation for the push to net neutrality with their throttling shenanigans. Bell has been most vocal in opposing changes in regulations that favour new entrants into their markets and is also the most "vertically integrated" of the major players. They've not been very supportive of this Conservative government, and the government is not very sympathetic to their "plight" either. Because they lack effective lobbying in this government, policy is more likely to follow popular opinion rather than lobbyist opinion.
It is also important to note that even if no changes are made to reguilations that Canada has wuite a "neutral net" already. Under already implemented regulations broadband providers, by law, MUST provide identical service to their wholesalers/resellers/third parties that they offer to retail customers directly. When the Bell complaint was investigated it turned out that Bell's own end customers were subjected to the same bandwidth throttling as the wholesale/resellers were.
Bell is in fact having a difficult time in being an ISP recently. They are losing revenue badly due to very inept management decisions and because they have now got a reputation for being the poorest of all the broadband providers in Canada. Aside from the news of the throttling, there was also a newsmagazine show called "Marketplace" that looked at Bell customer complaints and did a comparison with Telus and Shaw. The results were extremely embarassing to Bell as it demonstrated that their competition was much faster, sometimes 2 or 3 times faster.
Unlike the cellphone market, ISPs are in fact more competitive in Canada, and have historically offered better service and lower prices than found in the US, so while I would very much like to see a formal "net neutrality" policy in Canada to protect what is slowly eroding competition, the situation is not nearly as bad as it is in the US.
Or, you could just pay for that software you've pirated. See, no more pesky activation dialogs.
Or, you could just use Linux or *BSD instead. See, no more mandatory license fees or pesky activation dialogues...and it's legal too!
STARTING smoking is a lifestyle choice - one which is often made at an age where you're too young and headstrong to know better.
That argument has no merit at all unless you happen to have been a smoker for something like 30 years, and happened to have started at a time when people still didn't fully appreciate the health consequences of smoking. When I was "young and headstrong" in the 1980s and 1990s WE ALL NEW BETTER. Even the kids who did start smoking knew it was bad for you, and knew it was addictive, but it was "cool" to be rebellious and do stupid things. That doesn't mean we should be let out of our responsibility to deal with consequences of doing stupid things.
As someone who is a smoker and has tried many times to quit, I do NOT feel that I have control over it without medical aids.
Well, then, use the medical aids man! You made a bed when you started smoking that you must now lie in. You have a choice no matter what you say--REALLY try quitting (medical aids and all), or dealing with having to shiver outside in the rain during some smoke breaks, having smelly breath and clothes, paying more for insurance and extra tobacco taxes.
That effectively puts it in the "disease" category (as another poster has pointed out).
Total crap. It isn't a disease it is an addiction. You don't have a tumour that makes you HAVE to smoke or you'll die. There is no virus or bacteria that forces you to suck on a burning stick of tobacco or drink alcohol or inhale white powder. You made a choice to get hooked and you can make a choice to try to get out of it. If you aren't TRYING to get "un-hooked" then you are still making an unhealthy lifestyle choice. So long as you try (and you have, so don't give up) you are making a responsible choice that should be (and sometimes is) rewarded with incentives by insurance companies and the rest.
I will very soon be seeing a doctor to get something prescribed, since the "over the counter" stuff helps somewhat, but not enough.
I have seen (known personally in fact) cancer patients and those with emphysema using oxygen who were still lighting up--I know it is tough. In both those cases they actually quit, even though the doctors said it was too late. In the lung cancer victim's case she wanted to live long enough to see her grandchild. In the latter case it was because the oxygen was an explosion hazard and the doctor said that she could cause an explosion and kill herself or her daughter while lighting a cigarette. They were "hard core addicts" like yourself, but given proper motivation ANYONE can quit. I applaud you for making the meaningful effort--though I support "discrimination against smokers" I also thing people should be encouraged and rewarded for making the effort to become non-smokers, even if they are struggling to do so.
I apologise if I appeared unsympathetic to those who are more strongly addicted to smoking than most--those who are in your situation aren't the ones that I have a problem with. The topic is somewhat personal for me as well, as I have lost more than one close family member to tobacco-related cancer. Actually being there beside someone you care about whilst they die brings about a lot of emotion--it has been many years now, but it still angers me when an unapologetic, "proud smoker" spouts some claptrap about "smokers' rights" because they can't smoke in their favourite eatery anymore or had to pay extra for insurance, or a rental car, or hotel room, because they smoke. Smoking is not a "right" and deserves no protection. Starting smoking is a foolish lifestyle choice and, as you've found out, one with a pretty steep price.
The article you reference is about a proposed ban on hiring smokers for government jobs in Sarasota county. It is indeed a colossally dumb idea as proposed because it is not practical to enforce and the benefits of fewer sick days taken or lower claims is considerably smaller than the lost opportunities to hire the most qualified people. However I am firmly in support of the ability to "discriminate against smokers".
In fact, it is (rightly) common practice amongst medical and home insurance providers already to charge extra premiums to policy holders who smoke, and to deny coverage/claims to those who falsely declare themselves non-smokers in cases where smoking is at the root cause of the claim. That is the way it should be, and there should be no law preventing individuals or institutions from continuing the practice.
It is not inconsistent to support something like GINA and also support the freedom to discriminate in favour of non-smokers because the latter is a lifestyle choice, and the former, GINA, in my opinion is at its heart an update of laws against racial discrimination.
People aren't born with cigarettes in their mouths, and not only are we not forced to smoke, we have been told for decades that smoking is an unhealthy lifestyle choice that's best not even started. I cannot comprehend why anyone in this day and age would want to start up a smoking habit knowing what a totally stupid idea it is. Smokers deserve to pay more for (or be denied) insurance and pay a large "stupid tax" on tobacco. I think it is their right to be stupid and do stupid things, but I also believe that those who exercise their right to do stupid, destructive things should bear the full responsibility to cover the costs incurred.
Conversely, in this day and age, we know a lot about genetics to predict, to some degree of accuracy, if we are pre-disposed to health issues, yet we are quite far from being able to reliably create genetically perfect beings yet. In short, it is impossible for us to make any significant choices in our genetic makeup. In that respect discrimination based on genetic markers is on par with discrimination based on gender or race, so GINA is right in line with the spirit of the US constitution.
The Coleco one is a bit disingenuous though, because the floppy discs you used weren't the standard method of storage that came with it
;-)
Fair criticism to be sure, but compare this to ADAM's contemporaries: Commodore 64, Apple IIe, Atari 800XL, Tandy CoCo II, Sinclair Spectrum, Amstrad CPC...list goes on. NONE of these machines even had a standard floppy drive marketed as an option, much less as standard equipment so ADAM still wins out in that respect. At least the CPC had a standard drive INTERFACE so a third party device could be plugged in and software modified to support the drive, however, as the competition of the day goes, I'd still say Coleco took the best approach of all of them by offering an official plug'n'play option that used the same track-and-sector configuration originally used on the IBM PC.
I've heard that although the system was derived from the standard audio cassette, the special tapes used weren't identical- perhaps they used a nonstandard tape formulation?
The cassette was identical to a normal audio cassette with only one exception: there were two holes drilled into the face of the cassette housing in the upper corners (the whole is drilled into the areas where the voids are when you break off cassette write-protect tabs). This mod was there for two reasons: to prevent people from trying to see if standard cassettes would work, and to prevent them from being inserted on "side b" since the heads wrote across the entire width of the tape at once (making the tapes 256kbyte "single sided" media in a sense).
As for the tape formulation, there was nothing special about them--they're equivalent to "hi-fi" chromium-formulated audio tapes. Word got out that TDK audio tapes had very nearly identical frequency response to Coleco's tapes and they became a favourite for those "orphaned users" who couldn't find Coleco's official tapes and made their own.
and the drives ran at a higher speed than ordinary audio cassettes.
Not only that, the data transfer rate for a Coleco TAPE was faster than for a Commodre 64 DISK
So I don't know if it would be possible to even transfer the signal by digitising it via a standard cassette player.
I don't know of any software similar to what I've seen for Speccy's and such, where you take a WAV of the tape and process it into the binary image, for the ADAM, but it should be feasible.
The tape drives were a bit of a boneheaded idea, but unlike 3" floppies and waferdrives and such, they at least used media *physically* compatible with commonplace equipment. The biggest boner of all was that Coleco tape drives were INCAPABLE OF FORMATTING NEW MEDIA! This meant that you had to obtain pre-formatted tapes from somewhere (merely drilling the homes won't work--the tapes needed to be formated like a floppy).
So, what do you do when Coleco stops making formatted tapes? You format them yourself...using your stereo's tape deck to dub from an original tape! You needed a high-end 2-tape deck and had to fiddle with equalisers to get a proper result, but once you figured out the right settings it worked just fine! It did of course help to have a high-speed dubber because thought the ADAM could read all the blocks on a tape in just over 4 minutes, they took 60 minutes to play in a normal tape deck.
given that a dubbing audio deck could be used to format tapes, I cannot see how, with a bit of work, similar equipemnt couldn't be hooked to the line-in of your PC to digitise ADAM tapes too.
As for the ST... yeah, the IBM compatibility was a nice touch, but I'd rather have the extra storage space (880K vs. 720K) of my Amiga floppies.
Therein lies the trap: you get more capacity but at the cost of interoperability. For all the work of using extra device handlers/utilities/etc to get files on a PC floppy with less capacity you probably only did this when you NEEDED to..so now you're left with all your Amiga stuff on unreadable floppies and jus
Amiga and Macs could use PC format floppies too, so that's not an issue.
The original Macs could NOT use IBM-formatted floppies. It wasn't until 1988 that Apple brought out the SuperDrive, and then only on higher-end Mac II machines. It took another year to be able to get it as an option on the SE and they weren't the most common option until the 1990s. In addition to needing the SuperDrive you also needed "PC Exchange" to make a disk that worked on an IBM.
Amiga was in a similar boat, though the Amiga hardware was more standard. There, you needed a third-party, non-standard device handler and with that you lost the increased capacity and capabilities of the Amiga file system.
Because Macs and Amigas had such a disincentive for using a standard, the vast majority of data ended up on proprietary-format media and have thus made moving data after-the-fact quite an ordeal, whereas in the case of my Atari ST and Coleco ADAM I was able to create images for emulation without extra hardware or software of any kind.
I agree at the time that the native formats seemed appealing and were technically superior, but in the end standards based, open designs have proven to have the ultimate advantage.
You can plug PC 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 drive on an Amstrad, they use the same interface!
Yup--Amstrad was one of the makers of oddball "semi-standard" PCs. It had standard serial ports that others like Atari and Commodore seemed averse to using on their 8-bit home computer lines (probably because they wanted to make it a hassle to use third-party peripherals--basically buy aour stuff, or buy an overpriced adapter to plug in standard stuff).
Amstrad CPCs not only had the same floppy controller and interface as the IBM PC, it also used the same 6845 video display processor as well (which is why it had CGA-like graphics, and the added 16-colour low-res mode like the Tandy 1000 series and PCJr). Sound was identical to the MSX-based computers. They basically cherry-picked here and there.
Too bad the use of a non-standard form factor drive with the standard connector had to happen though. What's this guy going to do with the old discs now? Fortunately for myself, I purchased a floppy drive for my Coleco ADAM the first opportunity I could because the modified cassette tapes were not all that reliable and they were hard to find. As a result all my old stuff ended up on floppies.
The Coleco floppy drive had a non-standard ADAMNet interface (ADAMNet worked just like USB but slower--you could plug the keyboard into the back of the disk drive, or the front "keyboard" port, or swap the floppy and keyboard wires and the damn thing would work). More importantly though, the disks were normal 5.25" floppies FORMATTED TO A STANDARD 160KB FORMAT READABLE ON IBM PCs. Eighteen years after we got the ADAM I was able to scrounge up a leftover 5.25" floppy drive, put it in my Linux box and use DD to make images of the floppies that work perfect with emulators!
Interestingly Atari kind of migrated towards less-proprietary architecture with its ST line too--ST computers had standard serial and parallel ports, and it used 3.5" floppies with a variant of FAT formatting that was readable on IBM PC drives.
I was laughed at by Commodore and Apple fans for going with "toy" Coleco and Atari computers, but in a sense I got the last laugh, because I ended up with computers that had amongst the most easily recoverable media of all those computers of that era. So why did I choose the Coleco and Atari ST computers back then? Becasue both could be easily made to run a variant of CP/M, including popular apps like Wordstar.
VB.NET isn't BASIC, it is C# without semicolons and braces. Never mind the whether or not the complexity level is different, is so far removed from classic BASIC that VB.NET is just a bunch of letters that used to be an abbreviation for a product that replaced BASIC.
Hmm...I think there's a Perl contest in here somewhere, make a one-line/short Perl/regexp script that converts between C# and VB. Extra points for making it look like pretty ASCII art.
There is a difference between "strongly encouraged" and "required". Until it is required then it is not going to change much
...or whoever...supply them with crappy driver guess who gets to be on the front line supporting the crap? It isn't the aforementioned suppliers, it is the PC vendor. The end user bought from the PC vendor, and ultimately they call the PC vendor's support.
When a Dell or a Walmart "strongly encourage" that a supplier does something it is akin to the mafia "strongly encouraging" that the local Italian eatery "purchase its security services". Suppliers who ignore such customers' "encouragement" tend to disappear.
The only way a supplier can ignore such encouragement and survive is if they are significantly larger than the customer and can absorb the loss of the customer. Microsoft is probably the only such supplier in the industry at the moment...and look at what has happened to them: Vista sales plod along, XP will not die and MSFT has had to bend over and take it from their big OEM customers who insist on (big shock here) offering end users what they ask for (XP installed in machines after the product's end-of-life).
This is beyond warm-and-fuzzy feel-good stuff, and bigger than just Linux. Computer vendors want open drivers because they've been burned in the past with closed drivers. I think Dell, HP, Lenovo really hate having to sell a product that is full of software over which they have no control. If AMD or NVidia or Intel or Broadcomm
In most other industries, having such lack of transparency from suppliers would be unheard of. I think system builders are starting to realise how outrageous it is that suppliers have the upper hand in controlling the design and flow of information. They will insist in having a certain level of knowledge on how the supplied subsystems work so they can build a product that competes at a quality level competitive with Apple.
It sure doesn't sound like my experience.
The linux community tries in a lot of aspect to stray far far away from Windows out of principle yet fail to impliment the things Microsoft actually got right.
This is historically incorrect.
When Linus started making his kernel Windows NT was a new, unproven kernel and DOS and windows was a joke. Linus was familiar with UNIX and Minix in his academic background and built what he knew. The GNU software that completes the picture started as part of an effort to create Free replacements for UNIX software that was rapidly becoming closed.
The "Linux community" doesn't purposely try to be different from Windows because of its hate for Microsoft. From the start, GNU and Linux aspired to work like UNIX and be compliant with standards like POSIX. Not only were DOS and Windows less familiar to the interested parties, Microsoft products made no strategic effort to be compliant with any proper standard back in the day.
Also, it would be nice if you could give some examples of what MSFT *got right* that Linux-based OSes fail to implement (apparently "on principle"). Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE and the like all adopted the "automatic update" model amongst some other Microsoft advances.
The typical user should not have to open up a term window to install a program. It should be click and guide you through the rest. That was always my biggest complaint.
What are you talking about? I haven't opened a terminal window to install a software package on my desktop for years now! It isn't hard to find a "beginner's wizard" for installing software packages either--you can do it right from the GNOME equivalent of the start menu. Is it perfecet? No, but it's actually better than windows already--it is only different, and the biggest issue is that people are lazy and don't want to re-learn. It is a big reason Apple still has a small market share too.
Anyways, I find if you try to imitate the familiar you run into more frustrations than if you just try to make things work logically. If it looks different then users' expectations will be different. There are multiple XP-themed KDE desktop linux setups out there and none of them gained traction like GNOME-based Ubuntu that looks like nothing else in particular, except perhaps vaguely Mac-like. They suffer from an "uncanny-valley" sort of problem--they look so familiar, that when an imperfection is found it has an amplified, more jarring negative effect on the user.
Interestingly, that is a problem Vista has had--even more so than XP had. People expect the same, see somewhat the same, and then they are presented with messed up control panel dialogues, UAC, and so on and get extremely annoyed. It has proven more irritating to users than the dramatic win3.x to win9x transition.
Given that, I say forget about anti-MS "principles" AND brain-dead imitation. I think that Ubuntu, GNOME and even KDE 4 have not made great efforts at mimicking MSFT in their default behaviour and appearance to their benefit. It's easier to compete when you stand on your own.
Except the food prices and insatiable demand has had nothing whatever to do with biofuels. It has EVERYTHING to do with politics and speculation.
* China is rapidly moving towards intensive farming techniques, and in doing so has run up the cost of raw materials, from steel to potash, for several years now, to the point that it costs more to make food all over the world.
* To make matters worse, southeast asian countries (China and India again, notably) are hoarding feedstocks...for for FOOD, not fuel...which takes a lot of supply off the global market.
* Speculative investors are hoarding futures contracts--they buy the rights to vast amounts of grain or other commodities and are holding until technical indicators signal "sell"...except with everyone hoarding foodstocks the market is quite illiquid and prices continue to ratchet upwards. So, no sell signal for now.
The most critical commodities right now, oddly enough, are feedstocks that are rarely or never used to make biofuel: Wheat and rice. Overall, ALL food commodities are skyrocketing, and biofuel doesn't play a significant role anywhere at all, save for a minor effect on the US corn market..and, well, Americans are far too overstuffed on corn-derived foodstuffs already and could stand to go on a diet.
What is happening now in the markets is not sustainable and is not indicative of a trend. It is the next bubble--the air came out of real-estate and sub-prime credit bubbles straight into commodities (food/agriculture especially). As soon as the end of this year, or perhaps in a couple of years, can't say for sure, this bubble too will pop, when big silos of expensive grain sit for long enough and people stop bidding on such huge asking prices. With the way things are now, it is foolish to try to do any long-term economic feasibility studies of biofuels.
Ethanol can be derived from a multitude of sources, most of which are not used for human consumption, and many of which would not result in destruction of sensitive ecosystems. For example, if we invested in cellulose-sourced ethanol production we could make huge amounts of ethanol fuel without using much more land at all. Humans only eat a small fraction of the mass of a corn stalk--the rest gets cut down, ploughed under, burned, etc...there is more there than required to maintain soil fertility.
On the biodiesel side, there are waste products ranging from plant-based industrial lubricants to french fry grease that could be recycled into fuel, that now are just thrown away.
Aren't the "Reuse and Recycle" R's still important anymore? Ethanol is taken from food sources and results in local, regional and, as it increases in popularity, global increases in food prices as well as predictable food shortages. The current demand for food commodities to be used in biofuels at this point is absolutely miniscule and has no substantial impact on food prices whatsoever. The current problem is 99 percent due to hoarding by large nations like China and India. Most producers of southeast asia are under export bans right now--they are behaving like they always have, employing knee-jerk, ham-fisted centrally-planned measures in reaction to global markets. It temporarily patches over a short term crisis but it magnifies the long term/global problem. Besides the inefficiencies of transporting the raw materials, the finished product CANNOT be piped due to the inherent water in the ethanol rusting/corroding the pipes. So, the only means of transportation is truck, train or barge -- fossil fuel transportation systems. Except that you are wrong--ethanol-blended petrol is already transported bia pipeline, and there are proposals to construct ethanol pipelines alone strategic routes. Also, a sizeable chunk of crude used in the US is delivered via ocean-going tankers that consume several gallons to the mile in fossil fuel. Local distribution of gasoline is already via truck too in most cases.
Then there is the matter of all these studies assuming that for some reason the equipment involved in the manufacture and distribution of biofuels would never run on biofuels themselves. Would it not make sense to employ delivery trucks that ran on biodiesel to deliver the biodiesel?
I really don't see wha tthe big deal is. An energy source is an energy source, whether or not it is edible or comes from a plant or is dug out of the ground or from splitting atoms. Seems to me that biofuel is much more benign than some of the alternatives, so why not explore all options? Ultimately, though the source of energy is an important consideration, what is most important is EFFICIENCY. I don't think ethanol is quite there yet (biodiesel is closer), but I see no reason why we shouldn't pursue the technology further. Any means of safely and efficiently extracting energy for useful work is good.