Capacity is an issue. Solar panels only do so much. By themselves, they won't solve the problem. They won't produce enough electricity to cover all of the demand. They may help out in residential areas but they won't even begin to touch industrial use.
It's opposite sides of the same coin. The lack of market focus is the issue. Both companies are just forging ahead with their own idea of what to build without listening at all to user complaints. Both companies are diving into the deep end of the stupid pool, just from different sides.
There is already a computer and operating system out there for people who have no clue what they're doing. If you just want to play Farmville and exchange text messages with your BFF, get a Mac. Those of us who have to use computers professionally don't need to have big pretty pictures to figure out how to get work done. In fact, the ribbon obfuscates so many useful features, making Microsoft products a challenge to use. What real purpose is served by completely and fundamentally changing the user interface of a product that was already very well entrenched in so many offices? It's not like Microsoft has any real competition for the desktop office market.
At best, once I relearn the user interface, I will be just as productive as I was before. Certainly no more than I am now. There are no new features, at least not any that are significant. Fundamentally, the software does exactly what it did before but with a new interface. I could understand the change if it went with a significant improvement or advancement in functionality. But that's just not the case. It is change for the sake of change.
But what gets me is that this ribbon interface is universally criticized by "the masses" yet Microsoft continues to shove it down our throats in the entire product line. I just can't fathom what they're thinking.
Is Microsoft taking a page from the RIM management playbook? It seems to me like they're deliberately trying to make themselves irrelevant by not giving people what they clearly want. I guess hubris strikes every large company eventually. They're systematically flushing themselves down the toilet with every release of code. It will be interesting to see the post-Windows world in a few years.
Between political wrangling, NIMBY attitudes, etc., it's going to be very hard to develop sustainable electricity generation until we're really desperate.
I also understand perfectly well that pollution is a problem in many major metropolitan areas. I lived in the Los Angeles are for a while. It's truly disturbing how nasty that air really is. However, I don't necessarily see that electric cars will really solve that. California already has a shortage of electricity generation. And while modern power plants could be built, it's virtually impossible to do so in that state due to political wrangling. Other states have similar problems. And let's not forget that so much of our power infrastructure is fueled by natural gas and coal. Burning these domestically acquired fuels to power our cars may reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and moving the power plants outside of the dense urban areas may spread the pollution to other areas. However, we are still generating tons of CO2 in order to power our transportation.
Electric cars do have a use. I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. I'm just trying to remind people that they are not the great panacea that others would have you believe.
Are they a useful alternative for some of the population? Yes.
Do they help with our dependence on foreign oil? To an extent.
Do they help reduce pollution? Not really, though they do spread it out which doesn't hurt.
Should we continue to study them and try to make them more useful? Absolutely.
Should we continue to find a permanent solution that addresses the shortcomings of the electric car? No question.
So you really think using electricity from coal and natural gas fired power plants (by far the most predominate source of electricity in the USA) is going to solve the CO2 problem? Interesting.
And, despite your assertion, it takes a lot more than 3% of the population living in rural areas to supply everything needed by people in larger cities.
True, but where will the energy come from to produce the electricity in the future? That's just as much an issue as finding oil in the ground. Electricity doesn't just magically appear. It's not an energy source. It's a medium to transport energy from the producer to the consumer. Electric cars do not solve the problem of limited energy resources.
That's not unique to big city dwellers. It's human nature for people to not think beyond what they have around them. The country folk can't imagine why anyone would want to pack into crowded, dirty, crime ridden cities. City dwellers can't imagine being away from all of whatever draws them to the city. It's what they know and are comfortable with. They have some anecdotal evidence that supports their decision to live the way they live. They ignore, or at least dismiss any of the problems associated with where they live.
I've lived in small farm towns. I've lived in more than one major metropolitan area in more than one state in the US. I've visited several countries. I'm getting ready to visit another for my job. Every place had it's benefits. Every place had its drawbacks.
If you stop and think about it, rather than just applying your own standards to the entire world you can figure it out. But once you stop and think about what it takes for a large city to function effectively, it starts to make sense. But you have to open your mind to the concept that everything that shows up in the big city doesn't appear by magic.
Sure, if everyone lived in densely packed metropolitan areas we could do away with a lot of cars. But you still have to deal with the logistics of supplying everyone in those metropolitan areas. The cost to transport food and other goods from where they are produced to those cities is not trivial.
You have to figure out what has to be done to support the infrastructure that supplies those cities. First, you have to have the people who actually work the land out living on that land. You have to have the support infrastructure to provide them with the tools and supplies they need, along with the support and maintenance of those tools and supplies. Then you have to have the ancillary support for those people. Those people have kids that need schools to go to. They need to buy their own food from grocery stores. They need banks, gas stations, entertainment, etc. The people who work all of that need their own housing and support infrastructure. Pretty soon you start to figure out that you really do need towns every so many miles to make farming the land possible.
If you know anything about logistics, you'll know it's often more economical to process raw materials into finished goods where the raw materials are produced. In most cases, the raw materials contain significant waste material compared to the finished goods that are produced. Transporting all of that waste material requires a lot more energy. So it's cheaper to process all of that cotton into finished fabric, all of that corn into corn flakes, etc. before you send it off to the big city. So now you have industry spread around the country rather than being condensed in the big city. That means more people living away from the big cities in order to support those big cities, with all the infrastructure they need. Speaking of infrastructure, the transportation networks need to be built and maintained by more people who can't do their jobs from hundreds of miles away in the big city.
Shall I go on to the economies of designing and producing farm equipment near the farmland rather than in the big cities? There's a reason John Deere operates engineering facilities in Iowa rather than New York City.
I certainly don't disagree that in many cases, people could do their jobs in densely packed urban centers just as well as they could anywhere else. If people like that moved to the big city, we could reduce the number of cars out there. But that idea only goes so far. No matter what we do we still have to have people living out in the country doing work that can only happen out in the country. They can't move to the big city and do their jobs. It's just not possible for them.
That's all well and good but what about the people who need to live and work out in sparsely populated areas? After all, someone has to grow the food that is eaten by people in cities.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, you're not the only one who is coming up with ideas on how to make it work. There are already pilot programs (in Tokyo I believe) where you pull into a station and a robot drops the battery pack from the bottom of the car and swaps in a new one. Works pretty well in fact. Only takes a minute or two for the swap. Each battery pack is charged at the station. They track each battery pack in service via a bar code on it. They know how many times it's been recharged, what it's expected remaining life is, etc. When one goes bad prematurely, they can just pull it out of service and recycle the contents for the next batch of batteries. For a densely populated urban center with power to spare, it's not a bad system.
That would involve getting a new motherboard, processor and memory. If they have an older system they want to keep, the $10 video card would be the cheapest way to go.
I ran a dual VooDoo 2 setup with a Matrox 2D card of some kind in my old Pentium. With my network card, sound card and a couple other things I had just about every expansion slot filled. The single video card I bought just a couple years later blew it out of the water.
As far as pulling out the support for such old cards, I don't really see that it's a problem. For both of the people still running those cards, they can spend the $10 on a brand new video card that will run circles around whatever they have now.
I had a thought. Dangerous, I know. But I wonder why Microsoft continues to fight having a keyboard/mouse hooked up to the 360.
It occurs to me that Microsoft is primarily in the business of selling Windows and desktop software. If someone hooks up a keyboard and a mouse to their console, they might actually want to start using the 360 as a full featured computer. I bet that the misguided souls at Microsoft are trying to "protect" sales of Windows by not allowing the 360 to be a "real computer". Their reasoning may be that if you don't let them use the 360 as a "real computer", you have to buy another copy of a Microsoft product (i.e. Windows 7) so you can do "real computing" on another device.
I also suspect, as was mentioned at least once already, that Microsoft wants nothing to do with having Windows Live interact with a service that is a direct competitor (i.e. Steam) for whatever reason. It may be another misguided attempt to corral all of their customers into buying just from Microsoft. It may also be a concerted effort to conceal something within the Live framework such as an incompatibility, significant performance problems, hacking vulnerabilities no one has found yet, or even patent infringements. One could speculate endlessly about such things but there is no way of really knowing for sure.
I certainly disagree with what some people call "true" sports these days. Poker is not a sport, no matter what the advertisers say. Video games are far closer to a sport than a simple card game. At least with a video game you have to have some kind of eye-hand coordination to operate the game.
Let me clarify. I'm talking about a professional sport that people are actually interested in watching at a sports bar. Sure, there's always some kind of professional sport being broadcast. But only a few are truly popular. In an American sports bar, the only sports that are going to draw a crowd are American football, basketball, baseball, and probably hockey. Maybe even NASCAR in some regions. (yes, I'm probably missing one or two but that doesn't invalidate the point.) While individual sports bars may have a niche of fans from other sports, that's an exception rather than the rule. Golf is a professional sport but who goes to a sports bar to watch it? Very few people would go to a sports bar to watch tennis, even during Wimbledon, or the French Open. So what if there's a billiard tournament on ESPN? Not many people at a sports bar will care if you change the channel. Football (soccer) is wildly popular outside of the US but even during the World Cup, it's barely a blip on the radar of most Americans. Some bars may have World Cup on their TVs but that's just a couple of days before it's gone again. Same can be said for most other sports. They are professional, sure, but people don't go to the bars to watch them.
I'm not trying to denigrate these other sports. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of a bar trying to draw a crowd. Outside of the popular sports, there's nothing to draw a crowd at a sports bar. There's a lot of dead time throughout the year because there's no popular pro sport being played at the time. So there's plenty of room in the schedule to do these kinds of video game sessions to draw a crowd.
The thing is though, you can arrange these ahead of time to be played when there are no good games on. Baseball tends to have a game on almost any time every single day during the season but when you reach the fall, winter and spring sports you're talking about several days when there just isn't any games on. Sure, Americans play football all weekend (college on Saturday, professional on Sunday), and then there's the Monday night game, along with maybe a few more. But even with other sports, there are days when there's nothing on TV. May as well have something else competitive on where you can lure in the patrons.
And yes, video games are not sports in the traditional sense. But they are competitive and some do require the physical ability to control the game. Reaction time, eye hand coordination, etc. are all important in FPS games. Some of the mental challenges, like maintaining situational awareness to make tactical decisions, aren't as different from sports as you may think.
I wouldn't suggest that they are "true" sports. But they are competitions that may be interesting for someone to watch. And as such, not completely out of the realm of what would appeal to sports bar patrons.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll understand as you get older and your personal plumbing doesn't work like it used to.
Great, so instead of touching a filthy screen, we have cameras in the loo. Where can I sign up for that?
Capacity is an issue. Solar panels only do so much. By themselves, they won't solve the problem. They won't produce enough electricity to cover all of the demand. They may help out in residential areas but they won't even begin to touch industrial use.
It's opposite sides of the same coin. The lack of market focus is the issue. Both companies are just forging ahead with their own idea of what to build without listening at all to user complaints. Both companies are diving into the deep end of the stupid pool, just from different sides.
There is already a computer and operating system out there for people who have no clue what they're doing. If you just want to play Farmville and exchange text messages with your BFF, get a Mac. Those of us who have to use computers professionally don't need to have big pretty pictures to figure out how to get work done. In fact, the ribbon obfuscates so many useful features, making Microsoft products a challenge to use. What real purpose is served by completely and fundamentally changing the user interface of a product that was already very well entrenched in so many offices? It's not like Microsoft has any real competition for the desktop office market.
At best, once I relearn the user interface, I will be just as productive as I was before. Certainly no more than I am now. There are no new features, at least not any that are significant. Fundamentally, the software does exactly what it did before but with a new interface. I could understand the change if it went with a significant improvement or advancement in functionality. But that's just not the case. It is change for the sake of change.
But what gets me is that this ribbon interface is universally criticized by "the masses" yet Microsoft continues to shove it down our throats in the entire product line. I just can't fathom what they're thinking.
Is Microsoft taking a page from the RIM management playbook? It seems to me like they're deliberately trying to make themselves irrelevant by not giving people what they clearly want. I guess hubris strikes every large company eventually. They're systematically flushing themselves down the toilet with every release of code. It will be interesting to see the post-Windows world in a few years.
Congrats. You figured out the point I was trying to make.
Well, we may never run out. Though the idea of using humans in agriculture will change.
Soylent Green is people!
Between political wrangling, NIMBY attitudes, etc., it's going to be very hard to develop sustainable electricity generation until we're really desperate.
A short term disruption due to bad planning does not invalidate the premise.
I certainly agree that one size does not fit all.
I also understand perfectly well that pollution is a problem in many major metropolitan areas. I lived in the Los Angeles are for a while. It's truly disturbing how nasty that air really is. However, I don't necessarily see that electric cars will really solve that. California already has a shortage of electricity generation. And while modern power plants could be built, it's virtually impossible to do so in that state due to political wrangling. Other states have similar problems. And let's not forget that so much of our power infrastructure is fueled by natural gas and coal. Burning these domestically acquired fuels to power our cars may reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and moving the power plants outside of the dense urban areas may spread the pollution to other areas. However, we are still generating tons of CO2 in order to power our transportation.
Electric cars do have a use. I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. I'm just trying to remind people that they are not the great panacea that others would have you believe.
Are they a useful alternative for some of the population? Yes.
Do they help with our dependence on foreign oil? To an extent.
Do they help reduce pollution? Not really, though they do spread it out which doesn't hurt.
Should we continue to study them and try to make them more useful? Absolutely.
Should we continue to find a permanent solution that addresses the shortcomings of the electric car? No question.
So you really think using electricity from coal and natural gas fired power plants (by far the most predominate source of electricity in the USA) is going to solve the CO2 problem? Interesting.
And, despite your assertion, it takes a lot more than 3% of the population living in rural areas to supply everything needed by people in larger cities.
True, but where will the energy come from to produce the electricity in the future? That's just as much an issue as finding oil in the ground. Electricity doesn't just magically appear. It's not an energy source. It's a medium to transport energy from the producer to the consumer. Electric cars do not solve the problem of limited energy resources.
That's not unique to big city dwellers. It's human nature for people to not think beyond what they have around them. The country folk can't imagine why anyone would want to pack into crowded, dirty, crime ridden cities. City dwellers can't imagine being away from all of whatever draws them to the city. It's what they know and are comfortable with. They have some anecdotal evidence that supports their decision to live the way they live. They ignore, or at least dismiss any of the problems associated with where they live.
I've lived in small farm towns. I've lived in more than one major metropolitan area in more than one state in the US. I've visited several countries. I'm getting ready to visit another for my job. Every place had it's benefits. Every place had its drawbacks.
If you stop and think about it, rather than just applying your own standards to the entire world you can figure it out. But once you stop and think about what it takes for a large city to function effectively, it starts to make sense. But you have to open your mind to the concept that everything that shows up in the big city doesn't appear by magic.
Sure, if everyone lived in densely packed metropolitan areas we could do away with a lot of cars. But you still have to deal with the logistics of supplying everyone in those metropolitan areas. The cost to transport food and other goods from where they are produced to those cities is not trivial.
You have to figure out what has to be done to support the infrastructure that supplies those cities. First, you have to have the people who actually work the land out living on that land. You have to have the support infrastructure to provide them with the tools and supplies they need, along with the support and maintenance of those tools and supplies. Then you have to have the ancillary support for those people. Those people have kids that need schools to go to. They need to buy their own food from grocery stores. They need banks, gas stations, entertainment, etc. The people who work all of that need their own housing and support infrastructure. Pretty soon you start to figure out that you really do need towns every so many miles to make farming the land possible.
If you know anything about logistics, you'll know it's often more economical to process raw materials into finished goods where the raw materials are produced. In most cases, the raw materials contain significant waste material compared to the finished goods that are produced. Transporting all of that waste material requires a lot more energy. So it's cheaper to process all of that cotton into finished fabric, all of that corn into corn flakes, etc. before you send it off to the big city. So now you have industry spread around the country rather than being condensed in the big city. That means more people living away from the big cities in order to support those big cities, with all the infrastructure they need. Speaking of infrastructure, the transportation networks need to be built and maintained by more people who can't do their jobs from hundreds of miles away in the big city.
Shall I go on to the economies of designing and producing farm equipment near the farmland rather than in the big cities? There's a reason John Deere operates engineering facilities in Iowa rather than New York City.
I certainly don't disagree that in many cases, people could do their jobs in densely packed urban centers just as well as they could anywhere else. If people like that moved to the big city, we could reduce the number of cars out there. But that idea only goes so far. No matter what we do we still have to have people living out in the country doing work that can only happen out in the country. They can't move to the big city and do their jobs. It's just not possible for them.
That's all well and good but what about the people who need to live and work out in sparsely populated areas? After all, someone has to grow the food that is eaten by people in cities.
That's an amazing concept. If only we had such an energy dense liquid readily available to consume...
Fortunately for the rest of the world, you're not the only one who is coming up with ideas on how to make it work. There are already pilot programs (in Tokyo I believe) where you pull into a station and a robot drops the battery pack from the bottom of the car and swaps in a new one. Works pretty well in fact. Only takes a minute or two for the swap. Each battery pack is charged at the station. They track each battery pack in service via a bar code on it. They know how many times it's been recharged, what it's expected remaining life is, etc. When one goes bad prematurely, they can just pull it out of service and recycle the contents for the next batch of batteries. For a densely populated urban center with power to spare, it's not a bad system.
That would involve getting a new motherboard, processor and memory. If they have an older system they want to keep, the $10 video card would be the cheapest way to go.
I ran a dual VooDoo 2 setup with a Matrox 2D card of some kind in my old Pentium. With my network card, sound card and a couple other things I had just about every expansion slot filled. The single video card I bought just a couple years later blew it out of the water.
As far as pulling out the support for such old cards, I don't really see that it's a problem. For both of the people still running those cards, they can spend the $10 on a brand new video card that will run circles around whatever they have now.
I had a thought. Dangerous, I know. But I wonder why Microsoft continues to fight having a keyboard/mouse hooked up to the 360.
It occurs to me that Microsoft is primarily in the business of selling Windows and desktop software. If someone hooks up a keyboard and a mouse to their console, they might actually want to start using the 360 as a full featured computer. I bet that the misguided souls at Microsoft are trying to "protect" sales of Windows by not allowing the 360 to be a "real computer". Their reasoning may be that if you don't let them use the 360 as a "real computer", you have to buy another copy of a Microsoft product (i.e. Windows 7) so you can do "real computing" on another device.
I also suspect, as was mentioned at least once already, that Microsoft wants nothing to do with having Windows Live interact with a service that is a direct competitor (i.e. Steam) for whatever reason. It may be another misguided attempt to corral all of their customers into buying just from Microsoft. It may also be a concerted effort to conceal something within the Live framework such as an incompatibility, significant performance problems, hacking vulnerabilities no one has found yet, or even patent infringements. One could speculate endlessly about such things but there is no way of really knowing for sure.
"He made a fair move. Screaming about it can't help you."
"Let him have it. It's not wise to upset a Wookiee."
"But sir, nobody worries about upsetting a droid."
"That's 'cause droids don't pull people's arms out of their sockets when they lose. Wookiees are known to do that."
"I see your point, sir. I suggest a new strategy, R2: let the Wookiee win."
I certainly disagree with what some people call "true" sports these days. Poker is not a sport, no matter what the advertisers say. Video games are far closer to a sport than a simple card game. At least with a video game you have to have some kind of eye-hand coordination to operate the game.
Let me clarify. I'm talking about a professional sport that people are actually interested in watching at a sports bar. Sure, there's always some kind of professional sport being broadcast. But only a few are truly popular. In an American sports bar, the only sports that are going to draw a crowd are American football, basketball, baseball, and probably hockey. Maybe even NASCAR in some regions. (yes, I'm probably missing one or two but that doesn't invalidate the point.) While individual sports bars may have a niche of fans from other sports, that's an exception rather than the rule. Golf is a professional sport but who goes to a sports bar to watch it? Very few people would go to a sports bar to watch tennis, even during Wimbledon, or the French Open. So what if there's a billiard tournament on ESPN? Not many people at a sports bar will care if you change the channel. Football (soccer) is wildly popular outside of the US but even during the World Cup, it's barely a blip on the radar of most Americans. Some bars may have World Cup on their TVs but that's just a couple of days before it's gone again. Same can be said for most other sports. They are professional, sure, but people don't go to the bars to watch them.
I'm not trying to denigrate these other sports. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of a bar trying to draw a crowd. Outside of the popular sports, there's nothing to draw a crowd at a sports bar. There's a lot of dead time throughout the year because there's no popular pro sport being played at the time. So there's plenty of room in the schedule to do these kinds of video game sessions to draw a crowd.
The thing is though, you can arrange these ahead of time to be played when there are no good games on. Baseball tends to have a game on almost any time every single day during the season but when you reach the fall, winter and spring sports you're talking about several days when there just isn't any games on. Sure, Americans play football all weekend (college on Saturday, professional on Sunday), and then there's the Monday night game, along with maybe a few more. But even with other sports, there are days when there's nothing on TV. May as well have something else competitive on where you can lure in the patrons.
And yes, video games are not sports in the traditional sense. But they are competitive and some do require the physical ability to control the game. Reaction time, eye hand coordination, etc. are all important in FPS games. Some of the mental challenges, like maintaining situational awareness to make tactical decisions, aren't as different from sports as you may think.
I wouldn't suggest that they are "true" sports. But they are competitions that may be interesting for someone to watch. And as such, not completely out of the realm of what would appeal to sports bar patrons.
They are in Russia (the "heart of Siberia," according to their web site),
Ooh. So I could get one of the women to tell me about "moose and squirrel" when they wake me up. Where do I sign up?