Here in the USA, most of your electricity comes from coal. We usualy use electricty to generate hydrogen. If we ever move to the "Hydrogen Economy" without some major production changes, we would be better off just creating a coal burning car.
I hate to break it to you, but the Hydrogen car is not about the environment. Sure, it's a nice side-benefit (large power plants are more efficient, hydro and nuclear help reduce pollution, etc.), but the real reason is economics. Oil is quickly approaching a price point to where it is no longer economically feasible to power our transportation infrastructure off it.
Shifting to hydrogen would change the economic equation, and free our infrastructure from a costly choke point. All the power would be consolidated at the power plant level where the government can more easily regulate the infrastructure and provide incentives for companies to provide cheap power.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but economic considerations tend to apply a lot more pressure than the toothless protests of environmental protection groups.
Also, while I would love to have an electric or hybrid car, such vehicles are currently ignoring tow capacity
Well, depending on the size of your boat, a Ford Escape Hybrid should do the trick. 155HP may not sound like much, but the torque advantages of the electric motors should help offset that. (Seriously, how many people *really* run their engine at 200+ HP?)
a Silicon Valley-made electric car with a 0-60 acceleration rate that's faster than a Ferrari Spider and a Porsche Carrera.
Any engineer worth his salt can tell you that electric motors put out a hell of a lot more torque than gasoline engines. Gasoline engines are restricted by the tolerances of their mechanical parts, even if the engine is capable of producing more horsepower under load. That's why raw horsepower figures are often a poor indicator of a vehicle's acceleration.
Diesel Locomotives were making use of this fact long before the electric sports car showed up. By transferring the power from the Diesel Engine to an electric transmission, modern locomotives are able to smoothly apply power curves of well over 300KW without any of the slippage or rough starts associated with the Steam Engine.
Honestly, this entire story isn't anything new. The TZero was trouncing expensive sports cars long before the X-1 was introduced. The only difference I can see here is that the owner of the X-1 appears to be looking to build a replacement for Formula-1's rather than creating a slightly more practical Porche type of vehicle.
More info on TZero (The article has links to the TZero outaccelerating several fancy sports cars.)
You should have paid closer attention before responding. This is an anti-troll like the infamous BSD is Alive post from several years back. It's actually quite amusing, and would have probably done well if the author had waited for another "Mac is vulnerable to viruses; OMGWTFROFLOLBBQ!1!1!one!" story.
Why would WalMart use an external consultant (especially a lobbyist) to deal with a press inaccuracy?
If you read his email, he was just trying to establish a dialog with the author to prove or disprove his claims. Whitedust decided to act irresponsibly (again) and published it rather than forwarding it to the author.
Honestly, if I have any security needs in the future, Whitedust will be the LAST company I look to for help or recommendations.
Oh, lighten up. Get out of the house, visit the beach, work on your sense of humor a bit, and find me the other 99998 comments as proof.
(I kid, I kid!)
(Also, I've noticed that linking to one of your own posts is Never-Fail Karma Whore tactics.)
Which explains why I'm currently modded +4 rather than my usual +5. *finger-snap* I knew I did something wrong.
Seriously, relax. Sit back and chill out a bit. I'll be working on a list of "Times I've been right when everyone told me I was wrong" very soon now. Top on the list will be Goobuntu isn't for consumers! Wait, did I just link to my own post again? Damn. I guess I'll have to live with the +5^W^W +4 score. Sorry about that. I won't do it again. Really. (Oops.)
My point being that this anti-Mac trolling is a cheap attempt at driving up ad revenue. I caught the "ads" typo when I was proof-reading, and thought it fit right in. Especially since I don't see my royalty check! We should tag this article with "stolenfromakaimbatman" in protest.:-P
...the editor of PC Magazine reads Slashdot? What a shocker. And he even ads* in the requisite amount of Jobs hating because he knows his readers are Windows fans.
NeWS fell by the wayside because MIT (and DEC?) gave us X11.
Try again. NeWS fell by the wayside because Sun and Adobe tried to squeeze blood out of their users for it. X11 was free (and Motif was low-cost), so Sun's competitors banded together behind the X11 standard hoping that customers would prefer their lower costs over Sun's excellent technology. In addition, they promoted the "openess" of X11 and Motif over Sun's "proprietary technology."
The gambit worked, and Sun learned a valuable lesson. Since NeWS, their software has always been competitively priced and highly open. As a result, their push toward Open Source has been very natural for them.
Sorry, I forgot to ask. Where were you hosting the videos before? Up until recently, Blogger wouldn't even host images, much less files. (Another reason why I wanted to move.)
Actually there used to be a lot more there until I too moved to my own server for my new blog. To generate more PV's over there, I redirect the video viewers.
Ah, I see. Page-wise, that would have hurt a lot more. Not critically, mind you, but a lot more. I imagine that it's nice to be rid of that overweight Blogger page.:-)
While I am sure "bandwidth-wise" I would have been fine (except for the actual video which used up over a petabyte of BW), would their basic account have been able to handle 1m PV's a day for a week straight? I doubt it.
I dunno. I've been hit pretty hard in the past, and LunarPages has always come through. They're the largest hosting service on the market, so they've got the bandwidth to spare. They even offer temporary increases in monthly bandwidth for situations like Slashdotting. I don't know what it costs, but presumably it's less that the $3.95/GB they normally charge.
I got Drudged when I was hosting tsunami videos and got something in the realm of 7 million hits in the span of a week.
You got seven million hits on a single line of text? How did you know that you received 7 million page loads? (Blogger doesn't provide statistics, the last I knew.)
Granted, if you actually got 7 million hits, the lousy templates of Blogger would have cost you about 34K * 7,000,000 = 226GBs for that single line of text. That's still well below what a service like Lunarpages includes in its basic package.
That doesn't mean the tools I am using is getting blasted with this same attack, whereas infact it is. I am finding b2evolution is getting slammed with this same attack.
How so? Were you on the same sub-net as SixApart, or did you get explicity targetted?
RFC 1087 needs to be given teeth.
RFC 1087 is an antique, a response to the November 1988 attack of the Morris Worm. The federal government no longer owns and operates the Internet, and thus doesn't have the rights to prosecute under destruction of private property. The owners of the backbones still have that option, and Congress can always pass new legislation. Neither option would help because many of the guilty parties are located in areas like the Russian Federation. Going international instantly makes the laws a thousand times harder to enforce. In areas like the Russian Federation, there's still enough corruption for officials to be bribed to look the other way.
Ah, it's so nice to be self-hosted. Back when I was on Blogger.com, myself and many other users who received links from Slashdot stories or news sites became the target of a spammer who's sole purpose was to screw up the service for everyone. He had a script that would bomb a blog with hundreds of racist messages, overloading the system in the process. (Sorry, blogger.com's software isn't that good.) I was forced to disable the comments, delete the entry, and recreate it. Thankfully, there were only a few anonymous comments on the current entry which were easy to recreate.
While Blogger eventually added a captcha to solve the problem (after being non-responsive to support requests), it left a bad taste in my mouth. It was at that point that I decided to go self-hosted. I've never looked back. For the cost of a cheap hosting provider, you can setup a Wordpress installation that looks better, is more feature-rich, and automatically queues suspcious messages rather than allowing them to pass through. So while my site could be DDOSed if it was specifically targetted, it can't be overloaded with spam or used to take down other bloggers.
That's nothing. You need to read his Web 2.0 page:
A DotCom business plan:
Since everybody loves animals, we'll grab animals.com and make it the premier site for selling animals and animal byproducts like pet food and leashes on the Interweb.
We'll acquire massive funding to buy a fleet of trucks shaped like dogs. Products bought by the customer will be delivered to him or her in those trucks, immediately strengthening brand visibility.
New Interweb technologies allow entirely new forms of marketing. For example, we can send electronic Em@il letters to every single person in the world at the click of a button, at a fraction of the cost of a single newspaper advert!
Anyone looking back at this business plan recognizes three glaringly obvious problems. First off, animals.com is a stupid name because it's already registered.
Second, how would a cat owner feel about her new cat being delivered in a dog shaped truck? At bare minimum, you'd have needed trucks in the shape of America's top five pets: dogs, cats, gerbils (which double as hamsters), parakeets and snakes.
Not these problems couldn't have been solved. But how come no one recognized the most fundamental problem of the plan? Nobody in their right mind would ever buy anything on the Interweb! Hello!? Enter my credit card number in a little box on some anonymous, random computer in the former Soviet Union? I don't know how many digits credit card numbers consisted of in the 90s, but mine has like a zillion and would take me about 15 minutes to type.
You'd think that religious organizations would want these documents to be lost forever.
The Apocrypha? Definitely not! Many of these texts are perfectly valid Christian documents that simply were never intended to be part of the Bible.
The Gnostics? Eh, it's history. Sort of. Some people would argue that the church is destroying "the truth" (*cough*Dan Brown*cough*) if the texts were extinguished, and that certainly wouldn't help people decide for themselves. That being said, the shear volume of Gnostic texts - all which contradict each other (I swear these guys were the original fan fiction writers or something) - makes it difficult to take them seriously for anyone who actually studies them.
You sir, are being an ass. Did it ever occur to you that historical archives of all types are useful to more than just "religious nutters"? Or do you believe that the Odyssey should be discarded as a "work of religious nutters"?
Would it injure you to use that lump of grey matter between your ears before making such an inane comment?
Summary: DirectX has been rewritten as tighter, simpler, and faster code. The number of new features will actually be minimal, but the rendering architecture should be more powerful overall.
My take: Graphical advances will continue, but will probably have minimal impact on gaming. Most of the pretty new effects will continue to be powered by new shader algorithms, and 3D video card vendors will look to optimize these micro-programs in their new cards.
Required Gag: So if DirectX is now on 10.0, does that make it DirectXX?
Experts from Boeing, bring them on. Experts from the Society of Biblical Literature?? What have they got to do with a computer data formatting standard??
Isn't it obvious? Literary organizations have massive numbers of documents that need to be digitized and archived in perpetuity. As a result, they have a vested interest in using standardized formats that will be guaranteed to meet their needs for years to come. The Society of Biblical Literature is no different in these respects, especially as more and more fragments of apocryiphal and gnostic texts continue to be found.
I hate XML. We should be using something like JSON or YAML.
JSON and YAML are more focused formats intended for lightweight transmissions and compatibility with existing computer languages, and tend to complement XML rather than supplant it.
XML is designed as a "catch-all" format that is capable of storing any form of data. That makes it extremely powerful, yet sometimes quite unweildly.
Each format has its tradeoffs, and as a result it is hard to say that one is "better" than the other. For example, XML's verbosity allows for parsing errors to be much more easily identified and repaired while simultaneously preventing accidental errors from going unnoticed. In YAML and JSON it is much easier to place unintended characters or data structures without the parser noticing. Neither one (to my knowledge) has the ability to check the structure of the transmission like XML DTDs and Schemas do.
However, DOM and XSLT are both awesome ideas - especially for parsing documents.
You've just given two reasons for the existence of XML. Both concepts are extensions of the XML concept, and are not necessarly applicable to other data-exchange formats. (At least not without massive changes.)
XML was designed with the DOM in mind so that any type of flat or heirarchical data could easily be loaded and stored programatically. This cuts down on the number of programs that attempt to construct an interchange document manaually. This rigid structure thus makes way for the programatic transformation of such documents, ala XSLT.
[What] looked good in 1948, turned out bad (Tacoma bridge).
There's a huge difference between construction engineering and software engineering. In construction engineering, poorly understood physics and unforeseen weather patterns can create unpredictable situations and stresses. In software engineering, the rules of the system are predefined and well understood. While a lot of research goes into ways of doing specific tasks "better", the tradeoffs to each design are usually well understood.
The result is that standardized computer algorithms and formats are rarely incorrect. However, they do become obsolete in relatively short periods of time due to increases in computing power and informational storage/transmission requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the USA, most of your electricity comes from coal. We usualy use electricty to generate hydrogen. If we ever move to the "Hydrogen Economy" without some major production changes, we would be better off just creating a coal burning car.
I hate to break it to you, but the Hydrogen car is not about the environment. Sure, it's a nice side-benefit (large power plants are more efficient, hydro and nuclear help reduce pollution, etc.), but the real reason is economics. Oil is quickly approaching a price point to where it is no longer economically feasible to power our transportation infrastructure off it.
Shifting to hydrogen would change the economic equation, and free our infrastructure from a costly choke point. All the power would be consolidated at the power plant level where the government can more easily regulate the infrastructure and provide incentives for companies to provide cheap power.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but economic considerations tend to apply a lot more pressure than the toothless protests of environmental protection groups.
Also, while I would love to have an electric or hybrid car, such vehicles are currently ignoring tow capacity
Well, depending on the size of your boat, a Ford Escape Hybrid should do the trick. 155HP may not sound like much, but the torque advantages of the electric motors should help offset that. (Seriously, how many people *really* run their engine at 200+ HP?)
a Silicon Valley-made electric car with a 0-60 acceleration rate that's faster than a Ferrari Spider and a Porsche Carrera.
Any engineer worth his salt can tell you that electric motors put out a hell of a lot more torque than gasoline engines. Gasoline engines are restricted by the tolerances of their mechanical parts, even if the engine is capable of producing more horsepower under load. That's why raw horsepower figures are often a poor indicator of a vehicle's acceleration.
Diesel Locomotives were making use of this fact long before the electric sports car showed up. By transferring the power from the Diesel Engine to an electric transmission, modern locomotives are able to smoothly apply power curves of well over 300KW without any of the slippage or rough starts associated with the Steam Engine.
Honestly, this entire story isn't anything new. The TZero was trouncing expensive sports cars long before the X-1 was introduced. The only difference I can see here is that the owner of the X-1 appears to be looking to build a replacement for Formula-1's rather than creating a slightly more practical Porche type of vehicle.
More info on TZero (The article has links to the TZero outaccelerating several fancy sports cars.)
You should have paid closer attention before responding. This is an anti-troll like the infamous BSD is Alive post from several years back. It's actually quite amusing, and would have probably done well if the author had waited for another "Mac is vulnerable to viruses; OMGWTFROFLOLBBQ!1!1!one!" story.
Don't worry, it won't last long. A German couple will be along shortly to destory the car.
"Time to unpimp zee auto!"
Why would WalMart use an external consultant (especially a lobbyist) to deal with a press inaccuracy?
If you read his email, he was just trying to establish a dialog with the author to prove or disprove his claims. Whitedust decided to act irresponsibly (again) and published it rather than forwarding it to the author.
Honestly, if I have any security needs in the future, Whitedust will be the LAST company I look to for help or recommendations.
How did Jim Louderback get the Editor-in-Chief position, anyway?
I don't understand your surprise. This is the same magazine that gainfully employs John C. Dvorak! =)
Oh, lighten up. Get out of the house, visit the beach, work on your sense of humor a bit, and find me the other 99998 comments as proof.
(I kid, I kid!)
(Also, I've noticed that linking to one of your own posts is Never-Fail Karma Whore tactics.)
Which explains why I'm currently modded +4 rather than my usual +5. *finger-snap* I knew I did something wrong.
Seriously, relax. Sit back and chill out a bit. I'll be working on a list of "Times I've been right when everyone told me I was wrong" very soon now. Top on the list will be Goobuntu isn't for consumers! Wait, did I just link to my own post again? Damn. I guess I'll have to live with the +5^W^W +4 score. Sorry about that. I won't do it again. Really. (Oops.)
We should tag this article with "stolenfromakaimbatman" in protest.
Huh. I didn't actually expect anyone to enter the tag. But there it is, bigger than life. Thanks guys, that's hilarious! =)
My point being that this anti-Mac trolling is a cheap attempt at driving up ad revenue. I caught the "ads" typo when I was proof-reading, and thought it fit right in. Especially since I don't see my royalty check! We should tag this article with "stolenfromakaimbatman" in protest. :-P
...the editor of PC Magazine reads Slashdot? What a shocker. And he even ads* in the requisite amount of Jobs hating because he knows his readers are Windows fans.
All I have to say is: Where's my royalty check?
* Whoops, freudian slip
P.S. What does everyone think of the new comment system?
P.P.S. Yes, I really typed ads. I figured it was more insightful to point it out rather than correct it.
this one is like two sentences, a picture and a "more" button.
I think he was trying to capture the "flavor" of Windows Vista. i.e. You'll be spending 90% of your time clicking...
(Click Next to Continue)
through...
(Click Next to Continue)
the dialog...
(Click Next to Continue)
boxes. Each one of...
(Click Next to Continue)
these boxes...
(Click Next to Continue)
will annoy you with something else...
(Click Next to Continue)
incredibly trivial.
NeWS fell by the wayside because MIT (and DEC?) gave us X11.
Try again. NeWS fell by the wayside because Sun and Adobe tried to squeeze blood out of their users for it. X11 was free (and Motif was low-cost), so Sun's competitors banded together behind the X11 standard hoping that customers would prefer their lower costs over Sun's excellent technology. In addition, they promoted the "openess" of X11 and Motif over Sun's "proprietary technology."
The gambit worked, and Sun learned a valuable lesson. Since NeWS, their software has always been competitively priced and highly open. As a result, their push toward Open Source has been very natural for them.
Sorry, I forgot to ask. Where were you hosting the videos before? Up until recently, Blogger wouldn't even host images, much less files. (Another reason why I wanted to move.)
Actually there used to be a lot more there until I too moved to my own server for my new blog. To generate more PV's over there, I redirect the video viewers.
:-)
Ah, I see. Page-wise, that would have hurt a lot more. Not critically, mind you, but a lot more. I imagine that it's nice to be rid of that overweight Blogger page.
While I am sure "bandwidth-wise" I would have been fine (except for the actual video which used up over a petabyte of BW), would their basic account have been able to handle 1m PV's a day for a week straight? I doubt it.
I dunno. I've been hit pretty hard in the past, and LunarPages has always come through. They're the largest hosting service on the market, so they've got the bandwidth to spare. They even offer temporary increases in monthly bandwidth for situations like Slashdotting. I don't know what it costs, but presumably it's less that the $3.95/GB they normally charge.
I got Drudged when I was hosting tsunami videos and got something in the realm of 7 million hits in the span of a week.
You got seven million hits on a single line of text? How did you know that you received 7 million page loads? (Blogger doesn't provide statistics, the last I knew.)
Granted, if you actually got 7 million hits, the lousy templates of Blogger would have cost you about 34K * 7,000,000 = 226GBs for that single line of text. That's still well below what a service like Lunarpages includes in its basic package.
That doesn't mean the tools I am using is getting blasted with this same attack, whereas infact it is. I am finding b2evolution is getting slammed with this same attack.
How so? Were you on the same sub-net as SixApart, or did you get explicity targetted?
RFC 1087 needs to be given teeth.
RFC 1087 is an antique, a response to the November 1988 attack of the Morris Worm. The federal government no longer owns and operates the Internet, and thus doesn't have the rights to prosecute under destruction of private property. The owners of the backbones still have that option, and Congress can always pass new legislation. Neither option would help because many of the guilty parties are located in areas like the Russian Federation. Going international instantly makes the laws a thousand times harder to enforce. In areas like the Russian Federation, there's still enough corruption for officials to be bribed to look the other way.
Ah, it's so nice to be self-hosted. Back when I was on Blogger.com, myself and many other users who received links from Slashdot stories or news sites became the target of a spammer who's sole purpose was to screw up the service for everyone. He had a script that would bomb a blog with hundreds of racist messages, overloading the system in the process. (Sorry, blogger.com's software isn't that good.) I was forced to disable the comments, delete the entry, and recreate it. Thankfully, there were only a few anonymous comments on the current entry which were easy to recreate.
While Blogger eventually added a captcha to solve the problem (after being non-responsive to support requests), it left a bad taste in my mouth. It was at that point that I decided to go self-hosted. I've never looked back. For the cost of a cheap hosting provider, you can setup a Wordpress installation that looks better, is more feature-rich, and automatically queues suspcious messages rather than allowing them to pass through. So while my site could be DDOSed if it was specifically targetted, it can't be overloaded with spam or used to take down other bloggers.
You'd think that religious organizations would want these documents to be lost forever.
The Apocrypha? Definitely not! Many of these texts are perfectly valid Christian documents that simply were never intended to be part of the Bible.
The Gnostics? Eh, it's history. Sort of. Some people would argue that the church is destroying "the truth" (*cough*Dan Brown*cough*) if the texts were extinguished, and that certainly wouldn't help people decide for themselves. That being said, the shear volume of Gnostic texts - all which contradict each other (I swear these guys were the original fan fiction writers or something) - makes it difficult to take them seriously for anyone who actually studies them.
You sir, are being an ass. Did it ever occur to you that historical archives of all types are useful to more than just "religious nutters"? Or do you believe that the Odyssey should be discarded as a "work of religious nutters"?
Would it injure you to use that lump of grey matter between your ears before making such an inane comment?
Summary: DirectX has been rewritten as tighter, simpler, and faster code. The number of new features will actually be minimal, but the rendering architecture should be more powerful overall.
My take: Graphical advances will continue, but will probably have minimal impact on gaming. Most of the pretty new effects will continue to be powered by new shader algorithms, and 3D video card vendors will look to optimize these micro-programs in their new cards.
Required Gag: So if DirectX is now on 10.0, does that make it DirectXX?
Experts from Boeing, bring them on.
Experts from the Society of Biblical Literature?? What have they got to do with a computer data formatting standard??
Isn't it obvious? Literary organizations have massive numbers of documents that need to be digitized and archived in perpetuity. As a result, they have a vested interest in using standardized formats that will be guaranteed to meet their needs for years to come. The Society of Biblical Literature is no different in these respects, especially as more and more fragments of apocryiphal and gnostic texts continue to be found.
I hate XML. We should be using something like JSON or YAML.
JSON and YAML are more focused formats intended for lightweight transmissions and compatibility with existing computer languages, and tend to complement XML rather than supplant it.
XML is designed as a "catch-all" format that is capable of storing any form of data. That makes it extremely powerful, yet sometimes quite unweildly.
Each format has its tradeoffs, and as a result it is hard to say that one is "better" than the other. For example, XML's verbosity allows for parsing errors to be much more easily identified and repaired while simultaneously preventing accidental errors from going unnoticed. In YAML and JSON it is much easier to place unintended characters or data structures without the parser noticing. Neither one (to my knowledge) has the ability to check the structure of the transmission like XML DTDs and Schemas do.
However, DOM and XSLT are both awesome ideas - especially for parsing documents.
You've just given two reasons for the existence of XML. Both concepts are extensions of the XML concept, and are not necessarly applicable to other data-exchange formats. (At least not without massive changes.)
XML was designed with the DOM in mind so that any type of flat or heirarchical data could easily be loaded and stored programatically. This cuts down on the number of programs that attempt to construct an interchange document manaually. This rigid structure thus makes way for the programatic transformation of such documents, ala XSLT.
[What] looked good in 1948, turned out bad (Tacoma bridge).
There's a huge difference between construction engineering and software engineering. In construction engineering, poorly understood physics and unforeseen weather patterns can create unpredictable situations and stresses. In software engineering, the rules of the system are predefined and well understood. While a lot of research goes into ways of doing specific tasks "better", the tradeoffs to each design are usually well understood.
The result is that standardized computer algorithms and formats are rarely incorrect. However, they do become obsolete in relatively short periods of time due to increases in computing power and informational storage/transmission requirements.