Their methods may be under dispute, but their aim in this case is not evil
Not an excuse. Sports analogy: Kicking the players of the other team will get you disqualified in soccer, even if your aim is only to get a free path to the goal;-)
My comment was about why do not have a large number of electric cars NOW. The post was stating that it was because the oil companies where paying off the car companies. "Um, no. In 2005, the average driver spent $2,013 in gasoline and motor oil plus $2,339 on other vehicle expenses (repairs, insurance, etc) [census.gov]. Unless you have a magical car that never breaks, your car needs more than just oil and tires changed." What you will not have to pay insurance tag and title on your elective vehicle? Do you think it will never have issues? Also good modern cars are actually very trouble free. Not all mind you and I wouldn't bet on first gen mass market electric cars to be as trouble free as they will be in the future.
The problem BOTH of you have here is that the real life durability of the newer battery chemistries is not known yet. Batteries are the things that will make or break the economics of electric cars.
If they are as good as Rei claims he wins the argument, because electric motors are mature technology and VERY low-maintenance. But if they fail after 5 years and you have to pay $10,000 for a new pack... ouch, I'd be sorry for the one who bought the car.
The most used Lithium Ion chemistry uses LiCoO2 cathodes. Disadvantages: - Price (Cobalt is relatively rare and expensive). Acceptable for a notebook, not so good for a car that needs 500 times the capacity. - Aging (will lose capacity even if unused, so you might have to buy new batteries halfway through the life of your car). - can blow up when overheating or due to faults in manufacturing, see Sony laptop batteries...
Now there are some very interesting new developments in Lithium Ion technology, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion#Improvements_to_Lithium_Ion_Battery_Technology I guess one or more of those will end up making large Lithium Ion batteries a lot more attractive than NiMH. Right now some companies use these for battery tools and scooters (Segway), but the big breakthrough is yet to come.
I guess we were lucky then......a while ago the company I work for was planning to outsource a project to Tata. It failed due to lack of budget. Why they believed in the first place Tata would be cheaper (our managers don't think in terms of quality) is beyond me - we keep things going with a rather small team as it is.
Blame GM, Ford, VW, BMW, PSA, Toyota. I don't find it surprising that, all of a sudden, various car-makers are developping electric cars and fuel-cell cars,... why couldn't they do that 10 years ago? I am waiting for those a long time now.
They did occasionally but as long as petrol was cheap, there was not very much demand. Also, the car industry is a very conservative one which rarely tries something dramatically new. Most of them would rather wait for the competition to take the risk, and then copy the idea if it worked.
The last such attempt was Toyota releasing the Prius, which was a success. Now, various car makes have released hybrids or are working on them (which confirms the wait and copy attitude).
On the positive side, I think introducing hybrid technology is a breakthrough because it allows the industry to make progress in its traditional way of little steps. The "plug-in hybrid" is one of those: Make the batteries larger and add a charger - nothing spectacular and risky here;-)
If you believe Wikipedia, they started out as "classic" outsourcing company but do significant own research and software development today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Consultancy_Services. I don't think they have shown up as major product vendor in IT yet (in the sense of complete software packages you can buy off the shelf), but with the development capacities that are listed in the Wikipedia article it should be only a matter of time.
GP also stated that the money that doesn't go into tax breaks is used to lower the business taxes in general. Consequence: The states who offer subsidies have a competitive advantage in the area they hand out subsidies for. In other areas, the no subsidy/lower tax states have a competitive advantage. That should balance things out.
Besides, my impression from Germany is that the subsidies mostly go to large corporations which are good at tax evasion anyway, while small to medium businesses get nothing. I'd like to see that disparity removed, because I think the boost for smaller businesses would overall more than compensate for a few big corporations leaving.
Of course one of new solutions may end up being better than the rest, leading to a new energy monoculture. But then it will be a sustainable one, as I don't think fossil fuels will go back to being dirt cheap.
In this context, (other) renewable but unreliable energy sources would make sense. As in, storing electricity from solar or wind energy is a problem, but if it could be used to power the conversion of waste to synthetic oil, the output of that conversion can be stored very well.
The court in question, a "Oberlandesgericht" is the second highest instance for non-constitutional cases in Germany, and the highest for its federal state (Hessen). As far as I can tell from the layman's perspective, verdicts at that level tend to be taken into account by other courts, and while case law does not have the same importance as in the US, this precedent will have some influence.
I agree about Win9x stability being not so good, but XP Embedded might be worth a try. The NT line in general is much mor stable than Win9x, and XP Embedded can be cut down to use a lot less resources (by dropping all services you don't need). Also, many embedded devices run some version of Linux these days. So that appears to be a reasonable alternative. Of course it will cost money to port the software, but there are advantages:
-Better support for modern hardware. The company I work for produces a device that runs on DOS, but it becomes increasingly obvious that support for hardware under DOS is being neglected by the hardware vendors. For instance, running modern graphics cards in VESA graphics mode is not guaranteed to work.
-More available memory. Again, between network drivers and the main software it has become difficult to squeeze everything on our DOS device into 640k. I've briefly looked into using a protected mode DOS extender, but it would require porting at least the 16 bit assembler routines. Probably it would conflict with some of our DOS drivers too...
-Multitasking support (if you want it, for us the absence of other tasks that steal the CPU at inconvenient times is an advantage).
What, other than convenience, are we talking about here? Just having the searchable collection of programs is a pretty big step forward, IMHO. It reduces the "Find a program to do this thing" process to one step in a large number of cases, where Windows (Or even OSX) always requires "Find a program externally. Download the program. Install the program." as separate steps.
There is the question "is this too difficult for a not-so-skilled user?".
Downloading a setup program and running it seems well within the abilities of non-techies, while compiling the program from source might be too much for many of them. So we have a big threshold between being to use the program at all and failing in the setup process.
Giving the user a more comfortable way to do it is nice, but not the sort of difference that "can you use the system at all?" makes.
IANAL too, but even if this changing of positions is not explicitly forbidden, I would expect it to weaken the credibility of the argument. As in, your testimony counts less if you have stated the opposite before, because you it makes you look like a liar.
The second non-geeks get a whiff of dealing with GNU utilities or Linux itself - (think using man to work out that your partitions are represented by pseudo-files under/dev and you can automatically mount them by adding the appropriate information to/etc/fstab, but that if you can't figure that our they'll be someone in a forum who can post a list of steps to follow at a terminal) - they'll be clamouring to pay for windows.
Ubuntu already auto-mounts everything I've thrown at it, including external USB drives. The locations may not be to everyone's taste (I for instance could do without having the partitions from the USB drive pop up on the desktop), but the ease of use is there.
So the non-geeks won't be bothered enough to pay for Windows. Those who care enough to want to move the mountpoints around, are probably geeks enough to find out (and have used Windows before, so they know that it has its difficulties too;-)
I agree that Linux is as usable or better today, but that is a recent accomplishment. At least for a "typical" end user in the sense of your item 2. For him or her, there are only two important points:
1) Get the hardware to run. That works fine in Ubuntu today, but it was not always so easy.
On my first Linux experiments about 10 years ago (SuSe 5.0 IIRC), I had to set the video parameters from text mode to get X11 into graphics mode. There was a helpful script, but without the opportunity to go back: one mistake and you had to re-run all of it. Similarly, mounting drives required editing of fstab;-)
Fast forward to a few years ago, and you had more GUI setup dialogs that were easier to find for the uninitiated. But some things like getting the proprietary ATI driver to run were still a pain in the ass.
Only in the last few years Linux has reached Windows-like simplicity and in some cases pulled ahead: Most hardware is recognized out of the box, and Ubuntu will install even proprietary drivers over the net (which some of the more GPL-purist distros refuse). Others have reported on Slashdot that they found Linux driver support better than in Vista, but I guess XP is still unbeatable.
2) Get software and install it.
Here I don't see much of a difference. Windows: Get the setup.exe and double-click it Linux: Select packet in packet manager, OR get a.deb or.rpm file, then install. If the packet is in the repository, Linux scores some bonus points for convenience but that's all. I consider the.deb or.rpm file the equivalent of the setup.exe BTW. Compiling from source is not always easy in windows either - I have seen software that requires several installation and compilation steps in a very specific order;-)
Nice troll, but I'll explain the difference to all the previous Linux installations:
Among geeky types, it was already widely believed that Ubuntu (for instance) is just as easy to setup and use as Windows. But those people already have computer knowledge which may help them over some points where a non-geek may feel stumped. So they do not exactly represent the average user.
Computers that come preinstalled with Linux have been rare, and this is the first time lots of them get into the hands of non-experts. So people like GP's girlfriend are the real test of how newbie-friendly linux is. One of them is anecdotal, lots of them make a valid test. Give it a few months and both your and my post will be irrelevant because the results of the test are out.
Most geeks realize that Windows for a few dollars extra (or the same price) is worth it, even if you're not a fan of Windows.
For a device like the EEE PC, I disagree. My only reason to keep Windows around are games at this point, and the EEE PC would be unable to run the latest games anyway. For surfing, e-mail and office stuff I prefer Mozilla software and Open Office anyway. Those are available under Linux.
Your numbers assume that the batteries last as long as the rest of the car and no replacement after a few years is necessary. The Tesla, however, is built with Li-Ion batteries which tend to age with or without use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-ion_battery#Disadvantages Now I presume that this part of the Wikipedia article is based on the Lithium cobalt oxide cathodes that were the first to find widespread use, and newer chemistries could solve the problem. But battery life is something you definitely want to know about before buying an electric car.
Toyota are already selling hybrids and were the first to do it on a significant scale. Now those are not as spectacularly "green" as some people think, but they are a good start. This makes Toyota one of the few major brands that have taken the risk of releasing something really new as product (as opposed to waiting until someone else does it and then copying it;-)
Even if a car manufacturer is serious about going to alternative fuels, I don't see it happen within 7 years for the major brands. Because the alternatives are not at the point where they could do as well as gasoline motors in all aspects. A small company might choose to make only electric cars and sell enough to make a profit, but I doubt the market would absorb the numbers a large manufacturer makes.
Besides, it is Mercedes we're talking about. Historically they tend to be late to adopt technology trends. With direct injection diesels and cars that could use unleaded gasoline, they were among the last on the German market. Which is not to say Mercedes are incompetent, my impression of their cars is that they offer solid quality and a friend of mine who is a car mechanic agrees. But they are rather conservative, which means they offer mature technology but are rarely the first to do something.
I agree about the Geneva Convention only applying to soldiers who fight openly and wear some kind of identification (traditionally a uniform).
But even if you count non-uniformed fighters as criminals, the way the US has treated many of them is below the standards that apply to a nation under the rule of law:
1) Suspects should either be charged with a crime within a reasonable timeframe or be released. The US still imprison some "illegal combatants" in Guantanamo that have been there for years. The term "illegal combatant" itself was IMHO invented to weasel around the law: an attempt to treat the prisoners neither as soldiers nor as criminals. This is gradually rolled back thanks to the Supreme Court, and it gives me hope that the USA are still a civilized country at heart.
3) Lack of oversight (or maybe silent approval of the torture incidents) at Abu Ghraib.
Overall, I think the US has earned its bad reputation. Not so much because of violations of the Geneva Convention but because the minimum standards of due process for suspected criminals are not met.
However, you can turn on an option that loads a small TSR on boot-up which eliminates that lag. Admittedly, it's a bit kludgy, but to be honest, I'd wager MS only gets away with a fast start to Office because part of it's core is in the OS so it seems a fair trade.
True, OO.o with the quickloader is equivalent to MS Office. Personally I hate these preloading schemes because as long as you don't actually use the program it's a waste of RAM. Which means I prefer the Open Office quickloader as it is switched off easier. Instead of digging through the registry, you just open it from the taskbar and uncheck "load on system start";-)
Not if I know in advance that I cannot really use the X amount of traffic they are promising. A real life example:
I have a DSL 2000 kbit/s connection at home, and most download servers of commercial vendors don't give me the data as fast as I could pull them (funnily enough, Ubuntu updates usually manage to saturate my connection). So unless I want to engage in massive filesharing I don't have much reason to buy faster access. Bad for the ISP who won't sell more than the cheapest package (DSL 2000 w/"flatrate" is pretty much the entry level offer these days).
Slashdot Mirror
Not an excuse. Sports analogy: ;-)
Kicking the players of the other team will get you disqualified in soccer, even if your aim is only to get a free path to the goal
The problem BOTH of you have here is that the real life durability of the newer battery chemistries is not known yet. Batteries are the things that will make or break the economics of electric cars.
If they are as good as Rei claims he wins the argument, because electric motors are mature technology and VERY low-maintenance. But if they fail after 5 years and you have to pay $10,000 for a new pack... ouch, I'd be sorry for the one who bought the car.
The most used Lithium Ion chemistry uses LiCoO2 cathodes. Disadvantages:
- Price (Cobalt is relatively rare and expensive). Acceptable for a notebook, not so good for a car that needs 500 times the capacity.
- Aging (will lose capacity even if unused, so you might have to buy new batteries halfway through the life of your car).
- can blow up when overheating or due to faults in manufacturing, see Sony laptop batteries...
Now there are some very interesting new developments in Lithium Ion technology, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion#Improvements_to_Lithium_Ion_Battery_Technology
I guess one or more of those will end up making large Lithium Ion batteries a lot more attractive than NiMH. Right now some companies use these for battery tools and scooters (Segway), but the big breakthrough is yet to come.
I guess we were lucky then... ...a while ago the company I work for was planning to outsource a project to Tata. It failed due to lack of budget. Why they believed in the first place Tata would be cheaper (our managers don't think in terms of quality) is beyond me - we keep things going with a rather small team as it is.
They did occasionally but as long as petrol was cheap, there was not very much demand. Also, the car industry is a very conservative one which rarely tries something dramatically new. Most of them would rather wait for the competition to take the risk, and then copy the idea if it worked.
The last such attempt was Toyota releasing the Prius, which was a success. Now, various car makes have released hybrids or are working on them (which confirms the wait and copy attitude).
On the positive side, I think introducing hybrid technology is a breakthrough because it allows the industry to make progress in its traditional way of little steps. The "plug-in hybrid" is one of those: ;-)
Make the batteries larger and add a charger - nothing spectacular and risky here
A few years ago, they were caught with this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/07/help_my_belkin_router/
If you believe Wikipedia, they started out as "classic" outsourcing company but do significant own research and software development today:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Consultancy_Services.
I don't think they have shown up as major product vendor in IT yet (in the sense of complete software packages you can buy off the shelf), but with the development capacities that are listed in the Wikipedia article it should be only a matter of time.
GP also stated that the money that doesn't go into tax breaks is used to lower the business taxes in general.
Consequence:
The states who offer subsidies have a competitive advantage in the area they hand out subsidies for. In other areas, the no subsidy/lower tax states have a competitive advantage. That should balance things out.
Besides, my impression from Germany is that the subsidies mostly go to large corporations which are good at tax evasion anyway, while small to medium businesses get nothing. I'd like to see that disparity removed, because I think the boost for smaller businesses would overall more than compensate for a few big corporations leaving.
Well said.
Of course one of new solutions may end up being better than the rest, leading to a new energy monoculture. But then it will be a sustainable one, as I don't think fossil fuels will go back to being dirt cheap.
In this context, (other) renewable but unreliable energy sources would make sense. As in, storing electricity from solar or wind energy is a problem, but if it could be used to power the conversion of waste to synthetic oil, the output of that conversion can be stored very well.
This said, I don't trust the "Vetrolium" promises as they sound to good to be true. But there are other companies that have developed processes to turn agricultural waste into fuel. For instance Choren: http://www.choren.com/en/energy_for_all/.
For more general information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_generation_biofuels.
A moderately important one.
The court in question, a "Oberlandesgericht" is the second highest instance for non-constitutional cases in Germany, and the highest for its federal state (Hessen).
As far as I can tell from the layman's perspective, verdicts at that level tend to be taken into account by other courts, and while case law does not have the same importance as in the US, this precedent will have some influence.
I agree about Win9x stability being not so good, but XP Embedded might be worth a try. The NT line in general is much mor stable than Win9x, and XP Embedded can be cut down to use a lot less resources (by dropping all services you don't need).
Also, many embedded devices run some version of Linux these days. So that appears to be a reasonable alternative. Of course it will cost money to port the software, but there are advantages:
-Better support for modern hardware. The company I work for produces a device that runs on DOS, but it becomes increasingly obvious that support for hardware under DOS is being neglected by the hardware vendors. For instance, running modern graphics cards in VESA graphics mode is not guaranteed to work.
-More available memory. Again, between network drivers and the main software it has become difficult to squeeze everything on our DOS device into 640k. I've briefly looked into using a protected mode DOS extender, but it would require porting at least the 16 bit assembler routines. Probably it would conflict with some of our DOS drivers too...
-Multitasking support (if you want it, for us the absence of other tasks that steal the CPU at inconvenient times is an advantage).
There is the question "is this too difficult for a not-so-skilled user?".
Downloading a setup program and running it seems well within the abilities of non-techies, while compiling the program from source might be too much for many of them. So we have a big threshold between being to use the program at all and failing in the setup process.
Giving the user a more comfortable way to do it is nice, but not the sort of difference that "can you use the system at all?" makes.
IANAL too,
but even if this changing of positions is not explicitly forbidden, I would expect it to weaken the credibility of the argument. As in, your testimony counts less if you have stated the opposite before, because you it makes you look like a liar.
Ubuntu already auto-mounts everything I've thrown at it, including external USB drives. The locations may not be to everyone's taste (I for instance could do without having the partitions from the USB drive pop up on the desktop), but the ease of use is there.
So the non-geeks won't be bothered enough to pay for Windows. Those who care enough to want to move the mountpoints around, are probably geeks enough to find out (and have used Windows before, so they know that it has its difficulties too ;-)
I agree that Linux is as usable or better today, but that is a recent accomplishment. At least for a "typical" end user in the sense of your item 2. For him or her, there are only two important points:
1) Get the hardware to run. That works fine in Ubuntu today, but it was not always so easy.
On my first Linux experiments about 10 years ago (SuSe 5.0 IIRC), I had to set the video parameters from text mode to get X11 into graphics mode. There was a helpful script, but without the opportunity to go back: one mistake and you had to re-run all of it. Similarly, mounting drives required editing of fstab ;-)
Fast forward to a few years ago, and you had more GUI setup dialogs that were easier to find for the uninitiated. But some things like getting the proprietary ATI driver to run were still a pain in the ass.
Only in the last few years Linux has reached Windows-like simplicity and in some cases pulled ahead:
Most hardware is recognized out of the box, and Ubuntu will install even proprietary drivers over the net (which some of the more GPL-purist distros refuse). Others have reported on Slashdot that they found Linux driver support better than in Vista, but I guess XP is still unbeatable.
2) Get software and install it.
Here I don't see much of a difference. .deb or .rpm file, then install. If the packet is in the repository, Linux scores some bonus points for convenience but that's all. .deb or .rpm file the equivalent of the setup.exe BTW. Compiling from source is not always easy in windows either - I have seen software that requires several installation and compilation steps in a very specific order ;-)
Windows: Get the setup.exe and double-click it
Linux: Select packet in packet manager, OR get a
I consider the
Nice troll, but I'll explain the difference to all the previous Linux installations:
Among geeky types, it was already widely believed that Ubuntu (for instance) is just as easy to setup and use as Windows. But those people already have computer knowledge which may help them over some points where a non-geek may feel stumped. So they do not exactly represent the average user.
Computers that come preinstalled with Linux have been rare, and this is the first time lots of them get into the hands of non-experts. So people like GP's girlfriend are the real test of how newbie-friendly linux is. One of them is anecdotal, lots of them make a valid test. Give it a few months and both your and my post will be irrelevant because the results of the test are out.
For a device like the EEE PC, I disagree.
My only reason to keep Windows around are games at this point, and the EEE PC would be unable to run the latest games anyway. For surfing, e-mail and office stuff I prefer Mozilla software and Open Office anyway. Those are available under Linux.
And this shows that Linux is now usable for non-geeks when preinstalled. Many of those users wouldn't be able to reinstall their Windows either ;-)
There is still a lot of software that is only available for Windows (in particular games), but the OS itself is just as usable as Windows.
Your numbers assume that the batteries last as long as the rest of the car and no replacement after a few years is necessary. The Tesla, however, is built with Li-Ion batteries which tend to age with or without use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-ion_battery#Disadvantages
Now I presume that this part of the Wikipedia article is based on the Lithium cobalt oxide cathodes that were the first to find widespread use, and newer chemistries could solve the problem. But battery life is something you definitely want to know about before buying an electric car.
Toyota are already selling hybrids and were the first to do it on a significant scale. ;-)
Now those are not as spectacularly "green" as some people think, but they are a good start. This makes Toyota one of the few major brands that have taken the risk of releasing something really new as product (as opposed to waiting until someone else does it and then copying it
Even if a car manufacturer is serious about going to alternative fuels, I don't see it happen within 7 years for the major brands. Because the alternatives are not at the point where they could do as well as gasoline motors in all aspects. A small company might choose to make only electric cars and sell enough to make a profit, but I doubt the market would absorb the numbers a large manufacturer makes.
Besides, it is Mercedes we're talking about. Historically they tend to be late to adopt technology trends. With direct injection diesels and cars that could use unleaded gasoline, they were among the last on the German market.
Which is not to say Mercedes are incompetent, my impression of their cars is that they offer solid quality and a friend of mine who is a car mechanic agrees. But they are rather conservative, which means they offer mature technology but are rarely the first to do something.
I agree about the Geneva Convention only applying to soldiers who fight openly and wear some kind of identification (traditionally a uniform).
But even if you count non-uniformed fighters as criminals, the way the US has treated many of them is below the standards that apply to a nation under the rule of law:
1) Suspects should either be charged with a crime within a reasonable timeframe or be released. The US still imprison some "illegal combatants" in Guantanamo that have been there for years. The term "illegal combatant" itself was IMHO invented to weasel around the law: an attempt to treat the prisoners neither as soldiers nor as criminals. This is gradually rolled back thanks to the Supreme Court, and it gives me hope that the USA are still a civilized country at heart.
2) A criminal's guilt has to be proven in court, with reasonable opportunity for the defense to challenge the evidence. The rules under which the military tribunals were supposed to work (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_military_commission) do not make a fair trial. Again, the Supreme Court has limited this practice, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamdan_v._Rumsfeld.
3) Lack of oversight (or maybe silent approval of the torture incidents) at Abu Ghraib.
Overall, I think the US has earned its bad reputation. Not so much because of violations of the Geneva Convention but because the minimum standards of due process for suspected criminals are not met.
True, OO.o with the quickloader is equivalent to MS Office. Personally I hate these preloading schemes because as long as you don't actually use the program it's a waste of RAM. ;-)
Which means I prefer the Open Office quickloader as it is switched off easier. Instead of digging through the registry, you just open it from the taskbar and uncheck "load on system start"
Not if I know in advance that I cannot really use the X amount of traffic they are promising. A real life example:
I have a DSL 2000 kbit/s connection at home, and most download servers of commercial vendors don't give me the data as fast as I could pull them (funnily enough, Ubuntu updates usually manage to saturate my connection).
So unless I want to engage in massive filesharing I don't have much reason to buy faster access. Bad for the ISP who won't sell more than the cheapest package (DSL 2000 w/"flatrate" is pretty much the entry level offer these days).