"A Diahatsu Charade weighs 1587 lbs, Toyota Prius 2890 lbs."
The Charade is a tiny 2-door car with no power and a manual transmission. The Prius is a decently peppy 4-door midsize with an automatic (well, continuously variable) transmission.
If you want to compare hybrids to nonhybrids, compare similar vehicles. The Insight averages 63mpg, 40% better than the Charade - and that includes both the automatic and standard Insights (the standard Insight does even better).
Also note that aluminum is recycled more than any other material, except for steel. It makes economic sense to do so (far cheaper) and it can be recycled virtually indefinately.
Better not get in a collision in that Mini. Part of the reason that today's cars aren't super-light is the strength of the frame.
Also, how does the Mini do on emissions? I bet it doesn't even come close to ULEV, let alone SULEV or AT-PZEV (what the Prius has) certification.
A Toyota Prius gets similar fuel economy, is far roomier, has AC, does far better in a crash, accelerates faster, and has better emisisons.
How is that losing? It looks like a better vehicle than the Mini on most counts. At $21,000, it's not cheap, but I bet it's not a whole ton worse than the Mini was if you account for inflation.
"Turbo-Diesel owners have been seeing numbers in this range, or better, for years."
That's because diesel has more energy per gallon than gasoline. It also produces more carbon-dioxide per gallon.
You can't compare the two using "gallons".
"Otherwise most TDI Volkswagens have been able to outshine these numbers for years."
Again, totally not comparable. Not to mention that the US TDI does horribly on emissions tests. I haven't seen tests for the European model, but apparently it has trouble with US diesel blends (sulfur content).
Even the cleanest diesel engines running on sulfur-free diesel don't come close to the AT-PZEV rating of the Prius in terms of NOx and particulate emissions. Or, for that matter, carbon dioxide emissions (unless you use biodiesel).
How so? It doesn't offer the color gamut of CRT, but it provides excellent sharpness, (relatively) low power usage, excellent burn-in resistance, long lifetime, thin size, and (as of recently) excellent response time.
LCD is the ideal technology for computer usage.
Now, as for displaying video, it has a way to go. But just about everything else does, too. Just in different ways.
"Word screws with the styles something chronic. It creates styles on the fly, it has all sorts of styles 'select all 2 instances' which does nothing, and the style can't be deleted. My favourite feature is to randomly remove the numbering from my Heading 1..n styles, with no apparent way to get it back"
You, like many others, have no idea how to use styles in Word.
Yes, it creates styles as you apply formatting.
Yes, they are easy to delete. Format > Styles and Formatting > Click on arrow beside style > Click Delete.
"My favourite feature is to randomly remove the numbering from my Heading 1..n styles, with no apparent way to get it back."
Don't know what you're talking about. I've never had Word remove numbering "randomly". If you don't know how the program works, how are you suppsoed to use it?
"Then try to have a footer on every page. Then make one page landscape. Depending on your document, one of several things will happen:
Srolling the document causes a repagination. Unusable. The footer on all the landscape pages flashes with a frequency of about 1 second between the width needed for portrait and the width needed for landscape. Don't touch the keyboard, just sit back and watch Word cry It works fine. I've seen this behaviour once, far less often than the other two."
RESOLVED. Resolution: WORKSFORME.
"I hate Word. I really do. Buggy, slow and unintuitive."
That's just crap. You can't just make up shit and call it fact. It doesn't work.
Office is not bloated. On my system, Word takes 9MB. Hell, that's less than half of what Firefox takes. That's less than AbiWord.
OOo takes over 100M. That's nearly ten times more memory than Word. It also takes about 15 seconds to start - 3 times more than Word.
The installation directory is 95MB, considerably less than OpenOffice. The entire core suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook) installs from a 200MB CD - and that's with the dependencies, clipart, templates, and extras.
As for awkward, what exactly do you mean? For myself and nearly 400 million others, Office is perfectly normal. Style handling is considerably better in 2003, and the overall suite feels polished and clean.
After 6 versions for Windows, Office looks, feels, and behaves like a mature office suite. It hasn't crashed on me in months, it doesn't have any wierd quirks, it's feature-rich, and everything generally works pretty well.
Don't impugn Office unless you *really* use it. You'll find that OpenOffice.org is clumsy, buggy, and bloated.
"Windows computers being infested with spyware and viruses"
The number one source (and, these days, usually the only source) of spyware is user action. Users downloading and executing untrusted code, generally to get something for free.
I know plenty of people who download and install "free" screensavers and other software that is loaded with spyware.
They click through big, sacry security warnings (two, in fact, with XP-SP2) to do so as well.
If they were on Linux, they'd gladly enter their root password.
Re:Actually, Microsoft is now paying for its
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Gates will never be able to do that because of his success."
You know what? He doesn't care. Because, as cool looking and functional as Apple products are, Apple still only has ~4% of the market.
That's not changing anytime soon.
(non-real quotes)
Jobs: "We're better than you" Gates: "It doesn't matter. We already won."
Re:Never write off Microsoft...
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Only two products in the entire company turn a profit."
Not the case. Windows, Windows Server, Exchange, MSSQL, Visual Studio, Office, Mac Office, and a number of other products are consistantly profitable. The mobile division has recently become profitable.
"Phantasy Star Online and the network adapter blew the GC wide open for cracking."
Kind of. The network adaptor is slower than the optical drive, so games take a long time to load and often have stuttering problems. Oh, and you need a 'Cube, a copy of PSO, and a network adaptor.
It's curbed the kind of pircay that Nintendo worries about - pirated games being mass-stamped. Their bottom line isn't affected if someone develops a difficult-to-use hack that allows you to play pirated games - there are simply too few people who are willing to do it.
Contrast that with the PS2 and XBox, where pirated releases are easy to get on the street.
"It seems like every 4-6 months there is a new line of cards out with slightly better specs in the 500 or so price range."
I belive that this is called "technological advancement".
Why should you be complaining? The Radeon 9600 XT is faster than your TI-4800, and it sells for under $100.
New cards being released is a *good thing*. Last year's high-end parts are this year's midrange parts. I can now spend $180 and get a card that is faster than the Radeon 9800XT, a $500 card (when it was released).
Soon, a product with similar performance will be sold in the value segment for less than $100.
Slashdot Mirror
"And it doesn't need a ton of lead for the batteries, that you would need to dispose of when the car is "retired"."
Neither does the Prius. The HV battery is Ni-MH. Only the small aux battery (smaller than a normal car battery) is lead-acid.
"A Diahatsu Charade weighs 1587 lbs, Toyota Prius 2890 lbs."
The Charade is a tiny 2-door car with no power and a manual transmission. The Prius is a decently peppy 4-door midsize with an automatic (well, continuously variable) transmission.
If you want to compare hybrids to nonhybrids, compare similar vehicles. The Insight averages 63mpg, 40% better than the Charade - and that includes both the automatic and standard Insights (the standard Insight does even better).
Also note that aluminum is recycled more than any other material, except for steel. It makes economic sense to do so (far cheaper) and it can be recycled virtually indefinately.
Today's cars are also mostly made of steel.
Better not get in a collision in that Mini. Part of the reason that today's cars aren't super-light is the strength of the frame.
Also, how does the Mini do on emissions? I bet it doesn't even come close to ULEV, let alone SULEV or AT-PZEV (what the Prius has) certification.
A Toyota Prius gets similar fuel economy, is far roomier, has AC, does far better in a crash, accelerates faster, and has better emisisons.
How is that losing? It looks like a better vehicle than the Mini on most counts. At $21,000, it's not cheap, but I bet it's not a whole ton worse than the Mini was if you account for inflation.
"Turbo-Diesel owners have been seeing numbers in this range, or better, for years."
That's because diesel has more energy per gallon than gasoline. It also produces more carbon-dioxide per gallon.
You can't compare the two using "gallons".
"Otherwise most TDI Volkswagens have been able to outshine these numbers for years."
Again, totally not comparable. Not to mention that the US TDI does horribly on emissions tests. I haven't seen tests for the European model, but apparently it has trouble with US diesel blends (sulfur content).
Even the cleanest diesel engines running on sulfur-free diesel don't come close to the AT-PZEV rating of the Prius in terms of NOx and particulate emissions. Or, for that matter, carbon dioxide emissions (unless you use biodiesel).
"For anything serious it just isn't that good."
How so? It doesn't offer the color gamut of CRT, but it provides excellent sharpness, (relatively) low power usage, excellent burn-in resistance, long lifetime, thin size, and (as of recently) excellent response time.
LCD is the ideal technology for computer usage.
Now, as for displaying video, it has a way to go. But just about everything else does, too. Just in different ways.
"How about all the MS updates and patches on a rack at the local Best Buy? It would save a ton of re-update time on the modem."
c d/confirm.mspx
They already do this. My Office Depot had free CDs from Microsoft with SP2. You can also order it online for free.
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/
"It's a severe security-related bug, so the bug report is restricted."
And yet, when Microsoft does this, somehow it's "reprehensible".
Isn't the Open-Source model supposed to be, you know, open? The exploit is already in the wild. Blocking access to the bug doesn't do any good.
Not true. A decent processor with a codec like Realtek's ALC850 can handle 64 strems in hardware without issues.
NVIDIA's SoundStorm, for example, is excellent and compares well with discrete solutions.
VIA's "Vinyl" audio is also quite good.
There's also an onboard Creative Labs chip that's excellent.
If the 13-year-old had used a T-Mobile Sidekick / Danger Hiptop, there would be no contest.
I can regularly do 30WPM on the thumbkeyboard.
People laugh when they see the size of my phone. They stop laughing when they realize that I can actually type on it.
"Word screws with the styles something chronic. It creates styles on the fly, it has all sorts of styles 'select all 2 instances' which does nothing, and the style can't be deleted. My favourite feature is to randomly remove the numbering from my Heading 1..n styles, with no apparent way to get it back"
You, like many others, have no idea how to use styles in Word.
Yes, it creates styles as you apply formatting.
Yes, they are easy to delete. Format > Styles and Formatting > Click on arrow beside style > Click Delete.
"My favourite feature is to randomly remove the numbering from my Heading 1..n styles, with no apparent way to get it back."
Don't know what you're talking about. I've never had Word remove numbering "randomly". If you don't know how the program works, how are you suppsoed to use it?
"Then try to have a footer on every page. Then make one page landscape. Depending on your document, one of several things will happen:
Srolling the document causes a repagination. Unusable.
The footer on all the landscape pages flashes with a frequency of about 1 second between the width needed for portrait and the width needed for landscape. Don't touch the keyboard, just sit back and watch Word cry
It works fine. I've seen this behaviour once, far less often than the other two."
RESOLVED. Resolution: WORKSFORME.
"I hate Word. I really do. Buggy, slow and unintuitive."
That's just crap. You can't just make up shit and call it fact. It doesn't work.
Not even on Slashdot.
"MS Office is bloated, awkward and confusing."
Office is not bloated. On my system, Word takes 9MB. Hell, that's less than half of what Firefox takes. That's less than AbiWord.
OOo takes over 100M. That's nearly ten times more memory than Word. It also takes about 15 seconds to start - 3 times more than Word.
The installation directory is 95MB, considerably less than OpenOffice. The entire core suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook) installs from a 200MB CD - and that's with the dependencies, clipart, templates, and extras.
As for awkward, what exactly do you mean? For myself and nearly 400 million others, Office is perfectly normal. Style handling is considerably better in 2003, and the overall suite feels polished and clean.
After 6 versions for Windows, Office looks, feels, and behaves like a mature office suite. It hasn't crashed on me in months, it doesn't have any wierd quirks, it's feature-rich, and everything generally works pretty well.
Don't impugn Office unless you *really* use it. You'll find that OpenOffice.org is clumsy, buggy, and bloated.
IIS/6.0 on Windows Server 2003. Ever since it was in beta.
You mean how like the Hack IIS contest occurs on 20% of the world's web servers every day?
msn.com and microsoft.com both run IIS/6.0. Last time I checked, they haven't been hacked.
IIS 6.0 is actually a secure platform.
"Windows computers being infested with spyware and viruses"
The number one source (and, these days, usually the only source) of spyware is user action. Users downloading and executing untrusted code, generally to get something for free.
I know plenty of people who download and install "free" screensavers and other software that is loaded with spyware.
They click through big, sacry security warnings (two, in fact, with XP-SP2) to do so as well.
If they were on Linux, they'd gladly enter their root password.
"Gates will never be able to do that because of his success."
You know what? He doesn't care. Because, as cool looking and functional as Apple products are, Apple still only has ~4% of the market.
That's not changing anytime soon.
(non-real quotes)
Jobs: "We're better than you"
Gates: "It doesn't matter. We already won."
"Only two products in the entire company turn a profit."
Not the case. Windows, Windows Server, Exchange, MSSQL, Visual Studio, Office, Mac Office, and a number of other products are consistantly profitable. The mobile division has recently become profitable.
"Phantasy Star Online and the network adapter blew the GC wide open for cracking."
Kind of. The network adaptor is slower than the optical drive, so games take a long time to load and often have stuttering problems. Oh, and you need a 'Cube, a copy of PSO, and a network adaptor.
It's curbed the kind of pircay that Nintendo worries about - pirated games being mass-stamped. Their bottom line isn't affected if someone develops a difficult-to-use hack that allows you to play pirated games - there are simply too few people who are willing to do it.
Contrast that with the PS2 and XBox, where pirated releases are easy to get on the street.
"Of course, it's still easy to get around that, by shipping it with an ISA video card you found at the dump."
Power splitters qualify. Newegg even throws in one for free when you buy OEM Windows.
Only suckers pay $300 for Windows XP.
"You can almost get a whole Dell PC for less than the cost of a "valid" copy of Windows."
8 2E16837102151
http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N
Please tell me where you can get the $93 Dell PC.
Guess what? Dell and HP get Windows at a lower cost because *they buy more copies*.
They get Intel and AMD CPUs for less, too.
Wal-Mart gets better deals on the stuff they buy, too.
When you buy a lot, you get a cheaper price. That's just economics.
"Perhaps someone should tell them that a company called Free offers access up to 20 Megabits for 30/month in France."
Emphasis on "up to". The 1.5mbit service described isn't oversubscribed like the DSL you're referring to.
Also, 30 what? Euros? Dollars?
Hell, Verzion offers 30mbit for $50 a month in the US. It's called FIOS.
"Windows is not hard to crack at all once you have attained that level of access."
Well, no shit sherlock. Every OS, including Linux, is easily crackable if you have access to the hardware.
"Microsoft isn't going to give you a free ride FOREVER--they can't afford to."
Don't bet on it. Remember, Internet Explorer was a "free" web browser at a time when Netscape wanted money.
Microsoft will give away Office for free if they have to - if only to keep people running Windows.
"It seems like every 4-6 months there is a new line of cards out with slightly better specs in the 500 or so price range."
I belive that this is called "technological advancement".
Why should you be complaining? The Radeon 9600 XT is faster than your TI-4800, and it sells for under $100.
New cards being released is a *good thing*. Last year's high-end parts are this year's midrange parts. I can now spend $180 and get a card that is faster than the Radeon 9800XT, a $500 card (when it was released).
Soon, a product with similar performance will be sold in the value segment for less than $100.
Nothing is getting out of hand.
"because our RAM is naturally more expensive than third-party RAM; it's a volume issue"
If you can't get RAM cheaper than your customers, there is something seriously wrong with your supply chain.
Why should a person buying 4 DIMMs or a company buying 400 be able to get them for a lower price than Apple buying 40,000?
It doesn't make sense. The fact is, people buy 3rd party memory because you charge a pretty substantial markup. HP does the same thing.