although I mostly agree with the wind issue (I've experienced that a few times myself) I am not quite sure I understand the rest of your observations and I'd like to qualify the wind issue a bit more anyways.
The wind is a problem if you happen to sit fairly high up on a motorbike with a big side profile (aka most 'high performance' road bikes). Even if said bike weighed a lot you'd probably still be moved around quite a bit as you go fast. The wind is a lot less of an issue on choppers since you're sitting way lower and they have way smaller side profiles.
= has trouble hugging curves in mountain roads
huh? What does weight have to do with anything when talking about cornering? You don't see MotoGP riders strapping anvils to their bikes to corner better, do you?
= needs more acceleration to stay at speed despite drag.
this doesn't make any sense: AFAIK the drag is proportional to the bike's frontal area, not to its weight.
= while a heavier bike will absorb more momentum.
if you collide with a car and you're on a motorbike you're going to be thrown off it whether or not the motorbike weighs 200lb or 500lb: most/all cars outweigh you by an order of magnitude anyways, and let's not even talk about SUVs.
= these collisions are really terrible mismatches for a bike, especially one which can't jet out of the way at higher speeds
most of the bike-car collisions I've seen/heard about couldn't be avoided by being able to accelerate or go faster: if that was the case there would be no accidents involving high performance road bikes, right?
Personally I think this bike is perfect for European city commuting (since it's near silent and non-polluting odds are you'll be able to drive it in the city centres that are currently off-limits to mopeds and motorbikes) but won't really do much here in North America, although you might see the odd one around (like I've seen a S.M.A.R.T. car the other day, the likes of which you see way more often in Europe).
The 80kph speed limit is about perfect as well, as traffic usually moves around at 50-70kph in town: my old moped was capable of hitting 60-65kph (on a good day, with some tailwind) and having an extra 20kph would be way more than enough for those times where traffic is moving faster than usual.
Other games I wish somebody would 'update' for modern PCs are
- Midwinter (Atari ST) - Stunt Car Racer (Atari ST) - Powerdrome (Atari ST, not the nerfed Amiga version) - The original X-wing (PC) - Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 (PC, I think somebody is working on them)
on redhat 9, and have seen it for many months: basically after using firefox heavily for a while (many tabs open and closed, often on complex pages) firefox will start eating 100% CPU and become slow as molasses and never recover.
I've never left it running enough to actually crash, I just open a terminal window, kill it and restart it and it's back to its usual snappy self again.
I've never bothered to report this because I don't have a good repro scenario, although I do see this I'd say 2-3 times every day.
is very noticeably faster on my system, for a bit I was running a single HD (due to other issues) and as soon as I added the 2nd and mirrored it my XP boot time has gone down by around 40% as well as Half Life 2 load times.
I know I am paying a penalty in write speed but the doubled read speed more than makes up for it. With HDs as cheap as they are now (I have 2x200G Seagate SATA) and RAID controllers integrated in most mobos (I have a Silicon Image in my a8n-sli board, which I prefer to the nvidia chipset raid) I think it's stupid *not* to go the RAID route, as with a very modest cash outlay (for a 2nd HD, or for a 3rd and 4th if you plan to run RAID0+1) you'll see a noticeable speedup, not to mention that if one of your HDs packs it in you won't be SOL.
I really don't think the imdb folks would sell anyways.
On a related note I just wish the folks at zap2it licensed IMDB's scores (rather than the usual 4 stars which often are completely bogus) on my linux box I use freeguide + tv_imdb to achieve the integration but it's too slow (freeguide is VERY slow, and it takes a while to do the tv_imdb pass, and no I don't keep my box on 24/7 so I can't cron it at 2am) and on my (much faster) win32 gaming box I haven't found any TV listings app that I can use the same way (currently running freeguide which, again, is way slow despite the computer being an a64-3500+: this is one of the cases I wish somebody wrote a native win32 app for this)
my TV is connected to my digital cable box via component inputs, which is a heck of a lot better than the RF I'd be getting out of a 350
having mythtv would mean that I might be tempted to rip all my DVDs to avoid the constant disk shuffling, but I wouldn't be able to do that due to, again, the video quality issues.
The PVR from my cable company (which would cost me not that much more than a mythtv setup) although abysmal from the functionality standpoint does output in component *and* even downconverts HDTV to 480i: I'd much prefer to use mythtv but I'm starting to feel the pull towards that one instead, that's why I was asking if anybody knew of ways to fix my concerns.
been thinking about mythtv for a while...
on
MythTV 0.17 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
... but the thought of going from component input to coax irks me a lot (I also like how my non-hd Sony tv is able to 'compress' the DVD output so I get more lines of resolution for example, which I don't think would happen off a wintv pvr-350), what do people here do?
I'd like to have a mythtv box in the basement, drops in a few rooms and some sort of wireless system to remote control it all from wherever, but if the video quality will drop noticeably it wouldn't really be worth it.
...visually impaired people? It should be trivial to have a speech synthesizer create wavs on demand that pronounce the CAPTCHA and then ask the user to type it in.
thanks for the tips, I wanted AGP because I would like to have a decent performing graphics card (say, a 6800GT) while the only thing I can find in PCIe are 6600s: oh well, it looks like I'll have to wait a while longer for my upgrade:/
and I would really like to finally upgrade: I'd love to have an SMP box again but I'm really not sure if it's possible at all nowadays, what are my options (at a reasonable price point) for something in the 2xAthlon64/3500+ performance range (I know Athlon64s are not SMP-capable).
The option(s) seem to be Xeon and Opteron, but I'm not quite sure which mobos are best and most supported and/or which one of them is the most cost effective (also including RAM costs). My typical usage is linux (would vmware it in this case), win32 games (would prefer AGP to PCIe) and music (hauptwerk -> I need lots of RAM (2-3gigs) and CPU power).
I don't think I can wait another year for multicore CPUs to come out (already been waiting forever).
many times these days when you buy a digital camera or a scanner or a printer there is a preferential upgrade path from the bundled elements to full PS for US$299.
Most people who learn English as a second language tend to have a very good command of its written form; this is because in most schools abroad English is taught following a grammar-first/speech-later approach.
My spoken English, and especially my understanding of it, has improved by leaps and bounds since I started living in an English speaking country (Canada). I wish I could say the same about my writing: due to being constantly exposed to your/you're and similar constructs, I feel its quality has definitely decreased.
if you get a lot of hits even if you do this you won't be able to go too far before google will complain: it's not very hard to get lots of hits on broad queries even if you limit by group.
Also now you wouldn't be able to do things like, for example, if you were interested in it for historical reasons, searching posts on Freddie Mercury's (or Ayrton Senna's) death for the month after it happened.
Not to mention that when you sort by date things are not sorted by relevance at all, which means you likely will get A LOT more crap you have to wade through: limiting by date means that you can ignore time periods you're not interested in *AND* still sort by relevance.
search by date is the most useful feature when searching about many topics, often limiting the search to the last 2 years (or excluding the last 4 for example) yelds the results that one is looking for much more easily.
I have bookmarks to specific articles/threads it took me a long time to find and to which I refer now and then and if they stop working the usefulness of google groups for me will be much reduced...
As much as I understand why they would want to make USENET look more like a message board for people who never really grew up with it (usenet and gopher were mostly all we had back when I first went online) I still think that not having this functionality available for people who know how to make the most of it is very backward thinking.
as much as we agree on going intel chipsets for intel CPUs, why do you prefer via to nforce on amd? I've always been under the impression that recent nforce products are much better than via's offerings in features *and* compatibility/stability
I mean, come on, NONE and I mean NONE of my local computer stores have in stock ANY 6800GT (you have to preorder, takes quite a while to get it) or ANY 6800Ultra (don't think they *ever* had one in stock period) AGP. The only cards that seem to be fairly available are vanilla 6800s and even then they have been available for a month tops.
Given that the GT/Ultra AGP cards have been announced *several months* ago, before their PCIe versions will be available likely NVidia will have already announced the 8xxxx series or something.
I fondly remember being able to buy video cards max. 2 weeks after they were announced, then it was a month, then two, and now it seems cards become available together with the paper launch of the new models:(
I really feel for the stores, though, it must suck being able to stock only 'previous generation' parts.
if digital signing was mandatory and everybody had certs (chicken and egg problem the poster was alluding to) their name would *NOT* be associated to anything untowards, as it would be impossible to spoof an email from somebody else (yeah, you could munge the 'from:' but your mail client would alert you that the email has an invalid signature (and possibly if this is the case the mail wouldn't even get routed in the first place)).
by doing a biopsy of the lung lining of various infants at various ages? although not that many children die there should be enough deaths to make this a viable proposition (if doing such a biopsy on a healthy child is impossible).
If you don't see any abnormalities in the lining/alveoli wouldn't it be possible to assume that this would not be a factor? I'm sure there might be more snags about this as otherwise people wouldn't still be investigating the possibility...
you've saved in research costs thanks to this/. post:)
More seriously, hey, I know that one datapoint a theory does not prove/disprove (since we're talking about likelyhood here) and I should definitely have phrased my answer differently (instead of writing 'there goes your theory'), but as theories go the one that c-sections have an impact on allergies seems a bit far fetched, as I don't think c-section rates are *that* different from here to Europe while (at least anecdotally, based on my experience) allergy rates do seem to be.
Obviously I can speak only for me, my friends and acquaintances, but I do think that some environmental factors might be a more likely culprit rather than c-sections: good luck in finding out what the real cause is...
funny but I take you haven't met my mom, who, although not a cleaningless freak, did keep a spotless house and encouraged me to learn proper hygiene from an early age:-)
The more I think about this the more I wonder if the prevalence of carpeting as a flooring material here in North America is to blame for the much higher incidence of allergies, as where I'm from pretty much everybody has marble/tiles/cotto/hardwood floors and basically nobody has carpet.
Also since it's not customary at all to have visitors remove their shoes, people tend to wash their floors at least daily, where people here probably wash their carpets once a year (if that much).
ummm, I was born via a c-section and was not breastfed (strikes 1 and 2 against developing a good immune system) and I have absolutely 0 allergies (pets or food) and have never had any sort of throat/lung problems (knock on wood), there goes the c-section theory.
BTW, I am originally from Europe, and it seems allergies are WAY more common here in North America (I don't think I've ever *met* a person allergic to something before moving here, where I'd say 20-30% of the people I know have an allergy of some kind, most of the time to cats but often to peanuts/eggs).
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although I mostly agree with the wind issue (I've experienced that a few times myself) I am not quite sure I understand the rest of your observations and I'd like to qualify the wind issue a bit more anyways.
The wind is a problem if you happen to sit fairly high up on a motorbike with a big side profile (aka most 'high performance' road bikes). Even if said bike weighed a lot you'd probably still be moved around quite a bit as you go fast. The wind is a lot less of an issue on choppers since you're sitting way lower and they have way smaller side profiles.
= has trouble hugging curves in mountain roads
huh? What does weight have to do with anything when talking about cornering? You don't see MotoGP riders strapping anvils to their bikes to corner better, do you?
= needs more acceleration to stay at speed despite drag.
this doesn't make any sense: AFAIK the drag is proportional to the bike's frontal area, not to its weight.
= while a heavier bike will absorb more momentum.
if you collide with a car and you're on a motorbike you're going to be thrown off it whether or not the motorbike weighs 200lb or 500lb: most/all cars outweigh you by an order of magnitude anyways, and let's not even talk about SUVs.
= these collisions are really terrible mismatches for a bike, especially one which can't jet out of the way at higher speeds
most of the bike-car collisions I've seen/heard about couldn't be avoided by being able to accelerate or go faster: if that was the case there would be no accidents involving high performance road bikes, right?
Personally I think this bike is perfect for European city commuting (since it's near silent and non-polluting odds are you'll be able to drive it in the city centres that are currently off-limits to mopeds and motorbikes) but won't really do much here in North America, although you might see the odd one around (like I've seen a S.M.A.R.T. car the other day, the likes of which you see way more often in Europe).
The 80kph speed limit is about perfect as well, as traffic usually moves around at 50-70kph in town: my old moped was capable of hitting 60-65kph (on a good day, with some tailwind) and having an extra 20kph would be way more than enough for those times where traffic is moving faster than usual.
it should be even better!
I loved the game on my old Atari ST...
Other games I wish somebody would 'update' for modern PCs are
- Midwinter (Atari ST)
- Stunt Car Racer (Atari ST)
- Powerdrome (Atari ST, not the nerfed Amiga version)
- The original X-wing (PC)
- Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 (PC, I think somebody is working on them)
on redhat 9, and have seen it for many months: basically after using firefox heavily for a while (many tabs open and closed, often on complex pages) firefox will start eating 100% CPU and become slow as molasses and never recover.
I've never left it running enough to actually crash, I just open a terminal window, kill it and restart it and it's back to its usual snappy self again.
I've never bothered to report this because I don't have a good repro scenario, although I do see this I'd say 2-3 times every day.
is very noticeably faster on my system, for a bit I was running a single HD (due to other issues) and as soon as I added the 2nd and mirrored it my XP boot time has gone down by around 40% as well as Half Life 2 load times.
I know I am paying a penalty in write speed but the doubled read speed more than makes up for it. With HDs as cheap as they are now (I have 2x200G Seagate SATA) and RAID controllers integrated in most mobos (I have a Silicon Image in my a8n-sli board, which I prefer to the nvidia chipset raid) I think it's stupid *not* to go the RAID route, as with a very modest cash outlay (for a 2nd HD, or for a 3rd and 4th if you plan to run RAID0+1) you'll see a noticeable speedup, not to mention that if one of your HDs packs it in you won't be SOL.
I really don't think the imdb folks would sell anyways.
On a related note I just wish the folks at zap2it licensed IMDB's scores (rather than the usual 4 stars which often are completely bogus) on my linux box I use freeguide + tv_imdb to achieve the integration but it's too slow (freeguide is VERY slow, and it takes a while to do the tv_imdb pass, and no I don't keep my box on 24/7 so I can't cron it at 2am) and on my (much faster) win32 gaming box I haven't found any TV listings app that I can use the same way (currently running freeguide which, again, is way slow despite the computer being an a64-3500+: this is one of the cases I wish somebody wrote a native win32 app for this)
my TV is connected to my digital cable box via component inputs, which is a heck of a lot better than the RF I'd be getting out of a 350
having mythtv would mean that I might be tempted to rip all my DVDs to avoid the constant disk shuffling, but I wouldn't be able to do that due to, again, the video quality issues.
The PVR from my cable company (which would cost me not that much more than a mythtv setup) although abysmal from the functionality standpoint does output in component *and* even downconverts HDTV to 480i: I'd much prefer to use mythtv but I'm starting to feel the pull towards that one instead, that's why I was asking if anybody knew of ways to fix my concerns.
... but the thought of going from component input to coax irks me a lot (I also like how my non-hd Sony tv is able to 'compress' the DVD output so I get more lines of resolution for example, which I don't think would happen off a wintv pvr-350), what do people here do?
I'd like to have a mythtv box in the basement, drops in a few rooms and some sort of wireless system to remote control it all from wherever, but if the video quality will drop noticeably it wouldn't really be worth it.
CDRs and DVDRs? I used to back things up on Kodak Gold CDs but I can't find them anymore :/
...visually impaired people? It should be trivial to have a speech synthesizer create wavs on demand that pronounce the CAPTCHA and then ask the user to type it in.
thanks for the tips, I wanted AGP because I would like to have a decent performing graphics card (say, a 6800GT) while the only thing I can find in PCIe are 6600s: oh well, it looks like I'll have to wait a while longer for my upgrade :/
and I would really like to finally upgrade: I'd love to have an SMP box again but I'm really not sure if it's possible at all nowadays, what are my options (at a reasonable price point) for something in the 2xAthlon64/3500+ performance range (I know Athlon64s are not SMP-capable).
The option(s) seem to be Xeon and Opteron, but I'm not quite sure which mobos are best and most supported and/or which one of them is the most cost effective (also including RAM costs). My typical usage is linux (would vmware it in this case), win32 games (would prefer AGP to PCIe) and music (hauptwerk -> I need lots of RAM (2-3gigs) and CPU power).
I don't think I can wait another year for multicore CPUs to come out (already been waiting forever).
many times these days when you buy a digital camera or a scanner or a printer there is a preferential upgrade path from the bundled elements to full PS for US$299.
Most people who learn English as a second language tend to have a very good command of its written form; this is because in most schools abroad English is taught following a grammar-first/speech-later approach.
My spoken English, and especially my understanding of it, has improved by leaps and bounds since I started living in an English speaking country (Canada). I wish I could say the same about my writing: due to being constantly exposed to your/you're and similar constructs, I feel its quality has definitely decreased.
if you get a lot of hits even if you do this you won't be able to go too far before google will complain: it's not very hard to get lots of hits on broad queries even if you limit by group.
Also now you wouldn't be able to do things like, for example, if you were interested in it for historical reasons, searching posts on Freddie Mercury's (or Ayrton Senna's) death for the month after it happened.
Not to mention that when you sort by date things are not sorted by relevance at all, which means you likely will get A LOT more crap you have to wade through: limiting by date means that you can ignore time periods you're not interested in *AND* still sort by relevance.
search by date is the most useful feature when searching about many topics, often limiting the search to the last 2 years (or excluding the last 4 for example) yelds the results that one is looking for much more easily.
I have bookmarks to specific articles/threads it took me a long time to find and to which I refer now and then and if they stop working the usefulness of google groups for me will be much reduced...
As much as I understand why they would want to make USENET look more like a message board for people who never really grew up with it (usenet and gopher were mostly all we had back when I first went online) I still think that not having this functionality available for people who know how to make the most of it is very backward thinking.
as much as we agree on going intel chipsets for intel CPUs, why do you prefer via to nforce on amd? I've always been under the impression that recent nforce products are much better than via's offerings in features *and* compatibility/stability
Knights of the Grand Solid Halo-Life 2
:)
right?
I mean, come on, NONE and I mean NONE of my local computer stores have in stock ANY 6800GT (you have to preorder, takes quite a while to get it) or ANY 6800Ultra (don't think they *ever* had one in stock period) AGP. The only cards that seem to be fairly available are vanilla 6800s and even then they have been available for a month tops.
:(
Given that the GT/Ultra AGP cards have been announced *several months* ago, before their PCIe versions will be available likely NVidia will have already announced the 8xxxx series or something.
I fondly remember being able to buy video cards max. 2 weeks after they were announced, then it was a month, then two, and now it seems cards become available together with the paper launch of the new models
I really feel for the stores, though, it must suck being able to stock only 'previous generation' parts.
if digital signing was mandatory and everybody had certs (chicken and egg problem the poster was alluding to) their name would *NOT* be associated to anything untowards, as it would be impossible to spoof an email from somebody else (yeah, you could munge the 'from:' but your mail client would alert you that the email has an invalid signature (and possibly if this is the case the mail wouldn't even get routed in the first place)).
by doing a biopsy of the lung lining of various infants at various ages? although not that many children die there should be enough deaths to make this a viable proposition (if doing such a biopsy on a healthy child is impossible).
If you don't see any abnormalities in the lining/alveoli wouldn't it be possible to assume that this would not be a factor? I'm sure there might be more snags about this as otherwise people wouldn't still be investigating the possibility...
you've saved in research costs thanks to this /. post :)
More seriously, hey, I know that one datapoint a theory does not prove/disprove (since we're talking about likelyhood here) and I should definitely have phrased my answer differently (instead of writing 'there goes your theory'), but as theories go the one that c-sections have an impact on allergies seems a bit far fetched, as I don't think c-section rates are *that* different from here to Europe while (at least anecdotally, based on my experience) allergy rates do seem to be.
Obviously I can speak only for me, my friends and acquaintances, but I do think that some environmental factors might be a more likely culprit rather than c-sections: good luck in finding out what the real cause is...
funny but I take you haven't met my mom, who, although not a cleaningless freak, did keep a spotless house and encouraged me to learn proper hygiene from an early age :-)
The more I think about this the more I wonder if the prevalence of carpeting as a flooring material here in North America is to blame for the much higher incidence of allergies, as where I'm from pretty much everybody has marble/tiles/cotto/hardwood floors and basically nobody has carpet.
Also since it's not customary at all to have visitors remove their shoes, people tend to wash their floors at least daily, where people here probably wash their carpets once a year (if that much).
ummm, I was born via a c-section and was not breastfed (strikes 1 and 2 against developing a good immune system) and I have absolutely 0 allergies (pets or food) and have never had any sort of throat/lung problems (knock on wood), there goes the c-section theory.
BTW, I am originally from Europe, and it seems allergies are WAY more common here in North America (I don't think I've ever *met* a person allergic to something before moving here, where I'd say 20-30% of the people I know have an allergy of some kind, most of the time to cats but often to peanuts/eggs).
Knights of the Old Republic 2 (which, together with San Andreas and Halo 2) is one of the games I've been looking forward the most to.
I have to say that this year there are way better games coming out for consoles than for PCs, at least from a single player perspective.