Shortly after, the (unpublished) paper (by Lott and Whitley) discrediting the study was discredited. The re-ran the analysis using a different data set, and got the same results.
Actually, I expect that any winner will have some sort of regenerative braking system/power supplement system for acceleration. One old idea is to use braking forces to build pressure in a hydraulic reservoir, and then use that pressure to drive a supplemental hydraulic motor to aid in acceleration. Another is to charge batteries and use an electric motor.
It's pretty easy to hit a top speed of around 90MPH even with tiny gas engines, so I don't see that being a problem.
The 100MPG goal is definitely a stretch, but making it an easy to achieve goal isn't the point. You could likely build a reasonable 75MPG car with off-the-shelf tech today. That extra 25MPG makes things interesting. The Toyota Yaris gets 49MPG, and the Smart twofour gets 60MPG today, and they just run on straight internal combustion engines.
Plus, using imperial gallons instead of US gallons makes the mileage appear to be much higher;-)
I can think of a lot of places where I simply can't use a CFL. Maybe an LED based light would work, assuming I could actually buy one to fit, and it didn't cost $80...
- Appliances - Halogen light fixtures - Dimmable fixtures (dimmable CFL simply do not work properly...) - Outdoor lights (hey, it gets down to -40C in the winter, CFLs only last about 3-4 months in that environment if they work at all.) - Automotive lights (still no drop-in LED replacements for most turn signals. You often have to change the flasher unit.) - Any situation where you need LESS than a 60W bulb. Seriously, try to find a CFL with a light output similar to a 25W or 40W incandescent bulb.
I think it's important to make sure that there are alternatives to incandescent lights before banning them outright. Right now there are only reasonable alternatives to the standard 60/100w bulb.
I have replaced as many of the incandescents in my house as possible to CFLs, but not everything can be swapped out easily. I have 6 light fixtures that a CFL will simply not fit into since the CFL base is so large (yes, even the newest, smallest CFLs have bases that are wider than a standard bulb.) And I'm not about to spend $500 or more replacing light fixtures to save a few $ on electrical costs. And it's only this year that decent LED replacements are available for "landscape" lighting - sadly they all involve replacing the entire fixture instead of just swapping out the bulb.
You can get the "area is only so big" problem with LASIK and PRK. It's know as the ablation zone, and for most lasers it is only 5 or 6mm. If you have 8mm pupils, that is bad. The doc should measure your pupil size first before deciding if you can get the surgery. If they don't measure your pupil size, just find someone else to do the work!
I had a combo-surgery done - a point laser does a 6mm correction, and then a slit-scanning laser "tapers" the correction out to 11mm, all while maintaining a aspheric shape (the natural shape of the cornes, as opposed to most places with do a spheric correction.)
Takes a bit longer to do the surgery, and a bit longer to heal, but the results are supposed to be much better in the long term.
- Get the company to put in writing everything they will pay for
- House hunting trips (you need at least 2)
- Moving expenses (a lump sum? a percentage of total expenses?)
- Do you have to give back the moving allowance if you quit within 2 years? If you are laid off or fired?
- Will they pay to move you back to the East coast if they lay you off within 2 years?
- Sell everything you can. Beds, couches, dressers, tables, dishes and other items can all be bought again. It's usually cheaper to sell everything big and buy new stuff than it is to pay to have it moved across the country. If the company is paying for everything, then you don't have to worry about this. Beware that you can't deduct the cost of buying new stuff from your taxes - it might be cheaper in the long run to move everything after the tax deductions (it all depends on the value of the stuff you are selling!)
- Hire a company to move the stuff you don't sell. Don't even bother renting a U-haul or something like that. It doesn't save you that much money, and it's a huge pain in the ass. Look for a company that will drop a trailer/cargo container off at your house and let you pack it yourself. These are nice because all of your stuff stays in the one container until it gets to your new house. If you hire a company to pack and move your stuff, it will likely get moved between 3 or 4 trucks and warehouses by the time it makes it to your new house.
- Get extra insurance. The insurance that the moving company offers is usually just a bulk freight rate - a few pennies per pound. Check with your home owneres insurance to see if you are covered during the move, or if you need to buy extra insruance.
- Drive you car across the country. Not only can it be a great trip, but at least here in Canada the government gives you a living allowance plus a per-km rate you can deduct from your taxes. It's probably the only tax deductible vacation you are likely to ever get.
- Find some way to organize all of your receipts. Keep receipts for -everything- from now until a few months after you get into your new house. Let your tax accountant decide what to use and what to discard. Get into the habit of requesting a receipt for everything you buy, including a pack of gum at the gas station. It might be tax deductible.
- If you can, time your move to ensure you are living where the tax rate is the lowest when it matters. In Canada, you file your taxes in the province you are living in on December 31st of the tax year. Moving 1 day later could save or cost you thousands of dollars depending on what the tax rate difference is between the two locations.
Great advice, if you want to be a cripple by the time you are 40 years old. Running is possibly the worst thing you could do for your health. Stay at home in front of the PC and you are likely to have a healthier life.
Sure, running will give you great cardio fitness, but at the expense of arthritic ankles and knees.
If you REALLY want to get in shape, and be able to walk past your 50th birthday, take up swimming or cycling.
If you are going to spend the money to get a treadmill, get an elliptical machine instead. The good ones do a pretty good simulation of running uphill, but don't place much stress on the joints.
Forget about the HDTV tuner in this thing, I can live without that for another few years, I'm going to have to buy one of these for that line doubler. A stand alone line doubler costs over $2000 right now!
Now I'll be able to hook my PC up to that video projection system, and get a 120" TV that is watchable. Sweet.
I remember running Doom on my NeXTstation '040. 2-bit greyscale made it hard to even see the keys or monsters. No audio at all made it even harder to play. But the kicker was that it only ran at about 4 FPS.
But I -had- to play it, since it was developed on the NeXT platform, and I was a NeXT zealot at the time.
But reel.com doesn't rent movies anymore, they just sell them.
If you are stuck way out in the boonies, I think that satellite pay-per-view would be a better solution than Divx. Of course, it all depends on the selection of pay-per-view movies too. I think there is a better selection of movies on pay-per-view than there is on Divx, though.
And on a completely unrelated topic... anyone checked their cookies file today? Rob, stop it, you're killing me here. I can't get anything done when I'm ROTFLMAO all day!
I agree. Even though the NeXTstep interface is over 12 years old now, it is still the most powerful GUI on the planet. If the GNUstep project is succesful, then other flavours of UN*X will get to experience the same power and ease of use.
That's not to say that the NeXTstep interface didn't have it's problems, but it's really sad that even with all those problems, nothing else today matches what it offered 12 years ago (OK, BeOS comes close, and I haven't been able to play with MacOS X, which looks promising seeing as it's based on NeXTstep...)
The main problem with most GUIs is that they -are- just front-ends to a CLI program. To make a powerful GUI based application, you have to design it from scratch as such. There are plenty of things you can do with a GUI that you just can't do efficiently with a CLI, and vice-versa. Try using The GIMP sometime without the GUI...
One of the fundamental rules of user-interface design is that you can't design and build an application and then try to give it a nice interface. The interface has to be part of the initial design.
Hmmmm, I just checked the info from trailer 2 and trailer 3, and they both appear to be using the Sorenson Video CODEC.
I can easily attribute the lower quality image to the source being of lower quality (probably pulled off of broadcast TV and recorded to a VCR or something). But with trailer 2, which is larger, I don't get any skipped frames or flicker. Yet in trailer 3 there are several times when I get skipped frames.
Very odd. I'm not even going to attempt to explain it, since I am not very familiar with this stuff.
I know this is just fan art, but you can really spot the difference in the CODEC used on this movie vs. Trailer #2. Man, the CODEC for number 2 is amazing. Full screen playback on my PII/266 without a signle flicker, and the image was far better than any DVD I have seen. Incredible.
As for the content, it's Episode 1, how can you go wrong? The digital characters are stunning to say the least. Makes the dinos in JP look like claymation models. Check out the way the clothing moves! And those ears on Jar Jar!
Has anyone heard any rumours on the running time of the film? 2 hours? 3 hours? I need to find out just how many times I can see it the first day...
I was amazed at the stuff that made it past the network censors:
- A hard-drinking robot named Bender (hee hee hee) - The line "I don't want people to think we're robosexuals... just tell people you're my debugger." - Bender actually shit a brick when he was scared.
My favorite gadget is still my almost-4-year-old Casio Triple Sensor watch. Nice digital watch, digital compass, alitmeter, barometer, and thermometer all in one. It kicks ass.
I bought a nice CDMA Sony/Qualcomm phone last year, and I use it as my primary phone now (the phone line at home stays just for modem use, until I upgrade to ADSL this summer that is!) It keeps all of my phone nubmers, and I keep my schedule in my head, so there is no need for a PalmPilot or the like. But that's hardly a gadget to me anymore, as it is my main phone now.
It has a text-messaging feature, so I'm considering hacking together some software that will send me a message when I'm late for an appointment or something. The schedule in my head isn't 100% accurate all the time...
The gadget I most desire right now is a replacement to the Casio Triple Sensor. As soon as a watch hits the market that is at least as small as the Triple Sensor, and has a built-in GPS, it is mine. I don't care how much it costs.
I think it would be great to have the Threaded view for the main comments page, and then the Netsted view for displaying the contents of each thread. Oooohhh, whizzy. Now that would be a nice option to have.
Let me get this straight... on a $5000 car stereo system, the MP3'd CD sounded horrible, yet on an el-cheapo pair of headphones, it sounded great? This makes no sense to me. How could you possibly get better sound out of some cheap headphones than out of a $5000 stereo system, no matter what the source is?
> A suggestion I have: put the score of the follow-ups > next to their links in the threaded mode. That way it's > easier to tell if there is a decent follow-up to an article.
Less than an hour after this suggestion was made, it is already implemented and rolled out for use. Rob, you rock!
The 'Preview' button on the 'Post Comment' pages no longer gives you a Preview of your comments. It either shows the post you are replying to, or nothing at all if it is a top-level post (like this one.)
What I would love to see is a way to 'filter out' the articles I have already read. Maybe each time I click on a link, a small update is added to my cookie, and the next time I connect to that article, all of the follow-ups I already clicked on dissapear.
Or a simpler system, where the last time I clicked on a link for any given article, the time is recorded, and the next time I visit that article, I can hit a button that will hide all of the replies older than the time that is recorded for me. Of course, with that method, articles that I haven't read, but are old, would get hidden as well.
That way I could read a few of the articles, go away, come back later and finish off the ones I haven't read yet.
Much like a USENET newsreader, there needs to be someway to tag the articles I have seen already as 'read', so I don't have to wade through them again.
Slashdot Mirror
Shortly after, the (unpublished) paper (by Lott and Whitley) discrediting the study was discredited. The re-ran the analysis using a different data set, and got the same results.
2. fuel efficient = excessively low acceleration and/or low top speed
;-)
Actually, I expect that any winner will have some sort of regenerative braking system/power supplement system for acceleration. One old idea is to use braking forces to build pressure in a hydraulic reservoir, and then use that pressure to drive a supplemental hydraulic motor to aid in acceleration. Another is to charge batteries and use an electric motor.
It's pretty easy to hit a top speed of around 90MPH even with tiny gas engines, so I don't see that being a problem.
The 100MPG goal is definitely a stretch, but making it an easy to achieve goal isn't the point. You could likely build a reasonable 75MPG car with off-the-shelf tech today. That extra 25MPG makes things interesting. The Toyota Yaris gets 49MPG, and the Smart twofour gets 60MPG today, and they just run on straight internal combustion engines.
Plus, using imperial gallons instead of US gallons makes the mileage appear to be much higher
I can think of a lot of places where I simply can't use a CFL. Maybe an LED based light would work, assuming I could actually buy one to fit, and it didn't cost $80...
- Appliances
- Halogen light fixtures
- Dimmable fixtures (dimmable CFL simply do not work properly...)
- Outdoor lights (hey, it gets down to -40C in the winter, CFLs only last about 3-4 months in that environment if they work at all.)
- Automotive lights (still no drop-in LED replacements for most turn signals. You often have to change the flasher unit.)
- Any situation where you need LESS than a 60W bulb. Seriously, try to find a CFL with a light output similar to a 25W or 40W incandescent bulb.
I think it's important to make sure that there are alternatives to incandescent lights before banning them outright. Right now there are only reasonable alternatives to the standard 60/100w bulb.
I have replaced as many of the incandescents in my house as possible to CFLs, but not everything can be swapped out easily. I have 6 light fixtures that a CFL will simply not fit into since the CFL base is so large (yes, even the newest, smallest CFLs have bases that are wider than a standard bulb.) And I'm not about to spend $500 or more replacing light fixtures to save a few $ on electrical costs. And it's only this year that decent LED replacements are available for "landscape" lighting - sadly they all involve replacing the entire fixture instead of just swapping out the bulb.
I think that this guy must have been raised in a centrifuge.
You can get the "area is only so big" problem with LASIK and PRK. It's know as the ablation zone, and for most lasers it is only 5 or 6mm. If you have 8mm pupils, that is bad. The doc should measure your pupil size first before deciding if you can get the surgery. If they don't measure your pupil size, just find someone else to do the work!
I had a combo-surgery done - a point laser does a 6mm correction, and then a slit-scanning laser "tapers" the correction out to 11mm, all while maintaining a aspheric shape (the natural shape of the cornes, as opposed to most places with do a spheric correction.)
Takes a bit longer to do the surgery, and a bit longer to heal, but the results are supposed to be much better in the long term.
The 3 pound stylus arm keeps it from skipping!
You're just jealous :-)
--
My other UID is 4 digits
- Get the company to put in writing everything they will pay for
- House hunting trips (you need at least 2)
- Moving expenses (a lump sum? a percentage of total expenses?)
- Do you have to give back the moving allowance if you quit within 2 years? If you are laid off or fired?
- Will they pay to move you back to the East coast if they lay you off within 2 years?
- Sell everything you can. Beds, couches, dressers, tables, dishes and other items can all be bought again. It's usually cheaper to sell everything big and buy new stuff than it is to pay to have it moved across the country. If the company is paying for everything, then you don't have to worry about this. Beware that you can't deduct the cost of buying new stuff from your taxes - it might be cheaper in the long run to move everything after the tax deductions (it all depends on the value of the stuff you are selling!)
- Hire a company to move the stuff you don't sell. Don't even bother renting a U-haul or something like that. It doesn't save you that much money, and it's a huge pain in the ass. Look for a company that will drop a trailer/cargo container off at your house and let you pack it yourself. These are nice because all of your stuff stays in the one container until it gets to your new house. If you hire a company to pack and move your stuff, it will likely get moved between 3 or 4 trucks and warehouses by the time it makes it to your new house.
- Get extra insurance. The insurance that the moving company offers is usually just a bulk freight rate - a few pennies per pound. Check with your home owneres insurance to see if you are covered during the move, or if you need to buy extra insruance.
- Drive you car across the country. Not only can it be a great trip, but at least here in Canada the government gives you a living allowance plus a per-km rate you can deduct from your taxes. It's probably the only tax deductible vacation you are likely to ever get.
- Find some way to organize all of your receipts. Keep receipts for -everything- from now until a few months after you get into your new house. Let your tax accountant decide what to use and what to discard. Get into the habit of requesting a receipt for everything you buy, including a pack of gum at the gas station. It might be tax deductible.
- If you can, time your move to ensure you are living where the tax rate is the lowest when it matters. In Canada, you file your taxes in the province you are living in on December 31st of the tax year. Moving 1 day later could save or cost you thousands of dollars depending on what the tax rate difference is between the two locations.
Great advice, if you want to be a cripple by the time you are 40 years old. Running is possibly the worst thing you could do for your health. Stay at home in front of the PC and you are likely to have a healthier life.
Sure, running will give you great cardio fitness, but at the expense of arthritic ankles and knees.
If you REALLY want to get in shape, and be able to walk past your 50th birthday, take up swimming or cycling.
If you are going to spend the money to get a treadmill, get an elliptical machine instead. The good ones do a pretty good simulation of running uphill, but don't place much stress on the joints.
Forget about the HDTV tuner in this thing, I can live without that for another few years, I'm going to have to buy one of these for that line doubler. A stand alone line doubler costs over $2000 right now!
Now I'll be able to hook my PC up to that video projection system, and get a 120" TV that is watchable. Sweet.
I remember running Doom on my NeXTstation '040. 2-bit greyscale made it hard to even see the keys or monsters. No audio at all made it even harder to play. But the kicker was that it only ran at about 4 FPS.
But I -had- to play it, since it was developed on the NeXT platform, and I was a NeXT zealot at the time.
But reel.com doesn't rent movies anymore, they just sell them.
If you are stuck way out in the boonies, I think that satellite pay-per-view would be a better solution than Divx. Of course, it all depends on the selection of pay-per-view movies too. I think there is a better selection of movies on pay-per-view than there is on Divx, though.
And on a completely unrelated topic... anyone checked their cookies file today? Rob, stop it, you're killing me here. I can't get anything done when I'm ROTFLMAO all day!
I agree. Even though the NeXTstep interface is over 12 years old now, it is still the most powerful GUI on the planet. If the GNUstep project is succesful, then other flavours of UN*X will get to experience the same power and ease of use.
That's not to say that the NeXTstep interface didn't have it's problems, but it's really sad that even with all those problems, nothing else today matches what it offered 12 years ago (OK, BeOS comes close, and I haven't been able to play with MacOS X, which looks promising seeing as it's based on NeXTstep...)
The main problem with most GUIs is that they -are- just front-ends to a CLI program. To make a powerful GUI based application, you have to design it from scratch as such. There are plenty of things you can do with a GUI that you just can't do efficiently with a CLI, and vice-versa. Try using The GIMP sometime without the GUI...
One of the fundamental rules of user-interface design is that you can't design and build an application and then try to give it a nice interface. The interface has to be part of the initial design.
Hmmmm, I just checked the info from trailer 2 and trailer 3, and they both appear to be using the Sorenson Video CODEC.
I can easily attribute the lower quality image to the source being of lower quality (probably pulled off of broadcast TV and recorded to a VCR or something). But with trailer 2, which is larger, I don't get any skipped frames or flicker. Yet in trailer 3 there are several times when I get skipped frames.
Very odd. I'm not even going to attempt to explain it, since I am not very familiar with this stuff.
I know this is just fan art, but you can really spot the difference in the CODEC used on this movie vs. Trailer #2. Man, the CODEC for number 2 is amazing. Full screen playback on my PII/266 without a signle flicker, and the image was far better than any DVD I have seen. Incredible.
As for the content, it's Episode 1, how can you go wrong? The digital characters are stunning to say the least. Makes the dinos in JP look like claymation models. Check out the way the clothing moves! And those ears on Jar Jar!
Has anyone heard any rumours on the running time of the film? 2 hours? 3 hours? I need to find out just how many times I can see it the first day...
Mulder and Scully were on the shelf o' heads too. I have the episode on tape, I'll try to figure out what some of the other heads were.
I was amazed at the stuff that made it past the network censors:
- A hard-drinking robot named Bender (hee hee hee)
- The line "I don't want people to think we're robosexuals... just tell people you're my debugger."
- Bender actually shit a brick when he was scared.
Anyone catch anything else sneaky?
My favorite gadget is still my almost-4-year-old Casio Triple Sensor watch. Nice digital watch, digital compass, alitmeter, barometer, and thermometer all in one. It kicks ass.
I bought a nice CDMA Sony/Qualcomm phone last year, and I use it as my primary phone now (the phone line at home stays just for modem use, until I upgrade to ADSL this summer that is!) It keeps all of my phone nubmers, and I keep my schedule in my head, so there is no need for a PalmPilot or the like. But that's hardly a gadget to me anymore, as it is my main phone now.
It has a text-messaging feature, so I'm considering hacking together some software that will send me a message when I'm late for an appointment or something. The schedule in my head isn't 100% accurate all the time...
The gadget I most desire right now is a replacement to the Casio Triple Sensor. As soon as a watch hits the market that is at least as small as the Triple Sensor, and has a built-in GPS, it is mine. I don't care how much it costs.
I think it would be great to have the Threaded view for the main comments page, and then the Netsted view for displaying the contents of each thread. Oooohhh, whizzy. Now that would be a nice option to have.
Let me get this straight... on a $5000 car stereo system, the MP3'd CD sounded horrible, yet on an el-cheapo pair of headphones, it sounded great? This makes no sense to me. How could you possibly get better sound out of some cheap headphones than out of a $5000 stereo system, no matter what the source is?
> A suggestion I have: put the score of the follow-ups
> next to their links in the threaded mode. That way it's
> easier to tell if there is a decent follow-up to an article.
Less than an hour after this suggestion was made, it is already implemented and rolled out for use. Rob, you rock!
The 'Preview' button on the 'Post Comment' pages no longer gives you a Preview of your comments. It either shows the post you are replying to, or nothing at all if it is a top-level post (like this one.)
What I would love to see is a way to 'filter out' the articles I have already read. Maybe each time I click on a link, a small update is added to my cookie, and the next time I connect to that article, all of the follow-ups I already clicked on dissapear.
Or a simpler system, where the last time I clicked on a link for any given article, the time is recorded, and the next time I visit that article, I can hit a button that will hide all of the replies older than the time that is recorded for me. Of course, with that method, articles that I haven't read, but are old, would get hidden as well.
That way I could read a few of the articles, go away, come back later and finish off the ones I haven't read yet.
Much like a USENET newsreader, there needs to be someway to tag the articles I have seen already as 'read', so I don't have to wade through them again.