what fairytale are you living in? humanity is just as bad as it always has been.
What fairytale are you living in? Humanity has become much less violent, much more intelligent, and much more productive over the last few centuries.
*Less* violent? You historical ignorance is showing - medieval battle was pretty much hacking each other to bits until there were only a handful still standing, so that's violent, but pales in comparison in scale with the mechanized violence that was more or less perfected in the American Civil War and the First World War. How can you say mines ("torpedoes" in the Civil War-era), Gatling/machine guns, tanks, grenades, modern cavalry/infantry tactics, and poison gas are less violent? Humanity *is* as bad as it' always been, but modern societal structures now make it possible (and much more likely) to spread the misery of tyranny to billions, rather than just the tyrant's local domain - the incredible difficulty of scale was what makes Khan and Alexander so remarkable, but the 20th century alone gave us Hitler, Lenin/Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, who arguably make Genghis and Alex look almost like good guys...
*More* intelligent? Again, You're apparently unaware of the level of thinking, intelligence, and education in parts of ancient Greece and Rome. The Romans were demonstrably on the verge of the industrial revolution when their society fell, so technologically, we've really only got a little bit on them. Go read some of the old philosophers and mathemeticians and you'll see that they (and much of the educated class they belonged to) were capable of intelligence and depth and breadth of thought that is far beyond what is common even among our "intelligentsia" today.
More productive, I'll give you, but as I said, Rome was getting very close to mass production harnessing of power.
As moderns, we have this tendency to believe that we're smarter and better than our forbears, mostly becasue of technological hubris and arrogance. The more I read history, the more I'm convinced that modern man is quite likely considerably less intelligent on average than his ancient counterpart. (No that's not a setup for an Idiocracy joke, - there's some substantial evidence that human intelligence may well be falling rather than rising...)
Personally, the biggest issue that I see when I have encountered this type of situation is that the original programs are on floppies. If this is the case, you will need to find somebody with a Windows/95 machine that they're keeping together with spit, bailing wire, gaffer's tape and good intentions - you should be able to copy the program onto a USB key and then burn it on a CD/DVD for more permanent storage.
3.5" floppies are no problem - although getting a bit scarce, it's still pretty easy to get USB-connected floppy drives. It's the 5.25" floppies that are hard. Although I didn't expect to need to do this, I recently found that life would be better if I could get a bunch of data that lives only in a few files of 5.25" floppies.
There are a number of solutions to this, but few are just plug-and-play. It also depends on whether you need to be able to read and write the floppy as an application would, or whether you just want to scrape the bits off and save them in some kind of container on another filesystem. (I was looking for IBM-format floppies, but realized while I was researching this, that this is probably the time to grab the data off my old Commodore floppies as well - I was surprised to find that many of these 5.25" interface solutions are capable of reading floppies from darn near anything - C64, Apple, Atari, Amiga, etc. As a result, a couple of these are C64-centric, and some are read-only.)
BTW - Lots of folks will say that disks this old cannot be read. IMO, you'd be surprised how often the data is intact even after decades. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that these older disks were considerably less dense in the first place, making them more resistant to the vagaries of time-based magnetic bit rot than newer more dense media.
Here is a rundown of what I found - this will no doubt be handy to anyone with the same problem:
Do you frequently drive 7 hours straight without a bite to eat and a pee break?
Actually, yes. Did it three times in this month, in fact, for graduation and moving kids back home to Austin from college in Tulsa and Lubbock.
The trip to Lubbock is straight-through, since the Pacifica has the range to make that trip non-stop - got 24/27 MPG (loaded/unloaded) at 80 MPH - not bad for a 4L crossover SUV.
Tulsa is possible to do straight through, but it's tight enough that we do one gas stop. That stop is under 5 minutes, with another stop for food elsewhere, because really, isn't life too short, your health too important, and other food options too good to eat gas-stop swill? Do you really want to *have* to eat McDonald's or whatever's within walking distance of a Tesla charger?
>Commercial and residential rates are billed wildly different. Second, energy rates vary wildly. Depending on the region, like Texas or Tennessee, energy rates are closer to $0.06/kwh if you shop around. Obviously the more you buy, the more you save.
Well, that's true in the free parts of Texas - here in the People's Republic of Austin, we don't have the option of buying from the market like the rest of the state, so our real rates are more than twice that. My power bills for comparably sized houses more than doubled when I moved from Houston back to Austin. There are even power companies in much of Texas that do not charge at all for power at night - this could be a pretty good deal if you charge an electric car on a timer... Oh, and Austin Energy will give you a bunch of solar rebates that don't even offset the vastly increased cost of your solar system due to their ridiculous regulations and mandated crony installers. And don't even get me started on Austin's hideous water rates...
Germany has so much solar because it has *insane* subsidies. It's moronic *not* to put money in solar in Germany, because (although this is changing), any excess power you produce *must* be bought by the power company at a very hefty multiple of the normal price. Germany is *not* the way we want to go here - in fact, the rush to solar and the Green's crusade against nuclear have created very significant instability in Germany' power grid. They are not far from the time that a large, dark front could crash the country.
Germany's subsidies are a lesson in how to create a really unsustainable ecosystem. It only works because Germany's industrial base is a world leader and makes enough to keep the socialist redistribution (barely) afloat. With its current balance of trade, I'm not sure that the US could even pull off German-style subsidies, and the Germans themselves are backing away from them very quickly as they begin to see the train wreck unfold.
BTW, fraud and abuse is rampant in the industry in general (I work in solar, and have worked int he oil industry - "green energy" really is thousands of times sleazier than oil & gas ever was) - in Spain, for instance (which also pays a premium for power delivered from solar plants), a large solar PV farm was caught using a bunch of generators to inject power into the grid at night - not only was this dirtier than a real power plant, they were getting many. many times more for that power since it was "green" because it came from a solar plant!
Quick in a straight line maybe, but always obese and wallowing in the corners.
The roadster offers a perfect comparison: Drive a Lotus Elise (essentially, a modern gas-driven version of the Tesla Roadster's platform), then drive the Roadster and feel how the excess weight absolutely kills the sporty character of the car by butchering its performance and handling envelope. The only reason it works at all is because the Elise is such a light car to begin with.
Electric only offers good performance in a straight line, and then only for a few runs - I don't expect a Tesla of any kind would make it through a night of drag racing. And I don't expect we'll see electrics in any kind of road racing anytime soon. The lowliest Corolla would run away from the electrics after their batteries begin to flag just a few laps into the race...
Absolutely. If Citizens United is overturned, then unions absolutely should not retain the right to speak corporately after that right is removed from all others, especially those they oppose.
I'm not going to feed your obvious trolling, but I do want to make one thing clear - I work in the solar industry, but my company receives no subsidies. They're not worth the hassle and the control you give up to marauding beureaucrats.
Maybe this is because the oil industry evolved from the same people who ran the cattle industry, where a man's word was his bond and multi-million dollar deals were made on a handshake. Integrity was everything, and if you lost that, you simply weren't in the business anymore.
Oh GAWD please stop with the cheesy platitudes and the pining away for older, ostensibly better times. That is such a tired trope. Surely you recognize that this is a ludicrous and unprovable statement based on no evidence whatsoever?
Uh, no, it's based on actual truth, which in turn is based on the personal experience of my family and many others. You can whine about those older ways if you want, but the fact is they were the foundation of transforming Texas into one of the world's most dynamic and beneficial economies. There is good and bad with that, but overwhelmingly good.
Government (and "free governemtn money") corrupts pretty much everything absolutely...
And surely you recognize that this is a contradiction of your previous statement? The oil industry enjoys enormous tax breaks and subsidies. Are those billions in subidies not government money? Is the oil industry somehow immune to corruption because of its mythical birth among cattle barons?
First of all, your accounting includes lots of things as "subsidies" that all businesses get. It's ridiculous to count those as subsidies to the"oil industry".
Secondly, your premise is only remotely true if you blatantly lie with the statistics. In the US, the subsidy for renewables *dwarfs* that for other energy sources, when normalized to energy units. (This is really the only correct way to compare them - after all, why wouldn't one use an energy basis to compare energy sources, unless you're just trying to score cheap political argument points?)
Solar's subsidy is a whopping 1600X the subsidy for coal, oil, or gas, and over 300X that of nuclear. (Not that I'm complaining - I work in solar - but let's at least be honest about the fact that solar is really only viable if it receives enormous subsidies...)
Source Subsidy per kwh Coal $0.0006 Oil/Gas $0.0006 Nuclear $0.0031 Renewables $0.0154
Biomass Power $0.0020
Geothermal $0.0125
Hydroelectric $0.0008
Solar $0.9680
Wind $0.0525
If electric cars take over the market, the demand for car maintenance will collapse. Thats a big chunk of the job market in some areas and there will have to be some adjustment.
Yeah, right - like I didn't spend a ton of money recently on brakes, steering, and air conditioning, which is not really optional in Texas...
Of course, a Tesla makes no sense in Texas unless you're an urban commuter, since until they build some supercharger stations, you can't reasonably take a day trip to another city. A base Model S will, maybe, just barely, make it to Dallas or Houston from Austin, but definitely won't get you around town much once you're there, and of course, there's no prayer of a return trip the same day....
Think I'll stick with internal combustion for a few more years...
Tesla has exceeded pretty much everyone's expectations. The car itself is a technology tour-de-force, and quite impressive. Tesla has invested well to acquire or develop world-class manufacturing facilities, design, and development, and it shows.
Will they succeed, given that the economics of electric cars are still a little iffy (expensive product in the midst of a depression, etc.)? The market will decide. If they fail, it probably won't be because they didn't build a good company around a good product. They at least have a business model that *can* be profitable, and it appears that they've been executing it pretty well.
Contrast this with Solyndra, which never had any chance of success: Their business model required massive cash infusions to build specialized manufacturing systems that couldn't be bought and can't really make anything else. Their product cost $7.00 a watt to make, and their business plan was trying to sell into a market where the highest quality conventional panels (e.g., Schott German panels) were selling for under $4.00/W (This was back from Solyndra's business planning days - it's worse now, since Chinese solar panel overcapacity has collapsed the price for crappy panels to well under $1.00/W!) Add on top of that the fact that Solyndra's panels were far less effiicient from an areal coverage point of view, and you can see it was always certain to anyone that had even a basic understanding of solar that Solyndra *never* had any prayer of making money. The government loans to Solyndra were Obama administration money-laundering and paybacks to contributors, pure and simple.
Gov't loans for technology dev. can be a good thing, but it would be nice if someone were looking out for the taxpayers at least well enough to avoid the blatantly corrupt ripoffs...
I think this sends an excellent message to naysayers: Not all American startups with DOE loans end up like Solyndra.
No, but the reality is that way too many of them do.
I work in the green energy industry now (and used to work in the oil industry). The "green" industry is far, far slimier (more corrupt)... Maybe this is because the oil industry evolved from the same people who ran the cattle industry, where a man's word was his bond and multi-million dollar deals were made on a handshake. Integrity was everything, and if you lost that, you simply weren't in the business anymore.
Government (and "free governemtn money") corrupts pretty much everything absolutely...
So, every one of those 650,000 people aren't drinking enough orange juice?
No, the reality is far, far worse than that - roughly *none* of the humans (or guinea pigs, oddly enough) currently living on this planet gets enough vitamin C.
All humans carry a genetic defect that cripples the mechanism nearly all other mammals use to synthesize vitamin C. I'm not in favor of genetic engineering of humans, but this is the thing that brings me closest to backing the concept.
A "homo sapiens ascorbicus" would be a real blast from the past...
Although it's little-known outside orthomolecular medicine circles (Linus Pauling and Albert Szent-Györgyi (the discoverer of the Vitamin C/Krebs cycle) were two prominent members of the orthomolecular medicine community), Dr. Fred Klenner successfully cured several many polio patients in the late '40s and early '50s, using megadoses of acsorbic acid (nominally the same as vitamin C). A good number of these were advanced enough that they should have died or at the very least been crippled for life by the disease.
Because Klenner was only a backwoods Southern doctor, his remarkable success was largely overlooked for many years. (He wrote his experiences up and had them published as an article titled ‘Virus Pneumonia and Its Treatment with Vitamin C’ in the Journal of Southern Medicine and Surgery . This was followed up by many other articles over the years, mostly on megavitamin therapy for a variety of diseases, including tuberculosis and multiple sclerosis.
No doubt, the 2009 Trek reboot was rollicking good action fun with a bit of insider snark thrown in. What I've never understood, though, is how Spock managed to turn out so differently - clearly the "new" Spock has little control over his emotions, and apparently, little desire to control them. It was always that tension that made the half-breed human more human than the real humans in some circumstances. And although the new Kirk is a bit over the top, he was always meant to be - Roddenberry intended him as an exaggerated Horatio Hornblower. (And, to the point of the reviewer, StarTrek was deliberately intended as a "space opera" twist on the "horse opera" genre - he pitched the show to network execs as ""Wagon Train" to the stars"...)
Although I enjoyed the original, the idea of the Spock/Uhura lustfest just doesn't work for me at all. (First of all, did Uhura happen to just fall into Spock's seventh year rutting season? We'll never know, apparently....)
Anyway, it seems Spock's lust handily outstrips his logic, and we're left with the most improbably romance in history. (In the immortal words of the Trek take-off Galaxy Quest (which may well be the best "StarTrek" movie yet), "That's just *wrong*...)
Except it's not 97%, read the actual paper instead of the summary. And the others are producing evidence, and aren't on the payroll of major financial interests. Other than that, it's just like what you said.
The "science" behind this ridiculous "97% of all non-corrupt, progressive scientists agree" paper is even worse than the "science" arguing for AGW in the first place:
Now, Cook has upped the ante, allowing the average person to help participate in the lie and make it their own, as Brandon Schollenberger observes, Cook has launched a new “Consensus project” to make even more certain the public gets his message:
The guidelines for rating [the] abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:
that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).
If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:
Reject AGW 0.7% (78)
Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.
It’s gobsmacking. But, I see this as a good thing, because like the lies of presidential politics, eventually this will all come tumbling down.
This is dismaying. Even if we found a bottle on the beach and wished every gun on the planet to be turned into kittens and cheese burgers, we will still have them appear, but now not out of predicable venues, but out of thin air as far as any system is concerned. Let's face it, bad people will have reached their weapon production zenith, while the rest of us flounder around in inept, corrupt politics.
This is only dismaying if you believe free citizens have no right to fashion weapons for their own defense. The printable gun, in a way, just takes us back to where we were a century or two ago - anyone with a little technical knowledge and patience can make a reasonably effective weapon. Civilization didn't fall back then - in fact, you could argue that it reached its zenith at exactly the time that weapons production became achievable by any sufficiently motivated group with moderate wherewithal. There's a reason that the first use of interchangeable parts was in the firearms industry, paving the way for the machine age at large.
BTW, I've got enough experience with 3D CAD/CAM and the fiddliness of various rapid prototyping methods to recognize that it's actually considerably easier to get hold of conventional machine shop tools like lathes, gun drills, and milling machines and make much more serious weapons than DD's plastic pistol.
(If you're not averse to breaking laws, then history is full of good model weapons - the German MP3008, was a 9mm submachine gun designed to be easily fabricated with minimal tooling and expertise. Note that for resistance purposes, even the most basic of firearms can give you a shot (literally) at a better-armed enemy, allowing you to then take his (far more effective) weapon: witness cheap (a few dollars!) single shot pistols like the Liberator or "Deer Gun"...)
My point was that this exact thing has been tried before, and the market clearly decided it wasn't worth the trouble and expense. This is no different.
Rhombus Tech is building EOMA-68 as a duplicate answer to a question no one has asked in years. By any reasonable standards of modern embedded hardware (I've been working with deeply embedded hardware for my own company for the past few years), EOMA-68 is poorly designed, not tightly integrated, and does not even begin to match the capabilities of many of the embedded modules that are already available at good prices from a wide variety of manufacturers. RhombusTech seems only interested in trying to create and push a "proprietary open source" form factor just to be different. BTW, the Casio/Epson/whoever PCMCIA CPU cards also redefined pinouts, too, but at least they had the good engineering sense to use different specific keying (and to get the PCMCIA consortium to register it as such) to avoid plugging them in where thy could not work, or where they could damage or be damaged by other PCMCIA equipment. Relatively cheap and available (if huge) connectors are about the only thing PCMCIA/CF has going for it in today's world: there's a lot more working against it, starting with lots of wasted packaging space (it was great 25 years ago!), compatibility issues, heat dissipation difficulties, I/O limits, etc.
that's why we also created EOMA-CF which, surpriiise, re-uses Compact Flash. however that's *really* small No, sorry, wrong. Bzzzt. Thank you very much for playing.
As modern embedded electronics go, CF is simply enormous, rather than absolutely gigantic, as PCMCIA is. Have you actually taken a look inside a modern phone to see the scale of tight integration in these devices? Sure, you can chain yourself to PCMCIA/CF, but you can't do it without also chaining yourself to an anchor wedged firmly in the mid 1990's.
Like the earlier attempts, this attempt to dictate a "standard, open" CPU card form factor will fail - even with "Sparkly Magic Open Source GPL Sprinkles! (TM)" The market moves far too quickly for this - look how hard it is for AMD and Intel to even stick with their own CPU pinout and bus standards for more than a few years! By your logic, I should be able to buy a Core i7 plugin for my old Socket II Pentium computer, and somehow, magically, expect it to deliver all the goodness of a Microsoft Surface Pro despite the fact that everything that surrounds that processor (for input, interaction, communications, interfaces, etc.) has changed even more than the processor itself. Really, what you are proposing (and building!) makes that little sense!
That said, I think standard CPU form factors (even as pluggable modules) are a good thing, but the market has shown that only the most open and flexible ones have any chance at adoption. VIA is arguably the most successful here, and look a their success rate: MiniITX = Hit, NanoITX = meh, PicoITX = meh++, other attempts = Can Anyone Even Remember What They're Called?
Even the well-engineered schemes (RhombusTech's engineering is joke like, at best) that have significant industry backing (I'm thinking Qseven, here) have a hard time getting the required traction, and the pace of innovation and technology advancement makes it really hard to have a standard that's still relevant by the time it's developed and in production. Likewise, something will someday replace the hoary PC-104, but with modifications, it still clings to life as a contender. (And you could easily argue that the Arduino shield implementation is a non-standard "standard" of sorts, although it is not well-engineered, either...) Saying you have a fallback to Cardbus ("we have a plan, here, if it all goes to hell in a hand-basket: we use Cardbus", from your own comment below), is simply admission that you have no bloody idea how to do this right in the first place. CardBus is only slightly less antiquated than PCMCIA, and was itself sup
Not only that, it's been done before: One of the Japanese companies (Sharp or maybe more likely Epson?) tried to push a PCMCIA-based CPU module back in the early '90s. It was a decent idea then, but the form factor is not as reasonable a choice today, given the increased availability of smaller-scale SMD components....
And yet there are a great many of us here in Austin and San Antonio that would dearly love nothing more than to be able to choose our own power providers as residents of other Texas cites can. (Yes, I would happily pay more!) Austin Electric is deliberately making corrupt political decisions that must drive the future cost of electricity through the roof, but that's OK with the city council because AE is their invisible piggy bank that's just one more tax on everyone in town...
2. I am guessing there is already a pretty good amount of fiber in the city already....
Not so much as you'd think. Central and West Austin are a couple of inches of dirt over hard limestone, so trenching is difficult and expensive. Fiber-wise, Austin lags every other major city in Texas substantially.
3. High levels of actual city official interest. Meaning they are will to actually make the difficult choices happen to make this happen.
Actually, they will be more than happy to bend over just like KC did and give Google lots of free stuff with no protection for consumers/citizens. See all the recent tax-free deals favoring megacorporations at the expense of all other companies in the area.
4. High visibility when South by Southwest rolls through every year. 5. Tons of apartments and properties that will go out of their way to install this stuff to lure the kids in. I used to live in apartment in Austin that was one of the first in the nation to install high speed wireless internet. This is a huge renters market.
Probably true - the Austin city council wants to eliminate everything but high-rise urban housing. You can't build a desirable, sustainable, and stable community that way. Austin is arguably one of the most family-hostile cities in the country. The Austin schools are awful (I am still overcoming my AISD education), the only real options are the dynamic and vibrant (but expensive) private schools, or decent public schools north and west of town in non-AISD districts (Round Rock Westwood and Eanes Westlake are the best).
6. Its a much smaller town than the gigantic blob cities like Dallas or Houston.
True, Houston and Dallas are much bigger geographically, but they're also much bigger population-wise, too. Remember, you're talking about comparisons the 4th and 9th largest cites in the US (and San Antonio is 7th!) Houston is nearly three times the size of Austin, population-wise, although it is admittedly a huge city geographically - lots of cheap, flat land, few natural barriers, and minimal government interference lead to a large, but amazingly functional city - IMO, much more functional than Austin.
Other than its natural beauty, Austin really has a lot less going for it than most other Texas cities. (Yes that even applies to tech talent - the pools in Dallas and Houston are markedly superior, and San Antoniois gaining fast, since Austin's city government and venture capital community has driven much of the vital innovation to other cites in recent years. (viz, San Antonio and biotech, for just one example...) It's actually amazing how many tech businesses choose to stay in Austin given the outright hostility of the city to any kind of profit-making enterprise (unless owned by a multinational corporation that will line the pockets of the state's most corrupt politicians - then the city will grant permanent tax-exemptions!)
Actually, having lived many years in both cites, and as an Austin native back in town for the last 15 years, I can affirm that Austin's public officials are *far* more corrupt and "bought and paid for" than Houston's, especially when it comes to telecom.
There is effectively no broadband competition in Austin - good high speed connections here cost several times what they do in Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio. (This is only partly due to the notably superior fiber infrastructures that MFS built in those other cities.)
Austin's city council is completely in the pocket of Time Warner, and has effectively prevented any real competition. A decade ago, Grande Communications wanted to put in a first-class network here in Austin, giving TW some much-needed competition. Instead of promoting competition, coverage, and better services, the city council forced Grande to run fiber to the poor "underserved" east Austin neighborhoods first - Grande barely avoided bankruptcy, as the take rate for high-end digital services was predictably dismal in the city's ghettos. As a result, they did not have the cash to build out the network into the parts of town where there was demand and they could actually recover their cost. The situation is nearly as dismal with AT&T, which is actively discouraged from running fiber for U-verse through much of town, lest in interfere with Time Warner's corrupt but city-protected monopoly. Also predictably, TW offers pitiful service and really doesn't give a damn whether it works or not - it really is the worst service of any kind I've ever paid for, but I have no alternative where I live.
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What fairytale are you living in? Humanity has become much less violent, much more intelligent, and much more productive over the last few centuries.
*Less* violent? You historical ignorance is showing - medieval battle was pretty much hacking each other to bits until there were only a handful still standing, so that's violent, but pales in comparison in scale with the mechanized violence that was more or less perfected in the American Civil War and the First World War. How can you say mines ("torpedoes" in the Civil War-era), Gatling/machine guns, tanks, grenades, modern cavalry/infantry tactics, and poison gas are less violent? Humanity *is* as bad as it' always been, but modern societal structures now make it possible (and much more likely) to spread the misery of tyranny to billions, rather than just the tyrant's local domain - the incredible difficulty of scale was what makes Khan and Alexander so remarkable, but the 20th century alone gave us Hitler, Lenin/Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, who arguably make Genghis and Alex look almost like good guys...
*More* intelligent? Again, You're apparently unaware of the level of thinking, intelligence, and education in parts of ancient Greece and Rome. The Romans were demonstrably on the verge of the industrial revolution when their society fell, so technologically, we've really only got a little bit on them. Go read some of the old philosophers and mathemeticians and you'll see that they (and much of the educated class they belonged to) were capable of intelligence and depth and breadth of thought that is far beyond what is common even among our "intelligentsia" today.
More productive, I'll give you, but as I said, Rome was getting very close to mass production harnessing of power.
As moderns, we have this tendency to believe that we're smarter and better than our forbears, mostly becasue of technological hubris and arrogance. The more I read history, the more I'm convinced that modern man is quite likely considerably less intelligent on average than his ancient counterpart. (No that's not a setup for an Idiocracy joke, - there's some substantial evidence that human intelligence may well be falling rather than rising...)
Personally, the biggest issue that I see when I have encountered this type of situation is that the original programs are on floppies. If this is the case, you will need to find somebody with a Windows/95 machine that they're keeping together with spit, bailing wire, gaffer's tape and good intentions - you should be able to copy the program onto a USB key and then burn it on a CD/DVD for more permanent storage.
3.5" floppies are no problem - although getting a bit scarce, it's still pretty easy to get USB-connected floppy drives. It's the 5.25" floppies that are hard. Although I didn't expect to need to do this, I recently found that life would be better if I could get a bunch of data that lives only in a few files of 5.25" floppies.
There are a number of solutions to this, but few are just plug-and-play. It also depends on whether you need to be able to read and write the floppy as an application would, or whether you just want to scrape the bits off and save them in some kind of container on another filesystem. (I was looking for IBM-format floppies, but realized while I was researching this, that this is probably the time to grab the data off my old Commodore floppies as well - I was surprised to find that many of these 5.25" interface solutions are capable of reading floppies from darn near anything - C64, Apple, Atari, Amiga, etc. As a result, a couple of these are C64-centric, and some are read-only.)
BTW - Lots of folks will say that disks this old cannot be read. IMO, you'd be surprised how often the data is intact even after decades. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that these older disks were considerably less dense in the first place, making them more resistant to the vagaries of time-based magnetic bit rot than newer more dense media.
Here is a rundown of what I found - this will no doubt be handy to anyone with the same problem:
http://webstore.kryoflux.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1&products_id=30
http://store.go4retro.com/zoomfloppy/
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2503
http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html
The connector issue is actually a good point.
I hadn't really looked in to the e-car connector wars before, but we have a VietNam of conflicting charging connector standards in the US, and it's even worse when you look a the global picture.
Tesla's "supercharger" connector is just one more vendor-proprietary standard in the war.
Choose... wisely (and some prescience wouldn't hurt...)
Do you frequently drive 7 hours straight without a bite to eat and a pee break?
Actually, yes. Did it three times in this month, in fact, for graduation and moving kids back home to Austin from college in Tulsa and Lubbock.
The trip to Lubbock is straight-through, since the Pacifica has the range to make that trip non-stop - got 24/27 MPG (loaded/unloaded) at 80 MPH - not bad for a 4L crossover SUV.
Tulsa is possible to do straight through, but it's tight enough that we do one gas stop. That stop is under 5 minutes, with another stop for food elsewhere, because really, isn't life too short, your health too important, and other food options too good to eat gas-stop swill? Do you really want to *have* to eat McDonald's or whatever's within walking distance of a Tesla charger?
>Commercial and residential rates are billed wildly different. Second, energy rates vary wildly. Depending on the region, like Texas or Tennessee, energy rates are closer to $0.06/kwh if you shop around. Obviously the more you buy, the more you save.
Well, that's true in the free parts of Texas - here in the People's Republic of Austin, we don't have the option of buying from the market like the rest of the state, so our real rates are more than twice that. My power bills for comparably sized houses more than doubled when I moved from Houston back to Austin. There are even power companies in much of Texas that do not charge at all for power at night - this could be a pretty good deal if you charge an electric car on a timer... Oh, and Austin Energy will give you a bunch of solar rebates that don't even offset the vastly increased cost of your solar system due to their ridiculous regulations and mandated crony installers. And don't even get me started on Austin's hideous water rates...
Germany has so much solar because it has *insane* subsidies. It's moronic *not* to put money in solar in Germany, because (although this is changing), any excess power you produce *must* be bought by the power company at a very hefty multiple of the normal price. Germany is *not* the way we want to go here - in fact, the rush to solar and the Green's crusade against nuclear have created very significant instability in Germany' power grid. They are not far from the time that a large, dark front could crash the country.
Germany's subsidies are a lesson in how to create a really unsustainable ecosystem. It only works because Germany's industrial base is a world leader and makes enough to keep the socialist redistribution (barely) afloat. With its current balance of trade, I'm not sure that the US could even pull off German-style subsidies, and the Germans themselves are backing away from them very quickly as they begin to see the train wreck unfold.
BTW, fraud and abuse is rampant in the industry in general (I work in solar, and have worked int he oil industry - "green energy" really is thousands of times sleazier than oil & gas ever was) - in Spain, for instance (which also pays a premium for power delivered from solar plants), a large solar PV farm was caught using a bunch of generators to inject power into the grid at night - not only was this dirtier than a real power plant, they were getting many. many times more for that power since it was "green" because it came from a solar plant!
Quick in a straight line maybe, but always obese and wallowing in the corners.
The roadster offers a perfect comparison: Drive a Lotus Elise (essentially, a modern gas-driven version of the Tesla Roadster's platform), then drive the Roadster and feel how the excess weight absolutely kills the sporty character of the car by butchering its performance and handling envelope. The only reason it works at all is because the Elise is such a light car to begin with.
Electric only offers good performance in a straight line, and then only for a few runs - I don't expect a Tesla of any kind would make it through a night of drag racing. And I don't expect we'll see electrics in any kind of road racing anytime soon. The lowliest Corolla would run away from the electrics after their batteries begin to flag just a few laps into the race...
Absolutely. If Citizens United is overturned, then unions absolutely should not retain the right to speak corporately after that right is removed from all others, especially those they oppose.
I'm not going to feed your obvious trolling, but I do want to make one thing clear - I work in the solar industry, but my company receives no subsidies. They're not worth the hassle and the control you give up to marauding beureaucrats.
Maybe this is because the oil industry evolved from the same people who ran the cattle industry, where a man's word was his bond and multi-million dollar deals were made on a handshake. Integrity was everything, and if you lost that, you simply weren't in the business anymore.
Oh GAWD please stop with the cheesy platitudes and the pining away for older, ostensibly better times. That is such a tired trope. Surely you recognize that this is a ludicrous and unprovable statement based on no evidence whatsoever?
Uh, no, it's based on actual truth, which in turn is based on the personal experience of my family and many others. You can whine about those older ways if you want, but the fact is they were the foundation of transforming Texas into one of the world's most dynamic and beneficial economies. There is good and bad with that, but overwhelmingly good.
Government (and "free governemtn money") corrupts pretty much everything absolutely...
And surely you recognize that this is a contradiction of your previous statement? The oil industry enjoys enormous tax breaks and subsidies. Are those billions in subidies not government money? Is the oil industry somehow immune to corruption because of its mythical birth among cattle barons?
First of all, your accounting includes lots of things as "subsidies" that all businesses get. It's ridiculous to count those as subsidies to the"oil industry".
Secondly, your premise is only remotely true if you blatantly lie with the statistics. In the US, the subsidy for renewables *dwarfs* that for other energy sources, when normalized to energy units. (This is really the only correct way to compare them - after all, why wouldn't one use an energy basis to compare energy sources, unless you're just trying to score cheap political argument points?)
Solar's subsidy is a whopping 1600X the subsidy for coal, oil, or gas, and over 300X that of nuclear. (Not that I'm complaining - I work in solar - but let's at least be honest about the fact that solar is really only viable if it receives enormous subsidies...)
Source Subsidy per kwh
Coal $0.0006
Oil/Gas $0.0006
Nuclear $0.0031
Renewables $0.0154
Biomass Power $0.0020
Geothermal $0.0125
Hydroelectric $0.0008
Solar $0.9680
Wind $0.0525
If electric cars take over the market, the demand for car maintenance will collapse. Thats a big chunk of the job market in some areas and there will have to be some adjustment.
Yeah, right - like I didn't spend a ton of money recently on brakes, steering, and air conditioning, which is not really optional in Texas...
Of course, a Tesla makes no sense in Texas unless you're an urban commuter, since until they build some supercharger stations, you can't reasonably take a day trip to another city. A base Model S will, maybe, just barely, make it to Dallas or Houston from Austin, but definitely won't get you around town much once you're there, and of course, there's no prayer of a return trip the same day....
Think I'll stick with internal combustion for a few more years...
Tesla has exceeded pretty much everyone's expectations. The car itself is a technology tour-de-force, and quite impressive. Tesla has invested well to acquire or develop world-class manufacturing facilities, design, and development, and it shows.
Will they succeed, given that the economics of electric cars are still a little iffy (expensive product in the midst of a depression, etc.)? The market will decide. If they fail, it probably won't be because they didn't build a good company around a good product. They at least have a business model that *can* be profitable, and it appears that they've been executing it pretty well.
Contrast this with Solyndra, which never had any chance of success: Their business model required massive cash infusions to build specialized manufacturing systems that couldn't be bought and can't really make anything else. Their product cost $7.00 a watt to make, and their business plan was trying to sell into a market where the highest quality conventional panels (e.g., Schott German panels) were selling for under $4.00/W (This was back from Solyndra's business planning days - it's worse now, since Chinese solar panel overcapacity has collapsed the price for crappy panels to well under $1.00/W!) Add on top of that the fact that Solyndra's panels were far less effiicient from an areal coverage point of view, and you can see it was always certain to anyone that had even a basic understanding of solar that Solyndra *never* had any prayer of making money. The government loans to Solyndra were Obama administration money-laundering and paybacks to contributors, pure and simple.
Gov't loans for technology dev. can be a good thing, but it would be nice if someone were looking out for the taxpayers at least well enough to avoid the blatantly corrupt ripoffs...
I think this sends an excellent message to naysayers: Not all American startups with DOE loans end up like Solyndra.
No, but the reality is that way too many of them do.
I work in the green energy industry now (and used to work in the oil industry). The "green" industry is far, far slimier (more corrupt)... Maybe this is because the oil industry evolved from the same people who ran the cattle industry, where a man's word was his bond and multi-million dollar deals were made on a handshake. Integrity was everything, and if you lost that, you simply weren't in the business anymore.
Government (and "free governemtn money") corrupts pretty much everything absolutely...
Hmm, you never watched Charlie's Angels or the Bionic Woman, did you? Can't think of anything more Armerican...
So, every one of those 650,000 people aren't drinking enough orange juice?
No, the reality is far, far worse than that - roughly *none* of the humans (or guinea pigs, oddly enough) currently living on this planet gets enough vitamin C.
All humans carry a genetic defect that cripples the mechanism nearly all other mammals use to synthesize vitamin C. I'm not in favor of genetic engineering of humans, but this is the thing that brings me closest to backing the concept.
A "homo sapiens ascorbicus" would be a real blast from the past...
Although it's little-known outside orthomolecular medicine circles (Linus Pauling and Albert Szent-Györgyi (the discoverer of the Vitamin C/Krebs cycle) were two prominent members of the orthomolecular medicine community), Dr. Fred Klenner successfully cured several many polio patients in the late '40s and early '50s, using megadoses of acsorbic acid (nominally the same as vitamin C). A good number of these were advanced enough that they should have died or at the very least been crippled for life by the disease.
Because Klenner was only a backwoods Southern doctor, his remarkable success was largely overlooked for many years. (He wrote his experiences up and had them published as an article titled ‘Virus Pneumonia and Its Treatment with Vitamin C’ in the Journal of Southern Medicine and Surgery . This was followed up by many other articles over the years, mostly on megavitamin therapy for a variety of diseases, including tuberculosis and multiple sclerosis.
Google for the details - you'll be amazed...
And Firefly was a bit higher on the scale, while Max Headroom may actually have been the zenith...
No doubt, the 2009 Trek reboot was rollicking good action fun with a bit of insider snark thrown in. What I've never understood, though, is how Spock managed to turn out so differently - clearly the "new" Spock has little control over his emotions, and apparently, little desire to control them. It was always that tension that made the half-breed human more human than the real humans in some circumstances. And although the new Kirk is a bit over the top, he was always meant to be - Roddenberry intended him as an exaggerated Horatio Hornblower. (And, to the point of the reviewer, StarTrek was deliberately intended as a "space opera" twist on the "horse opera" genre - he pitched the show to network execs as ""Wagon Train" to the stars"...)
Although I enjoyed the original, the idea of the Spock/Uhura lustfest just doesn't work for me at all. (First of all, did Uhura happen to just fall into Spock's seventh year rutting season? We'll never know, apparently....)
Anyway, it seems Spock's lust handily outstrips his logic, and we're left with the most improbably romance in history. (In the immortal words of the Trek take-off Galaxy Quest (which may well be the best "StarTrek" movie yet), "That's just *wrong*...)
Except it's not 97%, read the actual paper instead of the summary. And the others are producing evidence, and aren't on the payroll of major financial interests.
Other than that, it's just like what you said.
The "science" behind this ridiculous "97% of all non-corrupt, progressive scientists agree" paper is even worse than the "science" arguing for AGW in the first place:
Note this excerpt from Anthony Wattts' blog on Cook's more-than-a-little-suspect claims:
Now, Cook has upped the ante, allowing the average person to help participate in the lie and make it their own, as Brandon Schollenberger observes, Cook has launched a new “Consensus project” to make even more certain the public gets his message:
The guidelines for rating [the] abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:
that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).
If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:
Reject AGW 0.7% (78)
Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.
It’s gobsmacking. But, I see this as a good thing, because like the lies of presidential politics, eventually this will all come tumbling down.
(Emphasis added by /. poster)
Kinda thought facial tattoos were always applied to the face, regardless of maleness...
This is dismaying. Even if we found a bottle on the beach and wished every gun on the planet to be turned into kittens and cheese burgers, we will still have them appear, but now not out of predicable venues, but out of thin air as far as any system is concerned. Let's face it, bad people will have reached their weapon production zenith, while the rest of us flounder around in inept, corrupt politics.
This is only dismaying if you believe free citizens have no right to fashion weapons for their own defense. The printable gun, in a way, just takes us back to where we were a century or two ago - anyone with a little technical knowledge and patience can make a reasonably effective weapon. Civilization didn't fall back then - in fact, you could argue that it reached its zenith at exactly the time that weapons production became achievable by any sufficiently motivated group with moderate wherewithal. There's a reason that the first use of interchangeable parts was in the firearms industry, paving the way for the machine age at large.
BTW, I've got enough experience with 3D CAD/CAM and the fiddliness of various rapid prototyping methods to recognize that it's actually considerably easier to get hold of conventional machine shop tools like lathes, gun drills, and milling machines and make much more serious weapons than DD's plastic pistol.
(If you're not averse to breaking laws, then history is full of good model weapons - the German MP3008, was a 9mm submachine gun designed to be easily fabricated with minimal tooling and expertise. Note that for resistance purposes, even the most basic of firearms can give you a shot (literally) at a better-armed enemy, allowing you to then take his (far more effective) weapon: witness cheap (a few dollars!) single shot pistols like the Liberator or "Deer Gun"...)
My point was that this exact thing has been tried before, and the market clearly decided it wasn't worth the trouble and expense. This is no different.
Rhombus Tech is building EOMA-68 as a duplicate answer to a question no one has asked in years. By any reasonable standards of modern embedded hardware (I've been working with deeply embedded hardware for my own company for the past few years), EOMA-68 is poorly designed, not tightly integrated, and does not even begin to match the capabilities of many of the embedded modules that are already available at good prices from a wide variety of manufacturers. RhombusTech seems only interested in trying to create and push a "proprietary open source" form factor just to be different. BTW, the Casio/Epson/whoever PCMCIA CPU cards also redefined pinouts, too, but at least they had the good engineering sense to use different specific keying (and to get the PCMCIA consortium to register it as such) to avoid plugging them in where thy could not work, or where they could damage or be damaged by other PCMCIA equipment. Relatively cheap and available (if huge) connectors are about the only thing PCMCIA/CF has going for it in today's world: there's a lot more working against it, starting with lots of wasted packaging space (it was great 25 years ago!), compatibility issues, heat dissipation difficulties, I/O limits, etc.
that's why we also created EOMA-CF which, surpriiise, re-uses Compact Flash. however that's *really* small
No, sorry, wrong. Bzzzt. Thank you very much for playing.
As modern embedded electronics go, CF is simply enormous, rather than absolutely gigantic, as PCMCIA is. Have you actually taken a look inside a modern phone to see the scale of tight integration in these devices? Sure, you can chain yourself to PCMCIA/CF, but you can't do it without also chaining yourself to an anchor wedged firmly in the mid 1990's.
Like the earlier attempts, this attempt to dictate a "standard, open" CPU card form factor will fail - even with "Sparkly Magic Open Source GPL Sprinkles! (TM)" The market moves far too quickly for this - look how hard it is for AMD and Intel to even stick with their own CPU pinout and bus standards for more than a few years! By your logic, I should be able to buy a Core i7 plugin for my old Socket II Pentium computer, and somehow, magically, expect it to deliver all the goodness of a Microsoft Surface Pro despite the fact that everything that surrounds that processor (for input, interaction, communications, interfaces, etc.) has changed even more than the processor itself. Really, what you are proposing (and building!) makes that little sense!
That said, I think standard CPU form factors (even as pluggable modules) are a good thing, but the market has shown that only the most open and flexible ones have any chance at adoption. VIA is arguably the most successful here, and look a their success rate: MiniITX = Hit, NanoITX = meh, PicoITX = meh++, other attempts = Can Anyone Even Remember What They're Called?
Even the well-engineered schemes (RhombusTech's engineering is joke like, at best) that have significant industry backing (I'm thinking Qseven, here) have a hard time getting the required traction, and the pace of innovation and technology advancement makes it really hard to have a standard that's still relevant by the time it's developed and in production. Likewise, something will someday replace the hoary PC-104, but with modifications, it still clings to life as a contender. (And you could easily argue that the Arduino shield implementation is a non-standard "standard" of sorts, although it is not well-engineered, either...) Saying you have a fallback to Cardbus ("we have a plan, here, if it all goes to hell in a hand-basket: we use Cardbus", from your own comment below), is simply admission that you have no bloody idea how to do this right in the first place. CardBus is only slightly less antiquated than PCMCIA, and was itself sup
Not only that, it's been done before: One of the Japanese companies (Sharp or maybe more likely Epson?) tried to push a PCMCIA-based CPU module back in the early '90s. It was a decent idea then, but the form factor is not as reasonable a choice today, given the increased availability of smaller-scale SMD components....
1. Owning their own electric utility.
And yet there are a great many of us here in Austin and San Antonio that would dearly love nothing more than to be able to choose our own power providers as residents of other Texas cites can. (Yes, I would happily pay more!) Austin Electric is deliberately making corrupt political decisions that must drive the future cost of electricity through the roof, but that's OK with the city council because AE is their invisible piggy bank that's just one more tax on everyone in town...
2. I am guessing there is already a pretty good amount of fiber in the city already....
Not so much as you'd think. Central and West Austin are a couple of inches of dirt over hard limestone, so trenching is difficult and expensive. Fiber-wise, Austin lags every other major city in Texas substantially.
3. High levels of actual city official interest. Meaning they are will to actually make the difficult choices happen to make this happen.
Actually, they will be more than happy to bend over just like KC did and give Google lots of free stuff with no protection for consumers/citizens. See all the recent tax-free deals favoring megacorporations at the expense of all other companies in the area.
4. High visibility when South by Southwest rolls through every year.
5. Tons of apartments and properties that will go out of their way to install this stuff to lure the kids in. I used to live in apartment in Austin that was one of the first in the nation to install high speed wireless internet. This is a huge renters market.
Probably true - the Austin city council wants to eliminate everything but high-rise urban housing. You can't build a desirable, sustainable, and stable community that way. Austin is arguably one of the most family-hostile cities in the country. The Austin schools are awful (I am still overcoming my AISD education), the only real options are the dynamic and vibrant (but expensive) private schools, or decent public schools north and west of town in non-AISD districts (Round Rock Westwood and Eanes Westlake are the best).
6. Its a much smaller town than the gigantic blob cities like Dallas or Houston.
True, Houston and Dallas are much bigger geographically, but they're also much bigger population-wise, too. Remember, you're talking about comparisons the 4th and 9th largest cites in the US (and San Antonio is 7th!) Houston is nearly three times the size of Austin, population-wise, although it is admittedly a huge city geographically - lots of cheap, flat land, few natural barriers, and minimal government interference lead to a large, but amazingly functional city - IMO, much more functional than Austin.
Other than its natural beauty, Austin really has a lot less going for it than most other Texas cities. (Yes that even applies to tech talent - the pools in Dallas and Houston are markedly superior, and San Antoniois gaining fast, since Austin's city government and venture capital community has driven much of the vital innovation to other cites in recent years. (viz, San Antonio and biotech, for just one example...) It's actually amazing how many tech businesses choose to stay in Austin given the outright hostility of the city to any kind of profit-making enterprise (unless owned by a multinational corporation that will line the pockets of the state's most corrupt politicians - then the city will grant permanent tax-exemptions!)
Actually, having lived many years in both cites, and as an Austin native back in town for the last 15 years, I can affirm that Austin's public officials are *far* more corrupt and "bought and paid for" than Houston's, especially when it comes to telecom.
There is effectively no broadband competition in Austin - good high speed connections here cost several times what they do in Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio. (This is only partly due to the notably superior fiber infrastructures that MFS built in those other cities.)
Austin's city council is completely in the pocket of Time Warner, and has effectively prevented any real competition. A decade ago, Grande Communications wanted to put in a first-class network here in Austin, giving TW some much-needed competition. Instead of promoting competition, coverage, and better services, the city council forced Grande to run fiber to the poor "underserved" east Austin neighborhoods first - Grande barely avoided bankruptcy, as the take rate for high-end digital services was predictably dismal in the city's ghettos. As a result, they did not have the cash to build out the network into the parts of town where there was demand and they could actually recover their cost. The situation is nearly as dismal with AT&T, which is actively discouraged from running fiber for U-verse through much of town, lest in interfere with Time Warner's corrupt but city-protected monopoly. Also predictably, TW offers pitiful service and really doesn't give a damn whether it works or not - it really is the worst service of any kind I've ever paid for, but I have no alternative where I live.