And it cannot scale at all. For each update, it locks the entire database. Multiple queries are done by accessing the same file, hence data sharing only at the filesystem level.
Don't get me wrong, it is a nice database for some applications, but not for heavy duty applications.
I have had few problems with Comcast. It is not unusual to get over 1.5 megabytes/second when downloading large files from a fast site. It's expensive, but much faster than the competition around here.
The speed test reported 21,499Kbps down and 601Kbps up.
I just ran the test and got 21,499Kbps down and 601Kbps up, at 7:45pm from Fremont to San Francisco. Granted, I pay an extra $10/month for more bandwidth (for more upstream bandwidth) but lately I've noticed a nice improvement in downstream bandwidth, given that it's supposed to be 8Mbps. I'm not complaining.
Over the years I have found that 80 columns is a good target. I tend to have 3-6 editor windows open at any given time with different files (or different areas in the same file) and it makes it much easier to view side by side. I think it also makes the code more readable. I use 4 space tabs and 98% of my C code fits fine within the 80 columns. Some requires putting arguments on separate lines or breaking things up, but it results in the code being more readable. For code reviews this is especially helpful when two columns are brought up on a projector.
If you're getting too many arguments to a function, consider re-writing the function to take a pointer to a structure instead.
I can see how this would be a problem with some languages like Java, but at least for C 80 columns seems just fine. If I have a long comment, I just use a comment block above the code and the editor happily extends it. If my code is getting indented too deep, it's time to look at breaking the functionality down into multiple functions.
There are a few places where this becomes a problem, so it isn't an absolute, but it is a good target. Also, I find indenting by 4 characters at a time to be a good target and it seems to be a widely accepted practice. 8 character indents make 80 columns unusable and 2 character makes it more difficult to identify indentation after long blocks of code (I often comment the closing blocks if it's really long for readability).
I also get annoyed at programmers who think it's OK to define tab characters to be 4 spaces. Tabs are 8 spaces, period. If I type less on a file, I should see proper indentation. To solve this problem, where I work we standardized with using only spaces for indenting rather than tabs (usually a simple setting on most editors).
In addition to that, if the person gets into a serious accident and was not wearing a seat belt or helmet, the state should refuse to pay for any medical costs or long-term care and the hospital should be legally allowed to deny care without proof of insurance. There should be an exemption for the insurance companies as well so they don't have to pay for a person's stupidity. If they die, that's their own damned fault. They also should be barred from disability and other government programs to help with medical problems. And finally, for those that manage to live, they should be required to show what happens in all the high schools.
I know one thing states have discovered. Requiring seatbelts and helmets saves them a lot of money. Caring for someone long term due to a head injury from a motorcycle accident costs a *lot* of money. Hell, a friend of mine was in a bad motorcycle accident (fortunately he wore all the right protective gear and did not have any head, neck or back injuries) and is still recovering. His medical bills are over $700,000. Fortunately he has medical insurance which is paying for most of it.
Hospitals are required to treat everyone in an emergency room, whether or not they can pay (which is one reason the hospital bills are so high... they need to make back the money somehow). And for the people without insurance, the state usually ends up picking up the tab as well.
I don't know about you, but a fig leaf would be a terrible thing to wear. Growing up there was a fig tree I would climb... those leaves make you itch and leave a milky white sap that quickly dries to an sticky itchy rubbery consistency all over the place. Plus, fig leaves are not smooth, but have lots of itchy little hairs all over them, not something I'd put against my skin if I could help it.
I run both. I have rarely had any problems with my nVidia 6200 and 6600 and have never experienced the problem you describe. I have used both systems for gaming under Linux and more. I used nVidia's bug reporting mechanism when I did have problems and they did respond (though were not able to help - backporting the driver worked and a newer driver fixed the bug). As for Intel, my desktop at work has an integrated Intel chip which doesn't seem to work properly with Xorg 7.2 (nor can it drive two monitors).
I second this. I curse the drivers for my ATI card daily at work. Xemacs leaves crap all over the place with ATI, Google Earth hangs, and the 3-D on the X1300 is slower than molasses, much slower than a G-force2! Even the mouse cursor frequently gets corrupted with Xinerama.
I can watch it repainting the screen with the screensaver!
Give me nVidia any day, even an old card over the proprietary crappy fglrx drivers.
The other thing is, when I have experienced problems with the nVidia drives and reported them, I have always been contacted back by nVidia in an attempt to resolve the problem. I have yet to even get a single response back from ATI/AMD even when they update the status of the bugs I've reported.
WRT Linux, ATI cards are only good for the dumpster until they get their act together on drivers. And no, I only need working 2-D support, and the open-source drivers don't work with this card at all.
I can see how this would work, but in order to also provide security, extra letters or words would also need to be in the captcha. I.e. if there's an un-OCRable word "between", the captcha could contain "frog between" or something like that, and the first word could be a previous un-OCRable word that has been validated by enough people.
Another method might be to separate out the un-OCRable letters from words and sprinkle them with known letters, though this might be less effective since people can often recognize words far better than individual letters. If one or two letters in a word cannot be interpreted, a person can often still read the entire word.
I remember something like this on my father's computer. He was running NT 4.0 and had a program he wanted to run that required DOS. He had space on his hard drive and booted the DOS 6.2.x installation floppies. The floppies automatically detected his system and determined that the partition table was screwed up so it automatically repartitioned and formatted a new DOS partition... on top of the NTFS partition. Fortunately there was a tiny partition in front and I was able to rebuild the original partition table without any data loss since the DOS format only overwrote the very beginning of the partition.
This is why I think Firefox should do what Konqueror did. Konqueror uses a separate task to run plugins in, keeping them isolated from the browser. This way, a runaway plugin can easily be killed while the browser continues along just fine. Also, it allows 32-bit plugins to run fine in a 64-bit browser. By using a separate task it is simple to limit a plugin's memory usage, i.e. on Unix just call setrlimit, which can limit CPU, memory, number of files, etc.
Today a lot of these features are quite helpful. I frequently use the integrated spell-checker in Konqueror. I couldn't live without a popup blocker (and adblock as well). Phishing protection is good for most users (who haven't much of a clue about it). I also use integrated search very frequently, switching between Google and Wikipedia. And in many work places, accessibility is required under the law, I believe.
I doubt that all of these features contribute all that much to the bloat, probably less than the fancy GUI and XUL support. Sure, each feature adds a bit, but I doubt any one of those features (with the possible exception of RSS) consumes much memory.
Konqueror itself is not very big, but it is used for other things besides web browsing. The problem is that the components of Konqueror, like KHTML, are used by many other KDE apps (like the help system, kmail, akregator, etc.) The nice thing with that, though, is the shared library is only loaded once for all the applications that need it. If I run both Firefox and Thunderbird (which is a big memory pig, I just restarted it when it was consuming 500MB of RAM), each one loads its own library, especially since I'm running X86_64. Thunderbird is 64-bit whereas Firefox is 32-bit so I can use all the plug-ins. Konqueror and KHTML are 64-bit, but the plugin task is 32-bits, so the plugins run as a completely separate process from the browser (which makes it easy to kill a run-away plugin).
In my case, I use both browsers, but prefer Konqueror since after a lot of usage it doesn't consume as much memory. I also like the tab support in Konqueror better, i.e. mouse wheel over the tabs and it's easier to navigate with a lot more tabs than Firefox.
As far as browser compatibility goes, I've only run into a handful of sites that don't work with Konqueror, as well as a handful that don't work with Firefox. Surprisingly, my bank works fine with Konqueror but is unusable with Firefox.
At the time there was a measured cooling trend from the 1940s through the 70s, caused by a lot of aerosols in the atmosphere which has a cooling effect. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling. Much of the hype about global cooling came from a few scientific papers and much was taken out of context or significantly overblown. It not an excuse for our understanding today to say that "They were wrong in the 1970s so therefore they must be wrong today!" The same could be said of people who once believed that the Earth was at the center of the solar system. They believed it then so therefore our knowledge today must be wrong.
Science is an ongoing study, where views change as our understanding grows. At this point, there is significant evidence supporting global warming, or more accurately, global climate change. Also, most of the evidence points to human activity causing most of this change. The confidence level of this is extremely high among climatologists. There is a slight possibility they are wrong, but should we risk our future on a slight probability, or act on a very strong probability. If 98% of the experts say one thing with only a few fringe saying something else and with a shrinking fringe, I would go with the 98%.
If they're wrong on global warming (unlikely) and we make a bunch of changes, it still helps in the long run by cutting our dependence on fossil fuels, which are a limited resource. No new significant oil fields have been found for many years (the artic wildlife refuge and the new one off of Cuba are not all that significant), and many have or are drying up. By moving away from fossil fuels and becoming more efficient, it saves a lot of money in the long run for everybody, the exception being the shorter term profits of the petroleum industry and car manufacturers. Many businesses have taken the initiative to improve their efficiency and reduce their CO2 output, often with a net financial gain in the process. Dow Chemical and BP are two examples of this.
Climate is extremely complex, and I doubt there will ever be a 100% understanding of it (our current computers are not nearly powerful enough to fully simulate it and likely won't be for many years if not decades). They can make a pretty good approximation today, and some parts, like the effects of CO2, are well understood since they can be studied experimentally in the lab. The effect of CO2 with retaining infrared radiation is also well understood and there is very little disagreement there. The sources of CO2 are also fairly well understood. We know how much fuel humans are burning which will correspond directly with CO2 output, which also happens to closely match the measured CO2 increase in the atmosphere.
The climate models continue to improve, the general trend isn't changing, only the accuracy, though the accuracy today is more than ample to see that we have a major problem. If the oceans warm enough to start releasing the vast amounts of methane hydrates on the floor then we are in real trouble, since methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.
And you can bet that the Senate hand picked the scientists who speak. There is rarely unanimous consensus on any scientific issue, yet in this case, the vast majority support global warming with the primary cause being human activity. Most of the scientists who claim otherwise are employed or paid by some of the oil companies like Exxon. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_contro versy.
Except that there aren't "stacks and stacks" of dead batteries. Toyota recycles all parts of their batteries and offers a $200 bounty and prints a 1-800 number to call on each battery. Furthermore, the failure rate of the batteries has thus far been extremely low. The charging/discharging system is far more sophisticated than what is used for, say, a laptop and the system is designed to maximize the life of the battery.
You are mistaken. My Prius routinely uses its electric motor at freeway speeds, alternating between charging the battery or supplementing the gasoline engine while driving a steady speed on a flat highway. The only limitation above 42MPH is that the gasoline engine must also turn to prevent one of the motors from spinning too fast. The electric motor will often assist the gasoline engine at freeway (and above) speeds. This is clearly visible on the display. When driving up a steep grade the electric motor certainly kicks in as I can see the battery charge drop at freeway speeds. When accelerating to overtake another vehicle the electric motor almost always kicks in to assist.
I agree with this. I've read numerous reports that analyzed the amount of CO2 and pollution produced when the power comes from coal sources and it's far less than a gasoline engine. In areas like mine, most power comes from mostly clean sources (if you count a large percentage from natural gas clean), and usually the utilities have a large surplus of extra electricity at night since many generators can't be powered off and on frequently).
Most days I drive under 25 miles round trip between home, work, and shopping. A couple times a week I might drive 50-60 miles round trip, so if a plug-in could handle, say, 50 miles it would meet most of my driving needs. For longer trips, the gasoline engine kicks in so I basically have unlimited range and only need to fill up once in a while on long trips. For short trips this would work especially well, since the worst milage is usually when the engine is cold. And if you forget to recharge, it's no big deal.
Also, the electricity cost for powering a vehicle are far less than gasoline, especially if you predict that the trend for gasoline (and diesel) continues as it has for the last few years. Gas is over $3/gallon now... it wasn't all that long ago it was under $2/gallon. I figure it will only be a year or possibly two before it hits $4/gallon.
And if electricity comes from renewable sources or even nuclear, all the better.
I don't think a plug-in hybrid is all that far off. They're making a lot of progress with battery technology. Toyota has already said their 2009 Prius will use Lithium Ion instead of NiMH. I've heard rumours it will be plug-in as well.
For around town driving I could see having an all-electric vehicle as well. A family could have a plug-in hybrid for one car where they can make long trips and an electric for local commuting, shopping, etc. Tesla is coming out with an all-electric sedan in the next couple of years in the $50-$60K range which might be a great commuting car, though I think the prices will need to drop a lot before they become popular, but the cost of batteries, especially lithium ion, is dropping fairly rapidly and that's by far the most expensive component of any electric vehicle.
The electric motors in my Prius are not that large physically, yet the car is still rated at 295 ft/lbs of torque from 0-1200 RPM with 67HP. Electric motors excel at torque.
I would think it would be simpler. After all, most (if not all) diesel locomotives have been hybrid for the last 50 years. They have a diesel engine that drives a generator and use an electric motor to power the wheels. By doing this, they completely eliminate the transmission and are able to provide tremendous torque, even at 0RPM, and there's no clutch or transmission to wear out. I still think a single, or possibly dual motors would be better than one in each wheel, just because it will be cheaper. Also, it might still be advantageous to have a transmission, though it would likely need far fewer gears, since it could keep the motor in its optimal range for providing high torque when accelerating yet keep the speed of the motor down when running at highway speeds. I would think such a transmission might be a lot simpler than a conventional 18 gear one.
Also, having a single motor means a lot less duplication for things like the inverter, cooling, etc.
I was talking with a friend of mine who works at Tesla motors and he said the same thing. A motor in each wheel adds too much mass there and makes the suspension far more difficult to deal with, plus having to properly split the power between different wheels. Basically it's simpler and cheaper to just use a centralized motor like a conventional car, which also gives better performance. Generally for performance you want to lower the mass as much as possible in the wheels since this reduces the angular momentum in the wheels and makes it much more responsive to bumps and other imperfections in the road surface.
I could see adding a smaller motor for the front and a larger motor in the rear, since the best acceleration comes from the rear, but front or all wheel drive is advantageous in some circumstances (i.e. driving in snow) and could provide even better regenerative braking support. (I.e. the front motor could be optimized as an alternator/generator while the rear one is optimized to provide power to the wheels).
Sure, a motor in each wheel would allow for some really creative designs, but it's not very practical due to the added weight, suspension, cost and complexity involved.
Also, in general, a single larger motor will be more efficient than two or four smaller motors, and is easier to add support for liquid cooling, power, etc. Having exposed high voltage wires to each wheel would be a reliability problem as well as a safety problem as well. Many hybrid motors run at well over 400 volts with multi-phase power and a lot of amps. Having this confined within the chassis means shorter wires, so less losses, less EMF, and better safety.
I can get 60MPG in city driving if I drive at a fixed 35-40MPH with no stops and use cruise control. The magic number in the Prius is 42MPH. Above this speed, the gasoline engine must run or one of the motors will spin too fast. At or below this speed, it can run pure electric. The other part is everything must be warmed up which usually takes 5 minutes or so according to the graph. Not only the engine has to warm up, but so does the transmission and electric motors (which have oil in them). A couple of very useful documents I found are http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/890029-WI fqPO/890029.PDF and http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/rpt/12258 6.pdf. These documents are great for geeks like me since they show detailed pictures and graphs of what's inside the hybrid system.
I think if Toyota put in more powerful motors, bigger batteries, and a more powerful engine they could actually improve milage further since the electric only system could run better at higher speeds and help more during acceleration. This is what Toyota is doing for the 2009 model, changing to Lithium Ion batteries, more powerful motors, and making it so you can plug it in as well.
I find it impressive how efficient the electric hybrid system is, with the inverter getting 95%+ efficiency and the motor also getting over 90% efficiency. Their simple CVT design also is fairly efficient as well.
I agree that the old EPA tests were severely flawed, though. Car manufacturers could by law not give any other numbers other than the EPA ones.
I don't care if the drivers are even slow (though not too slow). I have major problems with just 2-D graphics! Xemacs on my ATI X1300 leaves crap all over the window constantly, and the cursor is completely corrupted. I have to force the window to redraw constantly just to get rid of the corruption. I've also seen this problem a few times in other editors, but only rarely.
The ATI installer also sucked badly, generating a corrupt xorg.conf. It got confused because the machine had integrated Intel graphics. A later driver revision fixed this, but not the corruption problems.
I do not have any of these problems with nVidia. On this board, the framebuffer drivers are so slow as to be absolutely painful. I can watch it redrawing the screen and it significantly slows the entire system to a crawl just scrolling text! Also, even the cursor slows everything down since it's a software cursor. I don't even want to try Xinerama with the framebuffer driver.
As for 3-D, I tried Google Earth and it just hangs and consumes all of the CPU. It works fine with Mesa (though is incredibly slow) and perfectly on nVidia. My limited experience with this card drives me to recommend staying far away from ATI for Linux. If you have a choice and need 3-D, go nVidia. If you only need 2-D, go with anyone except ATI.
I also noticed that with Xinerama, moving a window between displays causes it to redraw. nVidia this works just fine. Also, moving the cursor between the two displays often causes it to turn into a vertical squiggly line (though it's still always corrupt even when it is "correct".
On Linux, nVidia just plain works and it works well. I guess the only positive thing I can say is that the ATI drivers at least have not crashed.
ATI could have the greatest hardware in the world, but it's useless if the driver doesn't work.
Of course I've reported this to ATI, but have not gotten any response. With nVidia, when I had problems in the past with one of their driver versions they emailed me to try and get it straightened out (they didn't, but I just downreved until they fixed it in an updated driver).
I have one of their cards now in a machine at work... the ATI drivers are quite buggy compared to nVidia. I would just go with nVidia until ATI has gotten their Linux act together.
I curse at my ATI card constantly due to the frequent bugs I hit (often every few minutes or even seconds the text in my editor gets corrupted, and my mouse cursor is also corrupted).
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And it cannot scale at all. For each update, it locks the entire database. Multiple queries are done by accessing the same file, hence data sharing only at the filesystem level.
Don't get me wrong, it is a nice database for some applications, but not for heavy duty applications.
I have had few problems with Comcast. It is not unusual to get over 1.5 megabytes/second when downloading large files from a fast site. It's expensive, but much faster than the competition around here.
The speed test reported 21,499Kbps down and 601Kbps up.
I just ran the test and got 21,499Kbps down and 601Kbps up, at 7:45pm from Fremont to San Francisco. Granted, I pay an extra $10/month for more bandwidth (for more upstream bandwidth) but lately I've noticed a nice improvement in downstream bandwidth, given that it's supposed to be 8Mbps. I'm not complaining.
Over the years I have found that 80 columns is a good target. I tend to have 3-6 editor windows open at any given time with different files (or different areas in the same file) and it makes it much easier to view side by side. I think it also makes the code more readable. I use 4 space tabs and 98% of my C code fits fine within the 80 columns. Some requires putting arguments on separate lines or breaking things up, but it results in the code being more readable. For code reviews this is especially helpful when two columns are brought up on a projector.
If you're getting too many arguments to a function, consider re-writing the function to take a pointer to a structure instead.
I can see how this would be a problem with some languages like Java, but at least for C 80 columns seems just fine. If I have a long comment, I just use a comment block above the code and the editor happily extends it. If my code is getting indented too deep, it's time to look at breaking the functionality down into multiple functions.
There are a few places where this becomes a problem, so it isn't an absolute, but it is a good target. Also, I find indenting by 4 characters at a time to be a good target and it seems to be a widely accepted practice. 8 character indents make 80 columns unusable and 2 character makes it more difficult to identify indentation after long blocks of code (I often comment the closing blocks if it's really long for readability).
I also get annoyed at programmers who think it's OK to define tab characters to be 4 spaces. Tabs are 8 spaces, period. If I type less on a file, I should see proper indentation. To solve this problem, where I work we standardized with using only spaces for indenting rather than tabs (usually a simple setting on most editors).
In addition to that, if the person gets into a serious accident and was not wearing a seat belt or helmet, the state should refuse to pay for any medical costs or long-term care and the hospital should be legally allowed to deny care without proof of insurance. There should be an exemption for the insurance companies as well so they don't have to pay for a person's stupidity. If they die, that's their own damned fault. They also should be barred from disability and other government programs to help with medical problems. And finally, for those that manage to live, they should be required to show what happens in all the high schools.
I know one thing states have discovered. Requiring seatbelts and helmets saves them a lot of money. Caring for someone long term due to a head injury from a motorcycle accident costs a *lot* of money. Hell, a friend of mine was in a bad motorcycle accident (fortunately he wore all the right protective gear and did not have any head, neck or back injuries) and is still recovering. His medical bills are over $700,000. Fortunately he has medical insurance which is paying for most of it.
Hospitals are required to treat everyone in an emergency room, whether or not they can pay (which is one reason the hospital bills are so high... they need to make back the money somehow). And for the people without insurance, the state usually ends up picking up the tab as well.
I don't know about you, but a fig leaf would be a terrible thing to wear. Growing up there was a fig tree I would climb... those leaves make you itch and leave a milky white sap that quickly dries to an sticky itchy rubbery consistency all over the place. Plus, fig leaves are not smooth, but have lots of itchy little hairs all over them, not something I'd put against my skin if I could help it.
I run both. I have rarely had any problems with my nVidia 6200 and 6600 and have never experienced the problem you describe. I have used both systems for gaming under Linux and more. I used nVidia's bug reporting mechanism when I did have problems and they did respond (though were not able to help - backporting the driver worked and a newer driver fixed the bug). As for Intel, my desktop at work has an integrated Intel chip which doesn't seem to work properly with Xorg 7.2 (nor can it drive two monitors).
I second this. I curse the drivers for my ATI card daily at work. Xemacs leaves crap all over the place with ATI, Google Earth hangs, and the 3-D on the X1300 is slower than molasses, much slower than a G-force2! Even the mouse cursor frequently gets corrupted with Xinerama.
I can watch it repainting the screen with the screensaver!
Give me nVidia any day, even an old card over the proprietary crappy fglrx drivers.
The other thing is, when I have experienced problems with the nVidia drives and reported them, I have always been contacted back by nVidia in an attempt to resolve the problem. I have yet to even get a single response back from ATI/AMD even when they update the status of the bugs I've reported.
WRT Linux, ATI cards are only good for the dumpster until they get their act together on drivers. And no, I only need working 2-D support, and the open-source drivers don't work with this card at all.
-Aaron
I can see how this would work, but in order to also provide security, extra letters or words would also need to be in the captcha. I.e. if there's an un-OCRable word "between", the captcha could contain "frog between" or something like that, and the first word could be a previous un-OCRable word that has been validated by enough people.
Another method might be to separate out the un-OCRable letters from words and sprinkle them with known letters, though this might be less effective since people can often recognize words far better than individual letters. If one or two letters in a word cannot be interpreted, a person can often still read the entire word.
I remember something like this on my father's computer. He was running NT 4.0 and had a program he wanted to run that required DOS. He had space on his hard drive and booted the DOS 6.2.x installation floppies. The floppies automatically detected his system and determined that the partition table was screwed up so it automatically repartitioned and formatted a new DOS partition... on top of the NTFS partition. Fortunately there was a tiny partition in front and I was able to rebuild the original partition table without any data loss since the DOS format only overwrote the very beginning of the partition.
I think they just need their village idiot back.
This is why I think Firefox should do what Konqueror did. Konqueror uses a separate task to run plugins in, keeping them isolated from the browser. This way, a runaway plugin can easily be killed while the browser continues along just fine. Also, it allows 32-bit plugins to run fine in a 64-bit browser. By using a separate task it is simple to limit a plugin's memory usage, i.e. on Unix just call setrlimit, which can limit CPU, memory, number of files, etc.
Today a lot of these features are quite helpful. I frequently use the integrated spell-checker in Konqueror. I couldn't live without a popup blocker (and adblock as well). Phishing protection is good for most users (who haven't much of a clue about it). I also use integrated search very frequently, switching between Google and Wikipedia. And in many work places, accessibility is required under the law, I believe.
I doubt that all of these features contribute all that much to the bloat, probably less than the fancy GUI and XUL support. Sure, each feature adds a bit, but I doubt any one of those features (with the possible exception of RSS) consumes much memory.
Konqueror itself is not very big, but it is used for other things besides web browsing. The problem is that the components of Konqueror, like KHTML, are used by many other KDE apps (like the help system, kmail, akregator, etc.) The nice thing with that, though, is the shared library is only loaded once for all the applications that need it. If I run both Firefox and Thunderbird (which is a big memory pig, I just restarted it when it was consuming 500MB of RAM), each one loads its own library, especially since I'm running X86_64. Thunderbird is 64-bit whereas Firefox is 32-bit so I can use all the plug-ins. Konqueror and KHTML are 64-bit, but the plugin task is 32-bits, so the plugins run as a completely separate process from the browser (which makes it easy to kill a run-away plugin).
In my case, I use both browsers, but prefer Konqueror since after a lot of usage it doesn't consume as much memory. I also like the tab support in Konqueror better, i.e. mouse wheel over the tabs and it's easier to navigate with a lot more tabs than Firefox.
As far as browser compatibility goes, I've only run into a handful of sites that don't work with Konqueror, as well as a handful that don't work with Firefox. Surprisingly, my bank works fine with Konqueror but is unusable with Firefox.
At the time there was a measured cooling trend from the 1940s through the 70s, caused by a lot of aerosols in the atmosphere which has a cooling effect. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling. Much of the hype about global cooling came from a few scientific papers and much was taken out of context or significantly overblown. It not an excuse for our understanding today to say that "They were wrong in the 1970s so therefore they must be wrong today!" The same could be said of people who once believed that the Earth was at the center of the solar system. They believed it then so therefore our knowledge today must be wrong. Science is an ongoing study, where views change as our understanding grows. At this point, there is significant evidence supporting global warming, or more accurately, global climate change. Also, most of the evidence points to human activity causing most of this change. The confidence level of this is extremely high among climatologists. There is a slight possibility they are wrong, but should we risk our future on a slight probability, or act on a very strong probability. If 98% of the experts say one thing with only a few fringe saying something else and with a shrinking fringe, I would go with the 98%. If they're wrong on global warming (unlikely) and we make a bunch of changes, it still helps in the long run by cutting our dependence on fossil fuels, which are a limited resource. No new significant oil fields have been found for many years (the artic wildlife refuge and the new one off of Cuba are not all that significant), and many have or are drying up. By moving away from fossil fuels and becoming more efficient, it saves a lot of money in the long run for everybody, the exception being the shorter term profits of the petroleum industry and car manufacturers. Many businesses have taken the initiative to improve their efficiency and reduce their CO2 output, often with a net financial gain in the process. Dow Chemical and BP are two examples of this. Climate is extremely complex, and I doubt there will ever be a 100% understanding of it (our current computers are not nearly powerful enough to fully simulate it and likely won't be for many years if not decades). They can make a pretty good approximation today, and some parts, like the effects of CO2, are well understood since they can be studied experimentally in the lab. The effect of CO2 with retaining infrared radiation is also well understood and there is very little disagreement there. The sources of CO2 are also fairly well understood. We know how much fuel humans are burning which will correspond directly with CO2 output, which also happens to closely match the measured CO2 increase in the atmosphere. The climate models continue to improve, the general trend isn't changing, only the accuracy, though the accuracy today is more than ample to see that we have a major problem. If the oceans warm enough to start releasing the vast amounts of methane hydrates on the floor then we are in real trouble, since methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.
And you can bet that the Senate hand picked the scientists who speak. There is rarely unanimous consensus on any scientific issue, yet in this case, the vast majority support global warming with the primary cause being human activity. Most of the scientists who claim otherwise are employed or paid by some of the oil companies like Exxon. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_contro versy.
Except that there aren't "stacks and stacks" of dead batteries. Toyota recycles all parts of their batteries and offers a $200 bounty and prints a 1-800 number to call on each battery. Furthermore, the failure rate of the batteries has thus far been extremely low. The charging/discharging system is far more sophisticated than what is used for, say, a laptop and the system is designed to maximize the life of the battery.
You are mistaken. My Prius routinely uses its electric motor at freeway speeds, alternating between charging the battery or supplementing the gasoline engine while driving a steady speed on a flat highway. The only limitation above 42MPH is that the gasoline engine must also turn to prevent one of the motors from spinning too fast. The electric motor will often assist the gasoline engine at freeway (and above) speeds. This is clearly visible on the display. When driving up a steep grade the electric motor certainly kicks in as I can see the battery charge drop at freeway speeds. When accelerating to overtake another vehicle the electric motor almost always kicks in to assist.
I agree with this. I've read numerous reports that analyzed the amount of CO2 and pollution produced when the power comes from coal sources and it's far less than a gasoline engine. In areas like mine, most power comes from mostly clean sources (if you count a large percentage from natural gas clean), and usually the utilities have a large surplus of extra electricity at night since many generators can't be powered off and on frequently).
Most days I drive under 25 miles round trip between home, work, and shopping. A couple times a week I might drive 50-60 miles round trip, so if a plug-in could handle, say, 50 miles it would meet most of my driving needs. For longer trips, the gasoline engine kicks in so I basically have unlimited range and only need to fill up once in a while on long trips. For short trips this would work especially well, since the worst milage is usually when the engine is cold. And if you forget to recharge, it's no big deal.
Also, the electricity cost for powering a vehicle are far less than gasoline, especially if you predict that the trend for gasoline (and diesel) continues as it has for the last few years. Gas is over $3/gallon now... it wasn't all that long ago it was under $2/gallon. I figure it will only be a year or possibly two before it hits $4/gallon.
And if electricity comes from renewable sources or even nuclear, all the better.
I don't think a plug-in hybrid is all that far off. They're making a lot of progress with battery technology. Toyota has already said their 2009 Prius will use Lithium Ion instead of NiMH. I've heard rumours it will be plug-in as well.
For around town driving I could see having an all-electric vehicle as well. A family could have a plug-in hybrid for one car where they can make long trips and an electric for local commuting, shopping, etc. Tesla is coming out with an all-electric sedan in the next couple of years in the $50-$60K range which might be a great commuting car, though I think the prices will need to drop a lot before they become popular, but the cost of batteries, especially lithium ion, is dropping fairly rapidly and that's by far the most expensive component of any electric vehicle.
The electric motors in my Prius are not that large physically, yet the car is still rated at 295 ft/lbs of torque from 0-1200 RPM with 67HP. Electric motors excel at torque.
I would think it would be simpler. After all, most (if not all) diesel locomotives have been hybrid for the last 50 years. They have a diesel engine that drives a generator and use an electric motor to power the wheels. By doing this, they completely eliminate the transmission and are able to provide tremendous torque, even at 0RPM, and there's no clutch or transmission to wear out. I still think a single, or possibly dual motors would be better than one in each wheel, just because it will be cheaper. Also, it might still be advantageous to have a transmission, though it would likely need far fewer gears, since it could keep the motor in its optimal range for providing high torque when accelerating yet keep the speed of the motor down when running at highway speeds. I would think such a transmission might be a lot simpler than a conventional 18 gear one.
Also, having a single motor means a lot less duplication for things like the inverter, cooling, etc.
I was talking with a friend of mine who works at Tesla motors and he said the same thing. A motor in each wheel adds too much mass there and makes the suspension far more difficult to deal with, plus having to properly split the power between different wheels. Basically it's simpler and cheaper to just use a centralized motor like a conventional car, which also gives better performance. Generally for performance you want to lower the mass as much as possible in the wheels since this reduces the angular momentum in the wheels and makes it much more responsive to bumps and other imperfections in the road surface.
I could see adding a smaller motor for the front and a larger motor in the rear, since the best acceleration comes from the rear, but front or all wheel drive is advantageous in some circumstances (i.e. driving in snow) and could provide even better regenerative braking support. (I.e. the front motor could be optimized as an alternator/generator while the rear one is optimized to provide power to the wheels).
Sure, a motor in each wheel would allow for some really creative designs, but it's not very practical due to the added weight, suspension, cost and complexity involved.
Also, in general, a single larger motor will be more efficient than two or four smaller motors, and is easier to add support for liquid cooling, power, etc. Having exposed high voltage wires to each wheel would be a reliability problem as well as a safety problem as well. Many hybrid motors run at well over 400 volts with multi-phase power and a lot of amps. Having this confined within the chassis means shorter wires, so less losses, less EMF, and better safety.
I can get 60MPG in city driving if I drive at a fixed 35-40MPH with no stops and use cruise control. The magic number in the Prius is 42MPH. Above this speed, the gasoline engine must run or one of the motors will spin too fast. At or below this speed, it can run pure electric. The other part is everything must be warmed up which usually takes 5 minutes or so according to the graph. Not only the engine has to warm up, but so does the transmission and electric motors (which have oil in them). A couple of very useful documents I found are http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/890029-WI fqPO/890029.PDF and http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/rpt/12258 6.pdf. These documents are great for geeks like me since they show detailed pictures and graphs of what's inside the hybrid system.
I think if Toyota put in more powerful motors, bigger batteries, and a more powerful engine they could actually improve milage further since the electric only system could run better at higher speeds and help more during acceleration. This is what Toyota is doing for the 2009 model, changing to Lithium Ion batteries, more powerful motors, and making it so you can plug it in as well.
I find it impressive how efficient the electric hybrid system is, with the inverter getting 95%+ efficiency and the motor also getting over 90% efficiency. Their simple CVT design also is fairly efficient as well.
I agree that the old EPA tests were severely flawed, though. Car manufacturers could by law not give any other numbers other than the EPA ones.
I don't care if the drivers are even slow (though not too slow). I have major problems with just 2-D graphics! Xemacs on my ATI X1300 leaves crap all over the window constantly, and the cursor is completely corrupted. I have to force the window to redraw constantly just to get rid of the corruption. I've also seen this problem a few times in other editors, but only rarely.
The ATI installer also sucked badly, generating a corrupt xorg.conf. It got confused because the machine had integrated Intel graphics. A later driver revision fixed this, but not the corruption problems.
I do not have any of these problems with nVidia. On this board, the framebuffer drivers are so slow as to be absolutely painful. I can watch it redrawing the screen and it significantly slows the entire system to a crawl just scrolling text! Also, even the cursor slows everything down since it's a software cursor. I don't even want to try Xinerama with the framebuffer driver.
As for 3-D, I tried Google Earth and it just hangs and consumes all of the CPU. It works fine with Mesa (though is incredibly slow) and perfectly on nVidia. My limited experience with this card drives me to recommend staying far away from ATI for Linux. If you have a choice and need 3-D, go nVidia. If you only need 2-D, go with anyone except ATI.
I also noticed that with Xinerama, moving a window between displays causes it to redraw. nVidia this works just fine. Also, moving the cursor between the two displays often causes it to turn into a vertical squiggly line (though it's still always corrupt even when it is "correct".
On Linux, nVidia just plain works and it works well. I guess the only positive thing I can say is that the ATI drivers at least have not crashed.
ATI could have the greatest hardware in the world, but it's useless if the driver doesn't work.
Of course I've reported this to ATI, but have not gotten any response. With nVidia, when I had problems in the past with one of their driver versions they emailed me to try and get it straightened out (they didn't, but I just downreved until they fixed it in an updated driver).
I have one of their cards now in a machine at work... the ATI drivers are quite buggy compared to nVidia. I would just go with nVidia until ATI has gotten their Linux act together.
I curse at my ATI card constantly due to the frequent bugs I hit (often every few minutes or even seconds the text in my editor gets corrupted, and my mouse cursor is also corrupted).
Plus, Google Earth doesn't seem to work with ATI.