Sure, that makes sense. But personally, I don't want a frickin' battery pack in my car. Don't want the weight, don't want the replacement issues, don't want the safety issues.
That's patently false. The current Volkswagen TDI's for instance, are 50 state legal (including CA), and don't require urea. The move to Ultra Low Sulfur fuel as a requirement in 2010 did a LOT to take care of the emissions.
Modern "euro" diesels are available from a number of makes including VW/Audi (Golf, Jetta, Passat, Audi A3, Tuareg/Q5 SUVs), BMW (X5 SUV), and Mercedes (several sedan models).
Get ride of all the complexity caused by the hybrids (battery packs, motors, etc).
Clean diesel is here today.
I drive a VW Golf TDI - It's not slow by any means (140hp, a bit below average for a hatchback, but 240ib/ft of torque, over a wide rev range, so it's very driveable, great passing power, etc), has great handling (no skinny fuel miser tires that ruin the driving experience), and gets great mileage. (30/42 EPA, but those are quite conservative. I get typically 33-35 around town, at 60mph constant speed I'm at 51-53mpg depending on how smooth the road is, dropping down to about 45 at 70, and 41 at 78-80).
It also only costs about $25k, with plenty of standard equipment.
No, I was just talking in general terms about any number of boutique/hand wired amps, ranging from relatively high-volume companies like Soldano to super-exclusive stuff like Dumble, where it's one guy making maybe one amp a month.
Making a good analog amp isn't especially difficult. What is difficult is doing it a cost that allows it to be retailed profitably. There are tons of absolutely killer boutique amp builders out there making great stuff that'll blow away pretty much anything mass-market (including marshall), but your're paying $4k+ for that sort of thing.
Absolutely. I'd love to see Microsoft either provide a high-quality cross-platform.NET implementation, or at least release the core CLR stuff. C# has a lot of really interesting stuff going on in it.
That's actually somewhat true, if you want to get really picky about it. Some digital outputs are really not that great in terms of clock sync, which actually can cause distortion. Sound reproduction is an inherently analog process. Digital-To-Analog conversion is trickier to do _really_ well, than many people assume.
Trying watching Star Wars with a fresh mind. It's a terrible, terrible movie with bad dialogue and worse acting. It was a novelty that many of us remember fondly because we saw it when we were kids, but it's very much a B-movie.
Because the carriers are forced to actually compete on price, since people can switch carriers at the drop of a hat. NO LONG TERM CONTRACTS.
Plus carriers only have to cover actual operating expenses, not making back the $500 or so that they "lost" from a heavily subsidized phone.
To give an actual example, a sample plan picked more or less at random, in the UK (Virgin Mobile)
600 minutes, 2500 texts, 2.5GB of data. 21GBP = ~$33.
A similar (but inferior plan) from Verizon in the US 450 minutes = $39.99. Add another $10 for 1000 texts (or $20 for unlimited), and another $30 for 2GB of Data. Oh, and your're locked in for 2 years.
Sure, you have to front the $600 for the phone, but your monthly bill is now $20 instead of $80. After 10 months you're breaking even, and after the two years of the contract your're about $700 ahead, enough to pay for a "free" phone upgrade, and then it's gravy from there on out.
Linux was never going to capture that market - Joe User doesn't know what an OS is - but look at all the developers and powerusers that have moved to OS X. I'm certainly in that category. I tried Linux for years - as far back as when Mandriva was still Mandrake, and Red Hate wasn't "Enterprise" - and since, through Gentoo, Debian, etc. None of those systems ever really worked very well for me. I mean, sure, if all you need to do all day is surf the web, read e-mail, and compile C code with GCC, written in Emacs, Linux is great. But if you actually want to experiment with multimedia, plays games (REAL games), or have hardware work reliably (I've had FAR more driver nightmares on Linux systems, and not just graphics drivers...), it's just not in the race.
Really? What abount games - just about every indie dev that considered porting to linux and then stopped cited the hassle of making builds for Fedora/Ubuntu/Suse/etc, dealing with the various dependencies and packaging formats, etc.
Ok, just wanted to see if there was some really cool subtle technique I was missing. Pretty much the last time I dealt with linked lists was about 5 years ago when I was playing around with Lisp...
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Sure, that makes sense. But personally, I don't want a frickin' battery pack in my car. Don't want the weight, don't want the replacement issues, don't want the safety issues.
Congrats, you live in a country with functional public transit. The US isn't.
That's patently false. The current Volkswagen TDI's for instance, are 50 state legal (including CA), and don't require urea. The move to Ultra Low Sulfur fuel as a requirement in 2010 did a LOT to take care of the emissions.
Yea there are.
Modern "euro" diesels are available from a number of makes including VW/Audi (Golf, Jetta, Passat, Audi A3, Tuareg/Q5 SUVs), BMW (X5 SUV), and Mercedes (several sedan models).
Get ride of all the complexity caused by the hybrids (battery packs, motors, etc).
Clean diesel is here today.
I drive a VW Golf TDI - It's not slow by any means (140hp, a bit below average for a hatchback, but 240ib/ft of torque, over a wide rev range, so it's very driveable, great passing power, etc), has great handling (no skinny fuel miser tires that ruin the driving experience), and gets great mileage. (30/42 EPA, but those are quite conservative. I get typically 33-35 around town, at 60mph constant speed I'm at 51-53mpg depending on how smooth the road is, dropping down to about 45 at 70, and 41 at 78-80).
It also only costs about $25k, with plenty of standard equipment.
No, I was just talking in general terms about any number of boutique/hand wired amps, ranging from relatively high-volume companies like Soldano to super-exclusive stuff like Dumble, where it's one guy making maybe one amp a month.
Making a good analog amp isn't especially difficult. What is difficult is doing it a cost that allows it to be retailed profitably. There are tons of absolutely killer boutique amp builders out there making great stuff that'll blow away pretty much anything mass-market (including marshall), but your're paying $4k+ for that sort of thing.
Nowhere, if he's interested in actual market research, rather than a publicity stunt.
So, out of curiosity, what IS burning all of those GB?
Absolutely. I'd love to see Microsoft either provide a high-quality cross-platform .NET implementation, or at least release the core CLR stuff. C# has a lot of really interesting stuff going on in it.
Nope. The first edition of Britannica was in 1768. The Dewey Decimal system wasn't introduced until over 100 years later, in 1876.
That's actually somewhat true, if you want to get really picky about it. Some digital outputs are really not that great in terms of clock sync, which actually can cause distortion. Sound reproduction is an inherently analog process. Digital-To-Analog conversion is trickier to do _really_ well, than many people assume.
Newsflash: There's a lot more to high quality audio reproduction than dynamic range (or even signal to noise ratio).
Frequency response, transient response, sampling rate, are all at least as important as dynamic range.
Trying watching Star Wars with a fresh mind. It's a terrible, terrible movie with bad dialogue and worse acting. It was a novelty that many of us remember fondly because we saw it when we were kids, but it's very much a B-movie.
Err, if the project isn't judged to be worth much, why don't you just, ya know, not do it?
http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/paymonthlySimOnly.do
Ok, WTF, this is the 3rd time today Slashdot has be replying to a different comment than the one I hit reply on...
By looking at the prices in Europe, where bring-your-own phones and no contracts is the norm, not the exception.
Because the carriers are forced to actually compete on price, since people can switch carriers at the drop of a hat. NO LONG TERM CONTRACTS.
Plus carriers only have to cover actual operating expenses, not making back the $500 or so that they "lost" from a heavily subsidized phone.
To give an actual example, a sample plan picked more or less at random, in the UK (Virgin Mobile)
600 minutes, 2500 texts, 2.5GB of data. 21GBP = ~$33.
A similar (but inferior plan) from Verizon in the US
450 minutes = $39.99. Add another $10 for 1000 texts (or $20 for unlimited), and another $30 for 2GB of Data.
Oh, and your're locked in for 2 years.
Yes, again, this is bad, why?
Sure, you have to front the $600 for the phone, but your monthly bill is now $20 instead of $80. After 10 months you're breaking even, and after the two years of the contract your're about $700 ahead, enough to pay for a "free" phone upgrade, and then it's gravy from there on out.
That sounds so worth it to get a few dozen sales.
Linux was never going to capture that market - Joe User doesn't know what an OS is - but look at all the developers and powerusers that have moved to OS X. I'm certainly in that category. I tried Linux for years - as far back as when Mandriva was still Mandrake, and Red Hate wasn't "Enterprise" - and since, through Gentoo, Debian, etc. None of those systems ever really worked very well for me. I mean, sure, if all you need to do all day is surf the web, read e-mail, and compile C code with GCC, written in Emacs, Linux is great. But if you actually want to experiment with multimedia, plays games (REAL games), or have hardware work reliably (I've had FAR more driver nightmares on Linux systems, and not just graphics drivers...), it's just not in the race.
Really? What abount games - just about every indie dev that considered porting to linux and then stopped cited the hassle of making builds for Fedora/Ubuntu/Suse/etc, dealing with the various dependencies and packaging formats, etc.
Yes, and it's been a major factor in Linux never gaining any meaningful traction outside the server market.
(Note: I don't consider Android to be Linux, any more than OS X is Mach).
Ok, just wanted to see if there was some really cool subtle technique I was missing. Pretty much the last time I dealt with linked lists was about 5 years ago when I was playing around with Lisp...