That depends on the automatic transmission. There's a fair amount of power loss through the torque converter. Some newer transmissions lock the torque converter in the highway cruising gear, and cars equipped with one of these should match the mileage of a manual on the highway, but the combination of power loss in lower gears and added weight to accelerate really hurts an automatic's mileage in city driving.
Crikey. Just how long has it been since you looked at cars that lock-up torque converters are found on "newer transmissions" ?
The reason autos typically provide better fuel economy despite the disadvantages is because most people can't drive for shit.
I dunno why everyone thinks if you get a sports car, or drive a bit fast, or otherwise enjoy them, you are compensating for something.
When they do it once or twice - and in a car that might actually be enjoyable to drive - it's for fun.
When they do it every. Single. Time. It's because they're wankers.
Pure simple fun and adrenalin are very valid reasons for doing something.
I enjoy driving a lot - but there are times and places for doing so, and crowded streets are neither. Added to which, there's no fun at all thrashing a car 100m at a time between traffic lights. Especially considering how much fuel (ie: $$$$) it wastes.
Why is it okay to block spammers and take down phishing sites but if you want to block kiddie porn sites it is censorship?
* You can't verify the age of some random person on the internet, based on their picture.
* There is no objective definition of "porn".
* "Child" varies between jurisdictions.
This is before even getting into whether or not "kiddie porn" is actually "child abuse", or, indeed, whether real children were involved at all (CGI is getting pretty good, to say nothing of photoshop).
How do we deal with that? Who do we prosecute? I honestly don't know, suggestions from the Slashdot crowd would be welcome.
Given the parties involved are clearly doing so voluntarily, *no-one* should be "prosecuted for it".
And you shouldn't refer to such individuals as "children" - even though they might be from a legal perspective - in the context of "child abuse". It detracts from those who have suffered genuine abuse, rather than voluntarily engaged in completely normal "coming of age" activities.
don't forget that those automatic transmissions weigh a great deal more (50-100 extra pounds) and typically offer far worse gearing for fuel economy... good luck finding a modern car with a stick-shift unless it's a sports car or you custom order it.
For the average drive (and even the average driver who thinks they aren't) an auto will provide as good - likely better - fuel economy as a manual.
The biggest problem with a lot of autos is that they *are* geared for economy, which results in relatively poor acceleration. So people who like to exercise their inadequacy by trying to win the stoplight drag need to bury their foot into the floor to do so, burning much more fuel than they need to.
What I'm trying to say is: GP doesn't have anything to do with you, and everything to do with people who get SUVs and don't do "SUV stuff."
Most people who own SUVs don't do "SUV stuff". They are used for - exactly as the GGP states - attempting to look cool ferrying the kids around (and they don't even do much of _that_).
I know a few people who do off-road driving. None of them would contemplate buying one of the vast majority of new "SUVs" because they suck unless your idea of "off road" is simply an unpaved road (to say nothing of having to get mud and dirt out of the carpets and seats and the scratches to the paintwork).
Come on, Apple(i hope) isn't Microsoft, they shouldn't be pulling this bullshit unless they want their base to turn on them.
That's *hilarious*. Apple have been "pulling this shit" for twenty years. If there's one thing they've figured out, it's that their user base is _never_ going to "turn on them".
I am starting to not see the difference between Apple and Microsoft....
You'd need some pretty rose-tinted glasses to have ever detected any difference (and that's being generous to Apple).
Television, Calculators, Computers. All these things have been accused of making our children stupid. Now it seems it's Google's turn.
I find it quite believable the first two are significant contributors to the atrocious levels of spelling/grammar, and mathematics, that a large chunk of the population under 25 seems to have today.
Change government fiscal incentives (direct and indirect) for having children to government fiscal incentives (direct and indirect) for NOT having children.
That won't happen in a million years. Americans are split evenly on abortion, but, nearly unanimously would prefer that the morons that get themselves pregnant take care of their own problems.
I fail to see how "taking care of their own problems" excludes abortion.
Regardless, the GP didn't ask for a solution that would be politically acceptable in the United States of Jesusland, he asked for a way to do it without resorting to fascism (which I assumed was being used in the colloquial "oppressive government" sense). I gave him one - remove external incentives for having children and make it trivial to avoid having children.
They aren't meaningless because most companies developing software for Windows assume it's an x86-only platform.
They're meaningless because they assess economic viability, not OS portability. That is to say, you're measuring the market, not the code.
Most people developing _anything_ assume it's an x86-only world because, practically speaking, it is. This is hardly a phenomenon unique to Windows, either. There are multitudes of "open source" applications that only work on x86 Linux.
So far, Microsoft has not endorsed writing portable software for Windows.
Nor does it need to. The onus for writing portable third-party applications is on the third parties, not Microsoft.
Most companies don't even know what's involved in developing portable software.
Which is, again, nothing to do with Microsoft. Most developers - regardless of platform - "don't even know what's involved in developing portable software." Why would they ?
Yes, that's news to me that there's Windows running on Itanium. I always thought Itanium was used only in UNIX servers.
While it's hardly surprising that it's "news" to you, Windows NT has been available on Itanium since 2001.
How derivative is it? Can I run MS Office on it?
No. No more than I can fire up OpenOffice on my Linux-running Fibre Channel switches.
You mean Windows Vista runs on Itanium CPUs? If that's true, that would be interesting.
Windows 2008 (which is little different from Vista, especially in the ways that matter here) is available for Itanium. You can even download an evaluation copy for free if you want.
People from the industry sector would strongly disagree. Millions of computers can't run Windows because their CPU isn't supported. Microsoft has been missing plenty of business opportunity right there. And of course leaves plenty of market to other OS vendors!:-)
Which hardware platforms do you think represent an untapped market for Windows ?
Windows NT 3.x and 4.x are not of common interest anymore; NT 5.0 (W2K), 5.1 (XP) and 6.0 (Vista) are tied IMO to the x86 platform, because 99.999999% of worldwide Windows sales are for that platform.
Your benchmarks for portability are both stupid and meaningless.
With x86, I mean IA-32 (descendants of the 80286 processor, and compatibles), and I64 (which refers to the 64-bit extensions in IA-32), as well as AMD64 (which is also a 64-bit extension of IA-32).
You forgot Itanium.
That the X-Box 360 runs on a PowerPC CPU is irrelevant, because it doesn't have a mainstream Windows kernel.
The XBox 360 runs a derivative of the NT kernel.
No, unless Microsoft sells Windows Vista for PowerPC processors and other mainstream CPUs that are widely used in the industry, I won't believe they're capable of writing a portable operating system.
They're already selling a portable OS right now. Windows NT is publicly available, at retail, for x86, x86-64 and ia64. An embedded derivative is running on a mass-market PPC-based games console.
The reason you can only buy NT for x86, x86-64, and ia64 is because there aren't any other mainstream hardware platforms it makes economic sense to release it on.
Describe in a thousand words or less how you accomplish that without facism. [wikipedia.org]
1. Remove all government fiscal incentives (direct and indirect) for having children.
2. Thorough and compulsory sex education.
3. Free contraceptives.
Apple with a fraction a of the software guys can keep their OS on two major different style of chips PowerPC, and Intel x86, along with 32bit and 64 bit versions of both. Sun keeps how many versions of Solaris?
Because they have to (and it's a toss-up whether the next major release of OSX will be available for PPC). Where's the business case for Microsoft to expend money supporting releases of Windows NT for any more than the 3-4 platforms it already does ?
The biggest problem is probably like with 64-bit Windows: drivers.
No, the biggest problem is applications. Same "problem" that stops people switching from Windows to $OS_DU_JOUR.
The second biggest problem, of course, is basic economics. What other hardware platform offers even the slightest amount of ROI for Microsoft to expend the effort on porting Windows to ? Where's the business case ?
It's the only major platform strongly tied to that CPU architecture.
Given that Windows NT (and variants) is currently available on 3-4 different hardware platforms (depending on how you're counting), has in the past been available on 3 more and has been internally ported to at least 2 more, I'm interested in why you think it is "strongly tied" to x86.
Houses are getting bigger, last year i learned a new phrase. "McMansion" for overbuilding a very large house on a normal sized lot, and having very little green space.
The term "McMansion" has been around for years and, yes, there have been a lot of the hideous things built.
However, even in the average McMansion, there typically isn't a room suitable for dedicating to a (near-cinema-equivalent) home theatre. The space tends to be wasted on additional "living areas" and things like massive kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms.
keep in mind America has tons of space. we have 300 million living in a nation that has 9,826,630 SQ KM, compare that to japans are of only 377,835 SQ KM. we have 26 times as much land, and japan has almost 130 million people, so we only have 230% more people and 2600% more land. Everyone in america could live in a house 10 times bigger than the size house each person in japan could have.
It's not about raw space, it's about usable space. People need to live reasonably close to work. Most people work in cities. Therefore, most people need to live within (broadly speaking) "city limits".
If you're going to try and argue the majority of domiciles within "city limits" are large enough to dedicate an entire ~5m x ~5m room just to a home theatre, then I'd have to say you're living in a very atypical area.
As noted, big houses need space. This requires living further away from the centre of the city and - statistically - further away from work. This means getting to work costs more.
Additionally, there is the issue of rising energy costs. Big houses - especially big houses built on the cheap (ie: McMansions) - tend to have relatively high heating and/or cooling energy requirements because they're poorly designed.
The point I'm trying to make here, is that home theatres require big houses. Big houses, for most people, are not economically feasible - and the upcoming mortgage crises and (relatively) skyrocketing energy costs across large chunks of the western world is really going to drive this fact home.
In fact, until the Vista release, Microsoft has had an insane commitment toward backwards compatibility.
What do you mean "until" ? There's boatloads of stuff in Vista (large chunks of UAC, virtualised file and registry access, etc) that exist for no other reason than to allow old, broken applications to continue working.
There is some controversy about whether a graphical version of Microsoft Excel was released in a DOS version. Microsoft documents show the launch of Excel 2.0 for MS-DOS version 3.0 on 10/31/87.
Well, I'd never heard of a version of Excel for DOS (and mentions of it outside of that one document are, well, pretty much nonexistant), but I'm willing to concede it might have existed. It *certainly* wasn't common, if it did, however, as that quote shows.
Regardless, these memories of "dos isn't done until lotus doesn't run" go back to the 80's when I was in my 20's. It is not from slashdot period and it was widely known that Microsoft played dirty back then.
And, still, I await even the slightest shred of actual evidence that it was ever true.
Heck, I'd nearly be satisfied with even a rational argument as to why it would be true (arguments that rely on alienating ~90% of the potential customer base are not rational).
Since, given the prominence of DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 in the 1980s PC world (probably for a majority, the only reason they had a PC at all), if new releases of DOS were frequently (or even infrequently) breaking 1-2-3, then it would be a well known, well documented and trivially demonstratable fact, not a vague rumor that employees from both Microsoft and Lotus at the time consider to be rubbish (indeed, the very opposite of reality) and people parroting it can never back up.
I think it holds water if you view it as a problem with the integration of Explorer with the Windows kernel, as opposed to it being a dependancy for so many programs out there.
There is no "integration of Explorer with the Windows kernel". Explorer is a user space application, just like its equivalents on other OSes. Always has been.
No, I don't see why one method of installing system updates, using a web page, needs a browser and a plugin.
Should have been:
No, I don't see why one method of installing system updates, using a web page, needing a browser and a plugin, is unreasonable.
If there was an application repository for Ubuntu that was web-browsable, and used a Firefox plugin to interface between that and the package manager, would that somehow make any of the subsystems involved not modular ?
Slashdot Mirror
That depends on the automatic transmission. There's a fair amount of power loss through the torque converter. Some newer transmissions lock the torque converter in the highway cruising gear, and cars equipped with one of these should match the mileage of a manual on the highway, but the combination of power loss in lower gears and added weight to accelerate really hurts an automatic's mileage in city driving.
Crikey. Just how long has it been since you looked at cars that lock-up torque converters are found on "newer transmissions" ?
The reason autos typically provide better fuel economy despite the disadvantages is because most people can't drive for shit.
I dunno why everyone thinks if you get a sports car, or drive a bit fast, or otherwise enjoy them, you are compensating for something.
When they do it once or twice - and in a car that might actually be enjoyable to drive - it's for fun.
When they do it every. Single. Time. It's because they're wankers.
Pure simple fun and adrenalin are very valid reasons for doing something.
I enjoy driving a lot - but there are times and places for doing so, and crowded streets are neither. Added to which, there's no fun at all thrashing a car 100m at a time between traffic lights. Especially considering how much fuel (ie: $$$$) it wastes.
Why is it okay to block spammers and take down phishing sites but if you want to block kiddie porn sites it is censorship?
* You can't verify the age of some random person on the internet, based on their picture.
* There is no objective definition of "porn".
* "Child" varies between jurisdictions.
This is before even getting into whether or not "kiddie porn" is actually "child abuse", or, indeed, whether real children were involved at all (CGI is getting pretty good, to say nothing of photoshop).
How do we deal with that? Who do we prosecute? I honestly don't know, suggestions from the Slashdot crowd would be welcome.
Given the parties involved are clearly doing so voluntarily, *no-one* should be "prosecuted for it".
And you shouldn't refer to such individuals as "children" - even though they might be from a legal perspective - in the context of "child abuse". It detracts from those who have suffered genuine abuse, rather than voluntarily engaged in completely normal "coming of age" activities.
don't forget that those automatic transmissions weigh a great deal more (50-100 extra pounds) and typically offer far worse gearing for fuel economy... good luck finding a modern car with a stick-shift unless it's a sports car or you custom order it.
For the average drive (and even the average driver who thinks they aren't) an auto will provide as good - likely better - fuel economy as a manual.
The biggest problem with a lot of autos is that they *are* geared for economy, which results in relatively poor acceleration. So people who like to exercise their inadequacy by trying to win the stoplight drag need to bury their foot into the floor to do so, burning much more fuel than they need to.
What I'm trying to say is: GP doesn't have anything to do with you, and everything to do with people who get SUVs and don't do "SUV stuff."
Most people who own SUVs don't do "SUV stuff". They are used for - exactly as the GGP states - attempting to look cool ferrying the kids around (and they don't even do much of _that_).
I know a few people who do off-road driving. None of them would contemplate buying one of the vast majority of new "SUVs" because they suck unless your idea of "off road" is simply an unpaved road (to say nothing of having to get mud and dirt out of the carpets and seats and the scratches to the paintwork).
Come on, Apple(i hope) isn't Microsoft, they shouldn't be pulling this bullshit unless they want their base to turn on them.
That's *hilarious*. Apple have been "pulling this shit" for twenty years. If there's one thing they've figured out, it's that their user base is _never_ going to "turn on them".
I am starting to not see the difference between Apple and Microsoft....
You'd need some pretty rose-tinted glasses to have ever detected any difference (and that's being generous to Apple).
Television, Calculators, Computers. All these things have been accused of making our children stupid. Now it seems it's Google's turn.
I find it quite believable the first two are significant contributors to the atrocious levels of spelling/grammar, and mathematics, that a large chunk of the population under 25 seems to have today.
Change government fiscal incentives (direct and indirect) for having children to government fiscal incentives (direct and indirect) for NOT having children.
That would be counterproductive.
That won't happen in a million years. Americans are split evenly on abortion, but, nearly unanimously would prefer that the morons that get themselves pregnant take care of their own problems.
I fail to see how "taking care of their own problems" excludes abortion.
Regardless, the GP didn't ask for a solution that would be politically acceptable in the United States of Jesusland, he asked for a way to do it without resorting to fascism (which I assumed was being used in the colloquial "oppressive government" sense). I gave him one - remove external incentives for having children and make it trivial to avoid having children.
They aren't meaningless because most companies developing software for Windows assume it's an x86-only platform.
They're meaningless because they assess economic viability, not OS portability. That is to say, you're measuring the market, not the code.
Most people developing _anything_ assume it's an x86-only world because, practically speaking, it is. This is hardly a phenomenon unique to Windows, either. There are multitudes of "open source" applications that only work on x86 Linux.
So far, Microsoft has not endorsed writing portable software for Windows.
Nor does it need to. The onus for writing portable third-party applications is on the third parties, not Microsoft.
Most companies don't even know what's involved in developing portable software.
Which is, again, nothing to do with Microsoft. Most developers - regardless of platform - "don't even know what's involved in developing portable software." Why would they ?
Yes, that's news to me that there's Windows running on Itanium. I always thought Itanium was used only in UNIX servers.
While it's hardly surprising that it's "news" to you, Windows NT has been available on Itanium since 2001.
How derivative is it? Can I run MS Office on it?
No. No more than I can fire up OpenOffice on my Linux-running Fibre Channel switches.
You mean Windows Vista runs on Itanium CPUs? If that's true, that would be interesting.
Windows 2008 (which is little different from Vista, especially in the ways that matter here) is available for Itanium. You can even download an evaluation copy for free if you want.
People from the industry sector would strongly disagree. Millions of computers can't run Windows because their CPU isn't supported. Microsoft has been missing plenty of business opportunity right there. And of course leaves plenty of market to other OS vendors! :-)
Which hardware platforms do you think represent an untapped market for Windows ?
Windows NT 3.x and 4.x are not of common interest anymore; NT 5.0 (W2K), 5.1 (XP) and 6.0 (Vista) are tied IMO to the x86 platform, because 99.999999% of worldwide Windows sales are for that platform.
Your benchmarks for portability are both stupid and meaningless.
With x86, I mean IA-32 (descendants of the 80286 processor, and compatibles), and I64 (which refers to the 64-bit extensions in IA-32), as well as AMD64 (which is also a 64-bit extension of IA-32).
You forgot Itanium.
That the X-Box 360 runs on a PowerPC CPU is irrelevant, because it doesn't have a mainstream Windows kernel.
The XBox 360 runs a derivative of the NT kernel.
No, unless Microsoft sells Windows Vista for PowerPC processors and other mainstream CPUs that are widely used in the industry, I won't believe they're capable of writing a portable operating system.
They're already selling a portable OS right now. Windows NT is publicly available, at retail, for x86, x86-64 and ia64. An embedded derivative is running on a mass-market PPC-based games console.
The reason you can only buy NT for x86, x86-64, and ia64 is because there aren't any other mainstream hardware platforms it makes economic sense to release it on.
3. Free contraceptives.
I should probably explicitly state that this includes abortion.
Describe in a thousand words or less how you accomplish that without facism. [wikipedia.org]
1. Remove all government fiscal incentives (direct and indirect) for having children.
2. Thorough and compulsory sex education.
3. Free contraceptives.
If you have source code for all the software you need, nothing keeps you from moving to a better CPU architecture.
Uh, what ? Two of the most important things in the world keep from doing that: time and money.
Apple with a fraction a of the software guys can keep their OS on two major different style of chips PowerPC, and Intel x86, along with 32bit and 64 bit versions of both. Sun keeps how many versions of Solaris?
Because they have to (and it's a toss-up whether the next major release of OSX will be available for PPC). Where's the business case for Microsoft to expend money supporting releases of Windows NT for any more than the 3-4 platforms it already does ?
The biggest problem is probably like with 64-bit Windows: drivers.
No, the biggest problem is applications . Same "problem" that stops people switching from Windows to $OS_DU_JOUR.
The second biggest problem, of course, is basic economics. What other hardware platform offers even the slightest amount of ROI for Microsoft to expend the effort on porting Windows to ? Where's the business case ?
It's the only major platform strongly tied to that CPU architecture.
Given that Windows NT (and variants) is currently available on 3-4 different hardware platforms (depending on how you're counting), has in the past been available on 3 more and has been internally ported to at least 2 more, I'm interested in why you think it is "strongly tied" to x86.
Houses are getting bigger, last year i learned a new phrase. "McMansion" for overbuilding a very large house on a normal sized lot, and having very little green space.
The term "McMansion" has been around for years and, yes, there have been a lot of the hideous things built.
However, even in the average McMansion, there typically isn't a room suitable for dedicating to a (near-cinema-equivalent) home theatre. The space tends to be wasted on additional "living areas" and things like massive kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms.
keep in mind America has tons of space. we have 300 million living in a nation that has 9,826,630 SQ KM, compare that to japans are of only 377,835 SQ KM. we have 26 times as much land, and japan has almost 130 million people, so we only have 230% more people and 2600% more land. Everyone in america could live in a house 10 times bigger than the size house each person in japan could have.
It's not about raw space, it's about usable space. People need to live reasonably close to work. Most people work in cities. Therefore, most people need to live within (broadly speaking) "city limits".
If you're going to try and argue the majority of domiciles within "city limits" are large enough to dedicate an entire ~5m x ~5m room just to a home theatre, then I'd have to say you're living in a very atypical area.
As noted, big houses need space. This requires living further away from the centre of the city and - statistically - further away from work. This means getting to work costs more.
Additionally, there is the issue of rising energy costs. Big houses - especially big houses built on the cheap (ie: McMansions) - tend to have relatively high heating and/or cooling energy requirements because they're poorly designed.
The point I'm trying to make here, is that home theatres require big houses. Big houses, for most people, are not economically feasible - and the upcoming mortgage crises and (relatively) skyrocketing energy costs across large chunks of the western world is really going to drive this fact home.
In fact, until the Vista release, Microsoft has had an insane commitment toward backwards compatibility.
What do you mean "until" ? There's boatloads of stuff in Vista (large chunks of UAC, virtualised file and registry access, etc) that exist for no other reason than to allow old, broken applications to continue working.
But reboot into Vista 64 and I'm lucky if it can go a couple hours without a hard lockup or a blue screen.
Then you have driver or hardware problems. Since you claim to know how to "diagnose crash problems", which is it ?
There is some controversy about whether a graphical version of Microsoft Excel was released in a DOS version. Microsoft documents show the launch of Excel 2.0 for MS-DOS version 3.0 on 10/31/87.
Well, I'd never heard of a version of Excel for DOS (and mentions of it outside of that one document are, well, pretty much nonexistant), but I'm willing to concede it might have existed. It *certainly* wasn't common, if it did, however, as that quote shows.
Regardless, these memories of "dos isn't done until lotus doesn't run" go back to the 80's when I was in my 20's. It is not from slashdot period and it was widely known that Microsoft played dirty back then.
And, still, I await even the slightest shred of actual evidence that it was ever true.
Heck, I'd nearly be satisfied with even a rational argument as to why it would be true (arguments that rely on alienating ~90% of the potential customer base are not rational).
Since, given the prominence of DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 in the 1980s PC world (probably for a majority, the only reason they had a PC at all), if new releases of DOS were frequently (or even infrequently) breaking 1-2-3, then it would be a well known, well documented and trivially demonstratable fact, not a vague rumor that employees from both Microsoft and Lotus at the time consider to be rubbish (indeed, the very opposite of reality) and people parroting it can never back up.
I think it holds water if you view it as a problem with the integration of Explorer with the Windows kernel, as opposed to it being a dependancy for so many programs out there.
There is no "integration of Explorer with the Windows kernel". Explorer is a user space application, just like its equivalents on other OSes. Always has been.
No, I don't see why one method of installing system updates, using a web page, needs a browser and a plugin.
Should have been:
No, I don't see why one method of installing system updates, using a web page, needing a browser and a plugin, is unreasonable.
If there was an application repository for Ubuntu that was web-browsable, and used a Firefox plugin to interface between that and the package manager, would that somehow make any of the subsystems involved not modular ?
So you don't see a fundamental problem with the fact that the update manager runs in a browser and requires a proprietary browser plugin?
No, I don't see why one method of installing system updates, using a web page, needs a browser and a plugin.
I don't see how that's a straw man [...]
It's a straw man because you attacking arguments I did not make.
I suppose your argument for Active Desktop/IE integration is reasonable, but my point was that IE is definitely not modular.
You haven't provided any examples of how the system is not modular, merely an opinion that use of particular modules was inappropriately made.