Was it expensive to maintain this functionality? It seems like the.doc format shouldn't be changing much these days, making it fairly cheap to keep around. Was the difficulty that Google is adding a bunch of features that aren't supported by those formats (doesn't seem likely?). Did they have to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft to use them? There must be a reason to remove them, simply deleting them because they're old doesn't make much sense, especially if people are still using them.
That's the thing, it was priced about the same as a full tower G4 with similar specs, when the target market was more like people who wanted something in between a full tower and an iMac.
Maybe they should have just gone the Nintendo route and made the top non-square (like the SNES) to avoid having people set stuff on it? The G4 Pyramid would have been pretty cool actually.
The global warming law has not actually passed into law and will probably die in committee, but here's an article about it: North Carolina wishes away climate change.
The thing that kills the bill won't necessarily be the climate change denial aspect (that part is popular in NC's legislature), but that it is basically legislating fraud. The guys want to sell coastline that will be underwater in a couple of decades and don't want potential buyers to know that.
putting the vents for the G4 Cube on top of the machine
How was this a bad idea? The problem with the Cube wasn't that the vents were on top, it was that Apple was trying to passively cool a fairly hot PowerPC processor. A small fan in the design might have saved it, except that Apple priced it way too high for the market segment that might have been interested in it and saw only tepid sales as a result.
In fact this could even be a prime example of why sticking the vents on the top is a good idea. It was nearly enough to cool a power hogging G4 processor with no fan and smallish heat sink. Conventional cases with front-to-back cooling are wasting energy doing work that convection would do for them if they had a bottom-to-top airflow.
The problem is that 30-45% advantage is sapped by transmission losses between the power plant and your home, not to mention the storage losses in your vehicle. It's still a net win, just not as big of one as most people would like.
Nobody knows which battery technology is going to pan out. There is a lot of money going into battery chemistry these days, but thus far we've only seen incremental improvements. It is possible that some revolutionary technology will break through and open up tons of opportunities for pure-electrics, but the smart money is on incremental improvements for the foreseeable future, which means it will take a long time to achieve energy density parity with fossil fuels.
The worst part is that electric powered really means coal powered given the composition of our national electric grid. Unless you are charging your car off of your personal windmill/solar array or something it's hard to be really green.
Also, I remember a lot of GM electric car owners practically crying when they had to give back their EVs so they could be crushed. GM never really liked them very much and made sure it had a way (by only offering leases) to insure that it could remove them all from the roads once the government incentives ran out. The market may be a niche, but it's a badly under-served one at the moment. Teslas are way too expensive and ostentatious for people who really just want a road legal golf cart to run errands around the city.
The funny thing is that the Prius and the diesels are efficient in opposite circumstances. The Prius is wonderful in stop and go city driving where the poor torque curve on small Diesels makes them less efficient (you have to really jam on the accelerator to get up to speed), but not so great at open road driving (where the electric drivetrain is just added weight) as the diesels.
One thing you'll note is that when people quote you their amazing fuel economy with their small diesels, they never mention the city MPG (or KPL).
Priuses are everywhere around here (Northern Virginia area) while Ferraris of all stripes are fairly rare. I can say this with some certainty too because both vehicles are distinctive on the road. Priuses with their weird egg shape and Ferraris because they fired their styling department back in the 70s and have just used the same design ever since.
There are numerous reasons why a Space Elevator on the moon is probably a bad idea.
1. The moon rotates very slowly, and space elevators depend on centripetal force to stay up, it would probably have to be longer than an Earth based elevator to work.
2. You need to be exporting massive amounts of material from the surface to even being to amortize the cost of the elevator, especially from a relatively low gravity surface like the moon. This means you need heavy industry in place before the elevator make sense, but there is not much heavy industry that make sense on the moon.
3. Launch costs from the moon are already relatively low compared to Earth assuming you're manufacturing the fuel on the Moon (anything else is lunacy in this scenario).
And travel costs to there are in the ~$1,000 range. As I mentioned, if the travel costs to Mars weren't astronomical this would make sense, but the level of investment needed just to get there means only serious money need apply, and probably from multiple sources.
Besides, if you want to survive an extinction level asteroid hit on Earth there is no need to head to Mars, you can dig out a huge hole underground and live there instead. The challenges are much much less difficult than Mars, and you can practice on small scales without breaking the bank the way a Mars mission would. Plus, if something goes wrong with your initial experiments, people can just use the emergency elevator to get out. On Mars they would die.
It takes an impact on the magnitude of "the Earth's surface is turned into a mile thick blanket of lava" before Mars makes sense as a permanent colony.
I wasn't suggesting that he hand out solar panels to everybody. I was suggesting that he make a renewable energy company that installs the mass windmills/solar/geo power stations that everybody says would be wonderful but nobody has the money to make. I am suggesting that said billionare be willing to take a loss on selling the power (at market rate) until his massive investment in economies of scale for renewable power systems drives the price down enough to make it competitive. At that point it becomes self sustaining, unlike this Mars Base idea.
What are those people going to be doing on mars that will justify the enormous expense of keeping them alive? Ultimately this is the problem with most Mars or Moonbase plans: there needs to be a compelling reason to be there. Something you can't do on Earth or in Earth orbit. It's going to be hard to be productive when most of your energy is going to just keeping people alive.
If we had some magical way of getting the people there without spending millions of dollars on fuel alone it could be useful as a lark and to learn about survival in extreme environments, but the costs are just too high for someone (anyone) to fund a project like this out of their own pocket. For the price of setting up a Mars colony you could convert a sizable percentage of the worlds power requirements over to renewables for instance.
The problem with sending flights from home is that effectiveness is measured in how many tons of bombs you can drop per day. If every mission has an 8 hour flight out to the target area, and an 8 hour flight back, then you'll looking at little more than a single mission per day. If there is a carrier parked 30 minutes off shore then those planes could make upwards of 15-20 sorties a day depending on how fast you turn them around. There's just no contest on which is more efficient, even if it is expensive to keep those boats floating.
A recent example of "projecting force" was air support for the Libyan rebels against Muammar Gaddafi. Plus, the best defense is a good offense. If your carriers can't threaten anybody, then in wartime they're just useless expensive hunks of metal.
If aircraft carriers are obsolete, what is going to replace them? Submarines can't project force outside of the water except to launch a limited number of missiles. Sub Carriers were tried by the Japanese in WWII, but were never especially practical. If your planes have to fly across three countries to get to their destination from the nearest airbase they aren't going to be able to offer much support.
Doesn't it seem more likely that people who run carriers will instead look to develop ways of stopping those supersonic missiles? That is the general idea behind the carrier battlegroup already. The carrier is in the middle projecting force, and everybody else is there making sure it stays safe. Besides, the kind of enemies that the Navy is fighting today are the ones that have ramshackle fishing boats and maybe an RPG to scare freighter captains with, not highly technological nation states. The nations they fight are the kind that don't even have a Navy and the only missile danger is losing fighter planes to SAMs.
The attackers had organization, a plan, and even RPGs, this wasn't guys angry at the video, it was guys using the video protests as cover for their own preplanned attack on the embassy.
What about the first time you fly? Or if you took a flight when you were 2 years old and then didn't take another until you were 18? This doesn't even begin to consider the fact that many people are self conscious about their weight anyway. What a mess.
Pilots are up there for when stuff goes wrong mostly. It would be completely possible today to set up an autopilot that could take off, fly to a destination, and land. Heck, AirBus jets are about 1/2 step away from that already. However, making that same autopilot capable of dealing with emergency situations is much much more difficult. There is an old army saying that life in the army is hours and hours of boredom followed by seconds of terror. That's about how pilots operate too. Almost all of the time your job is just to glance at the instruments and go "yep, everything's still ok", and maybe once in your career everything won't be alright and you'll have to act quick to save the plane.
Air Pockets/Wind Shear are basically invisible, especially from far enough away that you can do something about it in a 200 ton jumbo jet flying at 600mph. There's nothing you can do except try to find an altitude that has smoother air, which is basically just rolling the dice.
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Was it expensive to maintain this functionality? It seems like the .doc format shouldn't be changing much these days, making it fairly cheap to keep around. Was the difficulty that Google is adding a bunch of features that aren't supported by those formats (doesn't seem likely?). Did they have to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft to use them? There must be a reason to remove them, simply deleting them because they're old doesn't make much sense, especially if people are still using them.
That's the thing, it was priced about the same as a full tower G4 with similar specs, when the target market was more like people who wanted something in between a full tower and an iMac.
Maybe they should have just gone the Nintendo route and made the top non-square (like the SNES) to avoid having people set stuff on it? The G4 Pyramid would have been pretty cool actually.
The global warming law has not actually passed into law and will probably die in committee, but here's an article about it: North Carolina wishes away climate change.
The thing that kills the bill won't necessarily be the climate change denial aspect (that part is popular in NC's legislature), but that it is basically legislating fraud. The guys want to sell coastline that will be underwater in a couple of decades and don't want potential buyers to know that.
How was this a bad idea? The problem with the Cube wasn't that the vents were on top, it was that Apple was trying to passively cool a fairly hot PowerPC processor. A small fan in the design might have saved it, except that Apple priced it way too high for the market segment that might have been interested in it and saw only tepid sales as a result.
In fact this could even be a prime example of why sticking the vents on the top is a good idea. It was nearly enough to cool a power hogging G4 processor with no fan and smallish heat sink. Conventional cases with front-to-back cooling are wasting energy doing work that convection would do for them if they had a bottom-to-top airflow.
Having played FTL it seems the best way to put out a fire on a space ship is to just open up the windows and let the air ooze out slowly.
The coal was delivered to the power plant by a diesel burning train too. There are lots of hidden costs in the system.
The problem is that 30-45% advantage is sapped by transmission losses between the power plant and your home, not to mention the storage losses in your vehicle. It's still a net win, just not as big of one as most people would like.
You've lost me here. 44,883,100 gallons of natural gas is equivalent to a single 42 gallon barrel of oil?
Nobody knows which battery technology is going to pan out. There is a lot of money going into battery chemistry these days, but thus far we've only seen incremental improvements. It is possible that some revolutionary technology will break through and open up tons of opportunities for pure-electrics, but the smart money is on incremental improvements for the foreseeable future, which means it will take a long time to achieve energy density parity with fossil fuels.
The worst part is that electric powered really means coal powered given the composition of our national electric grid. Unless you are charging your car off of your personal windmill/solar array or something it's hard to be really green.
Also, I remember a lot of GM electric car owners practically crying when they had to give back their EVs so they could be crushed. GM never really liked them very much and made sure it had a way (by only offering leases) to insure that it could remove them all from the roads once the government incentives ran out. The market may be a niche, but it's a badly under-served one at the moment. Teslas are way too expensive and ostentatious for people who really just want a road legal golf cart to run errands around the city.
The funny thing is that the Prius and the diesels are efficient in opposite circumstances. The Prius is wonderful in stop and go city driving where the poor torque curve on small Diesels makes them less efficient (you have to really jam on the accelerator to get up to speed), but not so great at open road driving (where the electric drivetrain is just added weight) as the diesels.
One thing you'll note is that when people quote you their amazing fuel economy with their small diesels, they never mention the city MPG (or KPL).
Where the hell do you live? A racetrack?
Priuses are everywhere around here (Northern Virginia area) while Ferraris of all stripes are fairly rare. I can say this with some certainty too because both vehicles are distinctive on the road. Priuses with their weird egg shape and Ferraris because they fired their styling department back in the 70s and have just used the same design ever since.
There are numerous reasons why a Space Elevator on the moon is probably a bad idea.
1. The moon rotates very slowly, and space elevators depend on centripetal force to stay up, it would probably have to be longer than an Earth based elevator to work.
2. You need to be exporting massive amounts of material from the surface to even being to amortize the cost of the elevator, especially from a relatively low gravity surface like the moon. This means you need heavy industry in place before the elevator make sense, but there is not much heavy industry that make sense on the moon.
3. Launch costs from the moon are already relatively low compared to Earth assuming you're manufacturing the fuel on the Moon (anything else is lunacy in this scenario).
And travel costs to there are in the ~$1,000 range. As I mentioned, if the travel costs to Mars weren't astronomical this would make sense, but the level of investment needed just to get there means only serious money need apply, and probably from multiple sources.
Besides, if you want to survive an extinction level asteroid hit on Earth there is no need to head to Mars, you can dig out a huge hole underground and live there instead. The challenges are much much less difficult than Mars, and you can practice on small scales without breaking the bank the way a Mars mission would. Plus, if something goes wrong with your initial experiments, people can just use the emergency elevator to get out. On Mars they would die.
It takes an impact on the magnitude of "the Earth's surface is turned into a mile thick blanket of lava" before Mars makes sense as a permanent colony.
You also described the big idea behind the movie Idiocracy, minus the crazy suicide rocket idea.
I wasn't suggesting that he hand out solar panels to everybody. I was suggesting that he make a renewable energy company that installs the mass windmills/solar/geo power stations that everybody says would be wonderful but nobody has the money to make. I am suggesting that said billionare be willing to take a loss on selling the power (at market rate) until his massive investment in economies of scale for renewable power systems drives the price down enough to make it competitive. At that point it becomes self sustaining, unlike this Mars Base idea.
What are those people going to be doing on mars that will justify the enormous expense of keeping them alive? Ultimately this is the problem with most Mars or Moonbase plans: there needs to be a compelling reason to be there. Something you can't do on Earth or in Earth orbit. It's going to be hard to be productive when most of your energy is going to just keeping people alive.
If we had some magical way of getting the people there without spending millions of dollars on fuel alone it could be useful as a lark and to learn about survival in extreme environments, but the costs are just too high for someone (anyone) to fund a project like this out of their own pocket. For the price of setting up a Mars colony you could convert a sizable percentage of the worlds power requirements over to renewables for instance.
The problem with sending flights from home is that effectiveness is measured in how many tons of bombs you can drop per day. If every mission has an 8 hour flight out to the target area, and an 8 hour flight back, then you'll looking at little more than a single mission per day. If there is a carrier parked 30 minutes off shore then those planes could make upwards of 15-20 sorties a day depending on how fast you turn them around. There's just no contest on which is more efficient, even if it is expensive to keep those boats floating.
A recent example of "projecting force" was air support for the Libyan rebels against Muammar Gaddafi. Plus, the best defense is a good offense. If your carriers can't threaten anybody, then in wartime they're just useless expensive hunks of metal.
If aircraft carriers are obsolete, what is going to replace them? Submarines can't project force outside of the water except to launch a limited number of missiles. Sub Carriers were tried by the Japanese in WWII, but were never especially practical. If your planes have to fly across three countries to get to their destination from the nearest airbase they aren't going to be able to offer much support.
Doesn't it seem more likely that people who run carriers will instead look to develop ways of stopping those supersonic missiles? That is the general idea behind the carrier battlegroup already. The carrier is in the middle projecting force, and everybody else is there making sure it stays safe. Besides, the kind of enemies that the Navy is fighting today are the ones that have ramshackle fishing boats and maybe an RPG to scare freighter captains with, not highly technological nation states. The nations they fight are the kind that don't even have a Navy and the only missile danger is losing fighter planes to SAMs.
Replying to undo a moderation error, sorry about that poity.
You can unlock any car remotely if it has OnStar.
Cyan/magenta/yellow is for subtractive systems, like print. This would use RGB because it is being effectively projected.
The attackers had organization, a plan, and even RPGs, this wasn't guys angry at the video, it was guys using the video protests as cover for their own preplanned attack on the embassy.
What about the first time you fly? Or if you took a flight when you were 2 years old and then didn't take another until you were 18? This doesn't even begin to consider the fact that many people are self conscious about their weight anyway. What a mess.
Pilots are up there for when stuff goes wrong mostly. It would be completely possible today to set up an autopilot that could take off, fly to a destination, and land. Heck, AirBus jets are about 1/2 step away from that already. However, making that same autopilot capable of dealing with emergency situations is much much more difficult. There is an old army saying that life in the army is hours and hours of boredom followed by seconds of terror. That's about how pilots operate too. Almost all of the time your job is just to glance at the instruments and go "yep, everything's still ok", and maybe once in your career everything won't be alright and you'll have to act quick to save the plane.
Air Pockets/Wind Shear are basically invisible, especially from far enough away that you can do something about it in a 200 ton jumbo jet flying at 600mph. There's nothing you can do except try to find an altitude that has smoother air, which is basically just rolling the dice.