Let me restate before I get pounced on again.;) I'm not trying to disuade anyone from trying out motorcycles. The United States NHSTA says that 43.7% of people age 40 and over in the US own a motorcycle. So obviously they have broad appeal, and more people should consider them at an earlier age.
That said, unless/even-if you become a hard-core motorcyclist, you'll probably still want the Smart car in addition to the motorcycle, for snowy days and lots of other situations where timeliness and convenience are more important factors. So they're clearly not equivalent vehicles.
I do get it, I'm probably one of the purists. If I wouldn't have totalled my sportbike recently (the Chrysler was at fault, of course, but I faired better than he did so it's all good), I'd probably be commuting in an electric vest as much as I could this winter.
I should have summed up my post better at the end. Here's my addendum:
There are huge benefits that even a simple plastic-n-glass shell provides, and these benefits usually aren't apparent to cagers. While a Smart car does move in the direction of a motorcycle, Smart cars still absolutely have more in common with their larger cousins.
That said, yes, there are a wide variety of reasons why people enjoy motorcycling. For me, it's simple economics, and the fact that they come from the factory with much harder-core race components than cars ever will, so I don't have to spend tons of time to set a vehicle up the way I want it. If people's only choice is otherwise the Smart car, and there are things about motorcycles that they can really connect with, then absolutely, please consider motorcycles. Just don't consider them the same, because you'll be disappointed unless you have enough personal emotional reasons to surpass those differences.
Believe it or not, the Smart is hugely more practical than a motorocycle.
It's not practical to drive a two-wheeler on anything remotely resembling ice or snow (well, unless you're really crazy). Four wheels = year-round practictacality.
Drive a motorcycle at 40 degrees F for a minute or two, and you'll be incredibly appreciative of the plastic that keeps 100% of the wind off you, keeping you from freezing right away.
Okay, so you wear some very warm gear whenever it gets remotely cold, or if there's a chance you'll be out at night. And you wear your full-face helmet, of course. If you're a geek and value your typing fingers, you wear leather gloves at all times. And even when it's warm out, you might be inclined to wear something to protect you from a body-length scab in case you take a tumble. Now: count up the time it takes to put all that on before you leave your house every time, and the time to take it off whenever you arrive. Compare to being able to just jump in a car (and instantly having all that protection around you) and going.
With both hands on the handlebars and a full-face helmet over your head, it's very difficult or impossible to do even tiny tasks outside of driving... answering an importent cellular call, taking a sip of pop, jotting down an idea that occured to you, looking for a map at the last minute, etc. And as hard as it might be to take home groceries in a Smart car, it's doubly difficult on a motorcycle, if for no other reason than that weight balance and stability are extremely important on a two-wheeler where your grocery bags are exposed to the wind.
Plain-old telephones are already "spammed" more than most people like (except where legislation steps in, of course, since, as you mentinoed, it's much easier to track down the sender when they use telephony)
One of the touted benefits of VoIP is its reduced cost. Which means increased marketing profits. Which means more telemarketing on your VoIP phone than your POTS phone.
Yes, and HTML includes 1) a very flexible language (javascript), 2) a homogenous vnedor whose express intent is to blur the lines between local and remote content, and 3) a less educated user population who just wants to see cool new stuff.
I wasn't refering to small variations in OS overhead. I was refering to the fact that computer-illiterate people tend to accumulate spyware over time, and so their computer runs slower over time. I personally know a family who bought a new computer simply because of this, and refused to let me install AdAware on their old computer because they were afraid their it might somehow get broken during the process.
I'm even still introducing some geeks about AdAware, so there must be a huge number of unwashed masses who shelled out $1500 for a computer that now effectively runs like a $200 one due to spyware.
Your grandmother's computer seems to her like it's getting slower and slower. The solution as mentioned is obvious: buy a newer faster computer, with it a new license for Windows (even though she already had one). It's not immediately obvious that her computer is slow because of spyware and viruses, or that Microsoft is somewhat responsible for allowing the spyware and viruses onto her computer, or that this is the main way for Microsoft to continue generating money since they have 95% marketshare.
Yup. Debian and GNU and others detail their problems with Java here. When I first read this article, I thought it might imply that Sun might be moving forward in opening up Java more, unfortunately the influences go in the other direction.
SpaceShipOne burns... HTPB, a common ingredient in tire rubber.
In conventional rockets, propellant can be pre-mixed -- as in the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) used NASA space shuttle -- or sit in tanks that are filled just prior to launch, like liquid oxygen and hydrogen rockets. In both engine configurations, the are highly volatile and can be toxic to handle.
"The fact that the oxidizer and fuel are not molecularly mixed in these [hybrid] engines, makes them non-explosive," explained Greg Zilliac, a hybrid engine researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "We've actually shipped fuel grains by UPS in the past."
It'd still take a bit of time to transmit 80gb, but let me just state that I'm terribly jealous of geeks who are more endowed than me in the throughput department. Someone should sell a pill for natural bandwidth enhancement.
The P2P solution either requires users to have their cable modem pegged and nearly unusable for 60 days (80gb is the current best laptop drive size, most cable modems max out at 128kbps up), or that they backup only a fraction of their hard drive. I can't quite figure out how carrying a laptop drive around, full of your MP3's, which you can play on any computer you sit at, is any less convenient than either of those options.
And to save people research time... here's a link that explains booting linux from USB-2 or Firewire drive with the help of a boot floppy/CD, in the cases that the BIOS doesn't support it natively. (just like the Mandrake GlobeTrotter provides)
And compared to a mini-iPod, you get something that 1) you don't have to worry about power since it has no batteries and doesn't require external power, 2) you get the same amount of disk capacity for something like 1/3rd the cost, 3) THEY SUPPORT USB MASS-STORAGE drivers so any modern OS can talk to it without extra drivers or funky software. Yes, it's not a portable music player, but this solution may be more appropriate for geeks who spend all their time next to a computer in one form or another, or are a little more interested in the data-transport capabilities than the convenient music playing.
For what it's worth, these are VERY practical, I'm surprised I don't see more people using them. Compared to the mini-iPod, 2.5" drive enclosures are about 40% longer and wider but just as thin, they can be USB-bus powered since laptop drives consume less power, when combined with USB-2 they're no slower than laptop drives normally are, and since the enclosure is cheap, it's easy to upgrade the setup to a larger hard drive every couple years. It really seems like a no-brainer to me.
Alternatively, you can spend $100-200 on a iPod-sized laptop drive enclosure and drive, and have a MUCH faster incremental backup system that's easy to store away from the original data (eg. store your home backup drive at work).
As a bonus, you can use it to transport data (eg. your mp3 collection) between places, or even use it to boot linux anywhere with much more space and document storage capability than Knoppix.
Landlines are a dead technology?? I'm not sure where you're from, but that's certainly not true in the united states:
voice quality is clearly lower on cell phones... Cellphones use a 8-13kbps codec. I'm not sure what landlines internally get compressed to, but since landline's digital data gets transported over wired networks, it's cheaper and thus the codecs will ultimately be configured to use a higher bitrate, and thus have better audio quality. It even seems like 3G networks will use a lower codec, since 3G seems to be mostly touted as a way to increase cell tower capacity instead of voice quality.
cell tower owners can oversell any given cell tower, and then drop existing calls once it gets full and one more person dials in. You almost NEVER hear about landlines getting the "sorry, all our circuits are busy", but even when that happens, they tell the new callers, instead of kicking off other people in mid-conversation. Whereas some people get dropped cell calls very often even thugh they live very near a cell tower and have five-bars coverage.
cell phone service is more expensive here than landline service
cell phone company's customer service is very poor here. There's year-long contracts required for cell phones, if you mistakenly go over your minutes they practically take away first-born, and they generally seem to relentlessly try to screw you over
This isn't a direct comparison to landlines, but cell coverage in some places can be very poor to nonexistant (in case someone wants to say that cell phones have an advantage over landlines). I really wish people would wait until they get home to call me so I don't have to constantly ask them to repeat what they said and/or call them back because their connection is so poor.
Usenet started getting spammy, and many many users moved to web-based community forums. Sure, one reason was the rush to slap a browser interface on top of everything, but certainly part of it is that millions of different forum sites are harder to spam than one centralized usenet system.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but all those apply to Google as well:
You don't own it
They can monitor you
They can refuse access if they want
While software rental increases the amount of potential pain for users, it's still also be possible for a company to do a very good job, both technically and ethically.
As for the question of how sound might be more beneficial than video for games... Very fast-paced FPS's in particular (eg. natural selection) require players to track multiple enemies at once, at times on the other side of a vent or door, and once you come out shooting, to take all of their actions into consideration at once. Particularly for higher-level players, audio can give you more information about where you should dodge than video can, simply because video can't see things to the side, behind, overhead, or below you, and it can't see through walls. Increasing the accuracy of a 3D wavetracer (likely via hardware acceleration) will provide players more information during a 500 millisecond firefight than video is able to.
Ahem. Set aside 15 minutes and digest this whitepaper. Computer audio is vastly more complicated than simply increasing sample rate and bits per sample, and decreasing SNR and THD. If Aureal had still been around, Creative would have certainly been encouraged to work harder on their drivers and hardware acceleration of this stuff.
One the scale of 1000MB, bandwidth is free to people who already have broadband (eg. most geeks). Broadband providers generally won't cut your service off unless you go over sometihng like 30GB per month, so unless you're already very close to this limit, transfering a couple more gig is essentially free, to the end user at least.
This isn't the same abusing-GMail-storage topic, but... no framing??
Isn't this just a hair away from google saying "don't link to us unless we've given you explicit written permission"? It should be accepted (even among the legal community) by now that there are no possible legal implications between one site that includes another site in a frame.... right?
I just thought that Slashdot editors had started letting Shakespeare monkeys post stories. If I hadn't RTFA, I would have had no idea it was a real story.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, unless/even-if you become a hard-core motorcyclist, you'll probably still want the Smart car in addition to the motorcycle, for snowy days and lots of other situations where timeliness and convenience are more important factors. So they're clearly not equivalent vehicles.
I should have summed up my post better at the end. Here's my addendum:
That said, yes, there are a wide variety of reasons why people enjoy motorcycling. For me, it's simple economics, and the fact that they come from the factory with much harder-core race components than cars ever will, so I don't have to spend tons of time to set a vehicle up the way I want it. If people's only choice is otherwise the Smart car, and there are things about motorcycles that they can really connect with, then absolutely, please consider motorcycles. Just don't consider them the same, because you'll be disappointed unless you have enough personal emotional reasons to surpass those differences.
None of these are true for VoIP currently.
Don't forget the new "My Shopping Favories" and "My Radio Favorites".
I'm even still introducing some geeks about AdAware, so there must be a huge number of unwashed masses who shelled out $1500 for a computer that now effectively runs like a $200 one due to spyware.
Your grandmother's computer seems to her like it's getting slower and slower. The solution as mentioned is obvious: buy a newer faster computer, with it a new license for Windows (even though she already had one). It's not immediately obvious that her computer is slow because of spyware and viruses, or that Microsoft is somewhat responsible for allowing the spyware and viruses onto her computer, or that this is the main way for Microsoft to continue generating money since they have 95% marketshare.
Yup. Debian and GNU and others detail their problems with Java here. When I first read this article, I thought it might imply that Sun might be moving forward in opening up Java more, unfortunately the influences go in the other direction.
In conventional rockets, propellant can be pre-mixed -- as in the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) used NASA space shuttle -- or sit in tanks that are filled just prior to launch, like liquid oxygen and hydrogen rockets. In both engine configurations, the are highly volatile and can be toxic to handle.
"The fact that the oxidizer and fuel are not molecularly mixed in these [hybrid] engines, makes them non-explosive," explained Greg Zilliac, a hybrid engine researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "We've actually shipped fuel grains by UPS in the past."
It'd still take a bit of time to transmit 80gb, but let me just state that I'm terribly jealous of geeks who are more endowed than me in the throughput department. Someone should sell a pill for natural bandwidth enhancement.
The P2P solution either requires users to have their cable modem pegged and nearly unusable for 60 days (80gb is the current best laptop drive size, most cable modems max out at 128kbps up), or that they backup only a fraction of their hard drive. I can't quite figure out how carrying a laptop drive around, full of your MP3's, which you can play on any computer you sit at, is any less convenient than either of those options.
And to save people research time... here's a link that explains booting linux from USB-2 or Firewire drive with the help of a boot floppy/CD, in the cases that the BIOS doesn't support it natively. (just like the Mandrake GlobeTrotter provides)
And compared to a mini-iPod, you get something that 1) you don't have to worry about power since it has no batteries and doesn't require external power, 2) you get the same amount of disk capacity for something like 1/3rd the cost, 3) THEY SUPPORT USB MASS-STORAGE drivers so any modern OS can talk to it without extra drivers or funky software. Yes, it's not a portable music player, but this solution may be more appropriate for geeks who spend all their time next to a computer in one form or another, or are a little more interested in the data-transport capabilities than the convenient music playing.
For what it's worth, these are VERY practical, I'm surprised I don't see more people using them. Compared to the mini-iPod, 2.5" drive enclosures are about 40% longer and wider but just as thin, they can be USB-bus powered since laptop drives consume less power, when combined with USB-2 they're no slower than laptop drives normally are, and since the enclosure is cheap, it's easy to upgrade the setup to a larger hard drive every couple years. It really seems like a no-brainer to me.
As a bonus, you can use it to transport data (eg. your mp3 collection) between places, or even use it to boot linux anywhere with much more space and document storage capability than Knoppix.
Usenet started getting spammy, and many many users moved to web-based community forums. Sure, one reason was the rush to slap a browser interface on top of everything, but certainly part of it is that millions of different forum sites are harder to spam than one centralized usenet system.
- You don't own it
- They can monitor you
- They can refuse access if they want
While software rental increases the amount of potential pain for users, it's still also be possible for a company to do a very good job, both technically and ethically.As for the question of how sound might be more beneficial than video for games... Very fast-paced FPS's in particular (eg. natural selection) require players to track multiple enemies at once, at times on the other side of a vent or door, and once you come out shooting, to take all of their actions into consideration at once. Particularly for higher-level players, audio can give you more information about where you should dodge than video can, simply because video can't see things to the side, behind, overhead, or below you, and it can't see through walls. Increasing the accuracy of a 3D wavetracer (likely via hardware acceleration) will provide players more information during a 500 millisecond firefight than video is able to.
Ahem. Set aside 15 minutes and digest this whitepaper. Computer audio is vastly more complicated than simply increasing sample rate and bits per sample, and decreasing SNR and THD. If Aureal had still been around, Creative would have certainly been encouraged to work harder on their drivers and hardware acceleration of this stuff.
One the scale of 1000MB, bandwidth is free to people who already have broadband (eg. most geeks). Broadband providers generally won't cut your service off unless you go over sometihng like 30GB per month, so unless you're already very close to this limit, transfering a couple more gig is essentially free, to the end user at least.
Isn't this just a hair away from google saying "don't link to us unless we've given you explicit written permission"? It should be accepted (even among the legal community) by now that there are no possible legal implications between one site that includes another site in a frame.... right?
I just thought that Slashdot editors had started letting Shakespeare monkeys post stories. If I hadn't RTFA, I would have had no idea it was a real story.
Which boss would you want to build your roads? Provide your police force? These bosses are NOT the same.