McKinsey, who are about the smartest and best consultants in the world made a prediction for the number of cell phones that would be in the world by 2000 in 1990. They were out by a few orders of magnitude.
Do you have a citation for that? It's hard to imagine how anyone could be off by "a few orders of magnitude" (that's a factor of 1000 or more) on a ten-year prediction for cell phone usage. There are around a billion cell phones in use today. To be off by "a few orders of magnitude," you'd have to have predicted a trillion lines (150 per human being) or a million lines (80% fewer than there were in the U.S. alone in 1990).
Analysts are often wrong, particularly when predicting from early in a product's growth cycle (e.g., digital music players today), but I can't imagine they're often off by a thousandfold.
I heard of one company that replaced all of it's desktops with Thinkpads and used power as the single justification
Boy, that seems like a tough sell. Let's be generous and say that laptops draw 10W (in fact, probably more) and desktops draw 200W (probably actually less than that). You save 137kWh per month, or about $11. Assuming the computer has a useful life of 3 years and is on constantly, you save $396 over the system's entire life. That's not enough to make up the difference in purchase price, let alone the more expensive maintenance a laptop requires or the fact that it will probably die (or be obsolete) sooner than the desktop.
A/C seems like a red herring, too. Half of the year (in most places), you're running heat instead, so no savings there. But even if you were running A/C year-round, spending 1W to dissipate 1W of waste heat, that only doubles the savings, and they're still not enough.
OTOH, laptops have plenty of very real advantages. Power just isn't enough of one to matter.
Lest you mod this off-topic, the same argument applies. A 100W difference is barely $5/month, so don't spend much more than $200 extra to save that 100W.
My answer (for server/MythTV duty): Shuttle SK41G with an Athlon 2400 and a Samsung 7200-RPM hard drive. 50W at idle, 75W under load, and it runs cool and quiet all the time. The barebones case is $150 new, $75 used.
I think that many non-Americans are very poorly informed about the issues involved in this election.
Many Americans are single-issue voters, too. Issues like gun control, globalization, or abortion can be enough to decide someone's vote. What's wrong with foreigners latching onto "starts preemptive wars with phony intelligence and no exit strategy" as their single issue? European history is full of preemptive wars; who can blame them for disapproving?
If you're looking for good domestic reasons to want Bush gone, consider: record budget and trade deficits; significant abridgement of First, Fourth, and Fifth (and Eighth?) amendment rights; meager environmental record; and a lack of any meaningful progress on national security.
Taxes, school vouchers, Social Security reform, healthcare, tort reform, and judicial appointments matter to me.
he was standing at the driver's side of a vehicle on a major highway which to a reasonable observer(the officer) would indiate that he was the operator.
On the contrary, he was not charged with any traffic violations, including driving without a license. So the legality of his operating the vehicle was never in question. The officer kept asking for his "papers" with the justification, "I'm investigating an investigation." It had nothing to do with him being licensed to drive. Dudley was asked to identify himself before he had been accused of anything, before there was even probable cause to accuse him of anything.
we are better off for that ruling which defines clearly what can and can't be asked for at a roadside.
But this ruling doesn't provide that! It says that being asked to identify yourself is not self-incrimination, except in those unusual cases where it is self-incrimination, of which Dudley's wasn't one. So the cops are allowed to ask who you are, unless your name itself is incriminating. This case didn't, AFAIK, determine anything else the cops can or can't ask you.
It's pretty well established that the cops can ask to see your license (and registration) if they have some question about how you're operating a motor vehicle. That was never the issue here. Dudley wasn't driving, or doing anything else that required investigation, arrest, or a license, when the cops got to him.
On the 22nd of March 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Dudley's case, a case that will determine whether Dudley and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show "the papers" whenever a cop demands them.
Um, you forgot the rest of the story. Dudley lost, as did we all. The SCOTUS concluded 5-4 that your identity alone is not incriminating enough to be protected under the 5th amendment.
more and more I feel like I'm in one of those countries that the U.S. fights to "Get rid of their evil totalitarian regeim."
Careful there, chief. An ID requirement on travel is obnoxious, but not nearly as onerous as genocide, torture, or rape. Florida's election results in 2000 may be sketchy, but not quite so sketchy as Iraq's voting results in 2002 (unanimous -- nationwide! -- for Saddam, IIRC).
Argue against USA PATRIOT, DMCA, Hollings, INDUCE, and anything else that infringes your civil/personal rights. And I'll agree with you. But those bills are a far cry from turning the US into any of the dictatorships it has invaded or sanctioned in recent memory.
My own mother doesn't believe me when I tell her about all of it.
Can you blame her? You've heard of Godwin's law, right? When you start invoking that kind of hyperbole -- the US is no freer than Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, North Korea, etc. -- your audience will tune you out. Rightly so.
furthermore there is a positive correlation (ie more a causes more b) between "More Viewing of Fox News" and "Holding Misconceptions'
Be careful not to confuse causation with correlation. Fox News may make you stupid. But it's also possible that being stupid makes you watch Fox News. Correlation alone doesn't tell you which causes which.
They weigh 200 to 500 tons. What space transport mechanism can deliver that sort of cargo mass to Mars, or even to orbit?
The emphasis on this reactor is security: it's tamper-proof and can go 30 years without any service. For a Mars mission, portability is more important.
Also, what sort of Mars base needs 100MW? That's equivalant to about 100,000 homes -- a medium-sized city. Start with a few kW of solar, which is a lot more portable than a 500-ton fission reactor.
According to the article, these reactors will weigh 200 to 500 tons. Hard to move and hard to hide -- they're pretty much stationary once installed. From a dirty bomb standpoint, the worst that would happen is that it blows up in the developing country. So it's not the US's problem at that point. It's a security burden the developing country accepts when building any sort of nuclear plant, sealed-reactor or otherwise.
In other words, installing sealed reactors instead of traditional reactors reduces the risk that governments or terrorists will steal the fuel, and it doesn't add any new risks of dirty bombs.
Can you imagine a truck-sized flying car loaded with fuel flying into or even exploding next to a skyscraper?
Probably not as bad as you think. Why is a truck-sized explosion 400 feet up any worse than a truck-sized explosion (from, say, a truck) at ground level? We already deal with the threat of ground-level trucks. Two US skyscrapers have been hit with truck bombs in the last fifteen years. They make a mess, and people die. Making trucks airborne won't change that much.
In fact, people have crashed small planes into buildings, both before and after September 11th, and it doesn't do that much damage.
September 11th (clearly implied, if not mentioned, in your post) was different in that the projectiles were jumbo jets carrying thousands of gallons of fuel. Flying cars won't have thousands of gallons of fuel, won't weigh 100 tons, and won't do any more damage than cessnas or land-bound Ryder trucks do now.
I don't know what it is but every German seems to get absolutely fried their first day if they visit in the summer. You guys do have sunlight over there don't you?
Germany is around 50N latitude, north of anything in the continental US. El Paso is close to 30N latitude, more than 1000 miles further south. That makes a huge difference in the intensity of sunlight. El Paso also gets a whole lot fewer clouds, at least during the summer.
Europeans (and folks from the east coast of the US, even) have nothing that quite compares to west Texas.
I doubt there's a DxVA equivilant in linux, or hell even driver support for the component adapter for ATI cards. I'm sure the folks w/ MythTV boxes would know better than I.
XvMC helps accelerate MPEG playback. I know it works on recent NVidia cards. Looks like it works on Via and Savage. ATI, I don't know.
MythTV and MPlayer have support (maybe through patches?) for XvMC.
I don't have an XvMC video card. Just passing along what I've seen on MythTV forums.
So, after Mickey Mouse and Sonny Bono have had their pokes, and the DMCA has been enacted... NOW they decide "no more changing the copyright legislation"?!
Isn't this a little LATE?!
What, you think Congress was done passing copyright-related legislation? If this recommendation prevents the Hollings bill, the INDUCE Act, Congressional endorsement of the broadcast flag, or any of the other proposals on the table now/recently, it will still be useful.
I'd love to see the DMCA and the CTEA (the Sonny Bono act) repealed, but stopping future copyright madness is still better than nothing.
you can always setup an account on sourceforge.cs.duke.edu
Sadly, not anymore. It got hacked into and taken off the network. No one bothered to put it back up. Ask your professors for it nicely, and someone might reinstate it.
A shared CS Sourceforge might be useful to some, but as I recall (I set it up as a CPS108 TA in 2000) people mostly only used it when the professors and TAs made them.
I think probably the most important thing is stability. Investors will get scared if the government doesn't protect old copyrights as much as they do new copyrights
That makes absolutely no sense. When The Shadows recorded "Apache" in 1960 (for example), British law said it would be protected for 50 years. Some record company bought the rights to distribute it on the notion that they'd be able to sell records for 50 years. The law is quite clear that they have 50 years to recoup that investment before the song enters the public domain. What could be more stable than that?
And now you're suggesting that the copyright to "Apache" and everything else recorded after 1954 should be extended. The Shadows and their record company have known for 44 years that in 2010, the copyright would expire. If they couldn't plan for that event, that's their problem.
What this is really about is artists who haven't performed in decades are still collecting paychecks for work they recorded in the 1950s. And of course, record companies who would rather sit on 40-year-old Beatles tunes than invest in new artists. Clearly, they'd all like to keep getting this free money, even though they've known since the 1950s that, yeah, copyrights expire.
They're trying to change the rules after the contracts have been negotiated. What's so moral about that?
All of the above. The one-per-customer-per-day limit suggests that the emphasis is on #1, drawing customers to the store.
I have a fair amount of stuff to recycle, so I'll probably end up making 5-10 trips to Office Depot to do it. Some of what I have is loose video and Ethernet cards. Loose ISA cards aren't in their list, so do I have to stuff them into a computer before I can recycle them?
Eric Raymond, a leading open-source advocate, writing in his online "Jargon File," described the politics of the archetypal open-source programmer, whom he calls J. Random Hacker, as "vaguely liberal-moderate, except for the strong libertarian contingent, which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely."
Actually, ESR updated his page about a year ago to claim that all good hackers were now "moderate to neoconservative." The NYTimes is quoting an older (but more accurate!) version of the Jargon file.
I wonder if they did so intentionally. It's more than a bit dodgy of ESR to project his political views onto J. Random Hacker, but it would be almost as dodgy for the NYTimes to misquote ESR (or to knowingly use an old quotation) to project their "vaguely liberal-moderate" views onto ESR. What goes around comes around.:)
IPV9, for when being able to individually address every single particle in the entire universe just isn't enough.
Are you claiming that ipv6 has enough addresses for every particle in the universe? It doesn't. IPv6 has 2^128, or about 10^40 addresses. Even assuming 100% utilization of the available space, you're still a factor of 10^40 or more away from covering every particle in the universe.
i wrote some nice php extensions while travelling with ca 300km/h
300 km/h is impressive and is easily 3x what most trains in the US can do. But it's also only 1/3 the speed of a common airplane. Some people in the US commute from DC to New York City, or take one-day business trips from New York to Los Angeles. At 300 km/h, it would take about 12 hours to get from NY to LA -- assuming you don't stop.
For long distances, planes win hands-down. It costs something like $1200 per passenger and takes several days for a train to get from Florida to California. A plane can do it for under $300 per passenger in 5-6 hours.
Trains really only work in high-density areas. The northeast has decent trains, as do parts of California. But out west, where population density can fall below one person per square km? Bah. Trains just aren't practical there. Even planes aren't, outside of major cities.
America is 30x as big as Germany, with barely 3x the population. The World Factbook says Germany is the size of the state of Montana, with an astounding 80x Montana's population. Do you think you could design a sustainable passenger rail system for Montana?
all the intercitys of the deutsche bahn have 220V [thats normal current here btw;] outlets at each pair of seats
So do some American planes. Well, 12V, not 220. Plane and train rides are still mostly time wasted.
DVB doesn't work in the US, does it? I think we Americans are pretty much stuck with analog reception of everything that's not over-the-air HDTV. For HDTV we have pchdtv, which works with Linux and captures a straight MPEG stream like you said. For cable, satellite, and over-the-air analog, we're stuck with capture cards like the BT8*8 and PVR-250. Analog capture works well enough to be watchable and can be encoded easily in real time on a modern (e.g., 2 GHz+) PC.
No. It appears to have a Conexant (CX23883) chipset. Recent kernels do have Conexant support, but it's less mature than the BTTV support.
BTTV cards are easy to come by. KWorld makes a whole line of them, several of which sell in the $30-$40 range. If you've got $100-$120 to burn, buy an MPEG-2 card like a PVR-250.
Now I dont know if this e450 is european and takes 240v?
The inverter in the picture is clearly providing British-plug, 240V power, with a peak output power of 300W. So the current (10A) isn't a big problem, but the power (1600W) probably is. I have a 300W-peak inverter, and it has enough trouble providing 100W for my laptop charger.
Yeah, this must be a fake
I agree. I'm willing to bet the hoax-er doesn't even own an inverter, or he'd have found
something better to link to. 2000W-peak inverters do exist, but you have to look for them, they're a little pricey, and you need a truck or RV to power them.
The E450 requires 240V, and can draw 18 Amps maximum.
According to Sun's page, the E450 had dual-redundant 605W power supplies, drawing a combined max of 1664W. That's about 13.9A of power drawn on 120V (US) lines or 7.2A of power on 230V (European) lines. Or about 140A on your car's 12V cigarette lighter.
That's 4600 Watts. 6.2 Horsepower.
No, it's not. You're multiplying US current by European voltage. Sun's own page says the peak power input is 1664W, and the peak power output is 1210W. Under normal load, it's probably half that.
That's still a whole lot of juice to pull through the 10A-20A fuse that typically protects your cigarette lighter. It's also 5+ times as much as the cheap-ass 300W-peak inverter he links to can provide.
So the story is quite probably crap, but not because the Sun draws 4600W (it doesn't) or because the alternator would have trouble with an 800W load. The alternator would probably handle that fine, but the cigarette lighter and inverter would not.
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Do you have a citation for that? It's hard to imagine how anyone could be off by "a few orders of magnitude" (that's a factor of 1000 or more) on a ten-year prediction for cell phone usage. There are around a billion cell phones in use today. To be off by "a few orders of magnitude," you'd have to have predicted a trillion lines (150 per human being) or a million lines (80% fewer than there were in the U.S. alone in 1990).
Analysts are often wrong, particularly when predicting from early in a product's growth cycle (e.g., digital music players today), but I can't imagine they're often off by a thousandfold.
Boy, that seems like a tough sell. Let's be generous and say that laptops draw 10W (in fact, probably more) and desktops draw 200W (probably actually less than that). You save 137kWh per month, or about $11. Assuming the computer has a useful life of 3 years and is on constantly, you save $396 over the system's entire life. That's not enough to make up the difference in purchase price, let alone the more expensive maintenance a laptop requires or the fact that it will probably die (or be obsolete) sooner than the desktop.
A/C seems like a red herring, too. Half of the year (in most places), you're running heat instead, so no savings there. But even if you were running A/C year-round, spending 1W to dissipate 1W of waste heat, that only doubles the savings, and they're still not enough.
OTOH, laptops have plenty of very real advantages. Power just isn't enough of one to matter.
Lest you mod this off-topic, the same argument applies. A 100W difference is barely $5/month, so don't spend much more than $200 extra to save that 100W.
My answer (for server/MythTV duty): Shuttle SK41G with an Athlon 2400 and a Samsung 7200-RPM hard drive. 50W at idle, 75W under load, and it runs cool and quiet all the time. The barebones case is $150 new, $75 used.
Many Americans are single-issue voters, too. Issues like gun control, globalization, or abortion can be enough to decide someone's vote. What's wrong with foreigners latching onto "starts preemptive wars with phony intelligence and no exit strategy" as their single issue? European history is full of preemptive wars; who can blame them for disapproving?
If you're looking for good domestic reasons to want Bush gone, consider: record budget and trade deficits; significant abridgement of First, Fourth, and Fifth (and Eighth?) amendment rights; meager environmental record; and a lack of any meaningful progress on national security.
Taxes, school vouchers, Social Security reform, healthcare, tort reform, and judicial appointments matter to me.
Me, too. That's why I won't be voting Republican.
On the contrary, he was not charged with any traffic violations, including driving without a license. So the legality of his operating the vehicle was never in question. The officer kept asking for his "papers" with the justification, "I'm investigating an investigation." It had nothing to do with him being licensed to drive. Dudley was asked to identify himself before he had been accused of anything, before there was even probable cause to accuse him of anything.
we are better off for that ruling which defines clearly what can and can't be asked for at a roadside.
But this ruling doesn't provide that! It says that being asked to identify yourself is not self-incrimination, except in those unusual cases where it is self-incrimination, of which Dudley's wasn't one. So the cops are allowed to ask who you are, unless your name itself is incriminating. This case didn't, AFAIK, determine anything else the cops can or can't ask you.
It's pretty well established that the cops can ask to see your license (and registration) if they have some question about how you're operating a motor vehicle. That was never the issue here. Dudley wasn't driving, or doing anything else that required investigation, arrest, or a license, when the cops got to him.
Um, you forgot the rest of the story. Dudley lost, as did we all. The SCOTUS concluded 5-4 that your identity alone is not incriminating enough to be protected under the 5th amendment.
Careful there, chief. An ID requirement on travel is obnoxious, but not nearly as onerous as genocide, torture, or rape. Florida's election results in 2000 may be sketchy, but not quite so sketchy as Iraq's voting results in 2002 (unanimous -- nationwide! -- for Saddam, IIRC).
Argue against USA PATRIOT, DMCA, Hollings, INDUCE, and anything else that infringes your civil/personal rights. And I'll agree with you. But those bills are a far cry from turning the US into any of the dictatorships it has invaded or sanctioned in recent memory.
My own mother doesn't believe me when I tell her about all of it.
Can you blame her? You've heard of Godwin's law, right? When you start invoking that kind of hyperbole -- the US is no freer than Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, North Korea, etc. -- your audience will tune you out. Rightly so.
Be careful not to confuse causation with correlation. Fox News may make you stupid. But it's also possible that being stupid makes you watch Fox News. Correlation alone doesn't tell you which causes which.
javascript:location.href=location.href.replace( /http\:\/\/([a-zA-Z\.]+)\/(.*)/, "http://$1.nyud.net:8090/$2");void(0)
That barfs on any hostname with numbers or dashes, as well as any URL with a port number.
If you're running Mozilla or Firefox, try the Coralize extension, which lets you right-click any link or page to load it in Coral.
The emphasis on this reactor is security: it's tamper-proof and can go 30 years without any service. For a Mars mission, portability is more important.
Also, what sort of Mars base needs 100MW? That's equivalant to about 100,000 homes -- a medium-sized city. Start with a few kW of solar, which is a lot more portable than a 500-ton fission reactor.
In other words, installing sealed reactors instead of traditional reactors reduces the risk that governments or terrorists will steal the fuel, and it doesn't add any new risks of dirty bombs.
Probably not as bad as you think. Why is a truck-sized explosion 400 feet up any worse than a truck-sized explosion (from, say, a truck) at ground level? We already deal with the threat of ground-level trucks. Two US skyscrapers have been hit with truck bombs in the last fifteen years. They make a mess, and people die. Making trucks airborne won't change that much.
In fact, people have crashed small planes into buildings, both before and after September 11th, and it doesn't do that much damage.
September 11th (clearly implied, if not mentioned, in your post) was different in that the projectiles were jumbo jets carrying thousands of gallons of fuel. Flying cars won't have thousands of gallons of fuel, won't weigh 100 tons, and won't do any more damage than cessnas or land-bound Ryder trucks do now.
Germany is around 50N latitude, north of anything in the continental US. El Paso is close to 30N latitude, more than 1000 miles further south. That makes a huge difference in the intensity of sunlight. El Paso also gets a whole lot fewer clouds, at least during the summer.
Europeans (and folks from the east coast of the US, even) have nothing that quite compares to west Texas.
--Patrick... been to El Paso, but not Germany
XvMC helps accelerate MPEG playback. I know it works on recent NVidia cards. Looks like it works on Via and Savage. ATI, I don't know.
MythTV and MPlayer have support (maybe through patches?) for XvMC.
I don't have an XvMC video card. Just passing along what I've seen on MythTV forums.
Isn't this a little LATE?!
What, you think Congress was done passing copyright-related legislation? If this recommendation prevents the Hollings bill, the INDUCE Act, Congressional endorsement of the broadcast flag, or any of the other proposals on the table now/recently, it will still be useful.
I'd love to see the DMCA and the CTEA (the Sonny Bono act) repealed, but stopping future copyright madness is still better than nothing.
Sadly, not anymore. It got hacked into and taken off the network. No one bothered to put it back up. Ask your professors for it nicely, and someone might reinstate it.
A shared CS Sourceforge might be useful to some, but as I recall (I set it up as a CPS108 TA in 2000) people mostly only used it when the professors and TAs made them.
That makes absolutely no sense. When The Shadows recorded "Apache" in 1960 (for example), British law said it would be protected for 50 years. Some record company bought the rights to distribute it on the notion that they'd be able to sell records for 50 years. The law is quite clear that they have 50 years to recoup that investment before the song enters the public domain. What could be more stable than that?
And now you're suggesting that the copyright to "Apache" and everything else recorded after 1954 should be extended. The Shadows and their record company have known for 44 years that in 2010, the copyright would expire. If they couldn't plan for that event, that's their problem.
What this is really about is artists who haven't performed in decades are still collecting paychecks for work they recorded in the 1950s. And of course, record companies who would rather sit on 40-year-old Beatles tunes than invest in new artists. Clearly, they'd all like to keep getting this free money, even though they've known since the 1950s that, yeah, copyrights expire.
They're trying to change the rules after the contracts have been negotiated. What's so moral about that?
I have a fair amount of stuff to recycle, so I'll probably end up making 5-10 trips to Office Depot to do it. Some of what I have is loose video and Ethernet cards. Loose ISA cards aren't in their list, so do I have to stuff them into a computer before I can recycle them?
Actually, ESR updated his page about a year ago to claim that all good hackers were now "moderate to neoconservative." The NYTimes is quoting an older (but more accurate!) version of the Jargon file.
I wonder if they did so intentionally. It's more than a bit dodgy of ESR to project his political views onto J. Random Hacker, but it would be almost as dodgy for the NYTimes to misquote ESR (or to knowingly use an old quotation) to project their "vaguely liberal-moderate" views onto ESR. What goes around comes around. :)
Are you claiming that ipv6 has enough addresses for every particle in the universe? It doesn't. IPv6 has 2^128, or about 10^40 addresses. Even assuming 100% utilization of the available space, you're still a factor of 10^40 or more away from covering every particle in the universe.
300 km/h is impressive and is easily 3x what most trains in the US can do. But it's also only 1/3 the speed of a common airplane. Some people in the US commute from DC to New York City, or take one-day business trips from New York to Los Angeles. At 300 km/h, it would take about 12 hours to get from NY to LA -- assuming you don't stop.
For long distances, planes win hands-down. It costs something like $1200 per passenger and takes several days for a train to get from Florida to California. A plane can do it for under $300 per passenger in 5-6 hours.
Trains really only work in high-density areas. The northeast has decent trains, as do parts of California. But out west, where population density can fall below one person per square km? Bah. Trains just aren't practical there. Even planes aren't, outside of major cities.
America is 30x as big as Germany, with barely 3x the population. The World Factbook says Germany is the size of the state of Montana, with an astounding 80x Montana's population. Do you think you could design a sustainable passenger rail system for Montana?
all the intercitys of the deutsche bahn have 220V [thats normal current here btw ;] outlets at each pair of seats
So do some American planes. Well, 12V, not 220. Plane and train rides are still mostly time wasted.
DVB doesn't work in the US, does it? I think we Americans are pretty much stuck with analog reception of everything that's not over-the-air HDTV. For HDTV we have pchdtv, which works with Linux and captures a straight MPEG stream like you said. For cable, satellite, and over-the-air analog, we're stuck with capture cards like the BT8*8 and PVR-250. Analog capture works well enough to be watchable and can be encoded easily in real time on a modern (e.g., 2 GHz+) PC.
No. It appears to have a Conexant (CX23883) chipset. Recent kernels do have Conexant support, but it's less mature than the BTTV support.
BTTV cards are easy to come by. KWorld makes a whole line of them, several of which sell in the $30-$40 range. If you've got $100-$120 to burn, buy an MPEG-2 card like a PVR-250.
Many (most?) downloaded movies are direct-from-DVD rips or DV cameras.
The inverter in the picture is clearly providing British-plug, 240V power, with a peak output power of 300W. So the current (10A) isn't a big problem, but the power (1600W) probably is. I have a 300W-peak inverter, and it has enough trouble providing 100W for my laptop charger.
Yeah, this must be a fake
I agree. I'm willing to bet the hoax-er doesn't even own an inverter, or he'd have found something better to link to. 2000W-peak inverters do exist, but you have to look for them, they're a little pricey, and you need a truck or RV to power them.
According to Sun's page, the E450 had dual-redundant 605W power supplies, drawing a combined max of 1664W. That's about 13.9A of power drawn on 120V (US) lines or 7.2A of power on 230V (European) lines. Or about 140A on your car's 12V cigarette lighter.
That's 4600 Watts. 6.2 Horsepower.
No, it's not. You're multiplying US current by European voltage. Sun's own page says the peak power input is 1664W, and the peak power output is 1210W. Under normal load, it's probably half that.
That's still a whole lot of juice to pull through the 10A-20A fuse that typically protects your cigarette lighter. It's also 5+ times as much as the cheap-ass 300W-peak inverter he links to can provide.
So the story is quite probably crap, but not because the Sun draws 4600W (it doesn't) or because the alternator would have trouble with an 800W load. The alternator would probably handle that fine, but the cigarette lighter and inverter would not.