I tend to use non-explicit terms when posting. Quite a few people read from work, and "smuggling raisins". Won't trip any "inappropriate content" filters.
Actually, my milage is within EPA estimates and I spend the vast majority of the time stuck in L.A. traffic or simply commuting. The S2000 is by no means "gas thrifty" when compared to other four bangers. Drive it hard, or VTEC a lot and the mileage can drop into the low teens.
The numbers I gave out were based on mileages and costs I knew were correct, since I shopped out both the GX and S2000. The cost savings of the GX were important, so I looked that over very carefully. I do not know what a Civic DX gets (looed it up: 38 Hwy, 32 City) and it would get a better cost per mile @ $0.07 (assuming 34MPG mixed driving), but nowhere near as cheap as the GX would be.
Thanks for making me feel old. Episode IV was very popular among my friends and I at the time when we were 10 or so years old.
We had quite sophisticated tastes back then: Saturday morning cartoons Bicycles Peterbuilt/Kenworth/MAC big-rig trucks & CB radios Hotwheel/Matchbox car collecting Catching insects and lizards Tormenting the red ant nest at school Planet of the Apes (all of them) along with SWAT/Emergency!/6 Million Dollar Man were the best of Hollywood, and KISS was the best musical band.
Is it any wonder as adults we see these films differently?
The notion that this would automatically effect diesel prices for truck and rail transport is also nonsence. It would be trivial to structure the tax so that it applied to retail gasoline only.
Sure they can do this. During the late 70's gas was really high in price and diesel was cheap. Suddenly there were lots of (primarily German-made) diesel cars hitting the market. I particularly remember diesel VW Rabbits and quite a few diesel Mercedes Benz vehicles are still on the road.
Well, now diesel isn't as cheap as gas anymore. In fact, about 2 weeks ago it was around $2.60/gal here in California, about $0.20 higher than what I can buy that swill they call "Premium" gas here (91 octane).
If they make tax loopholes that make diesel a cheap alternative, people will be clamoring for diesel cars again.
Speaking as a Californian, the real "alternative" for commuting is the Honda Civic GX, a natural gas powered vehicle. ~250 mile range and if you have natural gas at home (most of us do) you can fuel it in your garage for about $5-10 per tank. There are also federal and state tax incentives to help knock a couple grand off the selling price ~$20,000 US. Drawbacks? The trunk space sucks, its several grand more expensive than a typical mid-range Civic. Otherwise it's clean, and you can drive in the HOV lanes solo.
The big advantage is that the car drives like any other Civic, and costs about $0.02-0.04/mile in fuel. In contrast, a car getting 20-23MPG costs about $0.10-0.12/mile to feed it premium here in California -- That's what my S2000 costs me nowadays.
I could have, but there was an additional semester's work to meet all the requirements for a degree in math (two more classes). Since I was already graduating and had a job lined up, I cut my losses and left. In retrospect, it was a good thing. All the math I use currently was taught in algebra. If I don't use it on a daily basis, it's promptly forgotten. If I had a math degree today, it would be a joke.
Though the only bright point I can remember was that after linear algebra, math seemed to get easier rather than harder.
Well I have some experience with old MO media. I've got a NeXT cube with the big, heavy, honking 5 1/4" MO drive. I have several MO disks to go with it and the oldest disk has a copy of NeXTSTEP 0.8 from the late 1980's. The drive itself is finicky as hell and very sensitive to dust, but after a good disassembly and dusting of the intenal components, the sucker boots right up. Quite impressive after all these years.
Actually, I did file. It took em a long time because I simply do not keep a whole lot of obsolete software lying around in the hopes of it paying off 10 years down the road in a class-action suit.
I had 3 MS Office licenses, 2 NT Licenses, 1 Win2k, 2 Win 98, 2 Win 98 SE and 6 Win 95 licenses.
I for sure as hell was not going to claim all of these because of the difficulty of locating the license keys/COA's for software I haven't been running for at least 5 years. I certainly do not want the hassle of MS auditing my claim and trying to explain where these came from. So I had to dig and dig to find what I could. It's a real pain in the ass, so most people should just keep the claim under $100.
For all my trouble, not all the proof could be found and I should be getting just $148 or so in vouchers.
You are correct. I downloaded a couple of these apps and checked them out. Though I could have sworn there were some with separate binaries, this was back in 1995, so my memory is hazy.
NS 3.3 ran on four platforms. That was the last version I used, and I distinctly remember it. There were even NeXTSTEP utilities that "thinned" out these fat applications and only left the thin executable you needed.
NeXTSTEP ran on four different hardware platforms and had fat binaries. Within the foo.app directory, there'd be foo-moto, foo-386, foo-sparc, and foo-hpux binaries. The OS would then attempt to execute the appropriate binary for the hardware platform the OS was running on.
OS X uses the.app directory so all the resources, bitmaps, and supporting files are in that one directory. That is why I can reinstall OS X and have MS Office X and all my other applications still work without reinstalling everything. I suppose they could still do fat binaries as well if they ever decided to do so.
Then some documentary I saw at one time was wrong. At that time they showed a plane, a "light panel" that showed orders issued from the ground controllers and mentioned that there was no way for the pilot to use his radio (to contact the KAL flight) because the Soviets at the time did not allow their aircraft to transmit on civilian frequencies to presumably make defections more difficult.
This was shown ages ago, perhaps around the time of the incident. Thanks for the link, I hate it when I spout off inaccurate info.
IIRC, The Japanese didn't carry radios in their Zero-sen fighters during WWII. The pilots communicated to each other visually to each other through hand signals. The bigger planes had them, but the familiar silver plane with the red meatball insignia seen all around the Pacific didn't.
I also recall that the Russian fighter that shot down that KAL flight that wandered into their airspace back in the mid-80's didn't have a voice radio, rather the radio it did have was used to light up a panel that showed what the commanders wanted the pilot to do.
That's nothing. The box I'm currently hacking on costs a cool $22K or thereabouts. Basically it's a Supermicro MB with 2 Xeons and two 8 disk arrays and a 80GB boot drive. It's also got 2 HotLink II cards in it for good measure.
I found the answer. Not only can you store it all, but you can rip all the data in a single afternoon! I've been working with this toy at work, it's wicked fast and has several terabytes of storage, nothing like RAID 0 with 16 drives!
Forgive the marketing spiel:
How Fast Is 200 Mbytes/Second?
One copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica (2619 pages per copy) is one (1) Gigabyte of data StreamStor can record the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in 5.12 seconds
The Library of Congress (20 million books, not counting pictures) is 20 Terabytes
StreamStor can record the entire Library of Congress in 29.13 hours
A typical video store with 5000 videos is 8 Terabytes StreamStor can record an entire video store in 11.65 hours
A copy of your favorite mystery novel is 1 Megabyte StreamStor can record a mystery novel in five thousandths (.005) of a second
One hour of music is 535 Megabytes StreamStor can record one hour of music in 2.675 seconds
Twenty four hours of music is 12.54 Gigabytes StreamStor can record 24 hours of music in 1.07 minutes
So you can rip your entire collection in 2 1/2 hours (not counting swap time). Too bad the bottleneck's not the StreamStor...
The Constitution and laws of the United States forbid all interference with the religious or political concerns of other nations. -- US President Millard Fillmore 1850-1853
Sure, I'd be all up for changing to the metric system, but how would you go about planning something like that in a cost effective manner. I suppose all new signs would have both systems used could be a start.
You'd have to do that a second time. They tore down the old highway signs with miles on them and put up hybrid miles/km traffic signs all throughout California (and I'm assuming elsewhere) in the years of the Carter administration. They later went though all the expense of tearing them down again and putting the old signs back up again after he was out of office.
The Constitution and laws of the United States forbid all interference with the religious or political concerns of other nations. -- US President Millard Fillmore 1850-1853
I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in Los Angeles the city is trying their very best to not issue necessary permits and drive these places out of business.
Dave and Buster's wanted to open up a place in the city and later bailed out because of the city insiting on a "conditional use permit" that would allow the city to revoke the permit for any reason (or no reason) 6 months or so after the permit was issued. D&B wanted to sink millions into the building they were considering converting into a restaurant. Instead they went elsewhere. Now of I want to go to a D&B I have to drive to Orange County or Ontario.
No, as a matter of fact it doesn't say anything at all. Sometimes I catch a brief flash of a window appearing and disappearing, that's all.
Usually what's left (in Virtual PC running Windows 2000) is some wierd executable sitting in the root directory of the C drive.
In OS X, on the two or three times it's happened there, it just downloads to the desktop. And I've never been prompted to accept the download, and I turned off all the auto-install crap in IE. Safari can just do what it wants for now.
None of it matters all that much, the executables do nothing in OS X, and Virtual PC is set up to "roll back" to a known state and discard changes to the disk. So if it gets infected with God-knows-what, I just restart it and all is well.
I don't know how many times I've looked for illicit crap on the net only to find my machine downloading.exe files on the sly while opening a web page.
It's even more interesting and amusing when Safari does it.
If that.exe file was downloaded on a windows box and executed, it could install a dialer program of somesort. Then it would simply dial out late at night to some pay-per-call number. That's how clicking a link will get you a phone bill.
If you have broadband, yank that old modem or disable it in the bios if it's built-in. This is especially true if you have people using the computer who show no common sense with e-mail or security in general.
I do not doubt in any way that this is an attempt to improve service.
What if I'm a first time customer? What if I try-to opt-out of RFID tags?
What if I like anonymity combined with a peaceful, non-disruptive shopping experience?
What happens when Equifax or some other company opens up a customer profiling database?
That last part is the scary one. Double-edged sword this one is.
I couldn't care less if Prada wants to show me what I look good in. Having my entire purchase history and everyday habits to the most minute detail up for bid is what scares the piss out of me. If RFID is commonplace or mandatory, someone will build it.
I need insurance. My insurance company checks up on whether I smoke or not, what I eat, and how often I buy condoms by checking a database.
I go to a Lexus or BMW dealer. As I walk in the door, a screen on every salesman's PDA notifies them that I bought 2 cars in the last 10 years, one was a Civic the other a Corolla. What kind of service would I get?
I would also bet that the IRS and state tax collecting agencies would love this data treasure trove too. Now everyone can be audited every year!
I'm pretty sure employers and law enforcement would love this too.
Actually you are right about the many MP3 devices, but the vast majority at the time were flash based.
As for the high-capacity models, the Nomad Jukebox was already out and was quite popular. The iPod did the same with about 1/2 the capacity, was firewire instead of USB, and was the size of a deck of cards (instead of a portable CD player). It was a tad expensive too.
I was underwhelmed at it when it came out. It took me about a year to warm up to the idea of getting one (10GB model). Later, it crapped out on a bad firmware upgrade. So it was replaced by a 3rd gen "docking model" (30GB). Good thing I got that replacement warranty.
Too bad about Palm though. I used to use a Psion 3a, then a Palm VII (and it was great for wireless email). I moved later to a Casio Pocket PC, but got burned when MS decided to abandon the platform. So no more of these gadgets for me.
If Apple decides to make one, I'll look it over. But no promises.
That you may do. But imagine what the world would be like when this becomes more commonplace.
Imagine going to a designer store to buy a nice handbag or whatnot for your better half when you are tagged head to toe with WalMart and JC Penny tags.
Imagine trying to get help in such a store. It's hard enough getting help from the clerks if you don't appear to fit the "profile", but rich people sometimes dress like slobs too. Determining which is which is a simple matter of "loyalty cards", credit accounts, and sharing of customer info between stores.
RFID will confirm to the staff you are not their type of "customer". They only attention you will attract is store security.
Better yet, there are many jewelry shops with automatic doors that are locked and released by the staff after they look over the customer. Imagine this spreading to other kinds of shops now that RFID tags can be used. Wouldn't it be grand to be denied entrance based on what you wear and what cards you carry (and possibly the cash) in your wallet rather than just appearance?
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I tend to use non-explicit terms when posting. Quite a few people read from work, and "smuggling raisins". Won't trip any "inappropriate content" filters.
You can try "Urban Dictionary" to find most of these terms.
The female of the moment AFAIR, was Farrah Fawcett. The hottest fapping material of the day was that poster of her smuggling raisins in a swimsuit.
You can see the very same poster in the movie Saturday Night Fever, another movie defining that decade.
Rest assured, we got some payback from those red ants in it too.
Actually, my milage is within EPA estimates and I spend the vast majority of the time stuck in L.A. traffic or simply commuting. The S2000 is by no means "gas thrifty" when compared to other four bangers. Drive it hard, or VTEC a lot and the mileage can drop into the low teens.
The numbers I gave out were based on mileages and costs I knew were correct, since I shopped out both the GX and S2000. The cost savings of the GX were important, so I looked that over very carefully. I do not know what a Civic DX gets (looed it up: 38 Hwy, 32 City) and it would get a better cost per mile @ $0.07 (assuming 34MPG mixed driving), but nowhere near as cheap as the GX would be.
Thanks for making me feel old. Episode IV was very popular among my friends and I at the time when we were 10 or so years old.
We had quite sophisticated tastes back then:
Saturday morning cartoons
Bicycles
Peterbuilt/Kenworth/MAC big-rig trucks & CB radios
Hotwheel/Matchbox car collecting
Catching insects and lizards
Tormenting the red ant nest at school
Planet of the Apes (all of them) along with SWAT/Emergency!/6 Million Dollar Man were the best of Hollywood, and KISS was the best musical band.
Is it any wonder as adults we see these films differently?
Sure they can do this. During the late 70's gas was really high in price and diesel was cheap. Suddenly there were lots of (primarily German-made) diesel cars hitting the market. I particularly remember diesel VW Rabbits and quite a few diesel Mercedes Benz vehicles are still on the road.
Well, now diesel isn't as cheap as gas anymore. In fact, about 2 weeks ago it was around $2.60/gal here in California, about $0.20 higher than what I can buy that swill they call "Premium" gas here (91 octane).
If they make tax loopholes that make diesel a cheap alternative, people will be clamoring for diesel cars again.
Speaking as a Californian, the real "alternative" for commuting is the Honda Civic GX, a natural gas powered vehicle. ~250 mile range and if you have natural gas at home (most of us do) you can fuel it in your garage for about $5-10 per tank. There are also federal and state tax incentives to help knock a couple grand off the selling price ~$20,000 US. Drawbacks? The trunk space sucks, its several grand more expensive than a typical mid-range Civic. Otherwise it's clean, and you can drive in the HOV lanes solo.
The big advantage is that the car drives like any other Civic, and costs about $0.02-0.04/mile in fuel. In contrast, a car getting 20-23MPG costs about $0.10-0.12/mile to feed it premium here in California -- That's what my S2000 costs me nowadays.
True, but how many of the parts currently available at Circuit City were invented/originally engineered for smart bombs?
Dunno, but my Circuit City bought TiVo recorded Dr. Strangelove a couple of weeks back without my ever telling it to do so.
I could have, but there was an additional semester's work to meet all the requirements for a degree in math (two more classes). Since I was already graduating and had a job lined up, I cut my losses and left. In retrospect, it was a good thing. All the math I use currently was taught in algebra. If I don't use it on a daily basis, it's promptly forgotten. If I had a math degree today, it would be a joke.
Though the only bright point I can remember was that after linear algebra, math seemed to get easier rather than harder.
For my CS degree, I was required to take all the same math courses a math major would have to take. After numerical analysis, my head was spinning.
Well I have some experience with old MO media. I've got a NeXT cube with the big, heavy, honking 5 1/4" MO drive. I have several MO disks to go with it and the oldest disk has a copy of NeXTSTEP 0.8 from the late 1980's. The drive itself is finicky as hell and very sensitive to dust, but after a good disassembly and dusting of the intenal components, the sucker boots right up. Quite impressive after all these years.
Actually, I did file. It took em a long time because I simply do not keep a whole lot of obsolete software lying around in the hopes of it paying off 10 years down the road in a class-action suit.
I had 3 MS Office licenses, 2 NT Licenses, 1 Win2k, 2 Win 98, 2 Win 98 SE and 6 Win 95 licenses.
I for sure as hell was not going to claim all of these because of the difficulty of locating the license keys/COA's for software I haven't been running for at least 5 years. I certainly do not want the hassle of MS auditing my claim and trying to explain where these came from. So I had to dig and dig to find what I could. It's a real pain in the ass, so most people should just keep the claim under $100.
For all my trouble, not all the proof could be found and I should be getting just $148 or so in vouchers.
You are correct. I downloaded a couple of these apps and checked them out. Though I could have sworn there were some with separate binaries, this was back in 1995, so my memory is hazy.
NS 3.3 ran on four platforms. That was the last version I used, and I distinctly remember it. There were even NeXTSTEP utilities that "thinned" out these fat applications and only left the thin executable you needed.
NeXT did it for a good reason:
.app directory so all the resources, bitmaps, and supporting files are in that one directory. That is why I can reinstall OS X and have MS Office X and all my other applications still work without reinstalling everything. I suppose they could still do fat binaries as well if they ever decided to do so.
NeXTSTEP ran on four different hardware platforms and had fat binaries. Within the foo.app directory, there'd be foo-moto, foo-386, foo-sparc, and foo-hpux binaries. The OS would then attempt to execute the appropriate binary for the hardware platform the OS was running on.
OS X uses the
Then some documentary I saw at one time was wrong. At that time they showed a plane, a "light panel" that showed orders issued from the ground controllers and mentioned that there was no way for the pilot to use his radio (to contact the KAL flight) because the Soviets at the time did not allow their aircraft to transmit on civilian frequencies to presumably make defections more difficult.
This was shown ages ago, perhaps around the time of the incident. Thanks for the link, I hate it when I spout off inaccurate info.
IIRC, The Japanese didn't carry radios in their Zero-sen fighters during WWII. The pilots communicated to each other visually to each other through hand signals. The bigger planes had them, but the familiar silver plane with the red meatball insignia seen all around the Pacific didn't.
I also recall that the Russian fighter that shot down that KAL flight that wandered into their airspace back in the mid-80's didn't have a voice radio, rather the radio it did have was used to light up a panel that showed what the commanders wanted the pilot to do.
That's nothing. The box I'm currently hacking on costs a cool $22K or thereabouts. Basically it's a Supermicro MB with 2 Xeons and two 8 disk arrays and a 80GB boot drive. It's also got 2 HotLink II cards in it for good measure.
Nonetheless, its up to the job.
I found the answer. Not only can you store it all, but you can rip all the data in a single afternoon! I've been working with this toy at work, it's wicked fast and has several terabytes of storage, nothing like RAID 0 with 16 drives!
Forgive the marketing spiel:
How Fast Is 200 Mbytes/Second?
One copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica (2619 pages per copy) is one (1) Gigabyte of data
StreamStor can record the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in 5.12 seconds
The Library of Congress (20 million books, not counting pictures) is 20 Terabytes
StreamStor can record the entire Library of Congress in 29.13 hours
A typical video store with 5000 videos is 8 Terabytes
StreamStor can record an entire video store in 11.65 hours
A copy of your favorite mystery novel is 1 Megabyte
StreamStor can record a mystery novel in five thousandths (.005) of a second
One hour of music is 535 Megabytes
StreamStor can record one hour of music in 2.675 seconds
Twenty four hours of music is 12.54 Gigabytes
StreamStor can record 24 hours of music in 1.07 minutes
So you can rip your entire collection in 2 1/2 hours (not counting swap time). Too bad the bottleneck's not the StreamStor...
The Constitution and laws of the United States forbid all interference with the religious or political concerns of other nations.
-- US President Millard Fillmore 1850-1853
You'd have to do that a second time. They tore down the old highway signs with miles on them and put up hybrid miles/km traffic signs all throughout California (and I'm assuming elsewhere) in the years of the Carter administration. They later went though all the expense of tearing them down again and putting the old signs back up again after he was out of office.
The Constitution and laws of the United States forbid all interference with the religious or political concerns of other nations.
-- US President Millard Fillmore 1850-1853
I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in Los Angeles the city is trying their very best to not issue necessary permits and drive these places out of business.
Dave and Buster's wanted to open up a place in the city and later bailed out because of the city insiting on a "conditional use permit" that would allow the city to revoke the permit for any reason (or no reason) 6 months or so after the permit was issued. D&B wanted to sink millions into the building they were considering converting into a restaurant. Instead they went elsewhere. Now of I want to go to a D&B I have to drive to Orange County or Ontario.
No, as a matter of fact it doesn't say anything at all. Sometimes I catch a brief flash of a window appearing and disappearing, that's all.
Usually what's left (in Virtual PC running Windows 2000) is some wierd executable sitting in the root directory of the C drive.
In OS X, on the two or three times it's happened there, it just downloads to the desktop. And I've never been prompted to accept the download, and I turned off all the auto-install crap in IE. Safari can just do what it wants for now.
None of it matters all that much, the executables do nothing in OS X, and Virtual PC is set up to "roll back" to a known state and discard changes to the disk. So if it gets infected with God-knows-what, I just restart it and all is well.
I don't know how many times I've looked for illicit crap on the net only to find my machine downloading .exe files on the sly while opening a web page.
.exe file was downloaded on a windows box and executed, it could install a dialer program of somesort. Then it would simply dial out late at night to some pay-per-call number. That's how clicking a link will get you a phone bill.
It's even more interesting and amusing when Safari does it.
If that
If you have broadband, yank that old modem or disable it in the bios if it's built-in. This is especially true if you have people using the computer who show no common sense with e-mail or security in general.
Problem solved.
I do not doubt in any way that this is an attempt to improve service.
What if I'm a first time customer?
What if I try-to opt-out of RFID tags?
What if I like anonymity combined with a peaceful, non-disruptive shopping experience?
What happens when Equifax or some other company opens up a customer profiling database?
That last part is the scary one. Double-edged sword this one is.
I couldn't care less if Prada wants to show me what I look good in. Having my entire purchase history and everyday habits to the most minute detail up for bid is what scares the piss out of me. If RFID is commonplace or mandatory, someone will build it.
I need insurance. My insurance company checks up on whether I smoke or not, what I eat, and how often I buy condoms by checking a database.
I go to a Lexus or BMW dealer. As I walk in the door, a screen on every salesman's PDA notifies them that I bought 2 cars in the last 10 years, one was a Civic the other a Corolla. What kind of service would I get?
I would also bet that the IRS and state tax collecting agencies would love this data treasure trove too. Now everyone can be audited every year!
I'm pretty sure employers and law enforcement would love this too.
Actually you are right about the many MP3 devices, but the vast majority at the time were flash based.
As for the high-capacity models, the Nomad Jukebox was already out and was quite popular. The iPod did the same with about 1/2 the capacity, was firewire instead of USB, and was the size of a deck of cards (instead of a portable CD player). It was a tad expensive too.
I was underwhelmed at it when it came out. It took me about a year to warm up to the idea of getting one (10GB model). Later, it crapped out on a bad firmware upgrade. So it was replaced by a 3rd gen "docking model" (30GB). Good thing I got that replacement warranty.
Too bad about Palm though. I used to use a Psion 3a, then a Palm VII (and it was great for wireless email). I moved later to a Casio Pocket PC, but got burned when MS decided to abandon the platform. So no more of these gadgets for me.
If Apple decides to make one, I'll look it over. But no promises.
That you may do. But imagine what the world would be like when this becomes more commonplace.
Imagine going to a designer store to buy a nice handbag or whatnot for your better half when you are tagged head to toe with WalMart and JC Penny tags.
Imagine trying to get help in such a store. It's hard enough getting help from the clerks if you don't appear to fit the "profile", but rich people sometimes dress like slobs too. Determining which is which is a simple matter of "loyalty cards", credit accounts, and sharing of customer info between stores.
RFID will confirm to the staff you are not their type of "customer". They only attention you will attract is store security.
Better yet, there are many jewelry shops with automatic doors that are locked and released by the staff after they look over the customer. Imagine this spreading to other kinds of shops now that RFID tags can be used. Wouldn't it be grand to be denied entrance based on what you wear and what cards you carry (and possibly the cash) in your wallet rather than just appearance?