...that this nonsense is being spoken by someone who couldn't possibly be even considered sensible or correct... having anything close to a valid argument against global warming.
"Solid capacitors also last longer with an average lifetime of 23 years compared to only three for electrolytic capacitors, according to Gigabyte."
Motherboards may get obsolete fast, but I still would expect a longer life than just three years.
If this is true, I'm amazed so many old computers work so well. Maybe this is a bit off. In either case, it seems with such a huge difference in life span, unless there's a huge change in cost, the extra reliability offered by solid capacitors should make them standard in every motherboard. I'm not an electrical engineer though (or an economist).
Battery powered electric cars with large enough batteries may not be practical for family vacations but they make perfect sense for most of the driving that most people in most urban areas do daily. Driving to the supermarket, drop the kids off at school, go to work, etc. I would have no problem driving my car to school, coming back home, and charging it back up overnight. That could cut my gas expenses down to zero. Imagine if all others who an electric car would be practical for, actually had one. It's one of those things like where you hear "if everyone turned off the lights when they're not in the room" or "use compact fluorescent bulbs" or "put a brick in the toilet tank" etc. You know that your contribution doesn't make a huge difference, but if others join the impact is gigantic. Of course, the impact of cutting down gas consumption is WAY greater than the impact of most of the other small energy saving ideas you usually hear.
But the sad thing is that right now electric cars aren't even an OPTION. I can't go buy an electric car even if I want one.
As for automobile pollution being "largely solved"... what planet are you living on? As far as I'm aware the improvements pretty much stopped after the 70s were over. Not because there wasn't more progress to be made, but because we stopped pushing the auto industry to innovate more in this area. Of course... look at the profits of the oil companies. Hard to believe they can't buy just a little bit of political influence with that kind of spare change on hand, isn't it?
GM spent more than $1 billion developing the EV1 including significant sums on marketing and incentives to develop a mass market for it.
Only 800 vehicles were leased during a four-year period.
No other major automotive manufacturer is producing a pure electric vehicle for use on public roads and highways.
A waiting list of 5,000 only generated 50 people willing to follow through to a lease.
Because of low demand for the EV1, parts suppliers quit making replacement parts making future repair and safety of the vehicles difficult to nearly impossible.
The issues about demand were answered clearly in the film. GM sabotaged their own marketing efforts, and even when people wanted one, they couldn't get one. It's as if they were trying their hardest to make people not want one. Just watch the movie, this is all answered.
As for the fact that no other manufacturer is producing a pure electric vehicle... well... isn't that just sad? I don't see how this contradicts anything said in the film though or how it furthers any point the author was trying to make.
Well, at least it's 1996/98... and dial-up services are still popular for those who don't want or can't get broadband (and really who needs broadband if you're a book lover and are all about the text!)
At least you're not telling people to take the receiver of their Bell system Western Electric 500 series phone, and place it in the coupler of their whatever-baud modem.
And I suppose some of those sites you summarized might be somewhere in archive.org still.:-)
No there was ONE more crisp recently... at a dinner table... I think for a holiday, Patsy asked for a crisp... the entire table is stunned in silence, and hurriedly passes her the bowl. She takes it, puts it in her mouth and sort of does an odd sucking motion, having forgotten how to actually eat solid things. Eventually it comes back out.
I can't remember what season that was in now... 4, 5, or one of the two specials.
I guess they never figured this whole thing would grow at such a rate. I wonder what other business ventures they came up with and how they fared in the dot com boom/crash.
I have a book from 1995 or so called "The Internet Yellow Pages" which seems to claim it lists every site on the Internet. It's about two inches thick and arranged by topic. There's sort of an even mix of Usenet newsgroups, gopher sites, telnet, WWW, listserv, and FTP.
There are efforts being made to consolidate all these social network sites into one, common portal like Optrata (one page to rule them all).
That may be the key for now, because I doubt any "standard" will develop among different social network sites. (I sure can't imagine how myspace, youtube, facebook, livejournal, orkut, etc. would agree on a standard: they all have their own approaches and problems. Myspace would demand every 1/3 request goes to a "under maintenance" page, still filled with a hundred ads and flash videos and other flash apps to crash your browser... and Orkut would demand every 2/3 requests is a server hiccup.)
In hindsight I think I was referring to the compiler not the virtual machine, taking longer to start up.
But still the virtual machine is a pain when it starts up... sometimes I'll be browsing a website, and suddenly it seems my computer is freezing or crashing... but then I realize, no, it's just Java starting up and some person decided to put a stupid Java applet on their page so their name can look like it's on fire or something... or show me the time.
As of what version have they been moving away from JIT?
I've been noticing significantly longer start-up times for Java over the years.
But then again, now that I think about it, this is usually just on the first run per session, so maybe the JVM has gotten slower to start-up over the years, and after that it resides in memory in the background.
I'm feeling too lazy to check this out and see if it's only the first run of a Java program that's slow, or if it's slow even if I then run another program.
Still, yeah... the programs themselves have gotten zippier over the years.
Also... *AT THE TIME*... a lot of the stuff in The Net seemed plausible to me except for the way the virus is visually shown to be eating away at the system magically at the end.
Then again at the time, Number 5 really could have been alive.
There's that obligatory exploit Trinity uses in Matrix... but I think like any movie, for every thing they get right there's a bunch of things they get wrong.
Peronally, I like Wargames.
And as much as everything else was completely wrong, I liked Wyatt's PC in Weird Science because it was black and looked powerful and had a modem. And they Enter key had two red LEDs. That was my dream computer as a kid, actually.
I suppose all the best movies I like didn't get technology right... like Short Circuit... but at least Tron had some basic information about what a "bit" was and some concept of users and sort of represented actual computer technology although in a very abstract and fantasy sort of way.
My contract with Cingular is up in February, and I've been looking for the best plan for someone like me who doesn't make a lot of calls (or long calls) but still likes to text message (or instant message).
So far the best I've been able to find is T-Mobile, who offers a $29.99 plan and a messaging service for $5 or $10 which covers both SMS and IMs.
Most other places have a $39.99 minimum plan, and the messaging is more expensive (the text rates for T-Mobile are half that for Virgin Mobile), and usually sending an IM is part of a seperate internet service.
I'm amazed T-Mobile doesn't have the most customers yet, with what they're offering compare to the others. But I suppose a lot of people might be like me, waiting for a contract to expire.
Slashdot Mirror
...that this nonsense is being spoken by someone who couldn't possibly be even considered sensible or correct... having anything close to a valid argument against global warming.
I think I remember that... was their logo a sideways winking smiley ;-)
???
I'm also fairly certain that it only does "ring/silent" and no option for vibrate.
Which kind of sucks, but if it has a hard drive in there I can see why vibrate would be impossible.
I'm also wondering how durable that screen is.
That's a $20 service on top of their cheapest phone plan of $39.99... plus taxes... isn't it?
Motherboards may get obsolete fast, but I still would expect a longer life than just three years.
If this is true, I'm amazed so many old computers work so well. Maybe this is a bit off. In either case, it seems with such a huge difference in life span, unless there's a huge change in cost, the extra reliability offered by solid capacitors should make them standard in every motherboard. I'm not an electrical engineer though (or an economist).
Give them a break... they have to proofread/edit about a full page's worth of text a DAY! And that's without a spellchecker (uhhh... apparently)!
I mean, they're overworked as it is!
Battery powered electric cars with large enough batteries may not be practical for family vacations but they make perfect sense for most of the driving that most people in most urban areas do daily. Driving to the supermarket, drop the kids off at school, go to work, etc. I would have no problem driving my car to school, coming back home, and charging it back up overnight. That could cut my gas expenses down to zero. Imagine if all others who an electric car would be practical for, actually had one. It's one of those things like where you hear "if everyone turned off the lights when they're not in the room" or "use compact fluorescent bulbs" or "put a brick in the toilet tank" etc. You know that your contribution doesn't make a huge difference, but if others join the impact is gigantic. Of course, the impact of cutting down gas consumption is WAY greater than the impact of most of the other small energy saving ideas you usually hear.
But the sad thing is that right now electric cars aren't even an OPTION. I can't go buy an electric car even if I want one.
As for automobile pollution being "largely solved"... what planet are you living on? As far as I'm aware the improvements pretty much stopped after the 70s were over. Not because there wasn't more progress to be made, but because we stopped pushing the auto industry to innovate more in this area. Of course... look at the profits of the oil companies. Hard to believe they can't buy just a little bit of political influence with that kind of spare change on hand, isn't it?
The issues about demand were answered clearly in the film. GM sabotaged their own marketing efforts, and even when people wanted one, they couldn't get one. It's as if they were trying their hardest to make people not want one. Just watch the movie, this is all answered.
As for the fact that no other manufacturer is producing a pure electric vehicle... well... isn't that just sad? I don't see how this contradicts anything said in the film though or how it furthers any point the author was trying to make.
You know the gom jabbar is the weapon on the finger, not the box, right?
Still I'm not sure how either tests for being a person. But in any case I love Dune references, so I'd mod you up if I had points.
Well, at least it's 1996/98... and dial-up services are still popular for those who don't want or can't get broadband (and really who needs broadband if you're a book lover and are all about the text!)
:-)
At least you're not telling people to take the receiver of their Bell system Western Electric 500 series phone, and place it in the coupler of their whatever-baud modem.
And I suppose some of those sites you summarized might be somewhere in archive.org still.
No there was ONE more crisp recently... at a dinner table... I think for a holiday, Patsy asked for a crisp... the entire table is stunned in silence, and hurriedly passes her the bowl. She takes it, puts it in her mouth and sort of does an odd sucking motion, having forgotten how to actually eat solid things. Eventually it comes back out.
I can't remember what season that was in now... 4, 5, or one of the two specials.
...and Stoli-Bolli... and gin and tonics... and a crisp once.
Awww... they're quoting Joanna Lumley in that article. :-(
Hahaha, that's hilarious :-)
I guess they never figured this whole thing would grow at such a rate. I wonder what other business ventures they came up with and how they fared in the dot com boom/crash.
I have a book from 1995 or so called "The Internet Yellow Pages" which seems to claim it lists every site on the Internet. It's about two inches thick and arranged by topic. There's sort of an even mix of Usenet newsgroups, gopher sites, telnet, WWW, listserv, and FTP.
There are efforts being made to consolidate all these social network sites into one, common portal like Optrata (one page to rule them all).
That may be the key for now, because I doubt any "standard" will develop among different social network sites. (I sure can't imagine how myspace, youtube, facebook, livejournal, orkut, etc. would agree on a standard: they all have their own approaches and problems. Myspace would demand every 1/3 request goes to a "under maintenance" page, still filled with a hundred ads and flash videos and other flash apps to crash your browser... and Orkut would demand every 2/3 requests is a server hiccup.)
And, computer related, it's also the name of some cluster management software made by Cluster Resources of Utah.
In hindsight I think I was referring to the compiler not the virtual machine, taking longer to start up.
But still the virtual machine is a pain when it starts up... sometimes I'll be browsing a website, and suddenly it seems my computer is freezing or crashing... but then I realize, no, it's just Java starting up and some person decided to put a stupid Java applet on their page so their name can look like it's on fire or something... or show me the time.
As of what version have they been moving away from JIT?
I've been noticing significantly longer start-up times for Java over the years.
But then again, now that I think about it, this is usually just on the first run per session, so maybe the JVM has gotten slower to start-up over the years, and after that it resides in memory in the background.
I'm feeling too lazy to check this out and see if it's only the first run of a Java program that's slow, or if it's slow even if I then run another program.
Still, yeah... the programs themselves have gotten zippier over the years.
...and you beat me to it.
Crap.
I was adding a PS to my original comment which pointed out the famous exploit Trinity uses in The Matrix.
Was sort of a rambling thought I know.
But yeah... I was a little kid when Short Circuit came out and I was an AOL user when The Net came out.
Also... *AT THE TIME*... a lot of the stuff in The Net seemed plausible to me except for the way the virus is visually shown to be eating away at the system magically at the end.
Then again at the time, Number 5 really could have been alive.
There's that obligatory exploit Trinity uses in Matrix... but I think like any movie, for every thing they get right there's a bunch of things they get wrong.
Peronally, I like Wargames.
And as much as everything else was completely wrong, I liked Wyatt's PC in Weird Science because it was black and looked powerful and had a modem. And they Enter key had two red LEDs. That was my dream computer as a kid, actually.
I suppose all the best movies I like didn't get technology right... like Short Circuit... but at least Tron had some basic information about what a "bit" was and some concept of users and sort of represented actual computer technology although in a very abstract and fantasy sort of way.
I'm so glad I'm agnostic.
My contract with Cingular is up in February, and I've been looking for the best plan for someone like me who doesn't make a lot of calls (or long calls) but still likes to text message (or instant message).
So far the best I've been able to find is T-Mobile, who offers a $29.99 plan and a messaging service for $5 or $10 which covers both SMS and IMs.
Most other places have a $39.99 minimum plan, and the messaging is more expensive (the text rates for T-Mobile are half that for Virgin Mobile), and usually sending an IM is part of a seperate internet service.
I'm amazed T-Mobile doesn't have the most customers yet, with what they're offering compare to the others. But I suppose a lot of people might be like me, waiting for a contract to expire.