sure, at small office only software shops there's no issue with kids at work... after all, you usually work long hours, if they don't visit you there... on the other hand at larger/professional/dangerous shops there's always the issue of the cleaning help, the janitor, the security guard... all walking buy and "accidentally" erasing your work... if it's important enough to run the business, it needs to be securely put into a computer.
personally, I think Vista will be the last windows OS. It's pretty much done... there's not much more to do with the WIMP model without sacerficing backward compatibility.... and endless backward support is Microsoft's only hold over the market. As soon as you start telling customers to throw away everything Mac looks much better... for enterprises it's Linux. On the other hand, Xbox is where home users are at... it's locked down, it's "standard" "one size fits all". Developers pay to be pre-approved to write software and pay to have the software tested. all the issues that windows has go away and the system works better for it.... of course you have NO freedom... but if 90% of your daily use is games or internet, what do you really need?? There's no way Microsoft will have another OS in less than 5 years... so Vista is the thing to beat in OSes...and it's a slow moving target right now. I expect to see Microsoft to make an Xbox-style move into the home office first, then enterprise... IT departments don't like change and the constant mess.. Microsoft is investing heavily in virtualizing software to other CPUs and.NET is processor agnostic. Microsoft must grow! And Dell is the next target for hardware... wait for it!
First issue... who says "most" programs CAN be recompiled? The first gen dual cores were basically duplicates of full processors, but as multicore becomes more popular, the cores will be more efficient and may start leaving out 100% compatibility in favor of sending threads to the better processor... that could save millions of gates per chip by tailoring some cores for FPU and some for SSE3 etc. This means in the future multicore processors won't automatically handle the old code more efficently. In comment to your "multiple computer" comment, that's what happens with code that doesn't play nice NOW.. in the future, it may not be possible to have ALL the features fo a full processor on ALL the cores.
In many companies they don't have access to code... sometimes the key parts are 20 + years old and the source physically lost.. very common in business/manufacturing. Sometimes it's not "profitable".. witness how long Adobe is taking to get a version for Intel macs... Sue it's JUST a recompile, but they don't WANT TO do it.. and normal users are legally not allowed.
The problem is not NEW programing languages, it's that much low-level stuff needs to be at least looked at and tested even if it's simply recompiled... that takes TIME and MONEY! If it's copyrighted software, there's nobody but the publisher that can legally do that! That means new versions with upgrade costs (and profit scalping). Like you said, forcing people to recompile usually makes them want to rewrite parts as well from being lost, misunderstood, or inefficient. That's a great time to bring in a new language to simplify things on one base of code and tools... On the other hand it's a great time to push Linux and OSS!!! After all, the code is open so there's nothing preventing somebody from doing the simple work of recompiling and testing on their own. (it still costs TIME, which isn't free, but at least it CAN be done).
that's why most workplaces absolutely don't allow work on employee owned computers anymore. Actually Microsoft already enforces that one.. Money always overrules safety. Many Universities and employers got sued in the 90's over student/employee owned computers with "pirated" software... companies were responsible for that borrowed version of photoshop even if you never used it for work purposes! I'd say that argument is already dead.
What you've got here is a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters of searching laptops... they're arguing is that you shouldn't worry about your work laptop being searched because it's not yours, and usually work disallows you from putting private data on there anyway. There's two problems with that. First, if it's a work laptop the TSA is searching, YOU are not the owner, especially if you are following the rules, what would you do with an encrypted volume or such work put on there to keep your email or company financial data private if your laptop was stolen? The second fallacy is that the TSA is saying if it's not your "work" laptop you somehow shouldn't be traveling with personal private data... that's the biggest form of bullshit ever. It's the whole "you incriminate yourself" by brining private material into a public place that's going on more and more lately... and that is 10 ways from wrong.. The founding fathers clearly knew what they wrote, in 1776 you would take crates of personal stuff along on trips.. often guys like George Washington or Ben Franklin were away from their homes on travel for MONTHS at a time... personal property is just that...personal... demanding that it remain personal is not some "license" to perform a search because you ask they not look there... that's exactly what unreasonable search is.. especially when the search is unrequested in a public place.
but searching bags has a certain amount of history behind it... the TSA couldn't get away with searching a lawyers briefcase and reading and copying confidential client files... that's what they're trying to do with laptops. If they look thru a ladies bag, they'd expect to see some private things (like birth control, prescriptions, etc) and expected to be professional and not to comment about them, but somehow because it's a computer, they get away with reading far more than they should "because one document might be terrorist" just doesn't fly.
first your employers computer is just that...theirs! You may be carrying it thru the airport, but what right does the TSA have to search it if it doesn't contain YOUR private data. Or worse, your company knows there is sensitive info like SSN or credit card info and has your work laptop HDD encrypted... now YOUR a terrorist because the TSA goon can't read your company's private data? How about federal prosecutors using that to hijack lawyers laptops in criminal cases!!! After all by going thru TSA your attorney would give up his right to privacy of your documents!!!
TSA checkpoints are not a place for police to be performing criminal investigations... the thought alone should make the court ban them outright! The whole "war on drugs" allowing "expanded" searches and confiscations as evidence collection as a form of punishment need to be nipped... that's clearly what's happening in many of these cases. Imagine having your laptop searched at a traffic stop because you were being audited by the IRS... no court would stand for that and the airport TSA searches are exactly the same thing.
The point is that a laptop full of documents being searched would be like opening a businessman's breifcase and auditing every document... not just looking for contraband. One could argue the TSA has the right to open a briefcase and feel around for contraband or secret compartments, but the courts would clearly draw the line at examining contents of sealed envelopes or private records... One could argue that the TSA has the right to have you "Start" your laptop as proof it's really operational, but like papers they shouldn't have the right to rummage around in there.
I think if this issue could GET to court they would "sandbox" the TSA much more than they are now.... after all, the TSA needs to look for "terrorist" they don't need to look at accounting fraud or child porn, etc... Much like traffic stops where they have to have "extra" proof beyond just a radar scanner for speeding to search you. Now whether the court can make it STICK or not remains to be seen.
the most important thing is that Apple has to submit the device to the FCC for approval on all those radio frequencies. At that point most of the details become public as the FCC testing notes are "public record" so it's better for Apple to nip the rumor mill and take all the media hype for itself.
that said, the [Apple]TV really got the short stick this round. That was supposed to get the spotlight and Steve dropped the ball. They didn't show us anything about it we didn't already know, so all the fan hype has been very negative. And we can't even BUY it yet!!
they have like 4x the population... they could litterally send 1/4 of their population over here and take us out 1-for-1 and still have 3/4 left for other stuff... When all the fancy war mechanics run out and we're back to stick and stones they'd win hands down.
I was looking at macrumors at the list of lawsuits against apple and half are related to "false" advertising... Notice that Apple did not market the feature at all prior to the macworld announcement. Hardware gurus knew the part supported pre-n but Apple ignored it. By doing it that way Apple cannot be accused (and you'll know it's comming) of "crippling" the hardware because they never advertised the feature. There's also the issue of trademarks and patents, you'd think they'd have been OK selling the hardware, but there's probably some patent on pre-n Apple didn't want to expense for something they couldn't actually advertise and sell... that would be the SOX part.
Like you said MS is famous for announcing the world and then having stuff be simply "broken" until the legal details are fixed. Note MS carefully chooses what to include for drivers...the lack of DVD movie decoding for 7 years comes to mind! Or the crippled CD/DVD burning, MS won't pay for the additional features that somebody else might have their own monopoly on. MS leaves the "functionality" mess to the OEM partners if they don't want to play. Apple at least works to pay other companies fair license fees for their IP or invents it's own.
they're not stupid, they know not to actually host the kiddie porn on a machine traceable to them, so botnets are the perfect cover... being as IRC and Usenet are starting to get smarter every year to push them out.
I'd like one of those for places like slashdot and Digg. It could even be a checkbox item that a submitter could indicate without coding at all!
OF course this is posted on Slashdot of all places... that doesn't even have a profanity filter to block naughty words that signed-in users could set as default. Nothing is as fun at work as the work web censor blocking Slashdot for GNAA posts on some interesting topic.
right there is my point.. why would it take an EU charter to put that into effect? That's what I was trying to point out. Ultimately, British are Subjects of the Crown, not citizens. They have won a lot of rights to the point that they look like the USA, but nobility is still running the show. That shows in situations like street cams where the govt has rights to put up cameras... because there's not any "treaty" that the British people have fought for to say the govt can't do that. The Brits will have to play the game with the govt over taking back things like privacy every time a new technology comes out to take it away because of how their legal history has been.
In the US, at least on paper, the govt is broken up in to state/federal and branches... The federal govt is heavily restricted in what it can do to individual citizens. That, of course, is breaking down to look the same, but at least there's a really old piece of paper that says our govt had limits once. I realize that the US is taking many of those human rights away quickly to catch up, but that's the point... they're being TAKEN away... in the UK, you never really had them in the first place... it was more one group of rich people agreeing to another group of richer people to "play fair" for a while. When push comes to shove, they will always pull their powers from the ultimate power of the Crown and the person who wears it... where in the US power comes from the Constitution alone.
but how much are those first 28,000 miles worth? Normally, I used to agree that new cars were a waste of cash, but for starts I got my car for considerably less (3,000+ less, so I'm equal to your example) on an end of year clearance sale...if I had better credit, I could have gotten the payments for the NEW car CHEAPER than the used one because the automaker was willing to eat the interest. Also, I use about double the "recommended" miles per year... carpool to school, errands, etc. 1 car family of 5, getting the "prime" miles is worth it. We've been pretty good about scheduled maintenance... with the 2 year "leased" cars, your gambling that the owner didn't just drive and ditch. Of course the BIG but is that I'm planning on holding the car for at least 5 to 7 years. If I was going to turn it in at 2 years it would be wasteful to pay that "new car" premium each time, but at 5 to 7 the "new car" premium is only a few hundred a year... I pay more that that for cheeseburgers and DSL upgrades.
one thing I would say is that Google has always put their products in the "sponsored advertiser" position. It's not like they're deceiving the customers. They eventually could piss off the PAYING advertisers like another poster mentioned and then Google is "just another search engine".
first, those "two minute" calls really add up.. having a lot of them shows that your staff does something during the day... even if it's just answer the phone for a user, sometimes you have to get it on paper to prove to management.
Second, tickets for your department should be habit, part of workflow, not against it! The system should "lead" you thru the work to be done and all the steps.. the goal of a good system should be to make it EASIER to do it the right way, using the system than NOT to use the system!!! It's got to be flawless, not another piece of red tape.
My company is iSeries based so we use Aldon because it integrates tickets and codemanagement... you can check out code against a ticket kind of like Bugzilla. My trouble is getting people to write GOOD tickets! Like you, I was one of the first in my company to try to embrace it, and do it right and really "get" that you can use the ticket system to troubleshoot calls and save time, that makes it stop being a meaningless paperwork task and something that actually makes you better at your job... my problem is that as more of the staff uses it and we're going more cross-plant (I have counter parts at 2 other locations, it would be nice to use their tickets too!) they put the tickets in with crap descriptions... or they don't see the benifits of using them to document processes. I'll point out that I have about half (or less. 5 years versus 10!) the experience time on the job of the next person up... they just don't seem to get that the ticket system becomes my "lifeline" so I don't have to rely on them for answers or spend large amounts of time on research and troublshooting. "Collective Knowledge" is what it's all about, and it's ALL valuable when you're as far behind everyone else as I am. There's some issues that only happen once a year.. or less... I can't seem to get thru to anybody that a ticket from 2 years ago may be the last time a user reported a problem! That's where the efficency is though!!!
exactly, if you go to a wild party at spring break, some picture of you may still end up on somebody's myspace... don't think just because you didn't put it there, that you're not online.
you don't find Hondas and Toyotas below blue book because the people that drive them pay a little extra up front and then literaly drive them till the wheels fall off... That's proper market action, there's high demand for used ones because there's not many to buy. That alone should tell you it's a really good car. I was looking at mini-vans and kept having a hard time finding a cheap dodge/chrysler.. until I realized the same thing.. people buy them to KEEP them, not for fashion.. so against all my judgement I bought a new one... and love it. Even with the considerable increase in car payment, the vehical is cheaper (and less fustrating) to drive with regular maintenance and lower insurance than trying to get a "deal" on something "cheap". Paying to get the "prime" life of the car is worth every penny. I won't be running out to buy a new one in 3 years, but this one's been a really good deal so far.
who cares, it got great mileage... on the market now, you're not even given that choice to take away options for better mileage! I want cheap wheels, not plastic toys. I believe the main reason the auto makers aren't doing that now is that those cars ran FOREVER with low maintenance costs because they didn't have "toys" to break. The "toys" sell cars and keep people buying new ones every 2 years...how ridiculous and wasteful is the purchase of a new car in that time frame!!!!
I had an '84 Nissan Sentra that could do 45+ on long highway trips AFTER 75,000 miles. Yes, it's a "hampster-mobile" but it worked. There's nothing on the market equivelant to that... 20+ years later? WTF. All the big auto small cars are crap, and even the Japanese cars have heavy feature creep. I want "cozy" room for 5 plus the ability to convert to cargo space in a pinch. The '80's eagle summit was another car my sister had that got killer mileage... butt ugly, but a dream to drive and great function. Those cars were modern version of the Volkswagon Beetle that were no-frills, cheap to fix, and great mileage... where's something BETTER 20 years later???
why do we need a car to go 180 MPH? Most of the cars in that spec can't actually be loaded with anything, and then people try putting the same engine into trucks and calling it "performance". I don't have any need for more than 85mph or so, even when I speed. I'd rather have the extra effort put into mileage and cargo/towing ability which require better engines, not faster ones.
if you look at the super high efficent vehicals comming out of Europe they are mostly hi-torque little diesel engines that can be run within an inch of their little lives. You'll never get a gasoline engine that efficent because it needs the extra cycle steps and RPMS just to work. You might get an Ethanol engine that efficent because you could use it in the big block engines without the heat issues.
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sure, at small office only software shops there's no issue with kids at work... after all, you usually work long hours, if they don't visit you there... on the other hand at larger/professional/dangerous shops there's always the issue of the cleaning help, the janitor, the security guard... all walking buy and "accidentally" erasing your work... if it's important enough to run the business, it needs to be securely put into a computer.
personally, I think Vista will be the last windows OS. It's pretty much done... there's not much more to do with the WIMP model without sacerficing backward compatibility.... and endless backward support is Microsoft's only hold over the market. As soon as you start telling customers to throw away everything Mac looks much better... for enterprises it's Linux. On the other hand, Xbox is where home users are at... it's locked down, it's "standard" "one size fits all". Developers pay to be pre-approved to write software and pay to have the software tested. all the issues that windows has go away and the system works better for it.... of course you have NO freedom... but if 90% of your daily use is games or internet, what do you really need?? There's no way Microsoft will have another OS in less than 5 years... so Vista is the thing to beat in OSes...and it's a slow moving target right now. I expect to see Microsoft to make an Xbox-style move into the home office first, then enterprise... IT departments don't like change and the constant mess.. Microsoft is investing heavily in virtualizing software to other CPUs and .NET is processor agnostic. Microsoft must grow! And Dell is the next target for hardware... wait for it!
First issue... who says "most" programs CAN be recompiled? The first gen dual cores were basically duplicates of full processors, but as multicore becomes more popular, the cores will be more efficient and may start leaving out 100% compatibility in favor of sending threads to the better processor... that could save millions of gates per chip by tailoring some cores for FPU and some for SSE3 etc. This means in the future multicore processors won't automatically handle the old code more efficently. In comment to your "multiple computer" comment, that's what happens with code that doesn't play nice NOW.. in the future, it may not be possible to have ALL the features fo a full processor on ALL the cores.
In many companies they don't have access to code... sometimes the key parts are 20 + years old and the source physically lost.. very common in business/manufacturing. Sometimes it's not "profitable".. witness how long Adobe is taking to get a version for Intel macs... Sue it's JUST a recompile, but they don't WANT TO do it.. and normal users are legally not allowed.
The problem is not NEW programing languages, it's that much low-level stuff needs to be at least looked at and tested even if it's simply recompiled... that takes TIME and MONEY! If it's copyrighted software, there's nobody but the publisher that can legally do that! That means new versions with upgrade costs (and profit scalping). Like you said, forcing people to recompile usually makes them want to rewrite parts as well from being lost, misunderstood, or inefficient. That's a great time to bring in a new language to simplify things on one base of code and tools... On the other hand it's a great time to push Linux and OSS!!! After all, the code is open so there's nothing preventing somebody from doing the simple work of recompiling and testing on their own. (it still costs TIME, which isn't free, but at least it CAN be done).
that's why most workplaces absolutely don't allow work on employee owned computers anymore. Actually Microsoft already enforces that one.. Money always overrules safety. Many Universities and employers got sued in the 90's over student/employee owned computers with "pirated" software... companies were responsible for that borrowed version of photoshop even if you never used it for work purposes! I'd say that argument is already dead.
What you've got here is a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters of searching laptops... they're arguing is that you shouldn't worry about your work laptop being searched because it's not yours, and usually work disallows you from putting private data on there anyway. There's two problems with that. First, if it's a work laptop the TSA is searching, YOU are not the owner, especially if you are following the rules, what would you do with an encrypted volume or such work put on there to keep your email or company financial data private if your laptop was stolen? The second fallacy is that the TSA is saying if it's not your "work" laptop you somehow shouldn't be traveling with personal private data... that's the biggest form of bullshit ever. It's the whole "you incriminate yourself" by brining private material into a public place that's going on more and more lately... and that is 10 ways from wrong.. The founding fathers clearly knew what they wrote, in 1776 you would take crates of personal stuff along on trips.. often guys like George Washington or Ben Franklin were away from their homes on travel for MONTHS at a time... personal property is just that...personal... demanding that it remain personal is not some "license" to perform a search because you ask they not look there... that's exactly what unreasonable search is.. especially when the search is unrequested in a public place.
but searching bags has a certain amount of history behind it... the TSA couldn't get away with searching a lawyers briefcase and reading and copying confidential client files... that's what they're trying to do with laptops. If they look thru a ladies bag, they'd expect to see some private things (like birth control, prescriptions, etc) and expected to be professional and not to comment about them, but somehow because it's a computer, they get away with reading far more than they should "because one document might be terrorist" just doesn't fly.
first your employers computer is just that ...theirs! You may be carrying it thru the airport, but what right does the TSA have to search it if it doesn't contain YOUR private data. Or worse, your company knows there is sensitive info like SSN or credit card info and has your work laptop HDD encrypted... now YOUR a terrorist because the TSA goon can't read your company's private data? How about federal prosecutors using that to hijack lawyers laptops in criminal cases!!! After all by going thru TSA your attorney would give up his right to privacy of your documents!!!
TSA checkpoints are not a place for police to be performing criminal investigations... the thought alone should make the court ban them outright! The whole "war on drugs" allowing "expanded" searches and confiscations as evidence collection as a form of punishment need to be nipped... that's clearly what's happening in many of these cases. Imagine having your laptop searched at a traffic stop because you were being audited by the IRS... no court would stand for that and the airport TSA searches are exactly the same thing.
I think if this issue could GET to court they would "sandbox" the TSA much more than they are now.... after all, the TSA needs to look for "terrorist" they don't need to look at accounting fraud or child porn, etc... Much like traffic stops where they have to have "extra" proof beyond just a radar scanner for speeding to search you. Now whether the court can make it STICK or not remains to be seen.
that said, the [Apple]TV really got the short stick this round. That was supposed to get the spotlight and Steve dropped the ball. They didn't show us anything about it we didn't already know, so all the fan hype has been very negative. And we can't even BUY it yet!!
they have like 4x the population... they could litterally send 1/4 of their population over here and take us out 1-for-1 and still have 3/4 left for other stuff... When all the fancy war mechanics run out and we're back to stick and stones they'd win hands down.
Like you said MS is famous for announcing the world and then having stuff be simply "broken" until the legal details are fixed. Note MS carefully chooses what to include for drivers...the lack of DVD movie decoding for 7 years comes to mind! Or the crippled CD/DVD burning, MS won't pay for the additional features that somebody else might have their own monopoly on. MS leaves the "functionality" mess to the OEM partners if they don't want to play. Apple at least works to pay other companies fair license fees for their IP or invents it's own.
they're not stupid, they know not to actually host the kiddie porn on a machine traceable to them, so botnets are the perfect cover... being as IRC and Usenet are starting to get smarter every year to push them out.
OF course this is posted on Slashdot of all places... that doesn't even have a profanity filter to block naughty words that signed-in users could set as default. Nothing is as fun at work as the work web censor blocking Slashdot for GNAA posts on some interesting topic.
that's what we do for his file system...
In the US, at least on paper, the govt is broken up in to state/federal and branches... The federal govt is heavily restricted in what it can do to individual citizens. That, of course, is breaking down to look the same, but at least there's a really old piece of paper that says our govt had limits once. I realize that the US is taking many of those human rights away quickly to catch up, but that's the point... they're being TAKEN away... in the UK, you never really had them in the first place... it was more one group of rich people agreeing to another group of richer people to "play fair" for a while. When push comes to shove, they will always pull their powers from the ultimate power of the Crown and the person who wears it... where in the US power comes from the Constitution alone.
but how much are those first 28,000 miles worth? Normally, I used to agree that new cars were a waste of cash, but for starts I got my car for considerably less (3,000+ less, so I'm equal to your example) on an end of year clearance sale...if I had better credit, I could have gotten the payments for the NEW car CHEAPER than the used one because the automaker was willing to eat the interest. Also, I use about double the "recommended" miles per year... carpool to school, errands, etc. 1 car family of 5, getting the "prime" miles is worth it. We've been pretty good about scheduled maintenance... with the 2 year "leased" cars, your gambling that the owner didn't just drive and ditch. Of course the BIG but is that I'm planning on holding the car for at least 5 to 7 years. If I was going to turn it in at 2 years it would be wasteful to pay that "new car" premium each time, but at 5 to 7 the "new car" premium is only a few hundred a year... I pay more that that for cheeseburgers and DSL upgrades.
one thing I would say is that Google has always put their products in the "sponsored advertiser" position. It's not like they're deceiving the customers. They eventually could piss off the PAYING advertisers like another poster mentioned and then Google is "just another search engine".
first, those "two minute" calls really add up.. having a lot of them shows that your staff does something during the day... even if it's just answer the phone for a user, sometimes you have to get it on paper to prove to management.
Second, tickets for your department should be habit, part of workflow, not against it! The system should "lead" you thru the work to be done and all the steps.. the goal of a good system should be to make it EASIER to do it the right way, using the system than NOT to use the system!!! It's got to be flawless, not another piece of red tape.
My company is iSeries based so we use Aldon because it integrates tickets and codemanagement... you can check out code against a ticket kind of like Bugzilla. My trouble is getting people to write GOOD tickets! Like you, I was one of the first in my company to try to embrace it, and do it right and really "get" that you can use the ticket system to troubleshoot calls and save time, that makes it stop being a meaningless paperwork task and something that actually makes you better at your job... my problem is that as more of the staff uses it and we're going more cross-plant (I have counter parts at 2 other locations, it would be nice to use their tickets too!) they put the tickets in with crap descriptions... or they don't see the benifits of using them to document processes. I'll point out that I have about half (or less. 5 years versus 10!) the experience time on the job of the next person up... they just don't seem to get that the ticket system becomes my "lifeline" so I don't have to rely on them for answers or spend large amounts of time on research and troublshooting. "Collective Knowledge" is what it's all about, and it's ALL valuable when you're as far behind everyone else as I am. There's some issues that only happen once a year.. or less... I can't seem to get thru to anybody that a ticket from 2 years ago may be the last time a user reported a problem! That's where the efficency is though!!!
exactly, if you go to a wild party at spring break, some picture of you may still end up on somebody's myspace... don't think just because you didn't put it there, that you're not online.
you don't find Hondas and Toyotas below blue book because the people that drive them pay a little extra up front and then literaly drive them till the wheels fall off... That's proper market action, there's high demand for used ones because there's not many to buy. That alone should tell you it's a really good car. I was looking at mini-vans and kept having a hard time finding a cheap dodge/chrysler.. until I realized the same thing.. people buy them to KEEP them, not for fashion.. so against all my judgement I bought a new one... and love it. Even with the considerable increase in car payment, the vehical is cheaper (and less fustrating) to drive with regular maintenance and lower insurance than trying to get a "deal" on something "cheap". Paying to get the "prime" life of the car is worth every penny. I won't be running out to buy a new one in 3 years, but this one's been a really good deal so far.
who cares, it got great mileage... on the market now, you're not even given that choice to take away options for better mileage! I want cheap wheels, not plastic toys. I believe the main reason the auto makers aren't doing that now is that those cars ran FOREVER with low maintenance costs because they didn't have "toys" to break. The "toys" sell cars and keep people buying new ones every 2 years...how ridiculous and wasteful is the purchase of a new car in that time frame!!!!
I had an '84 Nissan Sentra that could do 45+ on long highway trips AFTER 75,000 miles. Yes, it's a "hampster-mobile" but it worked. There's nothing on the market equivelant to that... 20+ years later? WTF. All the big auto small cars are crap, and even the Japanese cars have heavy feature creep. I want "cozy" room for 5 plus the ability to convert to cargo space in a pinch. The '80's eagle summit was another car my sister had that got killer mileage... butt ugly, but a dream to drive and great function. Those cars were modern version of the Volkswagon Beetle that were no-frills, cheap to fix, and great mileage... where's something BETTER 20 years later???
why do we need a car to go 180 MPH? Most of the cars in that spec can't actually be loaded with anything, and then people try putting the same engine into trucks and calling it "performance". I don't have any need for more than 85mph or so, even when I speed. I'd rather have the extra effort put into mileage and cargo/towing ability which require better engines, not faster ones.
if you look at the super high efficent vehicals comming out of Europe they are mostly hi-torque little diesel engines that can be run within an inch of their little lives. You'll never get a gasoline engine that efficent because it needs the extra cycle steps and RPMS just to work. You might get an Ethanol engine that efficent because you could use it in the big block engines without the heat issues.