Regarding mass, the earth is more or less closed. Regarding energy, you could say it's in a steady flow open system: energy in is approximately equal to energy out. The radiation absorbed from the sun is roughly equivalent to the heat vented off the upper atmosphere and the night side of the earth.
That's not precisely the case. Supposedly, global warming is taking place, meaning that the earth is experiencing a net enthalpy gain.
I don't really have a point with that except to say that it's clearly not a zero sum game. Strangely, very few things actually are a zero sum. I remember a version of economics was once explained to me that when I buy a Coke for $1, it actually causes two $1s to exist in the economy. I'm not sure that was explained correctly, but nonetheless economics is not quite zero sum, and a simpler analogy would be in barter. I grow an apple, you grow a pear. I trade you an apple for a pear. We've both gained wealth; while it may seem zero sum, production took place. (In point of fact, the production that took place was an energy conversion. That's where we lose conservation.)
(I admit I'm grossly oversimplifying. I'm trying to make a simple point, which is that things are either far simpler or less simple than people would like to think.)
Contrary to our general state of crisis and panic, the earth is certainly absorbing energy at a relatively constant rate; in other words, it is not a fully closed system, and in fact, if more efficient technology were utilized, the daily energy input to the planet exceeds our consumption.. problems come in through inefficient methods, which have increased the energy retention of the planet, or at least discharged a sufficient amount of stored energy to cause the net enthalpy to increase (heat transfer in=heat transfer out, net enthalpy = heat transfer in - heat transfer out + exothermic energy conversions such as burning stuff - endothermic energy conversions such as photosynthesis. Cancel out equal terms, you get net enthalpy=burning stuff - storing energy, since we're currently burning more than the equivalent to daily production of plant matter, if we oversimplify for sake of argument, the non-potential energy goes up. To maintain constant temperature, add enthalpy to ice converting it to water at the same temperature. Hence more energetic world than we used to have, hence less ice.)
If I was smarter or better educated, I could probably go on. I'm ure some/.er knows where life figures in and messes it all up. But mere elementary heat transfer goes at least far enough to show we don't live in a Thermos bottle.
So yeah, it's not a closed system. Those who think it is need a physics lesson.
Not really. I smell "GPL working as designed." If I recall correctly, there is no rule against reselling GPL licenced products, as long as it is still freely available and the source is properly cited. By the original intent, all participants in the GPL process are allowed to profit from the free speech that is involved, including and especially the contributors.
The only thing that generally prevents people charging whatever they want for obviously unoriginal GPL content is free market forces and the fact that most geek consumers prefer not to pay for what they can have gratis.
If I recall the quicklaunch is a folder of shortcuts, just like the desktop. The desktop button on it is unique, really it just references command-D but I recall from back then that there was no obvious way to recreate it if accidentally deleted. Now I just hit F11 and the desktop magically appears, no mouse required.
I don't know for sure, though. I ditched my PC about six years after becoming a mac zealot (that is to say, as soon as I could afford to buy a modern Mac, ie June).
I only became a mac zealot because I'm a competent enough geek to be limited by windows, but not quite competent enough to get anywhere on Linux etc.
This mouse looks neat, I guess. Thinner than my logitech, maybe that's a perk? Matches all the other white stuff on my desk?
Not really sure. With Expose and Dashboard I'm not really of the opinion that four buttons are enough. I have 8 on my mouse and I could do with more if I knew where to put them.
Hey, here's a cool idea. What if we had a separate thing just to hold buttons? That way we could keep track of more than just 8 or 9 and get to them easily. I bet we could easily make a controller with something like 100 buttons and sit it on the desk right next to the mouse.
Hmm, let me think about this one.
I'll stick with my Logitech- wireless, comfortable, functional- until something genuinely better comes along.
And don't forget the "free ipod mini after rebate" deal tacked on. I don't remember if that made the slashdot "headline", since it's a student only deal, but between that and the bump, it's definitely a good time, if not the best time, (at least for college students) to jump and buy an ibook.
I think he means that in eight years Macs will be $399?
If it holds true as some people have said that the Intel move is good econonomics and will make the chips cheaper, then we should eventually see a $399 Mini.
Truth be told, though, most current intel vendors aren't putting out much for $399. Dell's $399 box isn't likely to do much for very long, if they're anything like the Dell's I've used. You can get a computer at Walmart for less than $400, but I wouldn't expect the average consumer to do much with it right out of the box. A mac, on the other hand, comes with enough software to do everything most people would want to- I do more with my Mac than i ever did with my PC, and I haven't bought a single piece of software. (Yeah, I downloaded some free stuff, and it all beats the crap out of the Windows versions I used to use.)
Even with the Intel macs around the corner, though, I'll probably be buying my girlfriend a mac mini or an ibook in August. Why? Because I want her to have a good machine for the fall semester, and I think that the G4 is still a big enough improvement over what she has now, and yeah, I expect it to be useful for years down the line even if we later buy a newer one.
I guess if I really loved her i'd buy her an iMac now and a Centrino powerbook next year... i think she'd rather have a ring.
You are correct, but the ideal speed of a motor can be specifically tuned. I used to follow the "common sense" of lowering RPMs to gain fuel economomy. Then I had a lubrication problem in my 1989 Golf, and (as idiotic as this sounds, it worked) only got proper oil pressure in excess of 4000 RPM. My highway mileage went up from about 29 to 36 (your mileage may vary/anecdotal story I know). Years later, minue the death-throes-of-vehicle situation, I tried the same experiment after noting my turbocharged VW GTI got about 24 in mixed driving. I brought my RPMs up from a usual average around 1500-2500, up to >3000 at all times. I gained about two MPG. I haven't yet figured out if it's "worth it" in terms of wear and tear on the car. Probably is, every german car I've had has lasted greater than 150k miles, but I digress.
A hybrid drive can be combined with a Continuously variable transmission to stay in an extremely narrow RPM band. I believe Honda already offers this option; I doubt that you'd find the band varying very much when it is idle-charging, either way.
Charging efficiency reaches certain real-world limits. I think most consumers have no concept of thermodynamics. It will never be possible to get more than a certain amount of energy out of a gallon of gasoline (I have no clue what that is) and energy conversions back and forth between chemical potential, heat, enthalpy, mechanical work and kinetic energy, electric potential and back to chemical potential energy (and then again in reverse!) will always have some loss. It's inevitable, and the "best" battery technology varies widely. At first I wondered why, if lithium polymer is so great, why doesn't everything use it; but it turns out old fashioned things like lead acid and NiMH hold up better in certain conditions like high current applications and constant charge cycling.
Anyway. I am not an engineer. Ask me to fix it, I'll be glad to help; but I think I may be talking just slightly out of my league. Suffice to say, I think that some of these cars are already very close to reaching the real limit for gasoline efficiency.
Here's a question for an engineer, though. Is there an internal combustion equivalent of the Carnot engine concept? I'd be interested to know what the "ideal" possible efficiency is for a gasoline engine in a car, neglecting gear friction and all that...
The only reason stopping slowly helps MPG is actually similar to the concept of regenerative braking, albiet vaguely.
When you stop abruptly, you will arrive at the stoplight more quickly (higher speed for longer) therefore there is a greater probability of it still being red when you arrive at it, therefore you are more likely to be at ~0MPH, thus requiring to accelerate your car from 0 to whatever your cruising speed is (hence more energy and fule needed.)
If you ease off the accellerator when you first see the red light, you are a) not burning as much gas on your approach to the light, b) less likely to come to a full stop, and thus will have a smaller overall change in speed, less power required to return to cruising speed, less gas used. On the flip side, with this technique your chance of slowing down at a light is near 100% whereas in zero traffic, the abrupt stop method does give you a chance of zero change in speed, but you can only rely on that if you know the light timing and there's no traffic ahead to make you slow down anyway.
Incidentally, when I slow down earlier, and roll up to the red light at 20mph, still at speed when it turns, vs hitting it at 45 a few seconds sooner and needing to stop all the way, I find by a block past the light I've passed virtually everyone who was stopped at it, and so in addition to being energy efficient I've increased my average speed too.
Make sense?
Re: last line of parent: There is no benefit, as described above, to "getting to a stop light quicker" if it is red; hence the driver behind you has no real reason to be annoyed. But yeah, I'm sure he will be. Ignorance here is less than bliss.
Gah. Apple advertizes up to 25 minutes of skip protection in the same vein that you can have 10,000 songs on a 40gig. Being as I rip my songs at close to double the advertized rate I have about 5,000 songs on my 40gig with a few gigs free, and get real life 8 to 15 minute skip protection.
It loads up the next few songs on the current playlist (or its preselected random choices) up to its memory buffer. If I skip songs when the buffer is already low there is a delay while it loads the new song into memory.
I experience skipping after listening to only about 20MB of music with it on my waist, and I remember reading somewhere (don't know if it's true) that the pod parks its hard drive when it senses too much motion. So I pull it off my waist, hold it in my hand for a few seconds, and if I put it back before giving it time to spool up, it skips.
But I can effectively load a skip free 20-minutes playlist out of my entire collection WHILE RUNNING. A flash player cannot do that, nor can it be used for multi-gig file transfers, hence I don't own a flash player.
For instance, to the nerd who has been holding off on a music player purchase, the notion of a better deal on ipod (in the case of the color or mini models or the defunct 40gig) is stuff that matters.
Of course it would be better if the headline read (on say, January 23) "Apple to release new ipods in four weeks" but this is useful too.
One man's advertisement is another man's consumer education.
Not at all. The Hebrew codes specified in Leviticus et al specify a code of life that is extremely survival oriented, efficiency oriented, and family oriented. The end result of this is a nation that managed to thrive and grow to eventually produce movements which now dominate most of the world. Control for its own sake though it is not: 1) The kosher laws effectively prevent food poisoning and obesity. Much of what is forbidden, under available food preparation techniques (which were also specified at a high standard of sanitation), would have been either a bacterial risk or unhealthy in general. 2) Other laws, such as those governing clothing and housewares, prescribe a level of quality control that may have increased initial costs on many items, but probably resulted in better durability and a lower long term TCO. 3) Sex laws served two purposes. They held the family units together and guaranteed growth of the nation (more offspring than parents) as well as preserving the purity of the group. This may not make sense biologically but it avoided the cultural confusion which we Americans are so fond of. 4) The entirety of the code gave the Hebrews a sense of "something different" from their neighbors, as it continues to for those who follow it. Hence serving to unify the people and enhance a sense of nation, which is why they are just about the only cultural group of that period to have survived to the modern day.
That would make today (Jan 24) a particular 20 year anniversary. I'd expect Apple to be doing something celebratory, or something... like sell a few "Anniversary edition" iMacs. Not that that hasn't been beaten to death already with past special editions...
The description at the beginning of the article specifies "25 non-medically related technological innovations that have become widely used since 1980". As far as I know gene therapy is distinctly medical. While GM in general may not be, it has been in use in agriculture (where it has most substantially advanced) since the dawn of human society, so I'd hardly call it an innovation of the past 25 years.
Actually it's funny that you experience this with a Civic and aftermarket cruise, because my Civic used to do something similar with the factory cruise. Usually it would accept my cruise setting, then raise it by about 2mph every ten seconds or so until I backed it down with the decel button, but I had to keep my eye on it. I'd wager that it's a fairly common problem, but a lot of people are probably like me and just didn't see it as a big enough deal to report to the dealer- it's just not worth it to me to have to take it in, get a ride to work, worry about it all day, and then get a ride before they close...
Firefox is honestly a superior browser, and I'd use it, if it integrated with my OS.
Isn't that right there the whole crux of the old bundling argument?
I switched to Firefox when I realized it's actually faster than IE.. on a Celeron that makes a big difference... and I haven't had to look back since. I keep a windows open all the time, and with the use of Tabs I no longer have the taskbar clutter IE used to give me. I can't think of any better features than losing support for popups and ActiveX, though... I always thought feature-delete was the killer program for open source, and it's only in a strange sense here.
I did notice one benefit to IE: It seems fond of mangled HTML, and switching to FF forced me to fix a few old errors on a few of my web pages. Bother.
This film is based largely on suspension of disbelief. The world basically peeled off from our own after World War I when a group of seven rogue scientists in pre-Nazi Germany developed space travel, ornithopters, near-sonic flight, giant lasers, computerized robots, and genetic engineering... while Great Britain abandoned all common sense to build a fleet of FLYING aircraft carriers (bad idea: lose one prop/engine=lots of people and hardware die... but cool looking) and some ex-RAF volunteer builds a not-so-secret military base just outside of NYC and uses an amphibious P38 to match up with these new better-than-21st-century fighter bombers, oh and fly to china overnight without refuelling. Ok, so consider my disbelief suspended. If you really nuke it, you could go far enough to say, probably, the massive technological growth this movie posits in the decades after WWI (and perhaps a small lack of national tragedy and poverty) would have prevented the nazi movement from ever taking hold. In comic book movies, unlike real life, the radical genocide-minded bad guy never gets a following beyond a few hundred loyal minions and perhaps some robots.
Or does Apple Computer have some really bad lawyers?
I am sure I'm missing a few, but every case I can think of with Apple Computer in court resulted in their either flat out losing, or not winning in the intended way.
I was under the impression this has been available in America for quite some time from Timex. and Exxon.
Granted Speedpass isn't accepted everywhere by any means but gas and nowadays many McDonalds and a few supermarkets (in certain areas.)
The standard unit is small enough to just ditch the keychain and tuck the bead in my wallet; in fact with a bit of crazy glue I'm sure I could turn anything into a credit card of sorts. Since Mobil gives them away free (no fees, just a draw to their places) the tech must be cheap as hell- little more than an inductor/antenna and a simple IC with a serial number... it's basically less circuitry than a typical disposable camera, and far less than a digital watch.
say that again.. the rules "completely change" every five years?
my 2004 Windows XP has a recycling bin in the bottom right corner, as does my 1989 Mac SE.
with my Windows XP I have to insert a CD to play "The Sims", in my 1992 DOS 286 I had to insert a floppy disk and type a few commands to play "simcity"
In 1996 I ran Windows Update for the first time. In 2004 I ran windows update on my Win2k laptop as well as my desktop and my family's XP laptops.
In 1996 I used IE 4.0 on Windows 95. In 2004 I use IE 6.0 on Windows XP (2003). I still have a start menu, which still contains most of my menus. I still have a desktop, which contains shortcuts. I still have a task bar, which contains running programs. In fact, other than the particular shape, my 1991 Mac Classic has most of these things set up similarly.
In 1993 I had to not exchange floppy disks with strangers to avoid "Michelangelo" or whatever the trendy virus was. In 2004 I have to not open unexpected email attachments, and avoid unprotected sex with strangers too for similar reasons (in 1993 I was 12...)
I guess at one point, "how you do things" did fundamentally change every five years. After all, it was only five years from DOS 2.0 to Windows 3.1... or was it... and of course the Unix OS at my job hasn't been in place since 1983, no something like that would never happen.
I personally view the "speed of change" argument as a mere excuse. If anyone in any industry were to say that about their job as to why they don't learn the new tools, they'd be asked to leave. Why should computing be much different?
Also: next to my TV is a VCR (1988), a laserdisc player (1993), and a DVD player (2000) and my 9 year old niece knows how to use all of them, as do her parents.
Yeah... it's for this reason that I try to start the youngsters in the family on Linux boxes. Not because I think they're necessarily better off on Linux than windows- but because I think they need to learn the CONCEPTS and not just "click here."
What I find is that either they completely give up, or when they have to use Windows boxes at school or work, they have less trouble actually using their brain.
I still can't figure out what people find difficult or intimidating about computers. The only technological system I've ever actually found intimidating or difficult was... hmm... I'd have to say the interior of a car's instrument cluster. And that's not something consumers are ever supposed to see.
What exactly is it people have trouble with? Is there some magical thing I'm missing, something that makes a computer different from any other piece of technology that has controls and functions? Or is it just that most people don't know how to solve mechanical/visual puzzles?
Oncec upon a time, having a laptop was unusual for non-executives, and broadband internet was almost unheard of.
But back in those days, I could walk into just about any Starbucks-style cafe and a number of other places, and find that electricity for my laptop was available to me free of charge. It occurs to me that such a place has a power bill much higher than a <$80/mo broadband connection, and yet they're willing to give away the electricity as a perk to buying their coffee.
Four years ago (haven't been there since), the cafe in my small college town offered free broadband, which brought us non-social geeks out of our private rooms and into $4 mocha land, for the allure of having both internet and real human company. Nowadays, it's not just the geeks who want internet, but also the 14 year old daddy's wallet girls on AIM with their friends.
Ergo, any sensible business that gains revenue from loiterers should be coming to their senses about free wifi shortly.
I don't feel a need to bash the Rio because I haven't heard anything worthwhile about it. True, if I was going to spend $250 for a player, it would definitely be the minipod, and this should promptly stomp out the Rio's sales.
Which is good news for us, since Rio should be dropping to the $199 price point. Maybe I'll get one?
With the $199 4-gig Rio in my imaginary pipeline, we're not unlikely to see the 2-gig iPod at $149 in time for back to school...
here's a question. iPod's been out what, 3 years? Didn't it start close to the $299 mark? Why hasn't the high-capacity MP3 player market dipped below the $200 price point yet?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a closed system or a zero sum game.
/.er knows where life figures in and messes it all up. But mere elementary heat transfer goes at least far enough to show we don't live in a Thermos bottle.
Regarding mass, the earth is more or less closed. Regarding energy, you could say it's in a steady flow open system: energy in is approximately equal to energy out. The radiation absorbed from the sun is roughly equivalent to the heat vented off the upper atmosphere and the night side of the earth.
That's not precisely the case. Supposedly, global warming is taking place, meaning that the earth is experiencing a net enthalpy gain.
I don't really have a point with that except to say that it's clearly not a zero sum game. Strangely, very few things actually are a zero sum. I remember a version of economics was once explained to me that when I buy a Coke for $1, it actually causes two $1s to exist in the economy. I'm not sure that was explained correctly, but nonetheless economics is not quite zero sum, and a simpler analogy would be in barter. I grow an apple, you grow a pear. I trade you an apple for a pear. We've both gained wealth; while it may seem zero sum, production took place. (In point of fact, the production that took place was an energy conversion. That's where we lose conservation.)
(I admit I'm grossly oversimplifying. I'm trying to make a simple point, which is that things are either far simpler or less simple than people would like to think.)
Contrary to our general state of crisis and panic, the earth is certainly absorbing energy at a relatively constant rate; in other words, it is not a fully closed system, and in fact, if more efficient technology were utilized, the daily energy input to the planet exceeds our consumption.. problems come in through inefficient methods, which have increased the energy retention of the planet, or at least discharged a sufficient amount of stored energy to cause the net enthalpy to increase (heat transfer in=heat transfer out, net enthalpy = heat transfer in - heat transfer out + exothermic energy conversions such as burning stuff - endothermic energy conversions such as photosynthesis. Cancel out equal terms, you get net enthalpy=burning stuff - storing energy, since we're currently burning more than the equivalent to daily production of plant matter, if we oversimplify for sake of argument, the non-potential energy goes up. To maintain constant temperature, add enthalpy to ice converting it to water at the same temperature. Hence more energetic world than we used to have, hence less ice.)
If I was smarter or better educated, I could probably go on. I'm ure some
So yeah, it's not a closed system. Those who think it is need a physics lesson.
Not really. I smell "GPL working as designed."
If I recall correctly, there is no rule against reselling GPL licenced products, as long as it is still freely available and the source is properly cited. By the original intent, all participants in the GPL process are allowed to profit from the free speech that is involved, including and especially the contributors.
The only thing that generally prevents people charging whatever they want for obviously unoriginal GPL content is free market forces and the fact that most geek consumers prefer not to pay for what they can have gratis.
If I recall the quicklaunch is a folder of shortcuts, just like the desktop. The desktop button on it is unique, really it just references command-D but I recall from back then that there was no obvious way to recreate it if accidentally deleted. Now I just hit F11 and the desktop magically appears, no mouse required.
I don't know for sure, though. I ditched my PC about six years after becoming a mac zealot (that is to say, as soon as I could afford to buy a modern Mac, ie June).
I only became a mac zealot because I'm a competent enough geek to be limited by windows, but not quite competent enough to get anywhere on Linux etc.
This mouse looks neat, I guess. Thinner than my logitech, maybe that's a perk? Matches all the other white stuff on my desk?
Not really sure. With Expose and Dashboard I'm not really of the opinion that four buttons are enough. I have 8 on my mouse and I could do with more if I knew where to put them.
Hey, here's a cool idea. What if we had a separate thing just to hold buttons? That way we could keep track of more than just 8 or 9 and get to them easily. I bet we could easily make a controller with something like 100 buttons and sit it on the desk right next to the mouse.
Hmm, let me think about this one.
I'll stick with my Logitech- wireless, comfortable, functional- until something genuinely better comes along.
And don't forget the "free ipod mini after rebate" deal tacked on. I don't remember if that made the slashdot "headline", since it's a student only deal, but between that and the bump, it's definitely a good time, if not the best time, (at least for college students) to jump and buy an ibook.
I think he means that in eight years Macs will be $399?
If it holds true as some people have said that the Intel move is good econonomics and will make the chips cheaper, then we should eventually see a $399 Mini.
Truth be told, though, most current intel vendors aren't putting out much for $399. Dell's $399 box isn't likely to do much for very long, if they're anything like the Dell's I've used. You can get a computer at Walmart for less than $400, but I wouldn't expect the average consumer to do much with it right out of the box. A mac, on the other hand, comes with enough software to do everything most people would want to- I do more with my Mac than i ever did with my PC, and I haven't bought a single piece of software. (Yeah, I downloaded some free stuff, and it all beats the crap out of the Windows versions I used to use.)
Even with the Intel macs around the corner, though, I'll probably be buying my girlfriend a mac mini or an ibook in August. Why? Because I want her to have a good machine for the fall semester, and I think that the G4 is still a big enough improvement over what she has now, and yeah, I expect it to be useful for years down the line even if we later buy a newer one.
I guess if I really loved her i'd buy her an iMac now and a Centrino powerbook next year... i think she'd rather have a ring.
You are correct, but the ideal speed of a motor can be specifically tuned. I used to follow the "common sense" of lowering RPMs to gain fuel economomy. Then I had a lubrication problem in my 1989 Golf, and (as idiotic as this sounds, it worked) only got proper oil pressure in excess of 4000 RPM. My highway mileage went up from about 29 to 36 (your mileage may vary/anecdotal story I know). Years later, minue the death-throes-of-vehicle situation, I tried the same experiment after noting my turbocharged VW GTI got about 24 in mixed driving. I brought my RPMs up from a usual average around 1500-2500, up to >3000 at all times. I gained about two MPG. I haven't yet figured out if it's "worth it" in terms of wear and tear on the car. Probably is, every german car I've had has lasted greater than 150k miles, but I digress.
A hybrid drive can be combined with a Continuously variable transmission to stay in an extremely narrow RPM band. I believe Honda already offers this option; I doubt that you'd find the band varying very much when it is idle-charging, either way.
Charging efficiency reaches certain real-world limits. I think most consumers have no concept of thermodynamics. It will never be possible to get more than a certain amount of energy out of a gallon of gasoline (I have no clue what that is) and energy conversions back and forth between chemical potential, heat, enthalpy, mechanical work and kinetic energy, electric potential and back to chemical potential energy (and then again in reverse!) will always have some loss. It's inevitable, and the "best" battery technology varies widely. At first I wondered why, if lithium polymer is so great, why doesn't everything use it; but it turns out old fashioned things like lead acid and NiMH hold up better in certain conditions like high current applications and constant charge cycling.
Anyway. I am not an engineer. Ask me to fix it, I'll be glad to help; but I think I may be talking just slightly out of my league. Suffice to say, I think that some of these cars are already very close to reaching the real limit for gasoline efficiency.
Here's a question for an engineer, though. Is there an internal combustion equivalent of the Carnot engine concept? I'd be interested to know what the "ideal" possible efficiency is for a gasoline engine in a car, neglecting gear friction and all that...
The only reason stopping slowly helps MPG is actually similar to the concept of regenerative braking, albiet vaguely.
When you stop abruptly, you will arrive at the stoplight more quickly (higher speed for longer) therefore there is a greater probability of it still being red when you arrive at it, therefore you are more likely to be at ~0MPH, thus requiring to accelerate your car from 0 to whatever your cruising speed is (hence more energy and fule needed.)
If you ease off the accellerator when you first see the red light, you are a) not burning as much gas on your approach to the light, b) less likely to come to a full stop, and thus will have a smaller overall change in speed, less power required to return to cruising speed, less gas used. On the flip side, with this technique your chance of slowing down at a light is near 100% whereas in zero traffic, the abrupt stop method does give you a chance of zero change in speed, but you can only rely on that if you know the light timing and there's no traffic ahead to make you slow down anyway.
Incidentally, when I slow down earlier, and roll up to the red light at 20mph, still at speed when it turns, vs hitting it at 45 a few seconds sooner and needing to stop all the way, I find by a block past the light I've passed virtually everyone who was stopped at it, and so in addition to being energy efficient I've increased my average speed too.
Make sense?
Re: last line of parent: There is no benefit, as described above, to "getting to a stop light quicker" if it is red; hence the driver behind you has no real reason to be annoyed. But yeah, I'm sure he will be. Ignorance here is less than bliss.
Gah.
Apple advertizes up to 25 minutes of skip protection in the same vein that you can have 10,000 songs on a 40gig. Being as I rip my songs at close to double the advertized rate I have about 5,000 songs on my 40gig with a few gigs free, and get real life 8 to 15 minute skip protection.
It loads up the next few songs on the current playlist (or its preselected random choices) up to its memory buffer. If I skip songs when the buffer is already low there is a delay while it loads the new song into memory.
I experience skipping after listening to only about 20MB of music with it on my waist, and I remember reading somewhere (don't know if it's true) that the pod parks its hard drive when it senses too much motion. So I pull it off my waist, hold it in my hand for a few seconds, and if I put it back before giving it time to spool up, it skips.
But I can effectively load a skip free 20-minutes playlist out of my entire collection WHILE RUNNING. A flash player cannot do that, nor can it be used for multi-gig file transfers, hence I don't own a flash player.
And if you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk...
News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
For instance, to the nerd who has been holding off on a music player purchase, the notion of a better deal on ipod (in the case of the color or mini models or the defunct 40gig) is stuff that matters.
Of course it would be better if the headline read (on say, January 23) "Apple to release new ipods in four weeks" but this is useful too.
One man's advertisement is another man's consumer education.
You can all thank me. It wouldn't have happenned without me.
You see, I just passed the return period on my new monochrome 40 gig. Therefore, new models are automatically released.
Not at all. The Hebrew codes specified in Leviticus et al specify a code of life that is extremely survival oriented, efficiency oriented, and family oriented. The end result of this is a nation that managed to thrive and grow to eventually produce movements which now dominate most of the world. Control for its own sake though it is not:
1) The kosher laws effectively prevent food poisoning and obesity. Much of what is forbidden, under available food preparation techniques (which were also specified at a high standard of sanitation), would have been either a bacterial risk or unhealthy in general.
2) Other laws, such as those governing clothing and housewares, prescribe a level of quality control that may have increased initial costs on many items, but probably resulted in better durability and a lower long term TCO.
3) Sex laws served two purposes. They held the family units together and guaranteed growth of the nation (more offspring than parents) as well as preserving the purity of the group. This may not make sense biologically but it avoided the cultural confusion which we Americans are so fond of.
4) The entirety of the code gave the Hebrews a sense of "something different" from their neighbors, as it continues to for those who follow it. Hence serving to unify the people and enhance a sense of nation, which is why they are just about the only cultural group of that period to have survived to the modern day.
Was this the genuine first unveiling?
That would make today (Jan 24) a particular 20 year anniversary. I'd expect Apple to be doing something celebratory, or something... like sell a few "Anniversary edition" iMacs. Not that that hasn't been beaten to death already with past special editions...
The description at the beginning of the article specifies "25 non-medically related technological innovations that have become widely used since 1980". As far as I know gene therapy is distinctly medical.
While GM in general may not be, it has been in use in agriculture (where it has most substantially advanced) since the dawn of human society, so I'd hardly call it an innovation of the past 25 years.
Actually it's funny that you experience this with a Civic and aftermarket cruise, because my Civic used to do something similar with the factory cruise. Usually it would accept my cruise setting, then raise it by about 2mph every ten seconds or so until I backed it down with the decel button, but I had to keep my eye on it.
I'd wager that it's a fairly common problem, but a lot of people are probably like me and just didn't see it as a big enough deal to report to the dealer- it's just not worth it to me to have to take it in, get a ride to work, worry about it all day, and then get a ride before they close...
Isn't that right there the whole crux of the old bundling argument?
I switched to Firefox when I realized it's actually faster than IE.. on a Celeron that makes a big difference... and I haven't had to look back since. I keep a windows open all the time, and with the use of Tabs I no longer have the taskbar clutter IE used to give me. I can't think of any better features than losing support for popups and ActiveX, though... I always thought feature-delete was the killer program for open source, and it's only in a strange sense here.
I did notice one benefit to IE: It seems fond of mangled HTML, and switching to FF forced me to fix a few old errors on a few of my web pages. Bother.
This film is based largely on suspension of disbelief. The world basically peeled off from our own after World War I when a group of seven rogue scientists in pre-Nazi Germany developed space travel, ornithopters, near-sonic flight, giant lasers, computerized robots, and genetic engineering... while Great Britain abandoned all common sense to build a fleet of FLYING aircraft carriers (bad idea: lose one prop/engine=lots of people and hardware die... but cool looking) and some ex-RAF volunteer builds a not-so-secret military base just outside of NYC and uses an amphibious P38 to match up with these new better-than-21st-century fighter bombers, oh and fly to china overnight without refuelling. Ok, so consider my disbelief suspended.
If you really nuke it, you could go far enough to say, probably, the massive technological growth this movie posits in the decades after WWI (and perhaps a small lack of national tragedy and poverty) would have prevented the nazi movement from ever taking hold. In comic book movies, unlike real life, the radical genocide-minded bad guy never gets a following beyond a few hundred loyal minions and perhaps some robots.
Or does Apple Computer have some really bad lawyers?
I am sure I'm missing a few, but every case I can think of with Apple Computer in court resulted in their either flat out losing, or not winning in the intended way.
So... MS perhaps won't be happy about this... or do they care
Granted Speedpass isn't accepted everywhere by any means but gas and nowadays many McDonalds and a few supermarkets (in certain areas.)
The standard unit is small enough to just ditch the keychain and tuck the bead in my wallet; in fact with a bit of crazy glue I'm sure I could turn anything into a credit card of sorts. Since Mobil gives them away free (no fees, just a draw to their places) the tech must be cheap as hell- little more than an inductor/antenna and a simple IC with a serial number... it's basically less circuitry than a typical disposable camera, and far less than a digital watch.
oh and to stop it, you would, naturally, hit the start button....
Oh, you mean like on a new Mercedes S600, Honda S2000, or Cadillac XLR?
say that again.. the rules "completely change" every five years?
my 2004 Windows XP has a recycling bin in the bottom right corner, as does my 1989 Mac SE.
with my Windows XP I have to insert a CD to play "The Sims", in my 1992 DOS 286 I had to insert a floppy disk and type a few commands to play "simcity"
In 1996 I ran Windows Update for the first time. In 2004 I ran windows update on my Win2k laptop as well as my desktop and my family's XP laptops.
In 1996 I used IE 4.0 on Windows 95. In 2004 I use IE 6.0 on Windows XP (2003). I still have a start menu, which still contains most of my menus. I still have a desktop, which contains shortcuts. I still have a task bar, which contains running programs. In fact, other than the particular shape, my 1991 Mac Classic has most of these things set up similarly.
In 1993 I had to not exchange floppy disks with strangers to avoid "Michelangelo" or whatever the trendy virus was. In 2004 I have to not open unexpected email attachments, and avoid unprotected sex with strangers too for similar reasons (in 1993 I was 12...)
I guess at one point, "how you do things" did fundamentally change every five years. After all, it was only five years from DOS 2.0 to Windows 3.1... or was it... and of course the Unix OS at my job hasn't been in place since 1983, no something like that would never happen.
I personally view the "speed of change" argument as a mere excuse. If anyone in any industry were to say that about their job as to why they don't learn the new tools, they'd be asked to leave. Why should computing be much different?
Also: next to my TV is a VCR (1988), a laserdisc player (1993), and a DVD player (2000) and my 9 year old niece knows how to use all of them, as do her parents.
yeah, -1 troll.
Yeah... it's for this reason that I try to start the youngsters in the family on Linux boxes. Not because I think they're necessarily better off on Linux than windows- but because I think they need to learn the CONCEPTS and not just "click here."
What I find is that either they completely give up, or when they have to use Windows boxes at school or work, they have less trouble actually using their brain.
I still can't figure out what people find difficult or intimidating about computers. The only technological system I've ever actually found intimidating or difficult was... hmm... I'd have to say the interior of a car's instrument cluster. And that's not something consumers are ever supposed to see.
What exactly is it people have trouble with? Is there some magical thing I'm missing, something that makes a computer different from any other piece of technology that has controls and functions? Or is it just that most people don't know how to solve mechanical/visual puzzles?
Oncec upon a time, having a laptop was unusual for non-executives, and broadband internet was almost unheard of.
But back in those days, I could walk into just about any Starbucks-style cafe and a number of other places, and find that electricity for my laptop was available to me free of charge. It occurs to me that such a place has a power bill much higher than a <$80/mo broadband connection, and yet they're willing to give away the electricity as a perk to buying their coffee.
Four years ago (haven't been there since), the cafe in my small college town offered free broadband, which brought us non-social geeks out of our private rooms and into $4 mocha land, for the allure of having both internet and real human company. Nowadays, it's not just the geeks who want internet, but also the 14 year old daddy's wallet girls on AIM with their friends.
Ergo, any sensible business that gains revenue from loiterers should be coming to their senses about free wifi shortly.
I don't feel a need to bash the Rio because I haven't heard anything worthwhile about it. True, if I was going to spend $250 for a player, it would definitely be the minipod, and this should promptly stomp out the Rio's sales.
Which is good news for us, since Rio should be dropping to the $199 price point. Maybe I'll get one?
With the $199 4-gig Rio in my imaginary pipeline, we're not unlikely to see the 2-gig iPod at $149 in time for back to school...
here's a question. iPod's been out what, 3 years? Didn't it start close to the $299 mark? Why hasn't the high-capacity MP3 player market dipped below the $200 price point yet?