I have communted daily, year-round on a motorcycle for the last 5 years and I have to say, I don't believe motorcycles as we know them will ever be widely adopted in the US because motorcycles are:
1) relatively unsafe. No matter how carefully you drive, you could be that much safer driving equally carefully in a car.
2) somewhat uncomfortable in all but perfect weather - no climate control at all
3) useless for haulage. If you're a primary caretaker of kids, this alone is a deal-breaker
4) not fantastic economically unless you ride a humble bike and do your own maintainence. Motorcycles are not like cars, they do not go 100K miles with just oil changes. Paying a few hundred dollars every few thousand miles to adjust the valve timings isn't something car drivers are accustomed to any more, nor are tire changes every 8K miles or so. Each tire costs about $110, as much as an SUV or high-quality car tire.
5) inconvenience of dressing in battle gear before every little trip. It musses your hair and wrinkles your clothes.
True, on average they spend a little less on music than non-fileswappers. I suppose to that decrease in overall spending is a smoking gun to the music industry, though to me it makes sense that those using more efficient means of distribution (such as legal download sites, which p2p'ers use more often than other people) would share in the savings, i.e. why should I have to pay for the mall storefront if I never go there?
Griffin has made clear in previous statements that he regards the shuttle and space station as misguided. He told the Senate earlier this year that the shuttle was "deeply flawed" and that the space station was not worth "the expense, the risk and the difficulty" of flying humans to space.
But since he became NASA administrator, Griffin hasn't been so blunt about the two programs.
Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, "My opinion is that it was.... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible." Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in."
In other words, his criticism has not been limited to the orbit; that's merely the weakest of the stances he has taken.
Anyways, unless you have a feasible plan to put it in the "correct" orbit, the distinction is meaningless. It's like arguing planet X would be a great candidate for finding life, if only it were the right distance from a suitable star. If the thing won't work in its orbit, it won't work.
Yeah yeah, mobility will kill desktop PCs, it's been around the corner fro what? Half a decade?
It is happening where I work, and I'd say the majority now use laptops as their main/only computer. Desktops have little advantage over a laptop+docking station, and great disadvantage when it comes to conveience and productively for people who aren't in the same place all the time.
Really, I have almost given up on the idea that words on paper have meaning. Today's govt. is so vastly different from even 100 years ago, all with scarcely any alteration to the document that is supposedly its charter.
I have to imagine that this technology will be cost-prohibitive
A few nanometers of silicon doesn't sound very expensive to me!
Kidding aside, let's not jump to assumptions. I'm sure with will be costly right at first, but what makes you think it's inherently expensive? You have to compare with the alternatives; it might well be cheaper than whatever they're doing now. And with the ability to diagnose cancer so much earlier and more accurately, the long-term treatment might well be much cheaper - oh, and you'll be a lot less likely to die.
I think it's kind of a shame they cancelled the project. When I travel to DC I always use the Metro, and I always think how much harder it would be to get around if there were no such thing. I think an efficient, integrated, easy-to-use transportation system like that really helps "make" a city.
I wonder how they would do real-world testing with their penchant for secrecy though. Let a few out to beta testers and they're sure to show up on one of those websites Apple is currently suing by the next morning.
That's interesting because it explains why, though my Palms have been fairly succeptible to crashing and requiring soft resets, they usually do not get their databases scrambled and lose all my data. So some sort of protection is better than none.
Secondly, it's PLASTIC. If you don't want it to scratch, then cover it. The NANO Tubes will be out very shortly so that you and your ilk can stop your crying.
Will you eat your words if Apple finally fesses up and fixes the problem? I bet they will, just as with the super-noisy Dual G4 power supplies.
People aren't as dumb as you assume. Everybody who owns a nano has owned a cellphone, PDA, or other mp3 player, and knows what sort of durability is realistic.
PS, "it's PLASTIC" doesn't mean anything - there are many types, some softer than others.
perhaps the first settlers should be the ones to name the locations where they set up their colonies.
And I'm sure they would. Anybody can name anything they want, that doesn't mean those names will ever enter into common usage. In the long run most of these names will probably just be ignored and replaced with others.
For me it would need better performance than today's thin clients. Even websurfing or scrolling through a big word processing document using X is lousy over a 100mbps network.
What I think we need is a thin digital monitor cable with a range of up to a couple hundred feet. (Presumably fiber.) The point being, no client-side compression which induces sluggishness and require a fat client (which is why today's "thin" clients cost as much as PCs anyways).
Your "near 100% perfect operation since inception" includes two missions that ended in the deaths of their crews.
Are you joking? The last Soviet space fatilities were in 1971 - that's right, 10 years before the first Shuttle launch. In other words, for the period when both existed, the Shuttle has had 14 fatalities while the Soyuz has had 0.
Now for a real shock, let's compare how many times each has flown. The total is 850 for Soyuz and 113 for Shuttle, but that's going back before the Shuttle existed. I wasn't able to find how many Soyuz launches since 1981, but I'll be it's at least twice as many.
at some point someone is simply going to write an Office plugin that opens and saves in the format, so this whole debate over what MS will or will not do will be moot.
Complex document format translation - does it ever work? I say it will always be a band-aid. To handle a format correctly, there will aways have to be tweaks buried here and there in the code, as much as we would wish otherwise.
The other option is this is the latest round of "we've fixed it this time, honest".
Most software development houses struggle with this.
Every piece of software starts with a clean, elegant structure - in the mind of whoever created it. Over time some of their assumptions prove false, and more importantly, many of the "true believers" who originally engineered the system move on. The inevitable result is the next wave of developers have a burning urge to throw it out and start from scratch. Virtually all developers want to throw out the code they maintain and start from scratch. As this faction gains momentum, what do you think they say about the software? It sucks, it's not engineered, it's not maintainable, and so on. There's probably some truth to it, but a lot of it is people making an argument to justifiy doing what they want.
Is PalmOS really so great? I've been using it since before the start of the century:) and while it's a nice simple little environment, my latest Clie with camera and wifi really seem to have outstripped the capabilities of the PalmOS. Now that Palms can run more complex software, they badly need memory protection so a single app can't crash the whole thing. And though I almost hate to say it, handwriting recognition on the PalmPC seems several generations ahead of Palm's. And after all these years, Palm notepad is still limited to 4096 byte messages? That's just pathetic.
Also, hardly any software supports the camera, virtual grafiti area, or infrared port on my Clie TH55, because PalmOS was lagging in support for these things so Sony had to jump the gun and make their own APIs. Then finally Palm came out with their own incompatible APIs.
But wait, any ISP you're using now can already track your every move online right now. I don't believe there's any law to stop them. The only difference is, you're paying them $60/mo to do it.
Others have pointed out that you can easily put LaTeX documents in a version control system, such as subversion.
Sure, until some editor moves the linebreaks (which are not significant to TeX). Then diff'ing is screwed.
Anyways, that isn't the real problem. The real problem is that using LaTeX in practice requires a highly customized environment with lots of little scripts, tools, and packages, which is highly non-portable. Everybody uses TeX in a different way, an since Tex isn't very self-contained that leads to problems.
The fact is that LaTeX isn't an analogue to MS Office, or even MS Word. For instance, how do you make a figure? The answer is some external program. And what format should the figure be in? That depends a lot on what output you're working towards - a.png works great for.pdf output with pdflatex, but not for.ps files. And for that matter, "compiling" a text document (some indeterminate number of times) is a completely obsolete idea.
LaTeX is perfect for one or a small number of highly technical people to compose a document, and that is about it.
Why would Western Digital market THIS drive for RAID configs when they have 10K rpm SATA drives (Raptors) they could have used instead ?
AFAIK the Raptor is still stuck at 75GB, no? That's getting downright pathetic.
Individually, each of these new drives is slightly slower than a Raptor. But the cheap price for high capacity would allow liberal use of Raid-1. A pair of these in Raid-1 should destroy a single Raptor in every read benchmark.
I want to know, will it eliminate the need to call traditional trig functions like sin and cos in my code? I always feel slightly guilty doing that, based on conventional wisdom (perhaps outdated) that trig functions take a long time to compute.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if you could hit the 33mpg with extended city driving? That would be an amazing increase over the non-hybrid 18mpg.
1) relatively unsafe. No matter how carefully you drive, you could be that much safer driving equally carefully in a car.
2) somewhat uncomfortable in all but perfect weather - no climate control at all
3) useless for haulage. If you're a primary caretaker of kids, this alone is a deal-breaker
4) not fantastic economically unless you ride a humble bike and do your own maintainence. Motorcycles are not like cars, they do not go 100K miles with just oil changes. Paying a few hundred dollars every few thousand miles to adjust the valve timings isn't something car drivers are accustomed to any more, nor are tire changes every 8K miles or so. Each tire costs about $110, as much as an SUV or high-quality car tire.
5) inconvenience of dressing in battle gear before every little trip. It musses your hair and wrinkles your clothes.
True, on average they spend a little less on music than non-fileswappers. I suppose to that decrease in overall spending is a smoking gun to the music industry, though to me it makes sense that those using more efficient means of distribution (such as legal download sites, which p2p'ers use more often than other people) would share in the savings, i.e. why should I have to pay for the mall storefront if I never go there?
Anyways, unless you have a feasible plan to put it in the "correct" orbit, the distinction is meaningless. It's like arguing planet X would be a great candidate for finding life, if only it were the right distance from a suitable star. If the thing won't work in its orbit, it won't work.
Really, I have almost given up on the idea that words on paper have meaning. Today's govt. is so vastly different from even 100 years ago, all with scarcely any alteration to the document that is supposedly its charter.
Kidding aside, let's not jump to assumptions. I'm sure with will be costly right at first, but what makes you think it's inherently expensive? You have to compare with the alternatives; it might well be cheaper than whatever they're doing now. And with the ability to diagnose cancer so much earlier and more accurately, the long-term treatment might well be much cheaper - oh, and you'll be a lot less likely to die.
I think it's kind of a shame they cancelled the project. When I travel to DC I always use the Metro, and I always think how much harder it would be to get around if there were no such thing. I think an efficient, integrated, easy-to-use transportation system like that really helps "make" a city.
I wonder how they would do real-world testing with their penchant for secrecy though. Let a few out to beta testers and they're sure to show up on one of those websites Apple is currently suing by the next morning.
That's interesting because it explains why, though my Palms have been fairly succeptible to crashing and requiring soft resets, they usually do not get their databases scrambled and lose all my data. So some sort of protection is better than none.
People aren't as dumb as you assume. Everybody who owns a nano has owned a cellphone, PDA, or other mp3 player, and knows what sort of durability is realistic.
PS, "it's PLASTIC" doesn't mean anything - there are many types, some softer than others.
What I think we need is a thin digital monitor cable with a range of up to a couple hundred feet. (Presumably fiber.) The point being, no client-side compression which induces sluggishness and require a fat client (which is why today's "thin" clients cost as much as PCs anyways).
Forget Asimov, how about Jesus? (Or is that automatically flaimbait?)
Really? It's been that way on my Palm III, Palm V, Palm m505, and Clie TH55.
Now for a real shock, let's compare how many times each has flown. The total is 850 for Soyuz and 113 for Shuttle, but that's going back before the Shuttle existed. I wasn't able to find how many Soyuz launches since 1981, but I'll be it's at least twice as many.
Every piece of software starts with a clean, elegant structure - in the mind of whoever created it. Over time some of their assumptions prove false, and more importantly, many of the "true believers" who originally engineered the system move on. The inevitable result is the next wave of developers have a burning urge to throw it out and start from scratch. Virtually all developers want to throw out the code they maintain and start from scratch. As this faction gains momentum, what do you think they say about the software? It sucks, it's not engineered, it's not maintainable, and so on. There's probably some truth to it, but a lot of it is people making an argument to justifiy doing what they want.
Also, hardly any software supports the camera, virtual grafiti area, or infrared port on my Clie TH55, because PalmOS was lagging in support for these things so Sony had to jump the gun and make their own APIs. Then finally Palm came out with their own incompatible APIs.
But wait, any ISP you're using now can already track your every move online right now. I don't believe there's any law to stop them. The only difference is, you're paying them $60/mo to do it.
Anyways, that isn't the real problem. The real problem is that using LaTeX in practice requires a highly customized environment with lots of little scripts, tools, and packages, which is highly non-portable. Everybody uses TeX in a different way, an since Tex isn't very self-contained that leads to problems.
The fact is that LaTeX isn't an analogue to MS Office, or even MS Word. For instance, how do you make a figure? The answer is some external program. And what format should the figure be in? That depends a lot on what output you're working towards - a .png works great for .pdf output with pdflatex, but not for .ps files. And for that matter, "compiling" a text document (some indeterminate number of times) is a completely obsolete idea.
LaTeX is perfect for one or a small number of highly technical people to compose a document, and that is about it.
Individually, each of these new drives is slightly slower than a Raptor. But the cheap price for high capacity would allow liberal use of Raid-1. A pair of these in Raid-1 should destroy a single Raptor in every read benchmark.
I want to know, will it eliminate the need to call traditional trig functions like sin and cos in my code? I always feel slightly guilty doing that, based on conventional wisdom (perhaps outdated) that trig functions take a long time to compute.