* Innovative means of continuing to maintain a completely locked down network, even in the face of FCC regulations regarding LTE, in the name of security. * Forcing device manufacturers to lock down bootloaders such that only Verizon can issue security updates. * Failing to issue said security updates, creating insecure devices, forcing customers to upgrade. * Requiring upgrading customers to obtain a downgraded (limited) data plan in order to qualify for subsidized phones. (You're always paying a subsidized price, whether or not your contract is currently subsidizing a phone.) * Introducing a marketing strategy where eager users can pay twice for their subsidized phones if they'd like to upgrade early. (Do the math, it's not friendly, and is difficult to understand by design.
I'm sure there are plenty of legitimate innovations coming from Verizon. But it doesn't nearly make up for the harm they're doing to the future of mobile. Their primary mission is control, not customer satisfaction. They have a lot of customers, a lot of money, and most importantly, a lot of cell towers, which keeps us "happy enough" as customers.
It would a frivolous waste of money we dont have to fix something thats not broken.
However, what makes it s truly broken unit system is that it uses the unit pound for both mass and weight. Yes there have been "hacks" of the system to bring them inline with physical reality so you have the "avoirdupois pound" meaning a mass and the "pound" meaning force. However this means that the units are not clear: when you say "pound" do you mean force or mass? If you need to tweak your unit system to make it consistent with physics that's not really a good sign is it?
Scientists already use the Metric system, and few people who live on earth and are not scientists need to make a distinction between weight and mass.
How is this different from the folks who use kilogram-force? I just read a post on a motorcycle forum about an unfortunate individual who didn't know the difference between kgf*m and N*m on his torque wrench and managed to break three bolts in his cylinder head by applying 9.8 times more torque than necessary. Why anyone would label something in kgf*m (and why he continued torquing after breaking #1) is beyond me.
The imperial mass unit is slugs. The unit of force is pounds. Yes, you can use lbm, but it's no more revolting than kgf.
That said, I strongly support converting to metric.
I have the income to buy them. I have the desire to play them. I have the computer hardware to play them. And I won't pirate them.
But I won't pay you $50 or $60 and be rewarded with the very kind of stress that I've purchased the game to temporarily escape from. You're not going to stop the pirates, but you are going to stop me.
Powell went on to say that ISPs had huge up-front costs which had to be allocated out to consumers, and those consumers were familiar with usage-based fees from paying their power bill or buying food.
In the case of wireless, I couldn't agree more. I negotiate with my local grocery store and set a fixed price for the maximum amount of groceries I might need each month. It works great most of the time, except when unexpected company shows up at the end of the month and I wind up paying an extra $70/egg in overage charges.
I've been strongly offended by software patents ever since I learned over a decade ago about how meager the "innovations" they protect can be. I think most of us will make one or two "patentable innovations" per day before lunch, or at least infringe with some fundamental task like throwing an exception (never realizing we were "innovating" or "infringing" in the process).
So where should we send the money? I want to donate to an org that shares my opinions and is doing something about it. The two I know of are as follows, but would appreciate additional suggestions.
One could argue that smartphone handsets might be more "locked down" over time, but I never saw AT&T handsets being more locked down in any way than their T-Mo counterparts. They might throw more crapware in (can't believe I'm using that term for my phone), but as long as rooting exists, there will be ways of removing them.
AT&T is the only US carrier who has disabled the ability to install applications from sources other than the Android market (e.g., that have been downloaded from the web). It's very ineffective, given that one can load anything they want via the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) which is part of the Android SDK.
From what I've seen, the T-Mobile G2 simply supports tethering out of the box. AT&T is currently hunting down customers who are using "illegal" tethering software.
Crapware-infested Android phones make for a truly awful experience. Those apps tend to be cobbled together and listen for events which they shouldn't, draining the battery and lagging the phone. Sure the advanced users can clean them off, but the average user will conclude that Android sucks and buy an iPhone next time.
It is speculative crap, and had you read most of the other posts you would have seen that (let alone TFA). The specific problem is with a sticky bushing. In those instances they can demonstrably pull out the part and show you how it takes too much force to move, perhaps even more than the return-spring can supply. This means that pushing the accellerator will make it sluggishly return - or not at all.
There *may* be an ECM issue as well (though there's no evidence of it), and the code update to give the brake pedal priority fixes an obvious design flaw, but that's not what's at play now. What they're talking about is a known faulty *mechanical* system.
TFA is talking about moving from cable throttles to electronics and discusses hydraulics and hoses? I'm not putting much faith in TFA. Nor do I particularly place high esteem in arbitrary internet comments (as one should do with my commentary as well).
The point of my comment is that I'm questioning the information I'm hearing...it doesn't square with a lot of reported cases as well as knowledge of how these systems work. Referencing the same people I'm questioning isn't going to make me any more likely to believe it.
This may well be speculative crap, but at least based on the anecdotal incidents I keep hearing about, this sounds like an ECM problem.
First Toyota blamed floor mats. That immediately causes consumers to think that the problem was the fault of idiot drivers, not Toyota itself. The typical person's reaction would rightfully be something along the lines of "duh, if you stack floormats under the accelerator, it's going to stick...this is not Toyota's fault".
Now Toyota blames the pedal. And the pedal manufacturer. Again a simple system that people understand...that can be labeled as obviously defective and replaced with something theoretically not defective, bringing about peace of mind.
Finally Toyota is going to "go the extra mile" and update the ECMs to cause pressing the brake to cut the throttle. I imagine this is an algorithmic (code) change to the ECM, not just new calibrations. Apparently Toyota uses a proprietary ECM that is not very "hackable". That is, it's very closed in comparison to items like those in GMs and VW/Audis where there are cottage industries of tinkerers who have decompiled the code, modified calibrations for performance and economy, and even modified the algorithms themselves. (You don't see things like VAGCOM or EFILive for Toyotas.)
Point being, if they update the ECM and it is all proprietary stuff and there's no easy way to diff it (or an adequate number of eyes to catch the difference) they can fix the problem and scapegoat the pedal manufacturer. And potentially leave a lot of dangerous vehicles on the road to save face.
The biggest hole I can find in this idea is where I'm getting my data. Random reports from people, a lot of whom seem to claim their vehicles accelerated from a stop. And of course it's all stuff reported by the popular news media. And of course a lot of folks who rear-ended someone in their Toyota are going to suggest anything other than their own actions being the cause.
But being a software developer, the more I hear about this, the more it stinks of software. An ECM has too many variables to simulate all possible conditions, so you must rely on the algorithms to work correctly. My gut says there's a tiny hole in there somewhere, where most users will never encounter it.
...this does not apply to Mac users, because Mac's don't suffer from drive-by downloads and other malware. My PPC G5 running Safari on Snow Leopard is rock-solid and secure.
-1 Offtopic? Lay off this guy. He's probably tired and cranky after just having ported Snow Leopard to the PowerPC.
I recently picked up a Droid (after having had iPhones for the previous two years).
It appears to me that Gameloft's offerings for Android are poorly executed. The market reviews for this developer are quite low. Looking at the reviews for their paid games, you'll commonly see comments along the lines of "looks like an NES game", and it's easy to see why from the screenshots.
I have only tried Gameloft’s (free) Solitaire, but if that product is representative, it should come as no surprise why their Android sales are extremely poor. This games is so horrid that I wouldn't have it on my phone if you paid me to. It appears to be a port from some lesser-spec device.
When playing the FreeCell game, there is a man in the lower portion of the screen who looks around, nods his head, and emits little “Z” graphics if you take too long to move, i.e., indicating that he is tired. Who is this guy? Are they familiar with the fact that Solitaire is a single-player game? It is, after all named a derivative of the word “solitary”. And it does not help that the graphics in this game appear to use a 256-color palette, and textures that were originally intended for a non-smartphone with a screen resolution of about 160x160.
I'm currently annoyed that there aren't many good games for Android. I'd pay $10 without blinking for a well done solitaire game. I've even emailed Solebon suggesting that they port their iPhone product. But if the only offerings available are crap, I'll stick with the free sudoku and my SNES and Genesis emulators.
GM vehicles have similar third-party systems available to the general public, but they only target powertrain (engine/transmission) tuning (rather than body systems). The higher end ones such as EFILive (http://efilive.com) and HPTuners (http://hptuners.com) will let you edit most parameters (or at least the ones you care about) in your vehicle's PCM. In addition to programming, the devices allow you to log all parameters available to the PCM. The companies offering these tuning/logging devices have additionally written custom operating systems for the PCMs of these vehicles, for such purposes as running forced induction/large camshifts for drag racing applications. Additionally there are spliced-together operating systems for applications such as running engine X with transmission Y, even though GM never put those two items in one vehicle.
I don't know the true history of it, but I believe reverse engineering was involved. Given the large tuning market for GM products, it was apparently cost effective for multiple companies to do it.
I know of similar systems that exist for Fords, a few models of Honda (mostly Civics), Subarus, and Mitsubishis. Not certain on Chrysler. As I understand it, nothing exists for Toyota.
In my opinion, the presence of these devices removes most all of the big-scary "it's all electronic, you'll need a team of technicians to even open the hood" stigma that is commonly associated with new vehicles. Using EFILive, I've managed to improve both the performance and mileage (at the same time) of my brick of a vehicle, and diagnose trouble codes as well. If you plan on keeping a vehicle for a long time and doing the maintenance yourself, I find such a device to be a must-have.
I don't get it. How are you saving trees with this phone? Has Samsung employed a gang of vigilante loggers to cut them down if you do not walk a certain distance per day using the phone as a pedometer in "Eco walk" mode? Has there been a new scientific discovery that CO2 may in fact kill trees, negating the previous data that it is neutral or possibly even beneficial toward plant growth?
This brings to mind the "feature" in most navigation systems where most functionality is disabled while driving. Terrible idea, as it winds up being more distracting trying to work around it.
Case in point, the Nissan/Infiniti navi/entertainment stuff in my sister-in-law's car. It disables certain "more complex" functions when moving. One of the disabled features is browsing for a song to play from a CF card. Result: you spend more time playing with the thing trying to find the song you were looking for, which means the "safety feature" has in fact created an additional distraction.
The time I had to pull off the freeway in a "not-so-nice" area to reprogram my navigation system (had accidentally selected avoid freeways without realizing it) is another simple example of the dangers of such nannyware. Had to do this because the Nav thought it would be too dangerous for me to push "Dest", and then "Previous Destination", and then toggle the "Freeway" checkbox.
The next day a $2.50 Radio Shack switch was installed to disable the vehicle speed sensor feed wire.:D More modern navs can't be worked around in this fashion, but you can often scour torrent sites for "patches" to navigation DVDs to work around the speed-disable "feature". Some companies even make a living at it by building add on modules to the system itself, e.g. http://www.coastaletech.com/gmx320.htm. It's a requirement for any vehicle I purchase from here on out that any such "nanny features" be capable of being disabled.
No one wants this. I wouldn't touch a phone with it. Good luck with that.
Ok, now imagine what would happen if every computer company out there decided to provide Mac OS X with their computers instead of Windoze Vista or whatever they're installing on garbage prebuilt computers nowadays. Suddenly OS X won't be quite as great anymore because it will have all kinds of subtle failures and stuff. First, the hardware can induce failures that are no fault of the software.
True to a point, but Linux pulls it off just fine. I'd imagine a lot of that is due to its open source driver model, which results in better quality drivers that people actually care to maintain, and also keeps truly "crap" hardware from ever being plugged in at all. In any case, it's fairly clear that a good and stable OS can be supported across a huge, diverse, and often buggy set of hardware.
If you keep a vehicle for the duration of the loan, you'll never have negative equity.
Now you're just playing a sill numbers games. No, it won't technically be 'negative equity' once you've paid off the loan... It will just be an out and out loss of many thousands of dollars. Continuing to fuel it up and drive it just puts you further in the hole.
Now is the absolute worst time to upgrade to a more fuel efficient vehicle...any gain in efficiency will be overwritten by market hysteria.
I specifically discussed that already. "Hysteria" or not, waiting to sell of your SUV means more time for it's value to depreciate. You are gambling that the "hysteria" will subside in a reasonably short period of time, and that gas prices won't continue to rise significantly. The SUV owner owes X amount of money for an SUV. Whether they keep it or sell it, they will owe that money.
If they keep the SUV, that money is due over the course of several years at a very good interest rate.
If they sell the SUV, that money is due NOW. And then they need to go acquire additional transportation.
The "numbers game" is this: The new transportation will have better fuel economy, so the gas expense will be less. But unless gas doubles again, it's probably cheaper to keep the SUV.
Moral of the story: You were an idiot to buy the SUV, and now you're STUCK with the negative equity, no matter what you do. Throwing in the extra cost of gas and continuing to drive it will just put you deeper in a hole.
You can non-op it, drop the insurance on it, and HOPE the second-hand SUV market will improve, particularly as all evidence points to gas prices dropping sharply next year. But you're betting against a year of depreciation as well, so it might still be a loss to wait.
Even if you bought a Prius (46mpg, $1282/yr) it'd take 65k miles, or 5.5 years, to make up the difference.
Moral of the story: Buy used. Read my post again. I don't even begin to factor the cost of the replacement vehicle into the picture, only how long it will take to compensate for the equity loss using gas savings.
If you keep a vehicle for the duration of the loan, you'll never have negative equity. If you keep the vehicle for the 100k miles you originally planned on when you purchased it, a 30% reduction in resale value will be mildly annoying at best.
Now is the absolute worst time to upgrade to a more fuel efficient vehicle...any gain in efficiency will be overwritten by market hysteria.
"...and not convenient. You wind up going riding a lot more often when preparation consists of "throw the bikes in the truck and go.""
Bingo. Other solutions are not as convenient. 'Nuff said. Couldn't agree more. I like everyone else, could make do with a Chevy Aveo if I truly had to.
I also don't need this MacBook. I could have bought a Windows Vista laptop for half the price, and given the other $600 to an environmental group to fund the planting of trees. I'm willing to pay for convenience though.
You're carrying bikes for eight people and no one has a spot for a trailer? No one has parents or friends with a house and driveway? Heck, I've seen some flatbeds where people back 'em up to the side of a garage and then push 'em vertical. Takes up maybe eight square feet. No RV/"toy" paid parking lots near you? The most practical option for me is owning the pickup. Trailers also cause big problems being towed by small cars at 11,300ft of altitude on roads that have signs strongly cautioning against towing trailers. It's just not practical, and not convenient. You wind up going riding a lot more often when preparation consists of "throw the bikes in the truck and go."
And a Yakama car rack with gutter posts will hold four bikes easily. (Been there, done that.) Yeah, it might cost $600 for posts, rails, and racks, but that's a darn site better than an extra $8,000 or more for a bigger vehicle. Plus operating costs. No it won't. These are freeride bikes. Weight is at least 40lb, typically closer to 50. I'm not interested in putting 200lb on the roof of a car with the CG sitting 2 ft in the air. That's 400lb-ft of torque per g of lateral acceleration on gutter posts. A good accident avoidance maneuver will take you well over 1g. Color me uninterested at disregarding manufacturer's specs and then having uninsure-able equipment worth more than the price of a good car thrown across an intersection if I have to swerve around some idiot on a cell phone.
I've shopped for racks for friends who have cars/SUVs, freeride bikes are a bitch, rack manufacturers want you to only do 2 per rack for a very good reason. Only feasible solution for a car is a roof rack AND a hitch rack.
Or a smaller truck/car with a heavy-duty trailer hitch rack can hold three or four. (Mine does three, and folds up when not in use.)
And you can buy a car for day-to-day use, and then figure out something else for those special cases. (Heck, with the bottom dropping out of the huge SUV/truck market, you could have bought a car and then picked up a used truck for a song. (grin)). I don't drive enough to have more than one vehicle. I burn about 20 gallons of gas a month. And that truck was purchased four years ago.
Okay, I'll bite. Just how often do you actually carry eight bikes? Twice a month? Every weekend? Once a year?
And even so, I'm willing to be that you could have bought a Liberty or even a Tacoma and stuck a small two-wheeled trailer on the back for the half-dozen times you actually needed to carry eight bikes, and then not have been stuck with a gas guzzler the other five days of the week when you're simply commuting to work. (The fact that you felt you had to take a picture of all those bikes together tends to indicate that it was an exception and not the rule.)
Everyone thinks they're a special case, but add all of those special cases together and you create an enormous demand that drives up the prices for everyone else. And where I grew up, thinking solely of your own needs with no regard whatsoever for how it might impact others was considered to be a 'might selfish. Eight bikes is a bit of an extreme, but three or four is pretty common. Four guys and four bikes fit in that truck quite nicely. There's not a car rack made that is rated to support four freeride bikes (you have to buy a special rack to carry them at all). You could do it with two racks (one roof and a hitch rack).
I don't have a place to store a trailer. We've looked at renting them for the bigger Utah trips where we have 10 or 15 people going, but it has come out cheaper to take more trucks, even at $4/gallon. Rental trailers are also of dubious quality, safety, and availability (U-haul "reservations" mean precisely nothing). Renting the trailer would have been far more convenient for those trips (only two people driving shuttle runs), but we ran the numbers, and it's a loser.
The GM small block V8 engine is actually quite efficient for its purpose...that setup will do 19mpg on the freeway if you keep your foot out of it, and that one is actually lifted ever so slightly and has slightly larger/heavier than OEM tires on it. A Tacoma or Liberty wouldn't offer notably better mileage. For mileage comparison purposes, note that the truck in question getting 19mpg is also 4wd (I took the stickers off).
Mountain biking accounts for probably 10% of the miles on that truck, even though I do it a lot and don't have a commute. You can't buy a car for what you need 90% of the time though...otherwise that 90% becomes 100%. And for a lot of folks, that exceptional 10% is worth A LOT. I don't think I'm a particularly special case.
Oh, and if you drive a car of any kind and put more than 10k/year on it, I bet I've used less gas than you in the past year. Am I still selfish?
I take my 2.5 kids up the mountain 4x4ing and fishing all year round in my Liberty. My kids will not only learn a love of nature, but they'll keep those memories forever. Who am I to whine about the few $$ more per tank. Thats why I work, to buy and do the things I want. Don't see many civics up there... Beautiful mountains, waterfalls, lakes, wildlife...
Wait, I got it.... I'll take a picture of it for you, then you could see what I'm covering up... I'm sorry, perhaps you didn't get the point of the original post. You see, the original poster has no use for an SUV, and simply assumes everyones else's life is (or should be) a carbon copy of their own.
I too drive one of these horrible useless vehicles for similar reasons. Perhaps some slashdot poster can help me out...where I can find an eight-bike rack for a Prius? http://www.catastrophicerror.com/~endo/lottabikes.jpg
Re:SUVs were always mostly a waste
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What's the point of an SUV to drive through the city? That's like buying a sports car to drive a few blocks in a crowded city. The machine (SUV) was built for the purpose of being a sports utility vehicle. If you need large passenger seating, there are minivans. If you need to haul load, there are trucks. If your commuting, there are sedans and compacts. The problem is that generally speaking, you can't buy a specific vehicle for each purpose. You buy one vehicle that generally suits your needs. If you need to commute to the city, go camping, go to the grocery store, and tow a boat, you might well wind up in an SUV.
Slashdot Mirror
Recent innovations include:
* Innovative means of continuing to maintain a completely locked down network, even in the face of FCC regulations regarding LTE, in the name of security.
* Forcing device manufacturers to lock down bootloaders such that only Verizon can issue security updates.
* Failing to issue said security updates, creating insecure devices, forcing customers to upgrade.
* Requiring upgrading customers to obtain a downgraded (limited) data plan in order to qualify for subsidized phones. (You're always paying a subsidized price, whether or not your contract is currently subsidizing a phone.)
* Introducing a marketing strategy where eager users can pay twice for their subsidized phones if they'd like to upgrade early. (Do the math, it's not friendly, and is difficult to understand by design.
I'm sure there are plenty of legitimate innovations coming from Verizon. But it doesn't nearly make up for the harm they're doing to the future of mobile. Their primary mission is control, not customer satisfaction. They have a lot of customers, a lot of money, and most importantly, a lot of cell towers, which keeps us "happy enough" as customers.
It would a frivolous waste of money we dont have to fix something thats not broken.
However, what makes it s truly broken unit system is that it uses the unit pound for both mass and weight. Yes there have been "hacks" of the system to bring them inline with physical reality so you have the "avoirdupois pound" meaning a mass and the "pound" meaning force. However this means that the units are not clear: when you say "pound" do you mean force or mass? If you need to tweak your unit system to make it consistent with physics that's not really a good sign is it?
Scientists already use the Metric system, and few people who live on earth and are not scientists need to make a distinction between weight and mass.
How is this different from the folks who use kilogram-force? I just read a post on a motorcycle forum about an unfortunate individual who didn't know the difference between kgf*m and N*m on his torque wrench and managed to break three bolts in his cylinder head by applying 9.8 times more torque than necessary. Why anyone would label something in kgf*m (and why he continued torquing after breaking #1) is beyond me.
The imperial mass unit is slugs. The unit of force is pounds. Yes, you can use lbm, but it's no more revolting than kgf.
That said, I strongly support converting to metric.
I have the income to buy them. I have the desire to play them. I have the computer hardware to play them. And I won't pirate them.
But I won't pay you $50 or $60 and be rewarded with the very kind of stress that I've purchased the game to temporarily escape from. You're not going to stop the pirates, but you are going to stop me.
Powell went on to say that ISPs had huge up-front costs which had to be allocated out to consumers, and those consumers were familiar with usage-based fees from paying their power bill or buying food.
In the case of wireless, I couldn't agree more. I negotiate with my local grocery store and set a fixed price for the maximum amount of groceries I might need each month. It works great most of the time, except when unexpected company shows up at the end of the month and I wind up paying an extra $70/egg in overage charges.
I've been strongly offended by software patents ever since I learned over a decade ago about how meager the "innovations" they protect can be. I think most of us will make one or two "patentable innovations" per day before lunch, or at least infringe with some fundamental task like throwing an exception (never realizing we were "innovating" or "infringing" in the process).
So where should we send the money? I want to donate to an org that shares my opinions and is doing something about it. The two I know of are as follows, but would appreciate additional suggestions.
EFF Patent Busting Project: http://w2.eff.org/patent/wp.html
End Software Patents: http://endsoftpatents.org/donate
One could argue that smartphone handsets might be more "locked down" over time, but I never saw AT&T handsets being more locked down in any way than their T-Mo counterparts. They might throw more crapware in (can't believe I'm using that term for my phone), but as long as rooting exists, there will be ways of removing them.
AT&T is the only US carrier who has disabled the ability to install applications from sources other than the Android market (e.g., that have been downloaded from the web). It's very ineffective, given that one can load anything they want via the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) which is part of the Android SDK.
From what I've seen, the T-Mobile G2 simply supports tethering out of the box. AT&T is currently hunting down customers who are using "illegal" tethering software.
Crapware-infested Android phones make for a truly awful experience. Those apps tend to be cobbled together and listen for events which they shouldn't, draining the battery and lagging the phone. Sure the advanced users can clean them off, but the average user will conclude that Android sucks and buy an iPhone next time.
...since they removed the jobs/hired goons section. It's a shame too, as the local one had excellent goons.
It is speculative crap, and had you read most of the other posts you would have seen that (let alone TFA). The specific problem is with a sticky bushing. In those instances they can demonstrably pull out the part and show you how it takes too much force to move, perhaps even more than the return-spring can supply. This means that pushing the accellerator will make it sluggishly return - or not at all.
There *may* be an ECM issue as well (though there's no evidence of it), and the code update to give the brake pedal priority fixes an obvious design flaw, but that's not what's at play now. What they're talking about is a known faulty *mechanical* system.
TFA is talking about moving from cable throttles to electronics and discusses hydraulics and hoses? I'm not putting much faith in TFA. Nor do I particularly place high esteem in arbitrary internet comments (as one should do with my commentary as well).
The point of my comment is that I'm questioning the information I'm hearing...it doesn't square with a lot of reported cases as well as knowledge of how these systems work. Referencing the same people I'm questioning isn't going to make me any more likely to believe it.
This may well be speculative crap, but at least based on the anecdotal incidents I keep hearing about, this sounds like an ECM problem.
First Toyota blamed floor mats. That immediately causes consumers to think that the problem was the fault of idiot drivers, not Toyota itself. The typical person's reaction would rightfully be something along the lines of "duh, if you stack floormats under the accelerator, it's going to stick...this is not Toyota's fault".
Now Toyota blames the pedal. And the pedal manufacturer. Again a simple system that people understand...that can be labeled as obviously defective and replaced with something theoretically not defective, bringing about peace of mind.
Finally Toyota is going to "go the extra mile" and update the ECMs to cause pressing the brake to cut the throttle. I imagine this is an algorithmic (code) change to the ECM, not just new calibrations. Apparently Toyota uses a proprietary ECM that is not very "hackable". That is, it's very closed in comparison to items like those in GMs and VW/Audis where there are cottage industries of tinkerers who have decompiled the code, modified calibrations for performance and economy, and even modified the algorithms themselves. (You don't see things like VAGCOM or EFILive for Toyotas.)
Point being, if they update the ECM and it is all proprietary stuff and there's no easy way to diff it (or an adequate number of eyes to catch the difference) they can fix the problem and scapegoat the pedal manufacturer. And potentially leave a lot of dangerous vehicles on the road to save face.
The biggest hole I can find in this idea is where I'm getting my data. Random reports from people, a lot of whom seem to claim their vehicles accelerated from a stop. And of course it's all stuff reported by the popular news media. And of course a lot of folks who rear-ended someone in their Toyota are going to suggest anything other than their own actions being the cause.
But being a software developer, the more I hear about this, the more it stinks of software. An ECM has too many variables to simulate all possible conditions, so you must rely on the algorithms to work correctly. My gut says there's a tiny hole in there somewhere, where most users will never encounter it.
...this does not apply to Mac users, because Mac's don't suffer from drive-by downloads and other malware. My PPC G5 running Safari on Snow Leopard is rock-solid and secure.
-1 Offtopic? Lay off this guy. He's probably tired and cranky after just having ported Snow Leopard to the PowerPC.
Can I get a copy?
TRUECOMPANION.COM: World's First Sex Robot * Always Turned On And Ready To Talk Or Play
It seems this is yet another technical project doomed to failure from a lack of proper requirements gathering before implementation.
The primary theoretical advantage of a sex robot is that you can turn it OFF.
I recently picked up a Droid (after having had iPhones for the previous two years).
It appears to me that Gameloft's offerings for Android are poorly executed. The market reviews for this developer are quite low. Looking at the reviews for their paid games, you'll commonly see comments along the lines of "looks like an NES game", and it's easy to see why from the screenshots.
I have only tried Gameloft’s (free) Solitaire, but if that product is representative, it should come as no surprise why their Android sales are extremely poor. This games is so horrid that I wouldn't have it on my phone if you paid me to. It appears to be a port from some lesser-spec device.
When playing the FreeCell game, there is a man in the lower portion of the screen who looks around, nods his head, and emits little “Z” graphics if you take too long to move, i.e., indicating that he is tired. Who is this guy? Are they familiar with the fact that Solitaire is a single-player game? It is, after all named a derivative of the word “solitary”. And it does not help that the graphics in this game appear to use a 256-color palette, and textures that were originally intended for a non-smartphone with a screen resolution of about 160x160.
I'm currently annoyed that there aren't many good games for Android. I'd pay $10 without blinking for a well done solitaire game. I've even emailed Solebon suggesting that they port their iPhone product. But if the only offerings available are crap, I'll stick with the free sudoku and my SNES and Genesis emulators.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
PS: The Slashdot lameness filter needs to be sent to the ministry of love.
GM vehicles have similar third-party systems available to the general public, but they only target powertrain (engine/transmission) tuning (rather than body systems). The higher end ones such as EFILive (http://efilive.com) and HPTuners (http://hptuners.com) will let you edit most parameters (or at least the ones you care about) in your vehicle's PCM. In addition to programming, the devices allow you to log all parameters available to the PCM. The companies offering these tuning/logging devices have additionally written custom operating systems for the PCMs of these vehicles, for such purposes as running forced induction/large camshifts for drag racing applications. Additionally there are spliced-together operating systems for applications such as running engine X with transmission Y, even though GM never put those two items in one vehicle.
I don't know the true history of it, but I believe reverse engineering was involved. Given the large tuning market for GM products, it was apparently cost effective for multiple companies to do it.
I know of similar systems that exist for Fords, a few models of Honda (mostly Civics), Subarus, and Mitsubishis. Not certain on Chrysler. As I understand it, nothing exists for Toyota.
In my opinion, the presence of these devices removes most all of the big-scary "it's all electronic, you'll need a team of technicians to even open the hood" stigma that is commonly associated with new vehicles. Using EFILive, I've managed to improve both the performance and mileage (at the same time) of my brick of a vehicle, and diagnose trouble codes as well. If you plan on keeping a vehicle for a long time and doing the maintenance yourself, I find such a device to be a must-have.
http://www.inhabitat.com/wp-content/uploads/samsungblueearth2.jpg
I don't get it. How are you saving trees with this phone? Has Samsung employed a gang of vigilante loggers to cut them down if you do not walk a certain distance per day using the phone as a pedometer in "Eco walk" mode? Has there been a new scientific discovery that CO2 may in fact kill trees, negating the previous data that it is neutral or possibly even beneficial toward plant growth?
This brings to mind the "feature" in most navigation systems where most functionality is disabled while driving. Terrible idea, as it winds up being more distracting trying to work around it.
Case in point, the Nissan/Infiniti navi/entertainment stuff in my sister-in-law's car. It disables certain "more complex" functions when moving. One of the disabled features is browsing for a song to play from a CF card. Result: you spend more time playing with the thing trying to find the song you were looking for, which means the "safety feature" has in fact created an additional distraction.
The time I had to pull off the freeway in a "not-so-nice" area to reprogram my navigation system (had accidentally selected avoid freeways without realizing it) is another simple example of the dangers of such nannyware. Had to do this because the Nav thought it would be too dangerous for me to push "Dest", and then "Previous Destination", and then toggle the "Freeway" checkbox.
The next day a $2.50 Radio Shack switch was installed to disable the vehicle speed sensor feed wire. :D More modern navs can't be worked around in this fashion, but you can often scour torrent sites for "patches" to navigation DVDs to work around the speed-disable "feature". Some companies even make a living at it by building add on modules to the system itself, e.g. http://www.coastaletech.com/gmx320.htm. It's a requirement for any vehicle I purchase from here on out that any such "nanny features" be capable of being disabled.
No one wants this. I wouldn't touch a phone with it. Good luck with that.
Ok, now imagine what would happen if every computer company out there decided to provide Mac OS X with their computers instead of Windoze Vista or whatever they're installing on garbage prebuilt computers nowadays. Suddenly OS X won't be quite as great anymore because it will have all kinds of subtle failures and stuff. First, the hardware can induce failures that are no fault of the software.
True to a point, but Linux pulls it off just fine. I'd imagine a lot of that is due to its open source driver model, which results in better quality drivers that people actually care to maintain, and also keeps truly "crap" hardware from ever being plugged in at all. In any case, it's fairly clear that a good and stable OS can be supported across a huge, diverse, and often buggy set of hardware.
HTTP 599
Service Permanently Unavailable
The server you are trying to contact has crossed the event horizon of a black hole.
Now you're just playing a sill numbers games. No, it won't technically be 'negative equity' once you've paid off the loan... It will just be an out and out loss of many thousands of dollars. Continuing to fuel it up and drive it just puts you further in the hole.
I specifically discussed that already. "Hysteria" or not, waiting to sell of your SUV means more time for it's value to depreciate. You are gambling that the "hysteria" will subside in a reasonably short period of time, and that gas prices won't continue to rise significantly. The SUV owner owes X amount of money for an SUV. Whether they keep it or sell it, they will owe that money.
If they keep the SUV, that money is due over the course of several years at a very good interest rate.
If they sell the SUV, that money is due NOW. And then they need to go acquire additional transportation.
The "numbers game" is this: The new transportation will have better fuel economy, so the gas expense will be less. But unless gas doubles again, it's probably cheaper to keep the SUV.
No... no... no...!
Moral of the story: You were an idiot to buy the SUV, and now you're STUCK with the negative equity, no matter what you do. Throwing in the extra cost of gas and continuing to drive it will just put you deeper in a hole.
You can non-op it, drop the insurance on it, and HOPE the second-hand SUV market will improve, particularly as all evidence points to gas prices dropping sharply next year. But you're betting against a year of depreciation as well, so it might still be a loss to wait.
Moral of the story: Buy used. Read my post again. I don't even begin to factor the cost of the replacement vehicle into the picture, only how long it will take to compensate for the equity loss using gas savings.
If you keep a vehicle for the duration of the loan, you'll never have negative equity. If you keep the vehicle for the 100k miles you originally planned on when you purchased it, a 30% reduction in resale value will be mildly annoying at best.
Now is the absolute worst time to upgrade to a more fuel efficient vehicle...any gain in efficiency will be overwritten by market hysteria.
Bingo. Other solutions are not as convenient. 'Nuff said. Couldn't agree more. I like everyone else, could make do with a Chevy Aveo if I truly had to.
I also don't need this MacBook. I could have bought a Windows Vista laptop for half the price, and given the other $600 to an environmental group to fund the planting of trees. I'm willing to pay for convenience though.
You're carrying bikes for eight people and no one has a spot for a trailer? No one has parents or friends with a house and driveway? Heck, I've seen some flatbeds where people back 'em up to the side of a garage and then push 'em vertical. Takes up maybe eight square feet. No RV/"toy" paid parking lots near you? The most practical option for me is owning the pickup. Trailers also cause big problems being towed by small cars at 11,300ft of altitude on roads that have signs strongly cautioning against towing trailers. It's just not practical, and not convenient. You wind up going riding a lot more often when preparation consists of "throw the bikes in the truck and go." And a Yakama car rack with gutter posts will hold four bikes easily. (Been there, done that.) Yeah, it might cost $600 for posts, rails, and racks, but that's a darn site better than an extra $8,000 or more for a bigger vehicle. Plus operating costs. No it won't. These are freeride bikes. Weight is at least 40lb, typically closer to 50. I'm not interested in putting 200lb on the roof of a car with the CG sitting 2 ft in the air. That's 400lb-ft of torque per g of lateral acceleration on gutter posts. A good accident avoidance maneuver will take you well over 1g. Color me uninterested at disregarding manufacturer's specs and then having uninsure-able equipment worth more than the price of a good car thrown across an intersection if I have to swerve around some idiot on a cell phone.
I've shopped for racks for friends who have cars/SUVs, freeride bikes are a bitch, rack manufacturers want you to only do 2 per rack for a very good reason. Only feasible solution for a car is a roof rack AND a hitch rack. Or a smaller truck/car with a heavy-duty trailer hitch rack can hold three or four. (Mine does three, and folds up when not in use.)
And you can buy a car for day-to-day use, and then figure out something else for those special cases. (Heck, with the bottom dropping out of the huge SUV/truck market, you could have bought a car and then picked up a used truck for a song. (grin)). I don't drive enough to have more than one vehicle. I burn about 20 gallons of gas a month. And that truck was purchased four years ago.
And even so, I'm willing to be that you could have bought a Liberty or even a Tacoma and stuck a small two-wheeled trailer on the back for the half-dozen times you actually needed to carry eight bikes, and then not have been stuck with a gas guzzler the other five days of the week when you're simply commuting to work. (The fact that you felt you had to take a picture of all those bikes together tends to indicate that it was an exception and not the rule.)
Everyone thinks they're a special case, but add all of those special cases together and you create an enormous demand that drives up the prices for everyone else. And where I grew up, thinking solely of your own needs with no regard whatsoever for how it might impact others was considered to be a 'might selfish. Eight bikes is a bit of an extreme, but three or four is pretty common. Four guys and four bikes fit in that truck quite nicely. There's not a car rack made that is rated to support four freeride bikes (you have to buy a special rack to carry them at all). You could do it with two racks (one roof and a hitch rack).
I don't have a place to store a trailer. We've looked at renting them for the bigger Utah trips where we have 10 or 15 people going, but it has come out cheaper to take more trucks, even at $4/gallon. Rental trailers are also of dubious quality, safety, and availability (U-haul "reservations" mean precisely nothing). Renting the trailer would have been far more convenient for those trips (only two people driving shuttle runs), but we ran the numbers, and it's a loser.
The GM small block V8 engine is actually quite efficient for its purpose...that setup will do 19mpg on the freeway if you keep your foot out of it, and that one is actually lifted ever so slightly and has slightly larger/heavier than OEM tires on it. A Tacoma or Liberty wouldn't offer notably better mileage. For mileage comparison purposes, note that the truck in question getting 19mpg is also 4wd (I took the stickers off).
Mountain biking accounts for probably 10% of the miles on that truck, even though I do it a lot and don't have a commute. You can't buy a car for what you need 90% of the time though...otherwise that 90% becomes 100%. And for a lot of folks, that exceptional 10% is worth A LOT. I don't think I'm a particularly special case.
Oh, and if you drive a car of any kind and put more than 10k/year on it, I bet I've used less gas than you in the past year. Am I still selfish?
I take my 2.5 kids up the mountain 4x4ing and fishing all year round in my Liberty. My kids will not only learn a love of nature, but they'll keep those memories forever. Who am I to whine about the few $$ more per tank. Thats why I work, to buy and do the things I want. Don't see many civics up there... Beautiful mountains, waterfalls, lakes, wildlife...
Wait, I got it.... I'll take a picture of it for you, then you could see what I'm covering up... I'm sorry, perhaps you didn't get the point of the original post. You see, the original poster has no use for an SUV, and simply assumes everyones else's life is (or should be) a carbon copy of their own.
I too drive one of these horrible useless vehicles for similar reasons. Perhaps some slashdot poster can help me out...where I can find an eight-bike rack for a Prius? http://www.catastrophicerror.com/~endo/lottabikes.jpg