Funny, my roommate with no experience hasn't had problems with any of this, and outside of getting the wi-fi working I've not changed anything from the base installation.
So it works for him. What's your problem? Maybe you're just a troll? Naw...
The idea that Ubuntu is going to gain a bunch of market share because random plumbers, school teachers, and bartenders will decide to download the install CD and install a new OS themselves on their current computers is absurd.
Yeah, probably, but I think it's good to have as a goal. After all, if we changed the goal so that only the post-install experience needs to be good, under the assumption that only geeks and OEMs would actually be installing it, then the install process for Linux would be as terrible as it was back when Slackware was the most sophisticated distro. Personally I like the fact that Ubuntu is easier to install, and has more things working out-of-the-box after the install, every time I try a new version.
In the end though a bunch of market share is only possible if it comes pre-installed. Heck, Windows would have crap desktop marketshare if it didn't come pre-installed. So on that point I completely agree.
Quite frankly, I don't want to use the same operating system as someone who refuses to edit any configuration file.
Marketing Linux to the average desktop is a bad idea. Leave Linux to the power users and the server market.
Just because I'm not afraid of editing a config file doesn't mean I want to. I like that in a modern Ubuntu distro I can get everything working with a minimal amount of fuss, and don't like the parts that don't work automagically so I have to go mucking about with config files.
You know what the best part about it is, though? The "it works automagically don't worry" part and the "oops didn't work but don't worry you can fix it with text-editor-fu" part live in perfect harmony. Linux is getting better in the usability department, without sacrificing its "power user" roots. I can't see anything to complain about.
If you want to be an elitist about it, go use Slackware, or any *BSD. You can still consider yourself superior to the poor slobs whose Linux distros don't require config file editing, for whatever that's worth.
Oh, and I may be a power user, but I'm also a gamer, and I want games that run natively on Linux. Besides a tiny subset of games, that's not happening until Linux is the average desktop.
Tell that to my neighbor, my dad, my uncle, my dad's priest, my ex-business partner, an entire building of nurses... Crap dude. Wifi is a bit more complex than Ethernet. That's just the way it is.
If you don't care what router you connect to, it shouldn't be... But really I'm just guessing because I've never done it with windows, I figured the drivers would be there so getting it working would be easy, because it would have been in Ubuntu if it had the right drivers. But hey, I'm open to the idea that Linux is actually easier to use in some ways than Windows.;)
It's mostly a chipset thing. Spec your chipset before you buy to make life much easier.
Yeah, that's what you have to do, and normally I do.
But these were Linksys wi-fi cards, the same company who way back in `96 was including Linux drivers on the disks that came with their ethernet cards (and were folded into the mainstream kernel not that long after). They'd been my go-to for Linux networking for years, so I just assumed that these too would work.
Now I knew that Linksys had been bought out by Cisco, but I figured that can't make that much of a difference... Hahahaha, oh man, I learned my lesson.
Oh, and here's another wrinkle that probably doesn't apply to many people, but damned if I can get Ubuntu to install in a mixed ATA/SATA environment. Well it installs, but it won't boot thereafter.
True, but if he was using Windows he'd at least be able to connect to one of those open APs with little trouble.;)
Though at least for my specific case this might be a temporary thing in the beta. Before you had to get a driver from the chipset manufacturer's website and took a fair bit of mucking with, now there's an open source project that delivers working drivers that support wpa out of the box and everything. I think there's even a bug on ubuntu that says they are using the wrong drivers for the ralink chipsets.
But, unfortunately, it's far from perfect. Ubuntu is and has been good enough for my completely non-computer-literate roommate to use when the system is up and running. But there's no way he could have gotten the wireless working on his own (even in the 8.04 beta, I still had to download and install drivers, then muck around with/etc/networking/interfaces file to make it work).
Leakage has been making my life miserable, and my work is currently in 65nm.
Sorry to hear that. I'm far enough removed from having to deal with leakage (or other process) problems, so I'm pretty glad for that.:)
And yeah, it seems like 90nm was the first process where leakage current blew up unexpectedly. Prescott was Intel's first 90nm chip, and it was supposed to burn roughly equal or less power than the previous chip, but instead it burned more due to leakage and this crippled their ability to ramp the clock, which was the whole point of the Netburst design in the first place. Leakage killed the P4.
Not to minimize the fact that these gates reduce leakage enough to actually get those gains, but the drop in gate size alone (all other factors equal) would give the same numbers.
Yeah, but that's a pretty big freaking deal. Leakage current has come to dominate (or at least become a factor as significant as switching current), and is actually increasing as the technology shrinks. Going to 32nm, without paying a penalty in increased leakage, is quite an accomplishment.
Or put another way, all other factors being equal (including the dielectric), a drop in gate size alone would not result in the same numbers.
I know you said you aren't trying to minimize their accomplishment, but by saying it simply follows a basic equation when that equation has been failing for the past few generations (because it's not correct at these scales), you're doing just that.
The moral behaviour of the company making the product is to be taken into account, at least it is in my case.
Some will say that I am acting against how the market is supposed to work, that is not true.
Well if you listen to the die-hard capitalists (in particular the Randian strain of Libertarian), then basing purchasing decisions on the moral behavior of the company is your only valid way of preventing them from screwing you seven ways till sunday. Because any actual law that prohibited such immoral behavior would be at least as immoral as the behavior itself.
And not so die-hard capitalists will also agree that not buying a company's products because of their behavior is a valid way to punish them, even if there are laws that also prohibit such behavior.
Pretty much the only people who will say you are acting against how the market is supposed to work are die-hard sociopaths who don't care that some behavior is "immoral", and want you to keep lining their pockets regardless of what evil things they do in the name of making a buck, and the argument is solely a way of tricking you into ignoring your own moral outrage.
The other, of course, was Leonardo Di Caprio freezing to death.
Without intending it this way, I've actually only seen the last 10 minutes of the movie, and a fantastic 10 minutes it was. *glub glub* Bye bye, Leonardo!
I considered that a satisfactory experience. I see no need to view the whole thing just to see boobs.
Pfft, my previous car was an 87 Toyota Tercel. Why would the epithet "death trap" or "beer can" be offensive to me? I obviously seek out this kind of car.
Either way, neither of the two are complete solutions like so many want to believe. Relying on the sun for power is not feasible for anything other than base load stuff.
So this unlimited and completely pollution free* power source can only completely provide for the base load of the entire country (if you make zero attempt to solve the problem)? Oh, how terrible!
Nobody pushing for alternative energy is really that attached to the idea of a "complete" solution. It's the nay-sayers who are always harping on any particular weakness of any one technique and saying "well it can't do everything, what's the point?"
It's nice that people are thinking, but the problem is that the government tends to grant subsidies irresponsibly and places too much importance on any one system. The media plays up the importance of biofuels or wind power, then government pork follows and sends science off on a tangent following a single system.
No the problem is that people naturally stick to the status quo unless whatever the new thing is a "complete solution", so it often takes the government, for better or worse, to get people out of their comfort zone. In some cases, for better, like wind power, which is a fantastic source of power in many places (like west Texas where the farms are going up all the time), and is providing an increasing percentage of electricity, without trying to be a "complete solution". This is exactly what you seem to be asking for -- diversity, using appropriate tech where appropriate -- but it's an example of government pork gone bad?
Not that I believe most of them are subsidized; it's apparently fairly profitable to own a wind farm even without government help.
The money should instead be going into research on how to find the best balance of technology.
That makes no sense. The money required to 1) develop alternative energy sources and 2) do the feasibility studies on where and how they can be deployed and 3) actually build them, is vastly more than the amount of money required to take all those feasibility studies that have already been done and decide which tech to deploy where. "finding the best balance of technology" is pointless if you haven't spent the money to develop the tech, no?
We are going to have use coal for a long time, that's inescapable. There is no one solution that is capable of completely supplanting coal. It's going to require efforts in lots of fields like nuclear, geothermal, and solar. Each has its own characteristics, advantages, and draw backs. It's all about finding the right combination.
Coal is not inescapable, it's not the perfect fuel with no drawbacks in theory, it is itself not a "complete solution" in practice. If you're going to put nuclear on the table, then there's your opportunity to completely replace coal right there.
* In operation of course, not during manufacture, but seriously who cares? Our entire society is built on manufacturing, with the commensurate pollution. If they didn't build thermal solar plants, it's not like nothing else would be built. The comparatively minuscule environmental cost of building the plants is just noise compared to the benefits of running them pollution-free for years.
Thats somewhere between the size of New Jersey and New Hampshire.
Talk about pie in the sky... its more realistic to be talking about microwave power stations in orbit!
Yeah, and guess what the square mileage of farmland in the U.S. is? Hint: Hell of a lot more than New Jersey and New Hampshire combined.
So land-based farming is "pie in the sky", and we might as well talk about orbital hydroponics labs?
Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. We've paved over many times more than that amount of land to make our highways and Wal-Mart parking lots, a lot of it requiring dynamiting of mountains first; how exactly is it impossible to put up some mirrors on the ground? If you're imagining a contiguous 92x92 mile area, maybe that's why you're stumbling, not that it's actually any more infeasible, it's just not how it would be done.
Oh look, one of those anal-retentive idiots who misses the entire point.
Here's a clue: If you were driving at the speed limit, then with these illegally short lights, if you were close enough to the light when it turned yellow that you couldn't stop, you also wouldn't be able to make it through the light before it turned red.
Do you get it? This is incredibly unsafe regardless of your driving habits, it's unsafe even if you completely abide by the speed limit and all safe driving methods. Forcing unsafe situations on drivers traveling at the legal speed limit due to illegally short lights just to increase ticket revenue is insane, and in case I need to repeat it again illegal.
I'd at least have some pity on you when your assumption that your perfect driving skills trump the laws of physics is proven to be false, and you got in a crash through no fault of your own running a red light you couldn't have avoided running. But not all that much.
I did RTFA, so you need to do better than search for the first instance of "solar" to try to defend the OP. I know there were solar cars present, but it wasn't the grand prize victor, nor was it the car/mileage stated in the headline. Here's the sentence after the one you quoted:
(Solar vehicles weren't eligible for the grand prize.) And here's the quotes about the car from the headline, the actual grand prize winner:
The team from Mater Dei High School might be only months (or less) removed from driver's ed, but it pulled off a nifty feat of driving over the weekend. One of its entries in the Shell Eco-marathon Americas won the grand prize for motoring to a record 2,843.4 miles per gallon.
Those top three vehicles, like most in the competition (25 out of 33 total), used internal combustion engines. So: Winning car had solar panels? WRONG. Best non-solar car was 300 MPG Diesel? WRONG! Article headline is misleading in any way whatsoever? WRONG AGAIN!
To make gasoline look bad so that they can then refuse to award them the prize?
It just doesn't make sense.
Well, and it's wrong. The only type of car disqualified from the grand prize was solar, which makes sense in a competition that's all about fuel efficiency when a solar car can't actually run out of "fuel" without the sun going down... or being destroyed by my doomsday device. But that isn't even ready yet.
I digress... Diesel, hydrogen fuel cell, and liquid propane vehicles all competed and were allowed to win the grand prize. Solar cars are their own separate problem.
But yeah, it's also a silly conspiracy theory. Strange how the two go together.:)
If you read the article, the top competitor using gasline got 163.5 MPG. It does say they used Internal Combustion Engines, and it doesn't say what they did use but it's not gasoline.
Err, that's backwards.
You've got to go to the shell website, look for the Leader Board for the Eco-Challenge Americas, and then click on the link to the pdf which is here.
In it you can see that in the "combustion" class, the winner (same as overall winner) was the Mater Dei #22 car, at 2843.4 mpg, and that it used gasoline as its fuel.
The car that got 163.5 MPG was using LPG, not gasoline.
Here's a photo of the winning car (the one on the right, #22), where are these 200 sq ft of solar panels you're talking about? There's also a better angle on the team's homepage here, no solar panels to be seen. Heck, that car doesn't even have 200 sq feet of surface area even if you counted the belly.
Did you know that while solar cars did compete, they were not allowed to win the grand prize?
Yeah, you're full of it. But at least you tricked a mod or two.
Modern cars get better mileage with the windows rolled up and the AC on than with the with the AC off and the windows rolled down. Of course the best mileage is with the AC off and the windows up, but the passengers might be done to medium-well at the end of the trip.
This also depends highly on the car. I would figure this would be more true for larger cars with larger engines, where the AC consumes a commensurately smaller portion of the overall horsepower, with the implication that these aren't the most fuel efficient cars to begin with.
My Toyota Echo stands as a counter example, being at the very small end of the scale (and high efficiency for a pure gasoline ICE). My AC has a very noticeable impact on performance (I call turning off the AC "activating the turbo" when I'm merging onto highways), and also a very noticeable impact on fuel economy. Other cars may be better with AC on and windows up over 50 MPH, but I've measured my fuel economy in cross-country trips on interstates both with AC on, and with windows rolled down, and the AC-on fuel economy is about 2/3rds as good as windows down, from about 44 mpg to about 30.
Whereas I'm sure that if you're driving a light pickup with plenty of HP to spare, AC-on isn't as big a drain so going windows-up for reduced drag is probably better, so you're at 22 mpg instead of 20.:P
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Funny, my roommate with no experience hasn't had problems with any of this, and outside of getting the wi-fi working I've not changed anything from the base installation.
So it works for him. What's your problem? Maybe you're just a troll? Naw...
The idea that Ubuntu is going to gain a bunch of market share because random plumbers, school teachers, and bartenders will decide to download the install CD and install a new OS themselves on their current computers is absurd.
Yeah, probably, but I think it's good to have as a goal. After all, if we changed the goal so that only the post-install experience needs to be good, under the assumption that only geeks and OEMs would actually be installing it, then the install process for Linux would be as terrible as it was back when Slackware was the most sophisticated distro. Personally I like the fact that Ubuntu is easier to install, and has more things working out-of-the-box after the install, every time I try a new version.
In the end though a bunch of market share is only possible if it comes pre-installed. Heck, Windows would have crap desktop marketshare if it didn't come pre-installed. So on that point I completely agree.
Quite frankly, I don't want to use the same operating system as someone who refuses to edit any configuration file.
Marketing Linux to the average desktop is a bad idea. Leave Linux to the power users and the server market.
Just because I'm not afraid of editing a config file doesn't mean I want to. I like that in a modern Ubuntu distro I can get everything working with a minimal amount of fuss, and don't like the parts that don't work automagically so I have to go mucking about with config files.
You know what the best part about it is, though? The "it works automagically don't worry" part and the "oops didn't work but don't worry you can fix it with text-editor-fu" part live in perfect harmony. Linux is getting better in the usability department, without sacrificing its "power user" roots. I can't see anything to complain about.
If you want to be an elitist about it, go use Slackware, or any *BSD. You can still consider yourself superior to the poor slobs whose Linux distros don't require config file editing, for whatever that's worth.
Oh, and I may be a power user, but I'm also a gamer, and I want games that run natively on Linux. Besides a tiny subset of games, that's not happening until Linux is the average desktop.
Tell that to my neighbor, my dad, my uncle, my dad's priest, my ex-business partner, an entire building of nurses... Crap dude. Wifi is a bit more complex than Ethernet. That's just the way it is.
;)
If you don't care what router you connect to, it shouldn't be... But really I'm just guessing because I've never done it with windows, I figured the drivers would be there so getting it working would be easy, because it would have been in Ubuntu if it had the right drivers. But hey, I'm open to the idea that Linux is actually easier to use in some ways than Windows.
It's mostly a chipset thing. Spec your chipset before you buy to make life much easier.
Yeah, that's what you have to do, and normally I do.
But these were Linksys wi-fi cards, the same company who way back in `96 was including Linux drivers on the disks that came with their ethernet cards (and were folded into the mainstream kernel not that long after). They'd been my go-to for Linux networking for years, so I just assumed that these too would work.
Now I knew that Linksys had been bought out by Cisco, but I figured that can't make that much of a difference... Hahahaha, oh man, I learned my lesson.
Now, now. He did admit to being a dick. This is significant emotional progress, and the road to recovery may be coming at long last to an end.
But yeah, it was years ago, and I think years ago there was a bug in the installer that he happened to trip on. It's been fixed since.
Oh, and here's another wrinkle that probably doesn't apply to many people, but damned if I can get Ubuntu to install in a mixed ATA/SATA environment. Well it installs, but it won't boot thereafter.
True, but if he was using Windows he'd at least be able to connect to one of those open APs with little trouble. ;)
Though at least for my specific case this might be a temporary thing in the beta. Before you had to get a driver from the chipset manufacturer's website and took a fair bit of mucking with, now there's an open source project that delivers working drivers that support wpa out of the box and everything. I think there's even a bug on ubuntu that says they are using the wrong drivers for the ralink chipsets.
It's getting better all the time.
/etc/networking/interfaces file to make it work).
But, unfortunately, it's far from perfect. Ubuntu is and has been good enough for my completely non-computer-literate roommate to use when the system is up and running. But there's no way he could have gotten the wireless working on his own (even in the 8.04 beta, I still had to download and install drivers, then muck around with
Still, the progress is outstanding.
A: Sorry, but we can't hear you over the sound of us thumbing through all these big stacks of cash.
Leakage has been making my life miserable, and my work is currently in 65nm.
:)
Sorry to hear that. I'm far enough removed from having to deal with leakage (or other process) problems, so I'm pretty glad for that.
And yeah, it seems like 90nm was the first process where leakage current blew up unexpectedly. Prescott was Intel's first 90nm chip, and it was supposed to burn roughly equal or less power than the previous chip, but instead it burned more due to leakage and this crippled their ability to ramp the clock, which was the whole point of the Netburst design in the first place. Leakage killed the P4.
Not to minimize the fact that these gates reduce leakage enough to actually get those gains, but the drop in gate size alone (all other factors equal) would give the same numbers.
Yeah, but that's a pretty big freaking deal. Leakage current has come to dominate (or at least become a factor as significant as switching current), and is actually increasing as the technology shrinks. Going to 32nm, without paying a penalty in increased leakage, is quite an accomplishment.
Or put another way, all other factors being equal (including the dielectric), a drop in gate size alone would not result in the same numbers.
I know you said you aren't trying to minimize their accomplishment, but by saying it simply follows a basic equation when that equation has been failing for the past few generations (because it's not correct at these scales), you're doing just that.
The moral behaviour of the company making the product is to be taken into account, at least it is in my case.
Some will say that I am acting against how the market is supposed to work, that is not true.
Well if you listen to the die-hard capitalists (in particular the Randian strain of Libertarian), then basing purchasing decisions on the moral behavior of the company is your only valid way of preventing them from screwing you seven ways till sunday. Because any actual law that prohibited such immoral behavior would be at least as immoral as the behavior itself.
And not so die-hard capitalists will also agree that not buying a company's products because of their behavior is a valid way to punish them, even if there are laws that also prohibit such behavior.
Pretty much the only people who will say you are acting against how the market is supposed to work are die-hard sociopaths who don't care that some behavior is "immoral", and want you to keep lining their pockets regardless of what evil things they do in the name of making a buck, and the argument is solely a way of tricking you into ignoring your own moral outrage.
Not that fair...
How could a subject line like that not end in a blowjob joke?
The other, of course, was Leonardo Di Caprio freezing to death.
Without intending it this way, I've actually only seen the last 10 minutes of the movie, and a fantastic 10 minutes it was. *glub glub* Bye bye, Leonardo!
I considered that a satisfactory experience. I see no need to view the whole thing just to see boobs.
Pfft, my previous car was an 87 Toyota Tercel. Why would the epithet "death trap" or "beer can" be offensive to me? I obviously seek out this kind of car.
Either way, neither of the two are complete solutions like so many want to believe. Relying on the sun for power is not feasible for anything other than base load stuff.
So this unlimited and completely pollution free* power source can only completely provide for the base load of the entire country (if you make zero attempt to solve the problem)? Oh, how terrible!
Nobody pushing for alternative energy is really that attached to the idea of a "complete" solution. It's the nay-sayers who are always harping on any particular weakness of any one technique and saying "well it can't do everything, what's the point?"
It's nice that people are thinking, but the problem is that the government tends to grant subsidies irresponsibly and places too much importance on any one system. The media plays up the importance of biofuels or wind power, then government pork follows and sends science off on a tangent following a single system.
No the problem is that people naturally stick to the status quo unless whatever the new thing is a "complete solution", so it often takes the government, for better or worse, to get people out of their comfort zone. In some cases, for better, like wind power, which is a fantastic source of power in many places (like west Texas where the farms are going up all the time), and is providing an increasing percentage of electricity, without trying to be a "complete solution". This is exactly what you seem to be asking for -- diversity, using appropriate tech where appropriate -- but it's an example of government pork gone bad?
Not that I believe most of them are subsidized; it's apparently fairly profitable to own a wind farm even without government help.
The money should instead be going into research on how to find the best balance of technology.
That makes no sense. The money required to 1) develop alternative energy sources and 2) do the feasibility studies on where and how they can be deployed and 3) actually build them, is vastly more than the amount of money required to take all those feasibility studies that have already been done and decide which tech to deploy where. "finding the best balance of technology" is pointless if you haven't spent the money to develop the tech, no?
We are going to have use coal for a long time, that's inescapable. There is no one solution that is capable of completely supplanting coal. It's going to require efforts in lots of fields like nuclear, geothermal, and solar. Each has its own characteristics, advantages, and draw backs. It's all about finding the right combination.
Coal is not inescapable, it's not the perfect fuel with no drawbacks in theory, it is itself not a "complete solution" in practice. If you're going to put nuclear on the table, then there's your opportunity to completely replace coal right there.
* In operation of course, not during manufacture, but seriously who cares? Our entire society is built on manufacturing, with the commensurate pollution. If they didn't build thermal solar plants, it's not like nothing else would be built. The comparatively minuscule environmental cost of building the plants is just noise compared to the benefits of running them pollution-free for years.
Thats 246 billion square feet.
Thats somewhere between the size of New Jersey and New Hampshire.
Talk about pie in the sky... its more realistic to be talking about microwave power stations in orbit!
Yeah, and guess what the square mileage of farmland in the U.S. is? Hint: Hell of a lot more than New Jersey and New Hampshire combined.
So land-based farming is "pie in the sky", and we might as well talk about orbital hydroponics labs?
Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. We've paved over many times more than that amount of land to make our highways and Wal-Mart parking lots, a lot of it requiring dynamiting of mountains first; how exactly is it impossible to put up some mirrors on the ground? If you're imagining a contiguous 92x92 mile area, maybe that's why you're stumbling, not that it's actually any more infeasible, it's just not how it would be done.
Oh look, one of those anal-retentive idiots who misses the entire point.
Here's a clue: If you were driving at the speed limit, then with these illegally short lights, if you were close enough to the light when it turned yellow that you couldn't stop, you also wouldn't be able to make it through the light before it turned red.
Do you get it? This is incredibly unsafe regardless of your driving habits, it's unsafe even if you completely abide by the speed limit and all safe driving methods. Forcing unsafe situations on drivers traveling at the legal speed limit due to illegally short lights just to increase ticket revenue is insane, and in case I need to repeat it again illegal.
I'd at least have some pity on you when your assumption that your perfect driving skills trump the laws of physics is proven to be false, and you got in a crash through no fault of your own running a red light you couldn't have avoided running. But not all that much.
Troll is full of shit? CORRECT.
To make gasoline look bad so that they can then refuse to award them the prize?
:)
It just doesn't make sense.
Well, and it's wrong. The only type of car disqualified from the grand prize was solar, which makes sense in a competition that's all about fuel efficiency when a solar car can't actually run out of "fuel" without the sun going down... or being destroyed by my doomsday device. But that isn't even ready yet.
I digress... Diesel, hydrogen fuel cell, and liquid propane vehicles all competed and were allowed to win the grand prize. Solar cars are their own separate problem.
But yeah, it's also a silly conspiracy theory. Strange how the two go together.
If you read the article, the top competitor using gasline got 163.5 MPG. It does say they used Internal Combustion Engines, and it doesn't say what they did use but it's not gasoline.
Err, that's backwards.
You've got to go to the shell website, look for the Leader Board for the Eco-Challenge Americas, and then click on the link to the pdf which is here.
In it you can see that in the "combustion" class, the winner (same as overall winner) was the Mater Dei #22 car, at 2843.4 mpg, and that it used gasoline as its fuel.
The car that got 163.5 MPG was using LPG, not gasoline.
Here's a photo of the winning car (the one on the right, #22), where are these 200 sq ft of solar panels you're talking about? There's also a better angle on the team's homepage here, no solar panels to be seen. Heck, that car doesn't even have 200 sq feet of surface area even if you counted the belly.
Did you know that while solar cars did compete, they were not allowed to win the grand prize?
Yeah, you're full of it. But at least you tricked a mod or two.
Modern cars get better mileage with the windows rolled up and the AC on than with the with the AC off and the windows rolled down. Of course the best mileage is with the AC off and the windows up, but the passengers might be done to medium-well at the end of the trip.
:P
This also depends highly on the car. I would figure this would be more true for larger cars with larger engines, where the AC consumes a commensurately smaller portion of the overall horsepower, with the implication that these aren't the most fuel efficient cars to begin with.
My Toyota Echo stands as a counter example, being at the very small end of the scale (and high efficiency for a pure gasoline ICE). My AC has a very noticeable impact on performance (I call turning off the AC "activating the turbo" when I'm merging onto highways), and also a very noticeable impact on fuel economy. Other cars may be better with AC on and windows up over 50 MPH, but I've measured my fuel economy in cross-country trips on interstates both with AC on, and with windows rolled down, and the AC-on fuel economy is about 2/3rds as good as windows down, from about 44 mpg to about 30.
Whereas I'm sure that if you're driving a light pickup with plenty of HP to spare, AC-on isn't as big a drain so going windows-up for reduced drag is probably better, so you're at 22 mpg instead of 20.
That makes too much sense. Now I'm really depressed. :(