Gas cost about 34 cents a gallon, or about $2.00 in today's terms, but Americans were more concerned about air pollution. The Electrovair II, a show car unveiled in 1966 was an improved version of 1964's Electrovair I. Both were based on the rear-engine gas-powered Chevrolet Corvair, whose design provided a convenient location for the batteries. The large battery pack went under the hood, while the electric motor drove the wheels from the back of the car. The Electrovair II used silver-zinc batteries because they delivered high power. (These were the same batteries GM produced for use in intercontinental nuclear missiles)
The downside was that they were expensive and wore out quickly, as the carmaker admitted at the time. Performance was similar to the gas-powered Corvair, but range was still a problem. The car needed recharging after 40 to 80 miles.
"The objective is to determine what is technically feasible," GM wrote of its work on cars like the Electrovair, "regardless of whether a project ever will become economically possible."Electrovair II
In contrast to the Electrovair, GM's 512 Series Urban Cars weren't designed for real roads.
The three cars, with their 30 to 40 mph top speed and limited acceleration, would operate either on a paved road system of their own or in reserved lanes of existing roads, because they could not mix safely with today's freeway of boulevard traffic.
Each car had a different drive system. The blue car, the 512 Hybrid, was a gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle. The red car was an all-electric car and the yellow car ran on a 12-horsepower 19.6 cubic inch (0.3-liter) two-cylinder engine. The silver three-wheeled car was the gasoline-powered 511 Commuter Vehicle.
GM featured the cars in a 1969 media event called the "Parade of Power." The show highlighted the automaker's research into various forms of alternative propulsion. Also included were jet-powered cars, a steam-powered Pontaic Grand Prix and an exhibit on "nuclear reactor systems as possible means of powering vehicles." GM's 512 Series Urban Cars
As for auto workers, if you only have a GED, you should NEVER make 30/hr.... Sorry, just not right. If on the other hand, you have a degree in anything decent you have no business doing a simple assembly line job.
Someone here has a high opinion of himself.
You will be shocked if you check things like welds, body panel alignment, basic quality of individual components
When I see failures like these, I am more likely to ask questions about CAD/CAM engineering and the robots on the line.
led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free.
Because the immediate problem is the recession.
GM can't build an electric car if the company goes into liquidation. GM can't sell an electric car if its dealers go into liquidation.
Mechanics can't service an electric car if they go bankrupt with their suppliers.
Infrastructure once damaged is very difficult and expensive to rebuild.
You have to stop the bleeding first.
Research isn't a panacea.
It would be easy to aquander $10 billion on projects that have no realistic prospect of success within a reasonable time frame.
The geek isn't an unbiased observer here.
It should be obvious that a very generous cut of that $10 billion he wants the government to spend will be headed his way - and not to the auto worker on the line in Detroit.
Microsoft has become a single point of failure that poses and unacceptably enormous risk to our society's normal functioning.
The geek has been piping this tune since the launch of the IBM PC
- and we all still here.
Even if each failure is 99% safe, sooner or later we're going to have a major Warhol Worm that brings the entire Internet to its knees--along with large portions of the world's economy. Actually, I'd wager that the NSA already has the capability, and probably several other state actors, too.
If you want to bring the Internet down - and keep it down - what you really need is a dragline to snag the right cables.
The geek's magical - whimsical - Warhol Worm is little more than a distraction.
You can do far more damage by simply mismanaging the traffic that flows through Google.
The Windows client OS or app runs spends most of its time off-line or within the relatively safe confines of a corporate Intranet or a local ISP.
It should not be impossible to isolate the problem.
I'd take a small side bet that the clueless user on Automatic Updates will be adequately protected by the patch that has been sitting on the geek's PC for the last four months.
The dinosaurs seemed incredibly successful, too, but too many of them were too similar--and look what happened. In diversity there is strength.
I'd say a 185 million year run is incredibly successful.
Stories and characters that have proven enduringly popular in film and other reappear often. Batman first appeared in the comics around 1940 and has obvious links to The Shadow and The Mark of Zorro.
The person who wrote the summary likely thinks tha Pixar just "pops out" these films. In fact, they usually take about 4 years.
The interesting thing here is that Disney's classic animated features were just as long in production.
The wonderous new tech hasn't really changed things all that much.
There is a lesson in that for that for the geek who thinks that the free tool - or the sophisticated tool - makes every man an artist, a significant creative talent.
I thought the home market wouldn't care about things like this on average. How many people actually use Microsoft Office with their new OEM PC rather than use MS Works, or some crippled version of MS Office?
They really aren't any "crippled" versions of MS Office.
MS Office Home includes full versions of Exel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote, with a three-seat license.
The Ultimate Steal includes everything for $60. For this will need an.edu address and proof of enrollment.
0.5 credit hours.
If your employer has a volume license with Microsoft, home use is likely to cost you no more than S&H on the disks.
It is not always clear to me that the geek has decided on his target audience before he begins work on a project like The GIMP. That touches on issues like feature sets, UI design, the help system, tutorials, online resources...
and, of course, avoiding such elementary mistakes as choosing a name for your project that is not instantly offensive to anyone other than a gnome.
"Comfortable" is a relative term. "Able to wade through all of the dead projects and locate the useful bits" would be more accurate. Same with Freshmeat.
Sourceforge is root canal. Sourceforge is the cast that keeps you on crutches for six weeks - with an itch you cannot scratch.
If Sourceforge were a movie, it would be The Land of the Lost.
4 Free is never as compelling as the geek likes to think.
That the home market is a solidly middle class market couldn't be made any plainer than this: Chief Architect Software
This is a market where ideological purity or political correctness counts for absolutely nothing.
That lesson can't be repeated more often.
You have to prove - again and again - that you offering a better product than the incumbent.
The geek will choke on this - but he has to get it down:
The OEM price of Windows is trival - as close to free as makes no difference.
Windows is a solid, marketable, operating systems with a credible UI. It is not particularly difficult for a home user to secure - and the free tools available are more than adequate for the job.
It's all about the apps.
You have to brutally honest about what you have.
Don't try to sell The Gimp or OpenOffice as first-tier apps until they are first tier-apps.
Don't count the number of programs in your distro's repository.
Think about what is missing, what needs to be there to reach your target audience.
In order for something to be a crime, it must be demonstrated that it causes harm, suffering, or loss.
No it doesn't.
It only has to be defined as a crime in the statute books.
That is why is perfectly possible for an act to be legal in one jurisdiction and criminal in another.
You don't need to prove that violent video games cause violence. You only need to decide whether they can published.
You are talking about banning a form of expression. What is being expressed is a terrible thing, yes, but freedom of speech doesn't just protect things you find agreeable. Polite speech doesn't require protection. Censorship is always worse than what is being censored.
That's your opinion.
But others are free to disagree.
Only the collective judgment of society as expressed in its laws can be binding on everyone.
Society can say that we don't want this. We won't have this - and make it stick.
This is quite different from the system in the US, in which the government does nothing without the express blessing of a private corporation.
This is neither Insightful or clever. It is lazy, anti-historical nonsense.
The Roman Catholic Church reaches the voter - and the politician - on more elemental level than GM.
But over the years the church has lost substantial - hard-fought - debates over divorce, birth control, abortion, end-of-life and - in some states - on marriage for homosexuals.
The system is designed to make very difficult for any one individual or institution to control all the levers of power.
Yes, rail travel requires resources of iron and such to lay down infrastructure, but that infrastructure is used and maintained for many years and pays off over the long haul.
You have to build the road anyway.
Rail is very good at moving bulk freight. The mile long unit train that shuttles back and forth from the coal mine to the power plant.
Breaking bulk - dropping off a boxcar for the occasional pickup at every local factory, every rural hamlet, reaching deep into the inner city - that's hard.
Reality shows are the most successfully exported European television programmes, notably to the United States.
Programmes such as Survivor - produced by British-Swedish company Planet 24 and which has contestants competing in the wilderness for cash and other prizes, Big Brother of the Netherlands' Endemol - where a group of people live together in a house isolated from the outside world while constantly watched by cameras, and British 19 Television's Pop Idol - a show for music star wannabes, have become massively popular with American viewers.
Under EU rules, the majority of the European channels' programming must be devoted to European works, with at least 10 percent of that time or of their programming budgets to independent European productions.
Currently, certain channels in eight EU member states - Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK - still do not comply with these requirements however, and European productions account for less than 50 percent of their programming.
doesn't mean they will have the least idea of how to program a decent game.
much less how to recruit - and hang on to - outside talent.
scripting. direction. level design. art design. character design and animation. props. backgrounds. textures. music. audio and visual effects. vocal performance....
development and distribution through legitimate channels for the XBox, the PC, the iPhone and other platforms opens doors to advancement in the real world.
and that is something you can sell to the 3D modeler you want on your team.
Slashdot Mirror
Gas cost about 34 cents a gallon, or about $2.00 in today's terms, but Americans were more concerned about air pollution.
The Electrovair II, a show car unveiled in 1966 was an improved version of 1964's Electrovair I. Both were based on the rear-engine gas-powered Chevrolet Corvair, whose design provided a convenient location for the batteries. The large battery pack went under the hood, while the electric motor drove the wheels from the back of the car.
The Electrovair II used silver-zinc batteries because they delivered high power. (These were the same batteries GM produced for use in intercontinental nuclear missiles)
The downside was that they were expensive and wore out quickly, as the carmaker admitted at the time. Performance was similar to the gas-powered Corvair, but range was still a problem. The car needed recharging after 40 to 80 miles.
"The objective is to determine what is technically feasible," GM wrote of its work on cars like the Electrovair, "regardless of whether a project ever will become economically possible." Electrovair II
In contrast to the Electrovair, GM's 512 Series Urban Cars weren't designed for real roads.
The three cars, with their 30 to 40 mph top speed and limited acceleration, would operate either on a paved road system of their own or in reserved lanes of existing roads, because they could not mix safely with today's freeway of boulevard traffic.
Each car had a different drive system. The blue car, the 512 Hybrid, was a gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle. The red car was an all-electric car and the yellow car ran on a 12-horsepower 19.6 cubic inch (0.3-liter) two-cylinder engine. The silver three-wheeled car was the gasoline-powered 511 Commuter Vehicle.
GM featured the cars in a 1969 media event called the "Parade of Power." The show highlighted the automaker's research into various forms of alternative propulsion. Also included were jet-powered cars, a steam-powered Pontaic Grand Prix and an exhibit on "nuclear reactor systems as possible means of powering vehicles." GM's 512 Series Urban Cars
As for auto workers, if you only have a GED, you should NEVER make 30/hr.... Sorry, just not right. If on the other hand, you have a degree in anything decent you have no business doing a simple assembly line job.
Someone here has a high opinion of himself.
You will be shocked if you check things like welds, body panel alignment, basic quality of individual components
When I see failures like these, I am more likely to ask questions about CAD/CAM engineering and the robots on the line.
The more dollars that are in your pocket the more you can spend on things that drive innovation.
Such as what, specifically?
The early American auto maker was mostly content with the luxury market.
His handcrafted product as much an exercise in custom coach work - little changed since the days of Louis XIV - as in twentieth century mechanics.
The rare exceptions were still tied to the notion of a "horseless carriage."
Ford put innovation on the road.
The buyer followed him - not the other way around.
led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free.
Because the immediate problem is the recession.
GM can't build an electric car if the company goes into liquidation. GM can't sell an electric car if its dealers go into liquidation.
Mechanics can't service an electric car if they go bankrupt with their suppliers.
Infrastructure once damaged is very difficult and expensive to rebuild.
You have to stop the bleeding first.
Research isn't a panacea.
It would be easy to aquander $10 billion on projects that have no realistic prospect of success within a reasonable time frame.
The geek isn't an unbiased observer here.
It should be obvious that a very generous cut of that $10 billion he wants the government to spend will be headed his way - and not to the auto worker on the line in Detroit.
6 microwatts from a 1.0-megawatt TV antenna 4.1 kilometers away.
4 km from the megawatt tower does not put you in the boondocks.
In the real world, how much power can you realistically expect to extract from this thing?
Remember how pissed the techie crowd was with AOL and COMPUSERV for bring ever no-nothing to the Internet?
I also remember how games like Neverwinter Nights took the online RPG beyond its narrow techie base.
The key is that they don't have to spend gobs of money in an attempt to make it photorealistic.
In animation, you spend gobs of money to avoid looking photo realistic.
Inevitably, characters and backgrounds do not appear to belong in the same world.
Photo realism simply doesn't work.
The geek has been piping this tune since the launch of the IBM PC
- and we all still here.
Even if each failure is 99% safe, sooner or later we're going to have a major Warhol Worm that brings the entire Internet to its knees--along with large portions of the world's economy. Actually, I'd wager that the NSA already has the capability, and probably several other state actors, too.
If you want to bring the Internet down - and keep it down - what you really need is a dragline to snag the right cables.
The geek's magical - whimsical - Warhol Worm is little more than a distraction.
You can do far more damage by simply mismanaging the traffic that flows through Google.
The Windows client OS or app runs spends most of its time off-line or within the relatively safe confines of a corporate Intranet or a local ISP.
It should not be impossible to isolate the problem.
I'd take a small side bet that the clueless user on Automatic Updates will be adequately protected by the patch that has been sitting on the geek's PC for the last four months. The dinosaurs seemed incredibly successful, too, but too many of them were too similar--and look what happened. In diversity there is strength.
I'd say a 185 million year run is incredibly successful.
The dinosaurs were taken out by an event that erased more than 70 percent of Earth's living species.
"Dinosaur-Killer" Asteroid Crater Imaged for First Time
Plants. Animals. Proto-life forms.
When you get down to the basics we are not so very different after all.
That is the real lesson here.
Tech is the geek's Maginot Line.
It never reaches as far as it needs to. Impressive when seen head-on. Not so much from the backside.
So strike from the rear. You strike at weaknesses in the user. In the administrator. The developer. The man behind the curtain.
Point of clarification: I'm not arguing against standards--but they need to be open and agreed upon, not imposed by and for the sake of monopoly.
Of course you are arguing against standards.
It is rare when standards do more than codify practice. Standards create a monoculture of their own.
Standards emerge from committees who are ridden by internal political, ideological and economic rivalries and whose progress is glacially slow.
The entrepreneur takes the losses he must, but his real interest is in staking out new ground - and he moves very quickly.
Cars
The one certainty is that the Pixar feature is going to make a strong showing at the box office and do exceptionally well in home video.
It may not not deliver the numbers of Finding Nemo - but it will never quite disappear from view, either.
If 3D or the ultra-HDTV video display ever becomes mass market in the home, the Pixar back list will be pure gold.
So what else is new?
Stories and characters that have proven enduringly popular in film and other reappear often. Batman first appeared in the comics around 1940 and has obvious links to The Shadow and The Mark of Zorro.
The person who wrote the summary likely thinks tha Pixar just "pops out" these films. In fact, they usually take about 4 years.
The interesting thing here is that Disney's classic animated features were just as long in production.
The wonderous new tech hasn't really changed things all that much.
There is a lesson in that for that for the geek who thinks that the free tool - or the sophisticated tool - makes every man an artist, a significant creative talent.
Stop making your games for Windows only and maybe you'll see more money.
I suspect that if you are in this business you have credible numbers for the OSX and Linux platforms.
It would be helpful if OEM Linux shed its reputation as a bottom feeder.
That you could point to mass-market sales of entry-level gaming systems at least as plausible as the mid-line HP Pavilion sold at WalMart.
I am curious about the investment Disney and others are prepared to make in games like Pirates of Caribbean.
Free to play.
Period.
I think the small-time developer should be asking this question.
Disney has a lot of assets it can bring to the table.
IP. Creative talent. Tech.
It won't be generating headlines on Fox News when the addict passes $100/mo in "micropayments."
This I think is a model for disaster.
I thought the home market wouldn't care about things like this on average. How many people actually use Microsoft Office with their new OEM PC rather than use MS Works, or some crippled version of MS Office?
They really aren't any "crippled" versions of MS Office.
MS Office Home includes full versions of Exel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote, with a three-seat license.
The Ultimate Steal includes everything for $60. For this will need an .edu address and proof of enrollment.
0.5 credit hours.
If your employer has a volume license with Microsoft, home use is likely to cost you no more than S&H on the disks.
But there is no getting around the fact that the MS Office product - retail boxed - sells very, very well: Software Best Sellers in Business and Office
The problem for the GIMP is that products like Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate & VideoStudio Pro X2 Bundle pack a lot of power into a less intimidating package.
It is not always clear to me that the geek has decided on his target audience before he begins work on a project like The GIMP. That touches on issues like feature sets, UI design, the help system, tutorials, online resources...
and, of course, avoiding such elementary mistakes as choosing a name for your project that is not instantly offensive to anyone other than a gnome.
In Add/Remove Software, go to the search box, look for Gweled, click install
And if I don't frequent Slashdot, how do I know that Gweled is in the repository, what it does, or how to spell it?
"Comfortable" is a relative term. "Able to wade through all of the dead projects and locate the useful bits" would be more accurate. Same with Freshmeat.
Sourceforge is root canal. Sourceforge is the cast that keeps you on crutches for six weeks - with an itch you cannot scratch.
If Sourceforge were a movie, it would be The Land of the Lost.
Perhaps it will have a nice web portal with reviews, in-depth descriptions, and decent screenshots?
In other words, what Windows users found in TuCows in 1993 and Download.com in 1996.
What MIchael Robertson was saying was absolutely essential to the mainstreaming of the Linux desktop in 2002 when he launched CNR.com. CNR (sofware)
The difference is that Robertson was a pragmatist with no interest in the geek's ideological wars over development models and licenses.
CNR would list - and sell - the proprietary - closed source - DVD player or game that would help make his product competitive.
No lectures. No hassle.
There are four long-standing problems for Linux in the home.
1 Linux arrived late to the party.
It really, really, needed to be there - and strongly positioned - before Windows 95.
2 Linux is either invisible - embedded in the cell phone or set top box - or it's the second cousin, twice removed.
The Blue Light special on Aisle 3.
3 The home is a demanding, sophisticated market.
Difficult to get a handle on.
Light years removed from the sterotype of the Windows "luser." Software Best Sellers in Home and Hobbies
4 Free is never as compelling as the geek likes to think.
That the home market is a solidly middle class market couldn't be made any plainer than this: Chief Architect Software
This is a market where ideological purity or political correctness counts for absolutely nothing.
That lesson can't be repeated more often.
You have to prove - again and again - that you offering a better product than the incumbent.
The geek will choke on this - but he has to get it down:
The OEM price of Windows is trival -
as close to free as makes no difference.
Windows is a solid, marketable, operating systems with a credible UI. It is not particularly difficult for a home user to secure - and the free tools available are more than adequate for the job.
It's all about the apps.
You have to brutally honest about what you have.
Don't try to sell The Gimp or OpenOffice as first-tier apps until they are first tier-apps.
Don't count the number of programs in your distro's repository.
Think about what is missing, what needs to be there to reach your target audience.
It can be something as basic as Print Shop.
The simplest solution is USUALLY correct. It doesn't mean that the simplest solution is ALWAYS correct.
The race isn't always to the swiftest and the strongest.
But that is the way to bet.
The stunt is transparent - adolescent - pure geek.
No other mind could contrive it.
In order for something to be a crime, it must be demonstrated that it causes harm, suffering, or loss.
No it doesn't.
It only has to be defined as a crime in the statute books.
That is why is perfectly possible for an act to be legal in one jurisdiction and criminal in another.
You don't need to prove that violent video games cause violence. You only need to decide whether they can published.
You are talking about banning a form of expression. What is being expressed is a terrible thing, yes, but freedom of speech doesn't just protect things you find agreeable. Polite speech doesn't require protection.
Censorship is always worse than what is being censored.
That's your opinion.
But others are free to disagree.
Only the collective judgment of society as expressed in its laws can be binding on everyone.
Society can say that we don't want this. We won't have this - and make it stick.
If you want to make it illegal, you're going to show evidence that it needs to be
No you don't.
You can simply say that this is something we don't need or want to become anchored in our culture
That makes it a value judgment, a political decision.
The limits of permissible speech - "free speech" - in the U.S. - and every other jurisdiction - has changed over the years - and will change again.
This is quite different from the system in the US, in which the government does nothing without the express blessing of a private corporation.
This is neither Insightful or clever. It is lazy, anti-historical nonsense.
The Roman Catholic Church reaches the voter - and the politician - on more elemental level than GM.
But over the years the church has lost substantial - hard-fought - debates over divorce, birth control, abortion, end-of-life and - in some states - on marriage for homosexuals.
The system is designed to make very difficult for any one individual or institution to control all the levers of power.
this is just the trend of China being Nanny State China.
Trend?
What trend?
China has a tradition of centralized - intrusive - bureaucratic - government that goes back over 2,000 years.
Yes, rail travel requires resources of iron and such to lay down infrastructure, but that infrastructure is used and maintained for many years and pays off over the long haul.
You have to build the road anyway.
Rail is very good at moving bulk freight. The mile long unit train that shuttles back and forth from the coal mine to the power plant.
Breaking bulk - dropping off a boxcar for the occasional pickup at every local factory, every rural hamlet, reaching deep into the inner city - that's hard.
And if their consumer level stuff doesn't work your OS is "free as in worthless" and they'll be taking it back for a Windows machine. Sorry, No Sale.
Look at it from WalMart's point of view:
Your minimum wage clerk knows even less about tech than Joe.
The ARM netbook at $99 looks like just another overpriced toy - another gadget - and in a deep recession the toy doesn't sell very well.
It's going to be really, really, tough to make money on these things even - or perhaps especially - in deep discount retail.
Now imagine that you need to keep Linux printers and other peripherals on your shelves. They take up quite a lot of space. But they move very slowly.
This is not a good thing.
It's telling when the geek claims that the home user really only needs three apps - though which three apps is never quite clear.
But it makes for something less than a ringing endorsement of the 25,000 apps in his distro's repository.
The Windows user seems more alert to the possibilities. Bestsellers in Home and Hobbies
It is distant echo now.
But I remember what I was told when I first began shopping for a computer:
Don't begin with the hardware. Don't begin with the OS. Just think about you want to do with the machine. What you can do with the machine.
There are 736 members in the European Parliament.
200 more than the US Congress. It all seems a little unwieldy. Difficult to make an impression.
The median age:
Sweden 41 US 37 CIA World Fact Book
Reality shows are the most successfully exported European television programmes, notably to the United States.
Programmes such as Survivor - produced by British-Swedish company Planet 24 and which has contestants competing in the wilderness for cash and other prizes, Big Brother of the Netherlands' Endemol - where a group of people live together in a house isolated from the outside world while constantly watched by cameras, and British 19 Television's Pop Idol - a show for music star wannabes, have become massively popular with American viewers.
Under EU rules, the majority of the European channels' programming must be devoted to European works, with at least 10 percent of that time or of their programming budgets to independent European productions.
Currently, certain channels in eight EU member states - Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK - still do not comply with these requirements however, and European productions account for less than 50 percent of their programming.
Europe's Biggest TV Export: Reality Shows [May 29}
This suggests to me that support for piracy is strongest where support for the politically-mandated domestic product is weakest.
when modding is outlawed only outlaws will mod
doesn't mean they will have the least idea of how to program a decent game.
much less how to recruit - and hang on to - outside talent.
scripting. direction. level design. art design.
character design and animation. props. backgrounds. textures. music. audio and visual effects. vocal performance....
development and distribution through legitimate channels for the XBox, the PC, the iPhone and other platforms opens doors to advancement in the real world.
and that is something you can sell to the 3D modeler you want on your team.