For all the people complaining about Suburbans, Escalades and Expeditions, it is trucks, not SUVs that sell in the US.
The problem is that there are so many models of SUVs that they completely split the market so they don't get into the top 10 (except apparently the Escape). There is probably only something like 8 trucks on the market not counting large "commercial" models like the F350. There must be 40-50 SUVs on the market.
Well thanks to cost of complying with CAFE, a station wagon will be more expensive than a similar SUV that's exempt. That makes it difficult to sell a station wagon that has to compete with a bunch of similar but cheaper SUVs, unless you're a premium brand that tries to sell to less price-sensitive customers. That's how Volvo and VW get away with it.
A poorly designed merge section from one highway to another is what convinced me I needed a quick car.
It isn't safe merging into 60+ MPH traffic at 30 MPH. Top speed typically isn't a problem but acceleration on cars with wimpy engines is.
People say this all the time here. I can honestly say I've never seen or heard of an accident caused by someone not being able to get up to speed on a merge. People generally expect that there might be slower traffic at a merge and act appropriately. It's a total non-issue.
What about IE4 for Windows 95, which gave Windows 95 the quicklaunch, active desktop, IE integration in Explorer, start menu tweaks, and a bunch of other stuff that was later part of Windows 98?
I consider Windows 2000 to be the best release of Windows in the sense that at the time it was released, it was easily Microsoft's biggest step forward. Windows 2000 was a big improvement over NT4, but more importantly it was the first of the NT line that was able and ready to replace the 9x line for most people. That's what was huge about it.
Have you dealt with the retail heatsinks that Intel ships with their CPUs since at least the Core 2 days? Terrible design with some cheesy plastic fasteners that will very easily come loose if the case is knocked about a bit.
Have you ever noticed that a lot of the stuff you buy that was manufactured in Asia has those little packets of silica gel in the box? Now, those packets are pretty cheap, but they're not free, which means that they are there for a reason. Now, chances are it'll be fine, but the point stands that the companies that send thousands of containers across the ocean have figured out that it's cheaper to include silica gel than to deal with the occasional problems from excess humidity.
It's the tremendous stress that would be involved once you spin it up to simulate gravity on the inside (and to hold the atmosphere in if it is not sealed). You need a material strong enough so that it doesn't fly apart. If it rotated at orbital velocity (in other words it took a year to complete one rotation) then it is possible to build it using materials we have access to.
There are also other problems. First, a Dyson sphere is not a stable system. Left to its own devices, eventually the sphere will crash into the star (or the star will crash into the sphere, depending on your point of view). So you're going to need some kind of active system to get the thing positioned. Granted, that's probably not a big deal for someone advanced enough to build it.
The second thing is gravity, if you desire such a thing. Barring some artificial gravity machine, the only way to get gravity (well, simulate it) would be the way we already know how - by spinning the sphere. This would of course only leave you with a band that has the desired gravity characteristics (granted, this band would still be huge), surrounded by a progressively steeper hill that has less and less gravity as you climb it. And I would recommend putting some spin on it, otherwise you could not stand on the inside of the sphere as the star's gravity would pull you towards the center, as a sphere of equal thickness and density will impart no force on any mass inside of it. And you would have to spin it at a considerable rate to simulate a planet's gravity - much faster than a planet orbiting at the same distance (however, this would be an advantage for intergalactic space travel as starships would leave the system with a considerable speed boost and wouldn't have to slow down nearly as much to land on the sphere so you do have that going for you).
SSDs for office machines? Why? Modern computers are already vastly overpowered for basic office tasks as it is now. It's not like the SSD is going to launch Excel that much faster when it already launches nearly instantly. All you're really doing is setting yourself up for having to do mass replacements of the SSDs when they start to fail after about 2 years, and paying $100 more per machine right now.
Man, people like you are such downers. I mean, do you rip into people who restore old cars too? I mean, by the time you get that old antique car restored, you can easily buy a new Kia for less money and in many ways have a better car. Those people who restore old cars sure like to waste their time and money!
Maybe he just did it because he could? Or because he thought it would be a cool project? Because he likes to tinker and learn something? Because it's a hobby? C'mon, just lighten up a bit people.
Look at 1929-1933. That's what a government hoping the free market will right itself produces.
How about the depression of 1920-1921? That's a better example of what happens when the government more or less lets things run their natural course with minimal interference. The fact that most people aren't familiar with it goes to show well it worked.
Are you saying that a curtain of sound (perhaps not even directed so that you can hear it) inhibits the passage of other sounds through it? I don't know anything about acoustics, but this seems untrue.
The idea is basically you mask the distracting traffic noise by pumping out some less distracting random "white" noise a volume high enough that you can't hear the traffic anymore. It's basically the same thing as turning on a box fan or a noisy AC unit. In my opinion, it's a poor solution as I find the white noise itself distracting, especially since it generally has to be turned up to annoying levels to effectively mask something like traffic. There's one in my workplace and I hate it, as it basically sounds like the HVAC system going full blast without stopping for the entire workday.
Actually, flares might work better than you might expect. Unless the ship is massive, at a large enough distance you're not going to be able resolve it. You'll know that something is there from the radiation and approximately where it is but you won't be able to see it exactly where it is unless you're toting along an unfeasibly large telescope. Which means that you can't just whip out your rail gun and expect to hit it. So if you want to attack at a large distance, your only option really is use some kind of missile that can make course corrections as it closes in. If the distance is large enough remote control won't work either due to communication delays, which means that the missile would have to some kind of automatic guidance system. That pretty much leaves you with the same challenges we have today with automatic guidance systems which can be fooled with things like flares.
Hell, it's not really the Radeon drivers so much as AMD's flakey chipsets. I've seen the Radeon drivers blue screen AMD boxes every few days. Swap out the motherboard and CPU with Intel, using the exact same Radeon graphics card and driver revision the system suddenly becomes rock solid. It's quite amusing how AMD's own graphics cards run better on Intel's chipsets than their own.
Did you even read what he said? It doesn't matter if the chip is really hyperthreaded or not - having the chip tell Windows that is hyperthreaded would have solved the scheduling problem in Windows 7. Actually, I'm kind of surprised that this couldn't be a bios setting as it is.
Actually, the way I see it is that Microsoft learned their lesson 10-15 years ago the hard way with things like ActiveX, leading them make vast improvements with regards to security in their products. Lessons that a lot of other companies are just learning now.
You can also buy light fluorescent light fixtures that take a CFL-style bulb but have the ballast and electronics in the fixture itself. Look for fixtures that take a G24q base style bulb. I have one such fixture that I put in my hallway and so far I've been quite happy with it in the sense that turns on fast and at 100% brightness and I haven't had to replace the bulb yet.
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The problem is that there are so many models of SUVs that they completely split the market so they don't get into the top 10 (except apparently the Escape). There is probably only something like 8 trucks on the market not counting large "commercial" models like the F350. There must be 40-50 SUVs on the market.
Well thanks to cost of complying with CAFE, a station wagon will be more expensive than a similar SUV that's exempt. That makes it difficult to sell a station wagon that has to compete with a bunch of similar but cheaper SUVs, unless you're a premium brand that tries to sell to less price-sensitive customers. That's how Volvo and VW get away with it.
People say this all the time here. I can honestly say I've never seen or heard of an accident caused by someone not being able to get up to speed on a merge. People generally expect that there might be slower traffic at a merge and act appropriately. It's a total non-issue.
Even that's expensive. You can download Solaris for free.
Yeah, but if you familiarized yourself with Vista you already knew pretty much how to do everything in Windows 7 when it came out.
What about IE4 for Windows 95, which gave Windows 95 the quicklaunch, active desktop, IE integration in Explorer, start menu tweaks, and a bunch of other stuff that was later part of Windows 98?
I consider Windows 2000 to be the best release of Windows in the sense that at the time it was released, it was easily Microsoft's biggest step forward. Windows 2000 was a big improvement over NT4, but more importantly it was the first of the NT line that was able and ready to replace the 9x line for most people. That's what was huge about it.
Have you dealt with the retail heatsinks that Intel ships with their CPUs since at least the Core 2 days? Terrible design with some cheesy plastic fasteners that will very easily come loose if the case is knocked about a bit.
Have you ever noticed that a lot of the stuff you buy that was manufactured in Asia has those little packets of silica gel in the box? Now, those packets are pretty cheap, but they're not free, which means that they are there for a reason. Now, chances are it'll be fine, but the point stands that the companies that send thousands of containers across the ocean have figured out that it's cheaper to include silica gel than to deal with the occasional problems from excess humidity.
It's the tremendous stress that would be involved once you spin it up to simulate gravity on the inside (and to hold the atmosphere in if it is not sealed). You need a material strong enough so that it doesn't fly apart. If it rotated at orbital velocity (in other words it took a year to complete one rotation) then it is possible to build it using materials we have access to.
There are also other problems. First, a Dyson sphere is not a stable system. Left to its own devices, eventually the sphere will crash into the star (or the star will crash into the sphere, depending on your point of view). So you're going to need some kind of active system to get the thing positioned. Granted, that's probably not a big deal for someone advanced enough to build it.
The second thing is gravity, if you desire such a thing. Barring some artificial gravity machine, the only way to get gravity (well, simulate it) would be the way we already know how - by spinning the sphere. This would of course only leave you with a band that has the desired gravity characteristics (granted, this band would still be huge), surrounded by a progressively steeper hill that has less and less gravity as you climb it. And I would recommend putting some spin on it, otherwise you could not stand on the inside of the sphere as the star's gravity would pull you towards the center, as a sphere of equal thickness and density will impart no force on any mass inside of it. And you would have to spin it at a considerable rate to simulate a planet's gravity - much faster than a planet orbiting at the same distance (however, this would be an advantage for intergalactic space travel as starships would leave the system with a considerable speed boost and wouldn't have to slow down nearly as much to land on the sphere so you do have that going for you).
How so? It's not like there would be any time for you to be unhappy before being vaporized.
SSDs for office machines? Why? Modern computers are already vastly overpowered for basic office tasks as it is now. It's not like the SSD is going to launch Excel that much faster when it already launches nearly instantly. All you're really doing is setting yourself up for having to do mass replacements of the SSDs when they start to fail after about 2 years, and paying $100 more per machine right now.
Man, people like you are such downers. I mean, do you rip into people who restore old cars too? I mean, by the time you get that old antique car restored, you can easily buy a new Kia for less money and in many ways have a better car. Those people who restore old cars sure like to waste their time and money!
Maybe he just did it because he could? Or because he thought it would be a cool project? Because he likes to tinker and learn something? Because it's a hobby? C'mon, just lighten up a bit people.
How about the depression of 1920-1921? That's a better example of what happens when the government more or less lets things run their natural course with minimal interference. The fact that most people aren't familiar with it goes to show well it worked.
The idea is basically you mask the distracting traffic noise by pumping out some less distracting random "white" noise a volume high enough that you can't hear the traffic anymore. It's basically the same thing as turning on a box fan or a noisy AC unit. In my opinion, it's a poor solution as I find the white noise itself distracting, especially since it generally has to be turned up to annoying levels to effectively mask something like traffic. There's one in my workplace and I hate it, as it basically sounds like the HVAC system going full blast without stopping for the entire workday.
In that case, you've just replaced the noise from trucks and trans with small arms fire.
Actually, flares might work better than you might expect. Unless the ship is massive, at a large enough distance you're not going to be able resolve it. You'll know that something is there from the radiation and approximately where it is but you won't be able to see it exactly where it is unless you're toting along an unfeasibly large telescope. Which means that you can't just whip out your rail gun and expect to hit it. So if you want to attack at a large distance, your only option really is use some kind of missile that can make course corrections as it closes in. If the distance is large enough remote control won't work either due to communication delays, which means that the missile would have to some kind of automatic guidance system. That pretty much leaves you with the same challenges we have today with automatic guidance systems which can be fooled with things like flares.
Well, one way to get around that pesky problem is to set your story a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
You are aware that there is an almost completely different TV show that happens to share the same name, don't you?
The hackers will make ARM run code compiled for x86?
Hell, it's not really the Radeon drivers so much as AMD's flakey chipsets. I've seen the Radeon drivers blue screen AMD boxes every few days. Swap out the motherboard and CPU with Intel, using the exact same Radeon graphics card and driver revision the system suddenly becomes rock solid. It's quite amusing how AMD's own graphics cards run better on Intel's chipsets than their own.
Did you even read what he said? It doesn't matter if the chip is really hyperthreaded or not - having the chip tell Windows that is hyperthreaded would have solved the scheduling problem in Windows 7. Actually, I'm kind of surprised that this couldn't be a bios setting as it is.
Actually, the way I see it is that Microsoft learned their lesson 10-15 years ago the hard way with things like ActiveX, leading them make vast improvements with regards to security in their products. Lessons that a lot of other companies are just learning now.
You can also buy light fluorescent light fixtures that take a CFL-style bulb but have the ballast and electronics in the fixture itself. Look for fixtures that take a G24q base style bulb. I have one such fixture that I put in my hallway and so far I've been quite happy with it in the sense that turns on fast and at 100% brightness and I haven't had to replace the bulb yet.