their autosearch solution was innovative* (* not sure if it was their idea). Without changing how the internet fundamentally works, they chose to render a failed DNS lookup as something more friendly and functional than a limited, rather useless OK popup.
They took something that worked to a well-established specification that's been around for decades and broke it. That is not good nor is it innovative.
But don't take my word for it. I will defer to this guy to elaborate and this guy to explain how stuff broke.
As many people have mentioned, you do not alter the functionality of core, Internet functionality in the global domain at the behest of some fools from marketing. If you want to make a change to how things work, propose a change or start your own network. Don't fuck with a service that billions of people use and depend on.
It faces tough competition, such as MPEG-4, RealVideo and Windows Media
DivX is MPEG-4, you kook! Try learning a bit about a topic before spouting nonsense over it.
As for RealVideo, they are aiming for streaming, which means low bandwidth consumption, which means a trade-off of quality in favor of small size. They are not interested in displacing MPEG-2.
I noticed you can still go into the hardware (screw drivers, power tools, etc.) section of Sears and buy bolt cutters. Bolt cutters have a legitimate use, even when used for cutting pad locks. However, I am sure that some have used them to gain illegal access, somewhere! Quickly, someone tell the government so we can make them illegal!
Of course, if Symantec has their way, they'll also make security testing illegal too. Idiots.
I think Wikipedia's entry on gigabyte should make this law suit appear really stupid. Here's a clip from the entry:
Because of irregularities in definition and usage of the kilobyte, the exact number could be any of the following:
1073741824 bytes - 1024 times 1024 times 1024, or 2^30. This is the definition used in computer science and computer programming.
1000000000 bytes or 10^9 - this is the definition used by telecommunications engineers and storage manufacturers.
Since most people who buy computers are not in "computer science or computer programming", I would argue the value of 10^9 used by storage manufacturers is perfectly applicable when selling computers in the mainstream.
Sadly, it appears a lawsuit rather than education will be used to settle this matter, which will lead to a precedent that will be yet another aggrivation for the computer industry. Damnit, if you're a lay person, it's safe to say that 1,000 Megabytes is roughly 1 Gigabyte.
You don't understand. XML is meant to improve interoperability, not defeat it. Look at that XML. Can you tell me what any of it means? XML is supposed to describe the data so that another application needs to know nothing about the application that created it. For example, consder the following snippet:
<section>
<name>Dogs</name>
<subsection>
<name>Poodles</name>
<content> Poodle s are girly dogs, without a doubt. The irony is they are bred for hunting. </content>
</subsection>
<subsecti on>
<name>German Shepherds</name>
<content> These guys are badasses and look the part. </content>
</subsection>
</section>
(Please forgive some stray characters--Slashcode seems to be fucking up the ecode block.) Now, you can clearly see the structure of that document. You know what each piece of data is and how it relates to other pieces of data.
Now, look again at a snippet the Microsoft example:
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages><o:Words>3</o:W ords><o:Characters>20</o:Characters><o:Company>Whi te Goat Studios</o:Company><o:Lines>1</o:Lines><o:Paragrap hs>1</o:Paragraphs><o:CharactersWithSpaces>22</o:C haractersWithSpaces><o:Version>11.5604</o:Version> ; </o:DocumentProperties><w:fonts><w:defaultFonts w:ascii="Times New Roman" w:fareast="Times New Roman" w:h-ansi="Times New Roman" w:cs="Times New Roman"/><w:font w:name="Verdana"><w:panose-1 w:val="020B0604030504040204"/><w:charset w:val="00"/><w:family w:val="Swiss"/><w:pitch w:val="variable"/><w:sig w:usb-0="20000287" w:usb-1="00000000" w:usb-2="00000000" w:usb-3="00000000" w:csb-0="0000019F" w:csb-1="00000000"/></w:font></w:fonts><w:styles>< ; w:versionOfBuiltInStylenames w:val="4"/><w:latentStyles w:defLockedState="off" w:latentStyleCount="156"/><w:style w:type="paragraph" w:default="on" w:styleId="Normal"><w:name w:val="Normal"/><w:rPr><wx:font wx:val="Times New Roman"/><w:sz w:val="24"/><w:sz-cs w:val="24"/><w:lang w:val="EN-US" w:fareast="EN-US" w:bidi="AR-SA"/></w:rPr></w:style><w:styl e w:type="character" w:default="on" w:styleId="DefaultParagraphFont">
I think you can see that they clearly missed the point of XML. It's very broken and quite likely, Microsoft are doing this simply so they can say "look, we use XML, therefore, competition can interoperate with us." Cars are great, but the reality of the case here is they've built a car with skiies rather than wheels.
It's not that it's big--it's perfectly fine if the data and the metadata are big. So long as the metadata describes what the data are, everything works out nicely. Then you would have another set of definitions that describe what the data look like. This is what OpenOffice.org does. Their output files are actually tarballs that contain an XML formatted copy of your data and then seperate stylesheets to describe its appearance (sound familiar?).
Hey if you are just after the text then only look for tags. I'm guessing that means Word Text.
And what if it doesn't mean that? Have fun debugging your filter.
Oh, please. Look how irritable and angry you are. You have a chip on your shoulder.
You're being overly critical!
SDL is nice, and so are a lot of other freeware graphics/audio libraries, but most every developer will tell you they still don't stand up to the massive suite of DirectX technologies. You've probably never even bothered with a DirectX app or an SDL app. I have done both.
libSDL is not freeware, it's open source. Subtle but important difference. Furthermore, libSDL isn't just a graphics and video library. It handles threading, I/O, resource management, networking, and well, pretty much everything DirectX does. It's also highly extensible. ClanLib also falls into this category.
So you've done both, huh? Care to show us the code?
None are equivalent to the speed and power of DirectX.
Speed in what sense? Does DirectX somehow have faster network speeds than libSDL? Pretty vague statement you make there. Of course from what I can see, DirectX games are typically slower than OpenGL on the framerate front.
Hate Microsoft all you want, but that's just something you have to cede at this point in time. Why don't YOU do "research" before spouting off and insulting people for giving their opinions on the poor state of Linux gaming development?
Really, neither of us has presented hard facts or evidence that one development library is superior to the others. I have presented two complete options that are open source and available for Linux, *BSD (including OS X), Windows, and lots of embedded platforms. DirectX is proprietary and only works on Windows. That's shameful.
Furthermore, you say that Linux game development is in a poor state. That's a rather stupid comment to make, or you're just spouting FUD. I'm not sure, but it doesn't matter. Linux game development is not in a poor state. Loki has proven that we have all the technologies necessary to bring Windows games to Linux. Just because Loki didn't turn a profit doesn't mean that Linux game technologies are inferior. Proof: Loki ported many DirectX games to Linux that are fully functional and fully featured using libSDL. There's plenty of other game companies that have ported DirectX games to Linux quite nicely. And of course, we have id Software which simultaneously develops their games on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. That also shows that there are equivalent technologies available on all platforms.
When linux comes out with a directx equivelent then they might write for it ( this is ONE set of API's ) . Not opengl doesn't count, that is only graphics.
You need sound,graphics,networking,AND graphics card writers writing to those drivers. That is what makes windows such a good gaming platform. Linux needs to consolidate and throw away the 4 graphics libraries and the 3 different sound package blah blah blah blah blah...
Oh darn... wait, you mean something like this? Well, if you don't like that, how about this one? Oh, I see... you forgot to do any research before you made you groundless claim.
Then maybe folks will port apps. If I write a game on
linux 7.2 blah blah blah...
"Linux 7.2", huh? Thanks for proving my point that you don't know wtf you're talking about. "Interesting" my ass.
That's 165 billion to rebuild it. Saddam Hussein destroyed it before the U.S. invasion.
Uh, no. The initial war effort cost American tax payers 85 billion dollars. Then, we attempted to seize control over Iraq's natural resources (oil) to fund its rebuilding. That failed miserably, so now aside from asking for internnational assistance, we're putting out another 80 billion dollars of tax payer money.
And no, Saddam did not destroy Iraq before we came in. You are either insanely stupid, ignorant, or just a liar. What destroyed Iraq was the "shock and awe" campaign we waged where thousands of bombs were dropped on Baghdad every night for, what, two weeks? In the process, we killed thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and destroyed their homes. That, you idiot, destroyed Iraq. Iraq had electricity and running water before we showed up.
It is/was quite legal.
You people giving Bush blind support would really like to forget how Bush and his regime repeatedly lied to the American people and the United Nations about the reasons for attacking Iraq. Yes, it was illegal. Deceiving the American people for the purpose of going to war is illegal. Get a grip.
Oh... you mean, like $13 billion aid package to fight aids in Africa?
Versus the tens of billions spent on agricultural subsidiess that help perpetuate problems in poor nations (poor nations achieving greater developmental status would be more effective at fighting all these nasty things than our "care packages"). How about the 450 billion in our military budget partly paid for by reducing an already strapped education budget? What about the 85 billion to destroy Iraq and then the additional 80 billion to "rebuild it" (read: ensure our continued authority position over a nation swimming on oil--hence our plea for help, but refusal to give up control). Then of course in all that came a 5 billion+ deal for Halliburton (hand picked by you know who, without competition). (Need I remind you that our illegal war against Iraq has caused a surge in recuitment for Islamic terrorist organizations--sounds great.) Then there is refusal to abide by the wishes of Congress to undo this FCC mandated media conglomerate nonsense (of course, big business again here). This could go on for days...
Yea, Mr. Bush isn't very interested in serving our best interests. He seems genuinely dedicated to fucking shit up, however.
Or, perhaps, you meant about how he aquiesced to the liberals, complaining his tax cut didn't help the poor, by agreeing to the earned income tax credit?
So basically, if no one had pointed it out, Bush would have been pleased as punch to just give a big ol' tax break to his wealthy contituents.
Blah, I am too tired to make any more than a half-hearted attempt here.
There's probably a very good chance that CodeWeaversCrossOver Office will run your software. I recommend giving it a shot. It's not too expensive and the money you pay to CodeWeavers is mostly for support and eventually helps the Wine project.
All of my devices are tested by the FCC, coming with warnings like: "this device may not cause harmful inteference." So is that just meaningless tripe?
One idea would be that external sources have to contend with the aluminum shell of the airplane and receivers designed (somewhat) to handle intefering signals.
Nevertheless, you can successfully use a cell phone on an airplane (case in point: Somerset, PA, September 11, 2001). While I'm sure the hull provides some shielding, it is clearly not keeping the lion's share external radiation out.
Furthermore, what about inflight movies? You have 5-10 televisions or LCD panels hanging from the ceiling. Now a days, you probably have a DVD player somewhere. That could easily kick out as much radiation as a laptop. Is the problem eliminated by keeping them in lead boxes? Are they somehow grounded?
I'm no expert obviously, so I don't really have a firm opinion, but it seems fishy to me to say that these little devices cause so many headaches.
How come passing cell phone towers, HAM, satelites (GPS, etc.), cosmic rays, (... etc....) and even the cockpit systems themselves don't cause interference to the cockpit systems?
There's a million sources of radiation anywhere there exists modern inhabitation. How come these immensely powerful sources of radiation do not interfere with the aircraft but my CD player with 2AA batters can? And if a tiny electronic device running on two tiny batteries can disrupt an aircraft, how can it possibly be safe to fly? Doesn't that constitute a violation of FCC regulations? (Yes, I meant FCC.)
More Canadian-job-seeker questions: where's the best place to go look for employment opportunity in Canada? Is there anything largely available on the web? Publications? Where should I go?
Furthermore, what are the chances Canadian tech companies will hire talent from the United States? Is it a shot in the dark or are many open to the possibility?
We're hiring electrical engineers and Linux programmers where I work.
Where do I send my resume?
Shame you had to post this on Slashdot. Getting your contact information is going to be hell.
On this topic, I have an important question for anyone in the US who is looking at moving to Canada to get away from shit like this. How likely are you to get approved for immigration? I haven't completed college yet (I think I scored 3 points too short on an online test because of this), but I am a highly skilled technical worker. Is Canada eager to grab techies from the US or must we follow the same immigration guidelines as everyone else?:-)
I would enjoy moving to a country where the politicians have their heads on straight. I'd like politicians that don't perceive their citizens as the enemy (as ours does) and considers American corporations their only allies. (Notice how this trend is so very similar to the RIAA and the MPAA?) A little less religious nonsense in governing would be nice too--no good will come from trying to induce some insane, apocalyptic, Bibically inspired end-game scenario by making war with everyone you can.
After dinner tonight, inspired by this story, I went back up to my local Honda dealership and test drove a 2003 Civic Hybrid with a manual transmission. My girlfriend has the CVT, I want the stick-shift.:-)
During the test drive, I mentioned the idea to the saleswoman that I disliked the rims and would also want to replace the tires with Falkens as mentioned in my post.
According to her, this isn't a good idea.
The rims are designed to keep drag down while still being somewhat interesting to look at. They have no spokes and very few distortions that would cause unnecessary wind resistence. Furthermore, one of the reasons the diameter of the rims on hybrids are so low, is because they have less rotational inertia. The greater the dimeter, the more weight you have father from the axis which requires more power to get turning.
As for the tires, they are specially chosen as well. Many other people have mentioned in various threads (including an Ars Technical article) that the Honda Insight has really hard tires with high PSI that do not have a great deal of grip. The situation with the Civic Hybrid is not unlike this. While the tires are fit the norm more closely, they are a little harder than most. Replacing them with softer tires like Falkens (that have different drag characteristics because of their uni-directional treads) will impact fuel economy significantly.
To summarize, the saleswoman mentioned something that should be obvious to most Slashdot geeks: the hybrids are engineered with everything in mind. It's all "hand-in-hand". Screw something up, and the impact might be greater than you'd think.
I realized previously that replacing the rims or tires would change the dynamics, but now I am wondering if the potential draw-backs are worth it.
So, do not merely take my advice and go replacing the tires on your shiny new hybrid. Check with the Honda dealership. They aren't engineers, but they might have cheat sheets that can tell them (and you) what will get fucked up when you start fiddling with things.
After re-reading this I realized it wasn't quite accurate. Most auto critics give Honda cars very good reviews overall. It's just the styling they often call bland, not the cars as a whole.
Depending on your point of view, a car is "bland" because it's not doing interesting things like breaking down. A car could be considered boring because it always works and you don't really anticipate it not working. How dull, never having to take it in for repairs. How mundane, always knowing what to expect. Yea, I would call Hondas bland too.;-)
I'm pretty sure Honda doesn't have a billion dollars to burn just to up their mileage rating and let them sell more SUV's.
They certainly do if they make sufficient profit on SUVs. Perhaps they make 10,001$ profit on SUVs. Of course, I am just parotting what the salesperson said. It could be just a sales tactic to make us believe we were getting a really good deal. Of course, that doesn't figure because my girlfriend was deadset on a hybrid anyway: the sale was already made when we learned this.
Who knows. Perhaps Honda wanted to bite those costs to jumpstart the market for Civic Hybrids before going into really high-volume production. The car is still kind of new (even though they've been popular in Nihon for years). Maybe they are further willing to eat those costs to get 100,000 people to test the technology to help bring it to maturation.
Also, do not forget that Honda makes a solid profit on the millions of other cars they sell every year. 100,000 compared to their yearly sales is almost insignificant.
You also have to consider that a loss of 1,000,000,000$ over a certain number of years isn't that big of a deal for a company like Honda, especially if their long-term goals are served by the loss. It's just like any other business expense.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry... never mind me. For some reason, in my haste, I looked at your post and thought you were defending Verisign's nonsense. :-)
Please confiscate my crack pipe and I promise it'll never happen again.
They took something that worked to a well-established specification that's been around for decades and broke it. That is not good nor is it innovative.
But don't take my word for it. I will defer to this guy to elaborate and this guy to explain how stuff broke.
As many people have mentioned, you do not alter the functionality of core, Internet functionality in the global domain at the behest of some fools from marketing. If you want to make a change to how things work, propose a change or start your own network. Don't fuck with a service that billions of people use and depend on.
DivX is MPEG-4, you kook! Try learning a bit about a topic before spouting nonsense over it.
As for RealVideo, they are aiming for streaming, which means low bandwidth consumption, which means a trade-off of quality in favor of small size. They are not interested in displacing MPEG-2.
Who finds people like you to write for Slashdot!?
If every last /. user with US citizenship voted for Dean...
I noticed you can still go into the hardware (screw drivers, power tools, etc.) section of Sears and buy bolt cutters. Bolt cutters have a legitimate use, even when used for cutting pad locks. However, I am sure that some have used them to gain illegal access, somewhere! Quickly, someone tell the government so we can make them illegal!
Of course, if Symantec has their way, they'll also make security testing illegal too. Idiots.
Perhaps knowing exactly the sources spammers get addresses from is the most effective way at preventing spam.
I am sure there are plenty of places we give our email address out that we think are benign, but are not.
I think Wikipedia's entry on gigabyte should make this law suit appear really stupid. Here's a clip from the entry:
Since most people who buy computers are not in "computer science or computer programming", I would argue the value of 10^9 used by storage manufacturers is perfectly applicable when selling computers in the mainstream.
Sadly, it appears a lawsuit rather than education will be used to settle this matter, which will lead to a precedent that will be yet another aggrivation for the computer industry. Damnit, if you're a lay person, it's safe to say that 1,000 Megabytes is roughly 1 Gigabyte.
You don't understand. XML is meant to improve interoperability, not defeat it. Look at that XML. Can you tell me what any of it means? XML is supposed to describe the data so that another application needs to know nothing about the application that created it. For example, consder the following snippet:
(Please forgive some stray characters--Slashcode seems to be fucking up the ecode block.) Now, you can clearly see the structure of that document. You know what each piece of data is and how it relates to other pieces of data.
Now, look again at a snippet the Microsoft example:
I think you can see that they clearly missed the point of XML. It's very broken and quite likely, Microsoft are doing this simply so they can say "look, we use XML, therefore, competition can interoperate with us." Cars are great, but the reality of the case here is they've built a car with skiies rather than wheels.
It's not that it's big--it's perfectly fine if the data and the metadata are big. So long as the metadata describes what the data are, everything works out nicely. Then you would have another set of definitions that describe what the data look like. This is what OpenOffice.org does. Their output files are actually tarballs that contain an XML formatted copy of your data and then seperate stylesheets to describe its appearance (sound familiar?).
And what if it doesn't mean that? Have fun debugging your filter.
Just incase there was any confusion on the part of the editors.
You're being overly critical!
libSDL is not freeware, it's open source. Subtle but important difference. Furthermore, libSDL isn't just a graphics and video library. It handles threading, I/O, resource management, networking, and well, pretty much everything DirectX does. It's also highly extensible. ClanLib also falls into this category.
So you've done both, huh? Care to show us the code?
None are equivalent to the speed and power of DirectX.Speed in what sense? Does DirectX somehow have faster network speeds than libSDL? Pretty vague statement you make there. Of course from what I can see, DirectX games are typically slower than OpenGL on the framerate front.
Really, neither of us has presented hard facts or evidence that one development library is superior to the others. I have presented two complete options that are open source and available for Linux, *BSD (including OS X), Windows, and lots of embedded platforms. DirectX is proprietary and only works on Windows. That's shameful.
Furthermore, you say that Linux game development is in a poor state. That's a rather stupid comment to make, or you're just spouting FUD. I'm not sure, but it doesn't matter. Linux game development is not in a poor state. Loki has proven that we have all the technologies necessary to bring Windows games to Linux. Just because Loki didn't turn a profit doesn't mean that Linux game technologies are inferior. Proof: Loki ported many DirectX games to Linux that are fully functional and fully featured using libSDL. There's plenty of other game companies that have ported DirectX games to Linux quite nicely. And of course, we have id Software which simultaneously develops their games on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. That also shows that there are equivalent technologies available on all platforms.
Sorry, but you're wrong.
Oh darn... wait, you mean something like this? Well, if you don't like that, how about this one? Oh, I see... you forgot to do any research before you made you groundless claim.
"Linux 7.2", huh? Thanks for proving my point that you don't know wtf you're talking about. "Interesting" my ass.
Uh, no. The initial war effort cost American tax payers 85 billion dollars. Then, we attempted to seize control over Iraq's natural resources (oil) to fund its rebuilding. That failed miserably, so now aside from asking for internnational assistance, we're putting out another 80 billion dollars of tax payer money.
And no, Saddam did not destroy Iraq before we came in. You are either insanely stupid, ignorant, or just a liar. What destroyed Iraq was the "shock and awe" campaign we waged where thousands of bombs were dropped on Baghdad every night for, what, two weeks? In the process, we killed thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and destroyed their homes. That, you idiot, destroyed Iraq. Iraq had electricity and running water before we showed up.
You people giving Bush blind support would really like to forget how Bush and his regime repeatedly lied to the American people and the United Nations about the reasons for attacking Iraq. Yes, it was illegal. Deceiving the American people for the purpose of going to war is illegal. Get a grip.
Not doing so well there yourself, AC.
Versus the tens of billions spent on agricultural subsidiess that help perpetuate problems in poor nations (poor nations achieving greater developmental status would be more effective at fighting all these nasty things than our "care packages"). How about the 450 billion in our military budget partly paid for by reducing an already strapped education budget? What about the 85 billion to destroy Iraq and then the additional 80 billion to "rebuild it" (read: ensure our continued authority position over a nation swimming on oil--hence our plea for help, but refusal to give up control). Then of course in all that came a 5 billion+ deal for Halliburton (hand picked by you know who, without competition). (Need I remind you that our illegal war against Iraq has caused a surge in recuitment for Islamic terrorist organizations--sounds great.) Then there is refusal to abide by the wishes of Congress to undo this FCC mandated media conglomerate nonsense (of course, big business again here). This could go on for days...
Yea, Mr. Bush isn't very interested in serving our best interests. He seems genuinely dedicated to fucking shit up, however.
So basically, if no one had pointed it out, Bush would have been pleased as punch to just give a big ol' tax break to his wealthy contituents.
Blah, I am too tired to make any more than a half-hearted attempt here.
The "President" favors special-interest big business (you know, the people who paid for his campaign) over the best interest of the public.
Have we ever seen the current Administration not favor big business over the public best interest?
There's probably a very good chance that CodeWeavers CrossOver Office will run your software. I recommend giving it a shot. It's not too expensive and the money you pay to CodeWeavers is mostly for support and eventually helps the Wine project.
All of my devices are tested by the FCC, coming with warnings like: "this device may not cause harmful inteference." So is that just meaningless tripe?
Nevertheless, you can successfully use a cell phone on an airplane (case in point: Somerset, PA, September 11, 2001). While I'm sure the hull provides some shielding, it is clearly not keeping the lion's share external radiation out.
Furthermore, what about inflight movies? You have 5-10 televisions or LCD panels hanging from the ceiling. Now a days, you probably have a DVD player somewhere. That could easily kick out as much radiation as a laptop. Is the problem eliminated by keeping them in lead boxes? Are they somehow grounded?
I'm no expert obviously, so I don't really have a firm opinion, but it seems fishy to me to say that these little devices cause so many headaches.
How come passing cell phone towers, HAM, satelites (GPS, etc.), cosmic rays, (... etc. ...) and even the cockpit systems themselves don't cause interference to the cockpit systems?
There's a million sources of radiation anywhere there exists modern inhabitation. How come these immensely powerful sources of radiation do not interfere with the aircraft but my CD player with 2AA batters can? And if a tiny electronic device running on two tiny batteries can disrupt an aircraft, how can it possibly be safe to fly? Doesn't that constitute a violation of FCC regulations? (Yes, I meant FCC.)
Anybody know what percentage of passenger aircraft use fly by wire systems?
More Canadian-job-seeker questions: where's the best place to go look for employment opportunity in Canada? Is there anything largely available on the web? Publications? Where should I go?
Furthermore, what are the chances Canadian tech companies will hire talent from the United States? Is it a shot in the dark or are many open to the possibility?
By the way, tell me where to send resumes. :-)
Where do I send my resume?
Shame you had to post this on Slashdot. Getting your contact information is going to be hell.
On this topic, I have an important question for anyone in the US who is looking at moving to Canada to get away from shit like this. How likely are you to get approved for immigration? I haven't completed college yet (I think I scored 3 points too short on an online test because of this), but I am a highly skilled technical worker. Is Canada eager to grab techies from the US or must we follow the same immigration guidelines as everyone else? :-)
I would enjoy moving to a country where the politicians have their heads on straight. I'd like politicians that don't perceive their citizens as the enemy (as ours does) and considers American corporations their only allies. (Notice how this trend is so very similar to the RIAA and the MPAA?) A little less religious nonsense in governing would be nice too--no good will come from trying to induce some insane, apocalyptic, Bibically inspired end-game scenario by making war with everyone you can.
After dinner tonight, inspired by this story, I went back up to my local Honda dealership and test drove a 2003 Civic Hybrid with a manual transmission. My girlfriend has the CVT, I want the stick-shift. :-)
During the test drive, I mentioned the idea to the saleswoman that I disliked the rims and would also want to replace the tires with Falkens as mentioned in my post.
According to her, this isn't a good idea.
The rims are designed to keep drag down while still being somewhat interesting to look at. They have no spokes and very few distortions that would cause unnecessary wind resistence. Furthermore, one of the reasons the diameter of the rims on hybrids are so low, is because they have less rotational inertia. The greater the dimeter, the more weight you have father from the axis which requires more power to get turning.
As for the tires, they are specially chosen as well. Many other people have mentioned in various threads (including an Ars Technical article) that the Honda Insight has really hard tires with high PSI that do not have a great deal of grip. The situation with the Civic Hybrid is not unlike this. While the tires are fit the norm more closely, they are a little harder than most. Replacing them with softer tires like Falkens (that have different drag characteristics because of their uni-directional treads) will impact fuel economy significantly.
To summarize, the saleswoman mentioned something that should be obvious to most Slashdot geeks: the hybrids are engineered with everything in mind. It's all "hand-in-hand". Screw something up, and the impact might be greater than you'd think.
I realized previously that replacing the rims or tires would change the dynamics, but now I am wondering if the potential draw-backs are worth it.
So, do not merely take my advice and go replacing the tires on your shiny new hybrid. Check with the Honda dealership. They aren't engineers, but they might have cheat sheets that can tell them (and you) what will get fucked up when you start fiddling with things.
Depending on your point of view, a car is "bland" because it's not doing interesting things like breaking down. A car could be considered boring because it always works and you don't really anticipate it not working. How dull, never having to take it in for repairs. How mundane, always knowing what to expect. Yea, I would call Hondas bland too. ;-)
You sound like you're female.
Will you have sex with me?
They certainly do if they make sufficient profit on SUVs. Perhaps they make 10,001$ profit on SUVs. Of course, I am just parotting what the salesperson said. It could be just a sales tactic to make us believe we were getting a really good deal. Of course, that doesn't figure because my girlfriend was deadset on a hybrid anyway: the sale was already made when we learned this.
Who knows. Perhaps Honda wanted to bite those costs to jumpstart the market for Civic Hybrids before going into really high-volume production. The car is still kind of new (even though they've been popular in Nihon for years). Maybe they are further willing to eat those costs to get 100,000 people to test the technology to help bring it to maturation.
Also, do not forget that Honda makes a solid profit on the millions of other cars they sell every year. 100,000 compared to their yearly sales is almost insignificant.
You also have to consider that a loss of 1,000,000,000$ over a certain number of years isn't that big of a deal for a company like Honda, especially if their long-term goals are served by the loss. It's just like any other business expense.