If you expect MSN to have ANY positive coverage on this particular (ahem- Linux powered) appliance then maybe you also expect Fox News to start discussion Mr. Bush's ignorance of foreign policy. I mean, it's just NOT going to happen.
Who knows- I guess if you plan on cropping or blowing up pictures the K10 will be worth the extra cost. The digital preview looks nice and I figure the CCD will offer lower noise. I figure the K100D will hold it's value pretty well and I can always sell if the K10D turns out to be even better than advertised without losing my investment in lens or other equipment. The K100D is so cheap (for the body) that it really doesn't offer much of a penalty over an equivalent quality point and shoot.
Pure FUD? You agreed with me- basically saying, yet the manufacturers batteries are expensive but you can get cheap ones off of ebay. No shit. I can buy cheap a lot of things off of ebay. However, I'm not using them in MY camera- you really want to risk having off voltage Li batteries fry your $500 minimum camera body and then explaining to Nikon, Canon etc why the circuitry is fried? My pentax camera even has a warning regarding the use of batteries. I'm not saying all 3rd party batteries won't work, I'm pointing out a feature of the Pentax and explaining why it may be valuable.
As far as flavor of the month- remember Smart Media? Tried to buy any lately? There's also CF I and II, Memory Stick Duo, Pro Duo, xD picture card, mini-disks and probably several others. How many of these will last for the life of your camera? Of these CF is probably a viable alternative to SD but SD has been around for at least six years and shows no signs of going away. On the contrary the xSD adaptors give hope that the form factor will continue indefinitely. That's a big plus to me not to mention that I can swap cards among my camera, point and shot camera, MP3 player and cell phone. SD cards are the least expensive media by at least a small margin and certainly the most reuseable with CF being a close second.
Pentax K100D Seconded but most importantly....
on
10 Reasons To Buy a DSLR
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I also have a Pentax K100D and really like it's ability to use about every lens ever made. I wouldn't go back to a digicam. Just being able to adjust the depth of field and manually focus are huge advantages. It's really feel frustrated to use a point and shoot once you've used an SLR. This assumes of course that you are as infatuated with perfection and willing to read up, study and practice to perfection as I assume most readers of slashdot are.
One point I think the article skipped over though is the proprietary (RAW) format of most DSLRs. Unless you plan to take and save JPEGS, in which case you're better off using a digicam, you gotta use RAW. RAW's problem is it's a PITA to process. gphoto, etc for Linux sometimes deal with RAW, but others, like my model of the Pentax aren't even accomodated by Photoshop yet. So, beware you can't just take pictures out of these and upload them to flickr or do the other things you might be used to.
Good quality pictures, the sort of thing you see in the galleries of highly rated photos on www.photo.net, come from RAW photos that are processed in gphoto, GIMP, Photoshop, etc to bring out the best of the shot. It's not a quick process and you should aim more for the few good shots sort of scenario and leave the lot of candid photos to digicams or DSLRs on auto/jpeg mode.
The RAW format isn't the only proprietary trap of DSLRs. I bought a Pentax primarily because of the ease of lens interchange but it also uses standard old SD cards and regular AA batteries. I use rechargeables but the point is I don't have to buy those VERY expensive proprietary batteries or flavor of the month memory formats as you may if you don't watch out.
He hasn't printed the documents so he hasn't falsified or created anything. Is HP responsible for making the printers that might be used to create the tickets where they to be printed? No, the TSA and Mr. Markey himself are responsible for not having the checks in place to verify the tickets are real. They, and only they, are responsible for this hole. There are things called taggants you know, and security seals and NCIC systems that could easily fix this flaw which seems a LOT more serious to me than a 4oz jar of gerber being brought onto the plane.
What the hell are you talking about? Bin Laden is probably watching Sadam's trial every day and laughing his ass off. "Hey everybody look, I've put the head of the only sectarian leader of a major middle-eastern country on the chopping block and I'm still out here shitting on the West". So far as we know, Bin Laden is still walking around free. As far as Sadam, "assuming he's guilty"? Come on, only an idiot would assume otherwise. He's not in a democracy and I doubt the notion of guilty until proven innocent ever crossed his mind. I can't see any of the current power mongers in Iraq wanting him to come back nor can I see their actions being affected by his death. His death won't bring back one American, Brit, Pole or Iraqi. It's just one more death among many; his more deserved than most. The current Administration and most politicians (Markey included, he's received a letter to that effect from me, a constituent) will obviously do anything in their power to bet, borrow or steal votes but executing Sadam? Who really believes that will bring an end to the violence in Iraq or sway the vote any a significant number of Americans?
Here it is. There's only one way to stop the madness- a clean sweep! So mark Nov 7th on your calendar and make sure to read the manual for the automated voting machine and of course, bring your ID. For your safety and convenience there's no need to stick it a slot or show it to the attendent; just pass it it by this handy reader.... We know who you are.
Useful in theory but how much time does it actually take to monitor this. There is generally so much ARP and other traffic going on that I've found it's extremely difficult in practice to actually discover such a trend. iptraf and some other tools ease the burden by allowing device and port specific analysis but still you really have to pay attention on a real-time basis or do a lot of data-mining. Who's going to spend this time on home network much less a general business environment where system administrators are already overstreached and security administrators are still the CFO's favorite line item veto?
I was just at Heathrow over the weekend- waiting for my wife to get back from the duty free in Terminal 3. It's one of the world's crappiest terminals- not even chairs at the gate. SO there I am waiting, sitting on the only space available, the floor. Here comes some guard saying I can't sit there- "security reasons". So WTF am I supposed to do, call to my genie wife to bring me back into her bottle with her? "Security Reasons" is the catch phrase of power-hungry bureaucrats everywhere, it means, "I'd like to push you around and you'd don't dare even question me when I give you even an unreasonable command on a whim". I got a headache when I read about the RFID tags at the Hungarian airport. Security is used by all the worlds' despots as the rationale for their staying in power. No kidding Capt Obvious you say? Well, what's the best way to push aside this reason without being labeled treasonous?
I think technicians are the ONLY people who can legitimately convert people or at least expost them to alternatives. PHBs ram things down people's throats and create resentment but if someone is fixing up your computer and takes the time to actually talk with you- I think people are inclined to listen carefully. The good techs really care about people and people respond to that. People are busy and don't have much inclination to explore or do anything other than what they have done or are told to do. They don't want to waste time with the problems many MS systems create. They'd like to work on documents at home but may not want to fork over for MS Office, etc. I think this guys efforts are great. You can bet your ass MS wouldn't pass up the opportunity to convert someone- neither should we.
I think the biggest problem with ebay is sniping- it's really almost worthless to bid on things because unless you are there at the VERY last second, someone will overbid you by one dollar and win it. If there were a mechanism whereby by each person bid once, instead of multiple times in just a few seconds, perhaps it would increase the usefullness of the site. I would like to purchase things but I DON'T feel like sitting in front of ebay 24x7 just to win something.
Oh, so for instance if a corporation, say one like Boeing were to make certain promises to a Civil Servant then that Civil Servant would never say, affect managerial changes like say, redirect contracts. Or, in another case, a certain large corporation also in Washington might not ask that certain prosecutors or Judges be removed from a case. That would never happen right?
FYI- the OP is not a civil servent- he was retired military. When he was an officer, he did work for each and every American citizen. I am pretty suprised to see the US populous accepting the inconvenience of it all. It's really a suprising testament to the power of Mr. Bush and Company.
Doesn't the Government work for us? (Rhetorical question). It was interesting to hear our Attorney General at the press conference- the ernest docent, trying to convince us they were doing their very best to keep us informed and that all of this was for our safety. It's ridiculous.
I wonder if who's going to test suckling womens brests?
Not have a central configuration database is one of the reasons I much prefer Linux. A series of PLAIN TEXT config files in/etc is fine, per user config storage is excellent. A central database has to be protected from inadvertent changes, reducing my ability to configure things how I chose. Second, the more the components of an application are spread throughout the filesystem the more difficult system admin and recovery becomes. Why shouldn't I be able to copy an application from one machine to another, just the binary file and have it come up at least in some default state? I think this should be a goal for all applications and a central configuration database makes this just that much more difficult. I won't even talk about the cruft and corruption issues a central database brings with it.
Since you have not defined "better" and the acceptance of the faculty is irrelevant I will say yes- we previously used Intralearn. It probably has far fewer features than BB or WebCT I wouldn't know- it had the features I needed and I never experienced any interoperability problems. There's moodle which others have mentioned. I haven't used prometheus since it was absorbed by Blackboard but it worked well a few years ago. There is also OpenACS and.LRN which appear to be excellent candidates. I don't have a favored horse here; I think there are several candidates. The point is, blackboard and webct are MS friendly and looking to lock down the on-line learning market and that is NOT good.
kget. It's integrated into Konqueror. I don't know why a separate application is needed for everything. I hear this a lot from those coming from using Microsoft Windows. They run one program at a time taking up the whole screen. They look for a separate program for every single task.
Kget, like many other protocols, is tightly integrated with Konqueror. Just download using Konqueror and you can "manage" those downloads with kget. No learning kurve, no separate application.
NB: NO mention of Linux. Do you really want to use Firefox 1.0? I mean is it even available? I don't see Konqueror anywhere. There's NO reason why every box in that chart shouldn't be checked that I can see. Keeping the system simple and usable would avoid the problems.
I use WebCt and BB as an instructor- they do not work with Konqueror or Firefox. It may or may not work for students. From what I can tell most things other than the chat and email features do function for students under firefox, if you enable popups and java and don't push to hard. They do not work for Konqeuror. I can't speak to Nautilus.
It's not a matter of those environments being buggy, the on-line systems go out of their way (in my observation) to break things by making even the simpliest function a complex javascript or applet (not to mention obscure and poorly implemented). Most of the problems seem to be caused by internal checks within the scripts rather than actual incompatiblities. This qualifies as deliberate sabotage of non-MS environments as far as I'm concerned. Unless I see a statement from the vendor specifically stating that the environments have been tested, I've found you WILL encounter difficulties. These systems are sold on features and bling not usability. They are NOT selected or controlled by the students or faculty who use them. I'm sure those of you in larger businesses can relate...
As far as "contacting my system administrator", I think those sort of responses assume there's a responsive department that takes care of those things.
The way "modern" Universities work, anything that requires actual knowledge and work- beyond research under grants or administration- is outsourced. This means when you call to ask how to get something to work you encounter someone who only knows how to use a Microsoft Windows product in the ways shown to them by the on-line product's vendor. If you ask when it's going to be fixed, they'll defer to the vendor. Asking for features is well, not an option. This is not a criticism of my University- I think it's generally applicable. The days of interested, caring TAs and undergraduates maintaining systems catering for the staff and students appear to be long gone.
Blackboard and WebCT are consolidating the educational "on-line" learning software market and this is VERY bad for open source. Neither of these systems is at all friendly to Linux; I have to use them as an on-line professor. They don't work with Firefox, they don't work with Konqueror. The systems themselves are terribly complex and non-intuitive.
If this sounds somewhat like a rant- I encourage you to try either of these systems. I believe you'll come away just as frustrated. The notion of these systems gaining, or even trying to gain a stranglehold is very depressing.
I hope that not only are these patents denied but that Blackboard and WebCT get tied up in litigation until they go Chapter 11. If any market should be supportive of Open Source, I think the on-line learning marketplace is a natural. Having Blackboard and WebCT dominate is not good for us.
POOR! In fact, it's death rates are 2-4x worse than say a VW Golf or a Honda CVCC which are about the same size. Cherokees, as it happens, are relatively well-built with about the same fatality rates as the Golf and CVCC. If you research the issue, you'll see the truth in what I've said above, the overall death rates in single car accidents for SUVs and pickups are generally higher than well-built smaller cars. 32 deaths / million for a Cherokee vice 16/million for a Golf. I can't say if this is because of the physics, poor car design, because SUV drivers don't wear seatbelts or maybe they drive faster. That said, I drive a VW bus which is safer in the sense that it has trouble going faster than 50mph to begin with:)
An SUV hitting a smaller car- yes the smaller car is more likely to be damaged as it has to absorb more energy. An SUV or a smaller car hitting an immobile object like a telephone pole- you're probably safer in the smaller car. In the first case, the smaller car is probably made by Honda, VW, Saab or a similar manufacturer who has spent some time working to lower injuries and thus lawsuits against them. Secondly SUVs weigh more, sometimes a LOT more like over 8,000lb. If you hit an immobile object, like a rock that SUV has to soak up the extra kinetic energy and most likely that means a crushed passenger cage. An extra four or five feet of overhang and an 8' wide passenger compartment don't mean squat if that pole smacks into the drivers side. The notion that SUVs are safer is FUD.
I have a VW bus, which might qualify for the mini-van title. I've always owned them; so has my brother. We're both married. I think you'll find, at least for those of a certain type, a VW bus, especially a westfalia IS a chick magnet, if you don't mind a bit of underarm hair of course. I'm not talking about my underarm hair by the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Namely being a lawyer and having obtained his "BS" in Austin Texas, he is well qualified to make this determination. I mean after all, Baylor College leads by example, possibly falsifying LSAT data to U.S. News in order to obtain a higher ranking in obtain a higher ranking. http://search.conduit.com/Search.aspx?ctid=CT32953 6&uslang=500&SearchType=SearchWeb&q=Baylor%20colle ge%20ranking
What better official could the White House recruit!
Don't believe me- check it out- http://search.conduit.com/Search.aspx?ctid=CT32953 6&uslang=500&SearchType=SearchWeb&q=msn%20news. We've got Billy Bob Gates mocking, we have hitting back at critics,
MSN- It's not News it's propaganda!
If you expect MSN to have ANY positive coverage on this particular (ahem- Linux powered) appliance then maybe you also expect Fox News to start discussion Mr. Bush's ignorance of foreign policy. I mean, it's just NOT going to happen.
Who knows- I guess if you plan on cropping or blowing up pictures the K10 will be worth the extra cost. The digital preview looks nice and I figure the CCD will offer lower noise. I figure the K100D will hold it's value pretty well and I can always sell if the K10D turns out to be even better than advertised without losing my investment in lens or other equipment. The K100D is so cheap (for the body) that it really doesn't offer much of a penalty over an equivalent quality point and shoot.
Pure FUD? You agreed with me- basically saying, yet the manufacturers batteries are expensive but you can get cheap ones off of ebay. No shit. I can buy cheap a lot of things off of ebay. However, I'm not using them in MY camera- you really want to risk having off voltage Li batteries fry your $500 minimum camera body and then explaining to Nikon, Canon etc why the circuitry is fried? My pentax camera even has a warning regarding the use of batteries. I'm not saying all 3rd party batteries won't work, I'm pointing out a feature of the Pentax and explaining why it may be valuable.
As far as flavor of the month- remember Smart Media? Tried to buy any lately? There's also CF I and II, Memory Stick Duo, Pro Duo, xD picture card, mini-disks and probably several others. How many of these will last for the life of your camera? Of these CF is probably a viable alternative to SD but SD has been around for at least six years and shows no signs of going away. On the contrary the xSD adaptors give hope that the form factor will continue indefinitely. That's a big plus to me not to mention that I can swap cards among my camera, point and shot camera, MP3 player and cell phone. SD cards are the least expensive media by at least a small margin and certainly the most reuseable with CF being a close second.
I also have a Pentax K100D and really like it's ability to use about every lens ever made. I wouldn't go back to a digicam. Just being able to adjust the depth of field and manually focus are huge advantages. It's really feel frustrated to use a point and shoot once you've used an SLR. This assumes of course that you are as infatuated with perfection and willing to read up, study and practice to perfection as I assume most readers of slashdot are.
One point I think the article skipped over though is the proprietary (RAW) format of most DSLRs. Unless you plan to take and save JPEGS, in which case you're better off using a digicam, you gotta use RAW. RAW's problem is it's a PITA to process. gphoto, etc for Linux sometimes deal with RAW, but others, like my model of the Pentax aren't even accomodated by Photoshop yet. So, beware you can't just take pictures out of these and upload them to flickr or do the other things you might be used to.
Good quality pictures, the sort of thing you see in the galleries of highly rated photos on www.photo.net, come from RAW photos that are processed in gphoto, GIMP, Photoshop, etc to bring out the best of the shot. It's not a quick process and you should aim more for the few good shots sort of scenario and leave the lot of candid photos to digicams or DSLRs on auto/jpeg mode.
The RAW format isn't the only proprietary trap of DSLRs. I bought a Pentax primarily because of the ease of lens interchange but it also uses standard old SD cards and regular AA batteries. I use rechargeables but the point is I don't have to buy those VERY expensive proprietary batteries or flavor of the month memory formats as you may if you don't watch out.
He hasn't printed the documents so he hasn't falsified or created anything. Is HP responsible for making the printers that might be used to create the tickets where they to be printed? No, the TSA and Mr. Markey himself are responsible for not having the checks in place to verify the tickets are real. They, and only they, are responsible for this hole. There are things called taggants you know, and security seals and NCIC systems that could easily fix this flaw which seems a LOT more serious to me than a 4oz jar of gerber being brought onto the plane.
What the hell are you talking about? Bin Laden is probably watching Sadam's trial every day and laughing his ass off. "Hey everybody look, I've put the head of the only sectarian leader of a major middle-eastern country on the chopping block and I'm still out here shitting on the West". So far as we know, Bin Laden is still walking around free. As far as Sadam, "assuming he's guilty"? Come on, only an idiot would assume otherwise. He's not in a democracy and I doubt the notion of guilty until proven innocent ever crossed his mind. I can't see any of the current power mongers in Iraq wanting him to come back nor can I see their actions being affected by his death. His death won't bring back one American, Brit, Pole or Iraqi. It's just one more death among many; his more deserved than most. The current Administration and most politicians (Markey included, he's received a letter to that effect from me, a constituent) will obviously do anything in their power to bet, borrow or steal votes but executing Sadam? Who really believes that will bring an end to the violence in Iraq or sway the vote any a significant number of Americans?
Here it is. There's only one way to stop the madness- a clean sweep! So mark Nov 7th on your calendar and make sure to read the manual for the automated voting machine and of course, bring your ID. For your safety and convenience there's no need to stick it a slot or show it to the attendent; just pass it it by this handy reader.... We know who you are.
Useful in theory but how much time does it actually take to monitor this. There is generally so much ARP and other traffic going on that I've found it's extremely difficult in practice to actually discover such a trend. iptraf and some other tools ease the burden by allowing device and port specific analysis but still you really have to pay attention on a real-time basis or do a lot of data-mining. Who's going to spend this time on home network much less a general business environment where system administrators are already overstreached and security administrators are still the CFO's favorite line item veto?
I was just at Heathrow over the weekend- waiting for my wife to get back from the duty free in Terminal 3. It's one of the world's crappiest terminals- not even chairs at the gate. SO there I am waiting, sitting on the only space available, the floor. Here comes some guard saying I can't sit there- "security reasons". So WTF am I supposed to do, call to my genie wife to bring me back into her bottle with her? "Security Reasons" is the catch phrase of power-hungry bureaucrats everywhere, it means, "I'd like to push you around and you'd don't dare even question me when I give you even an unreasonable command on a whim". I got a headache when I read about the RFID tags at the Hungarian airport. Security is used by all the worlds' despots as the rationale for their staying in power. No kidding Capt Obvious you say? Well, what's the best way to push aside this reason without being labeled treasonous?
I think technicians are the ONLY people who can legitimately convert people or at least expost them to alternatives. PHBs ram things down people's throats and create resentment but if someone is fixing up your computer and takes the time to actually talk with you- I think people are inclined to listen carefully. The good techs really care about people and people respond to that. People are busy and don't have much inclination to explore or do anything other than what they have done or are told to do. They don't want to waste time with the problems many MS systems create. They'd like to work on documents at home but may not want to fork over for MS Office, etc. I think this guys efforts are great. You can bet your ass MS wouldn't pass up the opportunity to convert someone- neither should we.
I think the biggest problem with ebay is sniping- it's really almost worthless to bid on things because unless you are there at the VERY last second, someone will overbid you by one dollar and win it. If there were a mechanism whereby by each person bid once, instead of multiple times in just a few seconds, perhaps it would increase the usefullness of the site. I would like to purchase things but I DON'T feel like sitting in front of ebay 24x7 just to win something.
Oh, so for instance if a corporation, say one like Boeing were to make certain promises to a Civil Servant then that Civil Servant would never say, affect managerial changes like say, redirect contracts. Or, in another case, a certain large corporation also in Washington might not ask that certain prosecutors or Judges be removed from a case. That would never happen right?
FYI- the OP is not a civil servent- he was retired military. When he was an officer, he did work for each and every American citizen. I am pretty suprised to see the US populous accepting the inconvenience of it all. It's really a suprising testament to the power of Mr. Bush and Company.
Doesn't the Government work for us? (Rhetorical question). It was interesting to hear our Attorney General at the press conference- the ernest docent, trying to convince us they were doing their very best to keep us informed and that all of this was for our safety. It's ridiculous.
I wonder if who's going to test suckling womens brests?
Not have a central configuration database is one of the reasons I much prefer Linux. A series of PLAIN TEXT config files in /etc is fine, per user config storage is excellent. A central database has to be protected from inadvertent changes, reducing my ability to configure things how I chose. Second, the more the components of an application are spread throughout the filesystem the more difficult system admin and recovery becomes. Why shouldn't I be able to copy an application from one machine to another, just the binary file and have it come up at least in some default state? I think this should be a goal for all applications and a central configuration database makes this just that much more difficult. I won't even talk about the cruft and corruption issues a central database brings with it.
Since you have not defined "better" and the acceptance of the faculty is irrelevant I will say yes- we previously used Intralearn. It probably has far fewer features than BB or WebCT I wouldn't know- it had the features I needed and I never experienced any interoperability problems. There's moodle which others have mentioned. I haven't used prometheus since it was absorbed by Blackboard but it worked well a few years ago. There is also OpenACS and .LRN which appear to be excellent candidates. I don't have a favored horse here; I think there are several candidates. The point is, blackboard and webct are MS friendly and looking to lock down the on-line learning market and that is NOT good.
kget. It's integrated into Konqueror. I don't know why a separate application is needed for everything. I hear this a lot from those coming from using Microsoft Windows. They run one program at a time taking up the whole screen. They look for a separate program for every single task.
Kget, like many other protocols, is tightly integrated with Konqueror. Just download using Konqueror and you can "manage" those downloads with kget. No learning kurve, no separate application.
Blackboard DOES hate Linux. Whatever your experience with Blackboard 7, Blackboard itself does not agree:
s er_requirements.pdf
http://library.blackboard.com/docs/bbas_r7_0_brow
NB: NO mention of Linux. Do you really want to use Firefox 1.0? I mean is it even available? I don't see Konqueror anywhere. There's NO reason why every box in that chart shouldn't be checked that I can see. Keeping the system simple and usable would avoid the problems.
I use WebCt and BB as an instructor- they do not work with Konqueror or Firefox. It may or may not work for students. From what I can tell most things other than the chat and email features do function for students under firefox, if you enable popups and java and don't push to hard. They do not work for Konqeuror. I can't speak to Nautilus.
It's not a matter of those environments being buggy, the on-line systems go out of their way (in my observation) to break things by making even the simpliest function a complex javascript or applet (not to mention obscure and poorly implemented). Most of the problems seem to be caused by internal checks within the scripts rather than actual incompatiblities. This qualifies as deliberate sabotage of non-MS environments as far as I'm concerned. Unless I see a statement from the vendor specifically stating that the environments have been tested, I've found you WILL encounter difficulties. These systems are sold on features and bling not usability. They are NOT selected or controlled by the students or faculty who use them. I'm sure those of you in larger businesses can relate...
As far as "contacting my system administrator", I think those sort of responses assume there's a responsive department that takes care of those things.
The way "modern" Universities work, anything that requires actual knowledge and work- beyond research under grants or administration- is outsourced. This means when you call to ask how to get something to work you encounter someone who only knows how to use a Microsoft Windows product in the ways shown to them by the on-line product's vendor. If you ask when it's going to be fixed, they'll defer to the vendor. Asking for features is well, not an option. This is not a criticism of my University- I think it's generally applicable. The days of interested, caring TAs and undergraduates maintaining systems catering for the staff and students appear to be long gone.
Blackboard and WebCT are consolidating the educational "on-line" learning software market and this is VERY bad for open source. Neither of these systems is at all friendly to Linux; I have to use them as an on-line professor. They don't work with Firefox, they don't work with Konqueror. The systems themselves are terribly complex and non-intuitive.
If this sounds somewhat like a rant- I encourage you to try either of these systems. I believe you'll come away just as frustrated. The notion of these systems gaining, or even trying to gain a stranglehold is very depressing.
I hope that not only are these patents denied but that Blackboard and WebCT get tied up in litigation until they go Chapter 11. If any market should be supportive of Open Source, I think the on-line learning marketplace is a natural. Having Blackboard and WebCT dominate is not good for us.
Dodge Neon (note the side impact rating): http://www.iihs.org/ratings/ratingsbyseries.aspx?i d=382
POOR! In fact, it's death rates are 2-4x worse than say a VW Golf or a Honda CVCC which are about the same size. Cherokees, as it happens, are relatively well-built with about the same fatality rates as the Golf and CVCC. If you research the issue, you'll see the truth in what I've said above, the overall death rates in single car accidents for SUVs and pickups are generally higher than well-built smaller cars. 32 deaths / million for a Cherokee vice 16/million for a Golf. I can't say if this is because of the physics, poor car design, because SUV drivers don't wear seatbelts or maybe they drive faster. That said, I drive a VW bus which is safer in the sense that it has trouble going faster than 50mph to begin with:)
An SUV hitting a smaller car- yes the smaller car is more likely to be damaged as it has to absorb more energy. An SUV or a smaller car hitting an immobile object like a telephone pole- you're probably safer in the smaller car. In the first case, the smaller car is probably made by Honda, VW, Saab or a similar manufacturer who has spent some time working to lower injuries and thus lawsuits against them. Secondly SUVs weigh more, sometimes a LOT more like over 8,000lb. If you hit an immobile object, like a rock that SUV has to soak up the extra kinetic energy and most likely that means a crushed passenger cage. An extra four or five feet of overhang and an 8' wide passenger compartment don't mean squat if that pole smacks into the drivers side. The notion that SUVs are safer is FUD.
I have a VW bus, which might qualify for the mini-van title. I've always owned them; so has my brother. We're both married. I think you'll find, at least for those of a certain type, a VW bus, especially a westfalia IS a chick magnet, if you don't mind a bit of underarm hair of course. I'm not talking about my underarm hair by the way.