Aren't these, in the end, pretty much the same as a trolley? The bus is really a mini-bus that holds 11 people. It uses 40% as much electricity as a trolley. If you expanded the bus to hold as many people as a trolley can, wouldn't the increase in size and weight (both bus weight and passenger weight) make it use more energy?
If so, then what's the difference between this and, say, a mini-trolley? I mean, hell, why not ultracapacitor golf carts or something?
Removes the moving-part-inefficiency, disruption, inconvenience, installation cost, maintenance cost, and unsightliness of overhead wires. I'm guessing that these charging ports would be cheaper to install and maintain.
I'm working on a project right now for setting up an internal document management system. Ran up a blind alley of learning Drupal (that took a while!) only to discover that it wasn't suitable. Evaluated a few more (including SharePoint) and ended up going with the free and open-source TikiWiki instead. To quote McDonald's, I'm loving it!
To be fair stop signs don't seem like the most stimulating conversation.
Some friends were talking about how they'd gotten ticketed for running stop signs on their bikes because the cops were enforcing them. Sorry if it bores you what other people are talking about, but then they didn't really ask your opinion about how interesting the conversation seemed. Come to think of it, neither did I.
To borrow a phrase, on what planet do you spend most of your time?
It was big government that put a man on the moon.
It was big government that built the interstates. You're welcome.
It was big government that gave you the police department and firemen. You're welcome.
It's big government that puts men and women in uniform to go off and defend this country, but I don't hear Fox-News-watching sheep like yourself railing against the incompetence of government-run programs like the US Marine Corps or the socialised medicine that they receive.
This "all government is evil" bullshit is really getting tiresome. Why don't you take a look at government run health care systems around the world before you foam at the mouth with your anarchist hatred for the institutions of civilisation? Why don't you open your brainwashed eyes and see that there is only one industrialised country in the world (the USA) that thinks it's okay to leave people without health insurance or to let people go bankrupt because they get sick? Why can't you get it into your pointy little head that health care is as fundamental a human right as protection from the police or fire department? Why can't you see that Glenn Beck is bat shit insane?
Off-topic garbage like this reminds me of another right-wing lunatic I know who managed to turn a conversation about stop signs into a foaming-at-the-mouth rant about the federal government.
Your government is defective. Huge budget deficits, stealing from local cities and counties and flawed regulations being rammed through the legislative process.
Living here, I vote we rip up the state's constitution and start fresh. The first step is ousting the assholes currently in charge.
I entirely agree. The "assholes currently in charge" are the voters who think they're qualified to micromanage the budget via direct ballot initiative, handed the anti-tax troll minority a veto over tax increases (Prop 13), and promptly turn around and blame the politicians for the mess that the voters have gotten themselves into. After all, it's so much easier to blame the politicians that you voted for than to take responsibility for the batshit insane "initiatives" that you voted for even though you didn't understand half of them.
Rip up the constitution and start again? Allow me to begin. How about "direct ballot initiatives are history?"
My local 7-Eleven covers up the lads' magazines featuring attractive bikini-clad women on the covers. On the same shelf they have those awful tabloid magazines festooned with bikini-clad celebrities and their cellulite. These are the magazines that are not covered up. Go figure.
I find it very noticeable. Over the last nine years, on most stories I have had to wade through endless repetitions of the same stupid jokes to get to any informative comments of substance (nowadays I just have my filters set to downgrade anything modded 'funny'), and on stories about the technical achievements of the developing world there is a far greater proportion of those attempted jokes that are racist. It doesn't seem to stop them from getting modded 'funny' though.
Not one specific case of sexism was described in that blog post. I'm damned if I know what this writer is talking about.
I think a much bigger problem, from the point of view of/., is racism. As soon as an Indian or Chinese technical achievement is mentioned around here, the jokes start flooding in about curry and Chinese food and the way those people talk funny. It's as if the achievements of the Apollo program are almost of religious significance, but India launching satellites is considered a big joke. I wonder how much laughing these racists will be doing when a Taikonaut walks on the moon while America goes bankrupt.
Why is this news? Sun/Solaris dominated the high-end financial sector for ages...any exchange/trading house/equity firm/etc that is using Windows is insane IMHO. Linux is just the most recent unix platform to show up in the sector, it's not revolutionary...
Were there any open source solutions being used in there before?
There comes a point when 'let's add another lane' is no longer a viable option!
No, actually, if you're willing to spend 45 billion dollars you can add lanes pretty much indefinitely.
Even if that were true, it still wouldn't make traffic go any faster in the long run and you'd still have to do the driving yourself. Gimme a train any day, I'd rather sleep, read, or get work done than have to waste my time concentrating on driving.
They big argument against newspapers on Slashdot is this perception that they are low tech. I know personally the reason I stopped reading a daily paper had nothing to do with the internet. I stopped years before the internet got relevant for a few good reasons. First was far too many ads. In a major city like LA or New York you got a daily paper the size of a small phone book for a handful of stories you actually wanted to read with the bulk of it being ads. The Sunday papers were even worse. Also newspapers were where you went to get the whole story and not the fluff you tended to get through television. That changed and the quality of stories and reporting dropped like a rock. I saw it happen early on with my hometown paper, I come from a very small town. Back in the day they covered national news stories but by the end they were more like a high school paper. I found gradually with the newspapers I was reading the relevant stories got rarer and rarer and the quality of the information wasn't as good as I was getting on the evening news. I often found there were no more than two or three stories that interested me and some times there were none. The internet was the death blow for the papers but they were weakened before the internet came along. The decline was apparent back in the 80s and revenues have been falling for 20 years or more. The reasons for the decline are hard to put a finger on because blaming even TV doesn't make much sense because TV news was decades old when the newspapers started their fall from grace. In the end it may be more the newspaper's fault than technology itself. Focusing more on ad revenue and not on news itself weakened them and made them open for failure. Once they were the only source of news, then they were still the best source of news and finally the became a poor source of news. Their final death blow was easily available news and the need for news on demand but those things weren't the root cause of the newspaper's fall from grace. Most people on the site probably don't remember a time when newspapers were your primary source of news. Most thing things are better now but the truth is the quality of news is appalling. Things have gotten so bad most consider blogs a source of news, they don't in any way report news they are purely predigested information and mostly opinion and not news. There are no standards for blogs. Even web sites like CNN are shockingly bad. It's hard to find an article without typos. In an age of spell checkers they actually post most stories with typos. That's beyond embarassing. In the old news days a single miss-spelled word or mistake in a story was a black mark for an editor. On line news is largely free of editorial oversight. The death of newspapers shouldn't be celibrated but mourned. TV news has become news bunnies and male models and on-line news is so chaotic that there's no way to separate fact from fiction. The death of newspapers is in some ways the death of news.
Amen brother.
There is one newspaper that has managed to buck the trend by keeping the ads unobtrusive, concentrating on quality journalism, and keeping writing standards high. It can be heavy reading if you're not used to it since the articles are longer than your average newspaper piece, but they are detailed enough to be concise and informative. It is augmented by a witty application of cartoons and illustrations that help to get the point across. It is published weekly, and there is an actual benefit to reading it since the focus is on analysis of what happened instead of making a futile attempt to beat the internet to the punch of informing you about what happened. It is also available online for free, but the sheer quality of its work is such that they can afford to charge a bit more for online ads. This paper is continuing to grow.
In order to replace the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine,) charge time needs to drop to less than 10 minutes. With recharging stations nearly as common as gas stations.
Batteries aren't going to do that. Supercapacitors will. (Or some yet-to-be-invented technology.)
Maybe, but there's also the fact that people generally need about 8 hours of sleep at night, a time during which your car can be charging away. That actually removes the hassle of having to go out of your way to fill up at a gas station. I'd also imagine that electricity is easier to distribute since you don't have to truck it like petrol/gasoline.
The basic question is this: why bother with these things? So mall cops don't have to do any actual walking? Total waste of time.
Ah, the old/. staple reply. "I won't find it useful, so I don't see why anybody else will find it useful either." Throw in a total failure to RTFA (which mentions how Japan has a rapidly aging population and there are concerns about how to help the elderly to get around) and the perfect storm of ignorance is complete.
Hear hear. This reminds me of a book called The Design of Everyday things. We have certain conventions, like a flat metal panel on a door that you push, and a handle on a door that you pull. In our cars we have a steering wheel, a clutch, brake and accelerator in that order. Our computers have qwerty keyboards, which isn't necessarily the optimum layout. I'm sure someone could come up with an argument for an alternative arrangement and replace them with something "better," but that would just confuse the hell out of users.
Steering wheels remain in our cars because the consequences of a confused driver getting to grips with a joystick or steering pedals would be too dangerous.
Qwerty keyboards remain because we've gotten used to them and they are a universal standard.
Good usability is what people actually find easy to use in practice, not what they 'should find easier to use' according to some committee.
The car was dangerous because it used rear-wheel steering.
In at least this respect, B. Fuller should have taken the advice of automotive industry engineers of the day, who would have told him that this (steering arrangement) was a waste of time. It is generally presumed to be impossible to build a mechanical rear-wheel-steering system that exhibits positive stability (that being the natural tendency to hold a straight line, AND to return to a straight line on its own when you release the steering controls in a turn).
Positive stability isn't necessary for slow vehicles such as forklifts and construction and agricultural tractors, but it is critical for high-speed vehicles.
I recall reading that one (Dymaxion) was eventually converted to front-wheel steering, just so that it could to an exhibition run on a test track at typical car speeds.
~
Thrust SSC used single rear wheel steering and it broke the sound barrier.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't these, in the end, pretty much the same as a trolley? The bus is really a mini-bus that holds 11 people. It uses 40% as much electricity as a trolley. If you expanded the bus to hold as many people as a trolley can, wouldn't the increase in size and weight (both bus weight and passenger weight) make it use more energy?
If so, then what's the difference between this and, say, a mini-trolley? I mean, hell, why not ultracapacitor golf carts or something?
Removes the moving-part-inefficiency, disruption, inconvenience, installation cost, maintenance cost, and unsightliness of overhead wires. I'm guessing that these charging ports would be cheaper to install and maintain.
I'm working on a project right now for setting up an internal document management system. Ran up a blind alley of learning Drupal (that took a while!) only to discover that it wasn't suitable. Evaluated a few more (including SharePoint) and ended up going with the free and open-source TikiWiki instead. To quote McDonald's, I'm loving it!
To be fair stop signs don't seem like the most stimulating conversation.
Some friends were talking about how they'd gotten ticketed for running stop signs on their bikes because the cops were enforcing them. Sorry if it bores you what other people are talking about, but then they didn't really ask your opinion about how interesting the conversation seemed. Come to think of it, neither did I.
*snore*
To borrow a phrase, on what planet do you spend most of your time?
It was big government that put a man on the moon.
It was big government that built the interstates. You're welcome.
It was big government that gave you the police department and firemen. You're welcome.
It's big government that puts men and women in uniform to go off and defend this country, but I don't hear Fox-News-watching sheep like yourself railing against the incompetence of government-run programs like the US Marine Corps or the socialised medicine that they receive.
This "all government is evil" bullshit is really getting tiresome. Why don't you take a look at government run health care systems around the world before you foam at the mouth with your anarchist hatred for the institutions of civilisation? Why don't you open your brainwashed eyes and see that there is only one industrialised country in the world (the USA) that thinks it's okay to leave people without health insurance or to let people go bankrupt because they get sick? Why can't you get it into your pointy little head that health care is as fundamental a human right as protection from the police or fire department? Why can't you see that Glenn Beck is bat shit insane?
Off-topic garbage like this reminds me of another right-wing lunatic I know who managed to turn a conversation about stop signs into a foaming-at-the-mouth rant about the federal government.
Your government is defective. Huge budget deficits, stealing from local cities and counties and flawed regulations being rammed through the legislative process.
Living here, I vote we rip up the state's constitution and start fresh. The first step is ousting the assholes currently in charge.
I entirely agree. The "assholes currently in charge" are the voters who think they're qualified to micromanage the budget via direct ballot initiative, handed the anti-tax troll minority a veto over tax increases (Prop 13), and promptly turn around and blame the politicians for the mess that the voters have gotten themselves into. After all, it's so much easier to blame the politicians that you voted for than to take responsibility for the batshit insane "initiatives" that you voted for even though you didn't understand half of them.
Rip up the constitution and start again? Allow me to begin. How about "direct ballot initiatives are history?"
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
My local 7-Eleven covers up the lads' magazines featuring attractive bikini-clad women on the covers. On the same shelf they have those awful tabloid magazines festooned with bikini-clad celebrities and their cellulite. These are the magazines that are not covered up. Go figure.
I find it very noticeable. Over the last nine years, on most stories I have had to wade through endless repetitions of the same stupid jokes to get to any informative comments of substance (nowadays I just have my filters set to downgrade anything modded 'funny'), and on stories about the technical achievements of the developing world there is a far greater proportion of those attempted jokes that are racist. It doesn't seem to stop them from getting modded 'funny' though.
Not one specific case of sexism was described in that blog post. I'm damned if I know what this writer is talking about.
I think a much bigger problem, from the point of view of /., is racism. As soon as an Indian or Chinese technical achievement is mentioned around here, the jokes start flooding in about curry and Chinese food and the way those people talk funny. It's as if the achievements of the Apollo program are almost of religious significance, but India launching satellites is considered a big joke. I wonder how much laughing these racists will be doing when a Taikonaut walks on the moon while America goes bankrupt.
Why is this news? Sun/Solaris dominated the high-end financial sector for ages...any exchange/trading house/equity firm/etc that is using Windows is insane IMHO. Linux is just the most recent unix platform to show up in the sector, it's not revolutionary...
Were there any open source solutions being used in there before?
Or things get so unbearable that municipalities do away with the silly single-use-zoning ordinances that cause so many car journeys.
The congestion that "came back" is exactly what I'm talking about.
(I'm not thrilled with how the DOT maintains highways, but it does a better job than the railways do with their right of way.)
DOT, a government-run body, does a better job of maintaining its right of way than Union Pacific, a private company. Hmmm...
No, actually, if you're willing to spend 45 billion dollars you can add lanes pretty much indefinitely.
Even if that were true, it still wouldn't make traffic go any faster in the long run and you'd still have to do the driving yourself. Gimme a train any day, I'd rather sleep, read, or get work done than have to waste my time concentrating on driving.
They big argument against newspapers on Slashdot is this perception that they are low tech. I know personally the reason I stopped reading a daily paper had nothing to do with the internet. I stopped years before the internet got relevant for a few good reasons. First was far too many ads. In a major city like LA or New York you got a daily paper the size of a small phone book for a handful of stories you actually wanted to read with the bulk of it being ads. The Sunday papers were even worse. Also newspapers were where you went to get the whole story and not the fluff you tended to get through television. That changed and the quality of stories and reporting dropped like a rock. I saw it happen early on with my hometown paper, I come from a very small town. Back in the day they covered national news stories but by the end they were more like a high school paper. I found gradually with the newspapers I was reading the relevant stories got rarer and rarer and the quality of the information wasn't as good as I was getting on the evening news. I often found there were no more than two or three stories that interested me and some times there were none. The internet was the death blow for the papers but they were weakened before the internet came along. The decline was apparent back in the 80s and revenues have been falling for 20 years or more. The reasons for the decline are hard to put a finger on because blaming even TV doesn't make much sense because TV news was decades old when the newspapers started their fall from grace. In the end it may be more the newspaper's fault than technology itself. Focusing more on ad revenue and not on news itself weakened them and made them open for failure. Once they were the only source of news, then they were still the best source of news and finally the became a poor source of news. Their final death blow was easily available news and the need for news on demand but those things weren't the root cause of the newspaper's fall from grace. Most people on the site probably don't remember a time when newspapers were your primary source of news. Most thing things are better now but the truth is the quality of news is appalling. Things have gotten so bad most consider blogs a source of news, they don't in any way report news they are purely predigested information and mostly opinion and not news. There are no standards for blogs. Even web sites like CNN are shockingly bad. It's hard to find an article without typos. In an age of spell checkers they actually post most stories with typos. That's beyond embarassing. In the old news days a single miss-spelled word or mistake in a story was a black mark for an editor. On line news is largely free of editorial oversight. The death of newspapers shouldn't be celibrated but mourned. TV news has become news bunnies and male models and on-line news is so chaotic that there's no way to separate fact from fiction. The death of newspapers is in some ways the death of news.
Amen brother.
There is one newspaper that has managed to buck the trend by keeping the ads unobtrusive, concentrating on quality journalism, and keeping writing standards high. It can be heavy reading if you're not used to it since the articles are longer than your average newspaper piece, but they are detailed enough to be concise and informative. It is augmented by a witty application of cartoons and illustrations that help to get the point across. It is published weekly, and there is an actual benefit to reading it since the focus is on analysis of what happened instead of making a futile attempt to beat the internet to the punch of informing you about what happened. It is also available online for free, but the sheer quality of its work is such that they can afford to charge a bit more for online ads. This paper is continuing to grow.
It's called The Economist.
Gasoline is only explosive under very specific circumstances.
Such as on TV cop shows after any high speed chase that ends in a crash.
In order to replace the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine,) charge time needs to drop to less than 10 minutes. With recharging stations nearly as common as gas stations.
Batteries aren't going to do that. Supercapacitors will. (Or some yet-to-be-invented technology.)
Maybe, but there's also the fact that people generally need about 8 hours of sleep at night, a time during which your car can be charging away. That actually removes the hassle of having to go out of your way to fill up at a gas station. I'd also imagine that electricity is easier to distribute since you don't have to truck it like petrol/gasoline.
It IS a fad...
Maybe. But hybrids are just an interim step on the way to mass produced all-electric cars. I don't think they were ever intended as anything else.
fluff like environmental issues awareness bullshit
Oh boy. We clearly still have a lot of educating to do.
Clearly you don't spend enough time in school since you don't seem capable of writing meaningful sentences.
The basic question is this: why bother with these things? So mall cops don't have to do any actual walking? Total waste of time.
Ah, the old /. staple reply. "I won't find it useful, so I don't see why anybody else will find it useful either." Throw in a total failure to RTFA (which mentions how Japan has a rapidly aging population and there are concerns about how to help the elderly to get around) and the perfect storm of ignorance is complete.
I'm getting it too. Weird.
Hear hear. This reminds me of a book called The Design of Everyday things. We have certain conventions, like a flat metal panel on a door that you push, and a handle on a door that you pull. In our cars we have a steering wheel, a clutch, brake and accelerator in that order. Our computers have qwerty keyboards, which isn't necessarily the optimum layout. I'm sure someone could come up with an argument for an alternative arrangement and replace them with something "better," but that would just confuse the hell out of users.
Steering wheels remain in our cars because the consequences of a confused driver getting to grips with a joystick or steering pedals would be too dangerous.
Qwerty keyboards remain because we've gotten used to them and they are a universal standard.
Good usability is what people actually find easy to use in practice, not what they 'should find easier to use' according to some committee.
The car was dangerous because it used rear-wheel steering.
In at least this respect, B. Fuller should have taken the advice of automotive industry engineers of the day, who would have told him that this (steering arrangement) was a waste of time. It is generally presumed to be impossible to build a mechanical rear-wheel-steering system that exhibits positive stability (that being the natural tendency to hold a straight line, AND to return to a straight line on its own when you release the steering controls in a turn).
Positive stability isn't necessary for slow vehicles such as forklifts and construction and agricultural tractors, but it is critical for high-speed vehicles.
I recall reading that one (Dymaxion) was eventually converted to front-wheel steering, just so that it could to an exhibition run on a test track at typical car speeds.
~
Thrust SSC used single rear wheel steering and it broke the sound barrier.