You're right, they're tricky to connect without peering at the cable and the equipment. USB should have mandated that the top of the plug's sleeve be flat with an embossed USB logo, and the underside be slightly curved and smooth. Then you could tell the orientation of the plug without looking (or needing Braille sensitivity to distinguish the USB logo from the manufacturer's logo with your fingertips). Secondly, the receptacle should always be mounted the same way. It's usually longer side on top, but my LG Optimus S has the receptacle upside down.
You need to get out more. Google Shopping for Televisions +VGA shows hundreds of TVs from Coby, Haier, LG, Nexus, Sharp with VGA input; lots of other TVs call it "PC input" including my Samsung that handles a 1080x1920 extended desktop from my laptop. Most LCD TVs continue to have a VGA port even as HDMI inputs proliferate, so as bill_mcgonigle said VGA has broader support than any other display output.
The additional cable you need for audio is a hassle: some TVs use 3.5mm, others use RCA jacks, and some don't support audio in at all and you get to listen to the video through your laptop's speakers.
Yup, browser-based creative tools are lacking. Image editing is getting there with Pixastic and any number of online image croppers, but the ones I've tried seem more like demos than tools. Svg-edit seems like it has potential for diagramming. The problem with all of them is they seem focused on "Add this cool feature to your web site" rather than "This is a standalone web page that continues to work if you save it to your computer and go offline."
I wasn't talking about Google and "browser-based" is little to do with Google. Google make some excellent web apps that used to continue to work "when outside coverage", now Google Docs seems stuck between Google Gears and HTML 5 storage.
music player? With the HTML5 audio tag, ogg playback plus MP3 in Chrome, it's doable
editor? Bespin, Firefox extensions for simple text editing, FCKedit for local WYSIWYG are good enough
todo list? TiddlyWiki is a complete editable wiki that runs from a single HTML file (impressive!); I use the mGSD version with action items and projects
I've run Linux for years and besides vim and zsh, the only native app that has impressed me as much as the best browser-based apps is Inkscape.
I'd love to run even more stuff in the browser. I hate that I access most resources through bookmarks and the browser's smart location field, but other resources I have to go through the GUI toolkit's file "browser", and then launch external apps that usually lack all the browser's niceties (View Source, Ctrl-+ to zoom, bookmarks/back/forward/history, tabs, etc.). Browser-based doesn't mean using the cloud for all my files; browsers don't care if they load resources from http or file:/// URLs. ChromeOS has a Content View to show you local files, supposedly integrated with the Open/Save dialog; I wish Firefox Places had a directory view along with its bookmarks and history view. I don't want Firefox to integrate with my Linux desktop toolkit's crappy file handling and half-hearted semantic efforts, I want Firefox to subsume them.
The recent Radio Shack flyer was 80% Android phones. On Black Friday my local Best Buy had an end cap station promoting Samsung and Huawei Android tablets, and behind them rows of Android phones; I looked for a Windows 7 phone and couldn't find one. I think you can get a decent (as in "Would have blown anyone's mind 5 years ago") Android phone running Froyo 2.2 for $0 with a 2-year plan from every carrier, at which point the only reason to get a lesser phone is if you can't afford the data plan. I got an LG Optimus S "for free" along with an HTC Evo.
RDFa is still around, there are a few sites that still use it, but my Firefox add-ons that would pull semantic data.from RDFa statements embedded in HTML are obsolete and gathering dust. Instead a lot of people put microformats into their HTML, especially hCard, because it's more HTML-like and less verbose. Google's Rich Snippets (starred reviews, etc.) will parse either form of structured data markup, but supposedly 94% of the info they parse is in microformat not RDFa. HTML5/WHATWG has a concept called microdata that seems to allow indicating the scope of microformat information, AIUI using new itemscope and itemprop attributes rather than overloading class attributes. But that seems to have no support for RDFa.
Google could parse a lot more structured data so we could tell them what the hell our web pages are about. I'm convinced the reason they don't do this is the most diligent users of ANY and ALL such techniques will be spammers and SEO bastards. This comment is really is about person:Angelina Jolie body_part:breasts last_updated:today!, despite all its links to cheap inkjet cartridges and online betting.
Why does the computer industry persist in using these brain-dead failed acronyms instead of writing 800×480? Someone added the "Hyper-extended graphics array series" to Wikipedia's Graphic display resolutions article, surely WHSXGA is a parody. Maybe the reason manufacturers don't sell monitors with more than 120 pixels per inch is these mindbendingly stupid names. "We don't quite understand why, but our extensive surveys demonstrate nobody is willing to pay even $1 extra for QXGA resolution over a WUXGA monitor." Meanwhile digital cameras have raced to 12 megapixels because it's a number.
I want a 200 pixels per inch, 27-inch monitor. I think that works out to 4700×2650 pixels.
Tiddlywiki is quietly mind-blowing. An entire wiki that lives in a web page that's just a single HTML file (which you can archive or commit in git or whatever). That makes it a great note-taker that runs in your browser, that hyperlinks to itself and the rest of the web, but it's a local "app" that doesn't require a connection.
Even better for some, mGSD "is a Getting Things Done® system powered by TiddlyWiki and [some add-ons]" It's also just an HTML file. I know nothing about GTD, but I keep my To Do items in various areas it and with a double-click I'm editing their notes as wiki text.
Load either in a tab, use Firefox 4's "Pin as App Tab", and smile.
I'd still like something that unobtrusively makes sense of what I've done for when it's important. My computer's got my e-mails and browsing history, it should magically hand me what's relevant. How do I rate the book I ordered from Amazon? Which is the best picture of my friend out of my e-mails? Give me the e-mail confirmations and web pages related to an upcoming trip. I can use tagging in e-mail and the browser's bookmarking, but that's helping me do the work instead of doing the work for me.
A hybrid shuts off at a standstill and recovers energy otherwise lost while braking, its electric motor is fundamentally more efficient than a gas engine, and if it has a good power blending system (basically Toyota's ingenious HSD electronic continuously variable transmission that Mazda licensed in March) it can run its engine on a more efficient load more often. The best implementation so far enables a practical reliable mid-size car (larger than your Mazda 3) to achieve 50mpg on the EPA cycle, something no other internal combustion engine car has done since the two-seater 58 mpg Honda Insight was discontinued. It's comical to see people getting so emotional over a significant engineering advance, especially when it leads them to spout crap to discredit it, such as:
huge toxic batteries
Neither nickel-metal hydride nor lithium-ion are particularly toxic, unlike the lead acid batteries in all cars. All three kinds of batteries are recycled, and there's no comparison between the pollution from making a few hundred pounds of batteries vs. the TONS of gasoline they'll save over 120,000 miles in a well-engineered hybrid.
And that "stupidest architecture possible" enables thousands of cross-platform extensions. And XUL is the same idea as Macromedia's MXML and Microsoft's XAML.
Bollocks. From GM: The Chevrolet Volt is not a hybrid. GM has never to my knowledge called the Volt a hybrid and resisted anyone calling it a plug-in hybrid. Go visit the Chevy site and read their electric and hybrid pages, I'll wait.
You have the engineering basically right, but this is all about marketing. The Volt has two on-board sources of power (battery and gasoline engine) and can plug in to recharge the batteries. By everyone else's definition, that makes it a plug-in hybrid. But for whatever reason GM wanted to come up with their own car category with all the goodness of "electric" but with something new to forget the bitter pill of the EV1, yet without competing with Toyota "hybrids". GM tried the terms "extended-range electric vehicle" and "range-extended electric vehicle" but seem to have given up on establishing them. Their strategy has utterly backfired because once the car sites got hold of the car they determined the gas-only-after-battery-depleted MPG in the 30s which lets anti-environment car nuts immediately blather about existing hybrids and their 1992 Civic doing better. So now GM has to go back and promote the plug. Along with Sirius Cybernetic Corporation, GM's marketing department are truly "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes."
GM's site currently saysVolt is an electric car that uses gas to create its own electricity. Plug it in, let it charge overnight, and it's ready to run on a pure electric charge for up to 40 miles(2) - gas and emissions free. After that, Volt keeps going, even if you can't plug it in. Nope, an electric car is one powered by batteries only. The problem with GM's neologisms and hair-splitting over the definition of "only" is if the Volt is an electric car, then any car maker with a crappy mild hybrid that can travel 0.5 miles up to 17 mph from its electric motor "only" can split different hairs and call theirs "The next electric car", some of these jokes even have an "EV mode" button!
The sad thing about this marketing clusterfuck is the Volt will be the world's first plug-in hybrid vehicle for sale, and it it undeniably an impressive engineering achievement. Instead of USA! Chevrolet! USA number one! America F*** YEAH! we're pouring thousands of words into this boring non-argument./EndThread
A program to get it rolled out on the Web too - LibreDocs??
Google Docs can File > Download As... "Open Office" (and PDF for archiving), as can ZOHO Docs. I hope LibreOffice continues to be a good local editor for web documents with ODF as the file format of the exchange. With Google supporting it that seems plausible.
Or do you want a web app that can saves locally as seamlessly as it works remotely? HTML5 web storage makes it possible, the remote infrastructure is trickier. But that codebase would be radically different from Libre/OpenOffice's current C code.
Or do you want a local desktop application that can save to the cloud? Some GVFS/KIO/Git integration could get you part-way there "for free".
Or do you just want anyone to be able to directly view your native LibreOffice documents on a web site? (OO.o already does a good job of exporting as HTML.) Nobody has yet made the code to view a.od? file in a browser. But with Firefox's jar/zip support, most browsers supporting XML and XSLT, and lightning-fast JavaScript interpreters, it's conceivable.
Actually, I would love to have digital copies of my vinyl. But I don't want my digitizations made from my merely excellent Rega turntable and Sumiko Blue Point Special cartridge. I want a digital copy made by someone with a $400,000 half-ton fetishistic engineering turntable bolted to a 5-ton marble slab in an underground vault with a cartridge handmade by the nearly blind Japanese master, running through the discontinued $25,000 Boulder phono pre-amp and then to the latest hand-built by a cranky ex-recording engineer professional ADC converted and stored in some future-proof format like DSD or DXD. And after a team of vestal virgins has lovingly cleaned the record using a record cleaner that costs more than my turntable.
I'm serious, all this stuff exists. I read a review of a $75,000 Sirius System III turntable and the reviewer said the CD-R copies he made from it sounded better than playing the same vinyl on a mere $9,000 Simon Yorke turntable. I'd rather get his digitizations than make my own.
Which raises (not begs) the question, why don't the record companies do this and sell me their even-better digitizations from the original master tapes? There is a small market for better-than-CD digital files, but it requires broad consensus that "This is the closest to the original gold master there will ever be", unlike the f***ed -up debacle that was SACD and DVD-Audio.
Hmm, it varies. In Firefox if I'm logged in to Google a search result has an href with a plain URL but the onmousedown rewrites as I described above. If I log out the href is a Google URL and there's still an onmousedown rewrite. But in Konqueror where Google knows nothing about me, I get a plain href and no onmousedown handler.
So maybe another way to avoid Google tracking is use an obscure browser?
So on mouseover you see the original URL, but on click, function rwt ("rewrite"?) sends you to Google first with all that tracking crap, which then redirects you on your way.
If I right-click and Copy Link Location, I get a Google URL in Firefox with this tracking crap. If I feed that to curl, I don't get a status 301 redirect, I get a small piece of HTML back containing both a script that changes the window.location and a meta http-equiv refresh tag.
That's stupid. My browser does malware protection, I don't need Google or Facebook getting involved. And as @spazdor says, do that before presenting the link to me.
You're crazy if you think Google and Facebook intercept links for your benefit. They're doing it to track you, pure and simple. At least I can infer their outbound links. Link shorteners are Russian roulette. If services like Twitter wanted a better user experience, they would unshorten links when they present a feed to browsers.
Good for you (I loved my 1984 Civic). Your smaller car is ahead over 120,000 miles, except that if your Civic is in good shape you could buy a Prius and your Civic will displace someone else's gas guzzler.
North Americans are still waiting for a small new car that gets 50mpg, let alone a practical mid-size car. No car maker is contemplating hydraulic energy storage for passenger cars. Besides the diesel option, much fuel-efficiency effort is on the spectrum of stop-start -> micro hybrid (brake regen helps to power starter motor and accessories) -> mild hybrid (electric motor assists engine) -> full hybrid (car can travel part-time on electric motor) -> plug-in (cheapest and most efficient way to power that motor for the first X miles). Each step involves more battery, and those efforts are likely to result in battery density and cost improvements that improve the efficiency of electrically-assisted cars faster than alternative solutions.
Unlike conventional lead-acid batteries, NiMH and Li-on batteries aren't particularly "nasty chemicals". (Do you realize there's nickel in the chrome and steel of every car?)
The OP specifically mentioned a Prius vs. some 1992 Honda. Taking 1000 gallons as the embodied energy to build a car, over 120,000 miles Prius cost = 1000 + 2400 gallons. So buying a new Prius and driving it for 120,000 miles is no better than keeping your old 35mpg car on the road for another 120,000 miles. But that a) ignores whether your old car can go that long and b) as I keep saying it ignores what happens to your old car. When your new fuel-efficient purchase doesn't result in someone junking a gas guzzler, think twice. It seems to be decades before the average fuel economy of the US car fleet, let alone its clunkers, reaches that level.
BTW, I don't drive a hybrid and am still driving my old car (as little as I can). But I don't fool myself that I'm doing something great for the environment by doing so, nor do I begrudge someone for buying a new fuel-efficient car because of non-rigorous notions of repair/reuse/recycle.
As @jonored already pointed out, Prius uses NiMH. But lithium is coming, so whatever. Your hyperbole repeats the error of the OP. The onus is entirely on you to demonstrate that producing and eventually recycling 40 pounds of lithium or nickel (the battery weighs hundreds of pounds, but it's not pure metal) is worse for the environment than producing then burning tons of gasoline. Apparently you don't understand concepts like "several orders of magnitude". Neither lithium or nickel is particularly toxic, unlike the LEAD ACID batteries in conventional cars.
There is no lithium shortage. Bolivia and Argentina each have salt flats full of the stuff. The American lithium mine in Kings Canyon shut down because prices were low. And if and when prices rise, it's in every gallon of seawater. The metal in the battery is not the most expensive part and there are no subsidies for lithium or nickel production. If batteries are "massively expensive" then so are the tons of gasoline a well-engineered hybrid or electric vehicle will save in operation.
You don't seem to understand that a battery is a storage medium, not a consumable. After production, there are no byproducts from lithium or nickel whatsoever, it just sits in a battery until recycled. And I proved it avoids the burning of tons of gasoline, which does pollute, even ignoring the CO2.
As money is at least a conservative representation of environmental impact.
No, it's a pretty USELESS representation. You can buy a big truck for less than a Prius that took much more raw materials and pollution to make. You seem to be hoping that the economic analysis of break-even points somehow relates to environmental payback, but it doesn't. Same problem with your nonsensical sentence about cost efficiency, which is also nothing to do with pollution. Drive less and you pollute less, someone more talented than you can do the math to work out how much.
I provided facts and math backing up the comparative environmental benefits of a new Prius vs. a used Honda. You spouted an incoherent stew of false statements and unrelated topics.
I agree if you define "not being stupid" as buying the most economical used car. I picked the Accord because it's a similar size to the Prius. Presumably some buyers get a Prius despite it being a midsize car, because if you buy a smaller new car such as a Mini or Smart, you can only get worse mpg (!). If size and refinement don't matter, definitely get a 40mpg 1992 Civic (35 city / 43 highway) or the stellar 1994 Geo Metro XFi shitbox that Wired mentions and you're ahead on energy efficiency. (Quite a bit worse on smog, but that's a different analysis.)
However, as I pointed out that doesn't work for the auto fleet as a whole. It's not full of 40mpg econocars! Average passenger car mpg was 22.1 mpg in 2001 and if you think many "light trucks" are just car substitutes, it may have gone down since then. If you assume buying a new fuel-efficient car puts a 22 mpg car off the road, you're back to it being more energy-efficient than buying used.
One other point. My comparison was strictly based on weight of car vs. weight of fuel it consumes, the point being a car consumes far more petrol than it weighs. When you change one side of the equation to 1000 gallons of energy to produce the car, you need to change the other side to add the energy it takes to produce the gasoline. Oil companies are notoriously secretive about their production costs and processes, but I've seen estimates of 0.23 gallons to get one gallon in your tank, and it's only getting worse as we burn up the easy oil and shift to boiling tar and drilling in deep water.
Just like buying a used 1992 Honda is more "green" than buying a brand new Prius.
You're so confident you're right, but you aren't. fueleconomy.gov says the 1992 Honda Accord Wagon manual gets 19 city, 25 hwy. Let's take the best and say it gets 25 mpg. Meanwhile the Prius gets 50 mpg. Half as much gasoline. But the allegedly smug Prius buyer has bought 3,042 pounds of evil raw-materials-turned-manufactured-goods into our disposable consumption-based modern world, and obviously that's terrible and he should wise up and hang his head in shame. Let's kick him in the nads for his stupidity, right?
No. Over 120,000 miles that 1992 Accord will use 4800 gallons of gasoline, which at 6.125 lbs each weigh 14.8 tons. Burning that gasoline will emit 46 tons of CO2. Driving a Prius instead halves those numbers.
And that doesn't take into account the pollution from producing, spilling, refining and distributing those TONS of unrecyclable gasoline. The onus is on you and others spouting this nonsense to prove that 1.5 tons of mostly recyclable car is more pollution than 7 additional tons of gasoline going up in smoke. It simply isn't. My basic math lesson here is a gross simplification of why all reputable studies conclude 75-90% of the lifecycle pollution of a car occurs in its operation, not in its manufacture.
The next nail in the coffin of this bullshit meme is your car use doesn't occur in a vacuum. If you're already driving and you get a different car, what happens to your old one? If it's a gas guzzler, it's a win to junk it for the math above. If it isn't, someone else will probably take it and junk their gas guzzler. Another way to consider the problem is even simpler: the primary way to improve the overall efficiency of the car fleet is for people to buy more fuel-efficient cars.
None of this is to say that owning a car is "green". Scott Adams is right to point out it's a loaded term, but not because of this stupid American obsession to find hypocrisy in unrelated actions ("You think you're green with your bicycle, but you wear leather shoes, ya hypocrite!"). Green is just a relative term. A Prius is greener than a 1992 Accord if you drive the distances most Americans do. Driving less is always greener. Not buying a car at all and bicycling is greener still. etc.
These analyses make me laugh. Every other car features COSTS MONEY, so why do people expect this one to pay for itself?! Whip your calculator out for leather seats and satnav and see how far you get. Anyone not driving a 1983 Geo Metro XFi is a chump in purely economic terms, yet lazy journalists don't waste time breathlessly informing BMW drivers of their losses.
It's nice that a well-engineered hybrid reduces your gasoline expenditures. But anyone who expects the hybrid car feature to pay for itself can go stand way at the back of the line behind people who value it for emitting less CO2 (about 10 tons less over 120,000 miles), being quieter, not polluting at a standstill, etc.
Nickel isn't polluting, it just sits there. Presumably you mean the production of a few hundred pounds of NiMH batteries, containing (if I recall correctly) about 20 pounds of nickel. Note that the chrome and steel in a regular car already contains nickel, and that the real toxic villain is the lead-ACID battery in a conventional car
So what makes you think the pollution from manufacturing a few hundred pounds of recyclable batteries is remotely comparable to the TONS of gasoline and CO2 saved over 100,000 miles by driving a more fuel-efficient car? Repeating crap you've heard doesn't make it true.
The amount of energy and resources and toxic chemicals involved in the car manufacturing process FAR outweighs any "statement" you make with a hybrid.
Not true, no matter how worked up you get.
If you drive a 50mpg Prius, over 120,000 miles you'll consume 3 TONS less gasoline and put 10 TONS less CO2 in the air compared with a 35mpg car (here's the math). The gas savings are more than the car weighs! And producing,spilling, refining, and distributing that gasoline is itself resource-intensive and highly polluting. There's no credible evidence that manufacturing a car is on a pound-for-pound basis more polluting than the oil business. Instead, all reputable lifecycle studies (footnoted here) conclude 75-90% of the pollution from a car occurs in its operation.
Also this doesn't consider the follow-on effect of replacing your car. If you replaced your old car before it fell apart and it got decent mpg, then it's going to wind up in the hands of someone who can finally junk her gas guzzler.
It's a fact that one significant way you can help the environment is to increase the fuel efficiency of the car fleet by acquiring a more fuel-efficient car. There are others — there's always some way to be greener still, ranging from driving less to killing yourself.
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You're right, they're tricky to connect without peering at the cable and the equipment. USB should have mandated that the top of the plug's sleeve be flat with an embossed USB logo, and the underside be slightly curved and smooth. Then you could tell the orientation of the plug without looking (or needing Braille sensitivity to distinguish the USB logo from the manufacturer's logo with your fingertips). Secondly, the receptacle should always be mounted the same way. It's usually longer side on top, but my LG Optimus S has the receptacle upside down.
You need to get out more. Google Shopping for Televisions +VGA shows hundreds of TVs from Coby, Haier, LG, Nexus, Sharp with VGA input; lots of other TVs call it "PC input" including my Samsung that handles a 1080x1920 extended desktop from my laptop. Most LCD TVs continue to have a VGA port even as HDMI inputs proliferate, so as bill_mcgonigle said VGA has broader support than any other display output.
The additional cable you need for audio is a hassle: some TVs use 3.5mm, others use RCA jacks, and some don't support audio in at all and you get to listen to the video through your laptop's speakers.
Yup, browser-based creative tools are lacking. Image editing is getting there with Pixastic and any number of online image croppers, but the ones I've tried seem more like demos than tools. Svg-edit seems like it has potential for diagramming. The problem with all of them is they seem focused on "Add this cool feature to your web site" rather than "This is a standalone web page that continues to work if you save it to your computer and go offline."
I wasn't talking about Google and "browser-based" is little to do with Google. Google make some excellent web apps that used to continue to work "when outside coverage", now Google Docs seems stuck between Google Gears and HTML 5 storage.
What's left that doesn't run in a browser?
I've run Linux for years and besides vim and zsh, the only native app that has impressed me as much as the best browser-based apps is Inkscape.
I'd love to run even more stuff in the browser. I hate that I access most resources through bookmarks and the browser's smart location field, but other resources I have to go through the GUI toolkit's file "browser", and then launch external apps that usually lack all the browser's niceties (View Source, Ctrl-+ to zoom, bookmarks/back/forward/history, tabs, etc.). Browser-based doesn't mean using the cloud for all my files; browsers don't care if they load resources from http or file:/// URLs. ChromeOS has a Content View to show you local files, supposedly integrated with the Open/Save dialog; I wish Firefox Places had a directory view along with its bookmarks and history view. I don't want Firefox to integrate with my Linux desktop toolkit's crappy file handling and half-hearted semantic efforts, I want Firefox to subsume them.
I'd like to try it out. Hmm, no .img on http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os . There's a Hexxeh blogging about it at http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/ , but the most recent build from his "bleeding edge, untested!" series at http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/vanilla.php is "Version 0.8.71.rdb7d4e77, built on 28th of October 2010."
The recent Radio Shack flyer was 80% Android phones. On Black Friday my local Best Buy had an end cap station promoting Samsung and Huawei Android tablets, and behind them rows of Android phones; I looked for a Windows 7 phone and couldn't find one. I think you can get a decent (as in "Would have blown anyone's mind 5 years ago") Android phone running Froyo 2.2 for $0 with a 2-year plan from every carrier, at which point the only reason to get a lesser phone is if you can't afford the data plan. I got an LG Optimus S "for free" along with an HTC Evo.
Sorry Ballmer, maybe Windows Phone 7.1 or IX
RDFa is still around, there are a few sites that still use it, but my Firefox add-ons that would pull semantic data .from RDFa statements embedded in HTML are obsolete and gathering dust. Instead a lot of people put microformats into their HTML, especially hCard, because it's more HTML-like and less verbose. Google's Rich Snippets (starred reviews, etc.) will parse either form of structured data markup, but supposedly 94% of the info they parse is in microformat not RDFa. HTML5/WHATWG has a concept called microdata that seems to allow indicating the scope of microformat information, AIUI using new itemscope and itemprop attributes rather than overloading class attributes. But that seems to have no support for RDFa.
Google could parse a lot more structured data so we could tell them what the hell our web pages are about. I'm convinced the reason they don't do this is the most diligent users of ANY and ALL such techniques will be spammers and SEO bastards. This comment is really is about person:Angelina Jolie body_part:breasts last_updated:today!, despite all its links to cheap inkjet cartridges and online betting.
at a measly WVGA
Why does the computer industry persist in using these brain-dead failed acronyms instead of writing 800×480? Someone added the "Hyper-extended graphics array series" to Wikipedia's Graphic display resolutions article, surely WHSXGA is a parody. Maybe the reason manufacturers don't sell monitors with more than 120 pixels per inch is these mindbendingly stupid names. "We don't quite understand why, but our extensive surveys demonstrate nobody is willing to pay even $1 extra for QXGA resolution over a WUXGA monitor." Meanwhile digital cameras have raced to 12 megapixels because it's a number.
I want a 200 pixels per inch, 27-inch monitor. I think that works out to 4700×2650 pixels.
Tiddlywiki is quietly mind-blowing. An entire wiki that lives in a web page that's just a single HTML file (which you can archive or commit in git or whatever). That makes it a great note-taker that runs in your browser, that hyperlinks to itself and the rest of the web, but it's a local "app" that doesn't require a connection.
Even better for some, mGSD "is a Getting Things Done® system powered by TiddlyWiki and [some add-ons]" It's also just an HTML file. I know nothing about GTD, but I keep my To Do items in various areas it and with a double-click I'm editing their notes as wiki text.
Load either in a tab, use Firefox 4's "Pin as App Tab", and smile.
I'd still like something that unobtrusively makes sense of what I've done for when it's important. My computer's got my e-mails and browsing history, it should magically hand me what's relevant. How do I rate the book I ordered from Amazon? Which is the best picture of my friend out of my e-mails? Give me the e-mail confirmations and web pages related to an upcoming trip. I can use tagging in e-mail and the browser's bookmarking, but that's helping me do the work instead of doing the work for me.
A hybrid shuts off at a standstill and recovers energy otherwise lost while braking, its electric motor is fundamentally more efficient than a gas engine, and if it has a good power blending system (basically Toyota's ingenious HSD electronic continuously variable transmission that Mazda licensed in March) it can run its engine on a more efficient load more often. The best implementation so far enables a practical reliable mid-size car (larger than your Mazda 3) to achieve 50mpg on the EPA cycle, something no other internal combustion engine car has done since the two-seater 58 mpg Honda Insight was discontinued. It's comical to see people getting so emotional over a significant engineering advance, especially when it leads them to spout crap to discredit it, such as:
huge toxic batteries
Neither nickel-metal hydride nor lithium-ion are particularly toxic, unlike the lead acid batteries in all cars. All three kinds of batteries are recycled, and there's no comparison between the pollution from making a few hundred pounds of batteries vs. the TONS of gasoline they'll save over 120,000 miles in a well-engineered hybrid.
And that "stupidest architecture possible" enables thousands of cross-platform extensions. And XUL is the same idea as Macromedia's MXML and Microsoft's XAML.
GM called it a hybrid the whole time.
Bollocks. From GM: The Chevrolet Volt is not a hybrid. GM has never to my knowledge called the Volt a hybrid and resisted anyone calling it a plug-in hybrid. Go visit the Chevy site and read their electric and hybrid pages, I'll wait.
You have the engineering basically right, but this is all about marketing. The Volt has two on-board sources of power (battery and gasoline engine) and can plug in to recharge the batteries. By everyone else's definition, that makes it a plug-in hybrid. But for whatever reason GM wanted to come up with their own car category with all the goodness of "electric" but with something new to forget the bitter pill of the EV1, yet without competing with Toyota "hybrids". GM tried the terms "extended-range electric vehicle" and "range-extended electric vehicle" but seem to have given up on establishing them. Their strategy has utterly backfired because once the car sites got hold of the car they determined the gas-only-after-battery-depleted MPG in the 30s which lets anti-environment car nuts immediately blather about existing hybrids and their 1992 Civic doing better. So now GM has to go back and promote the plug. Along with Sirius Cybernetic Corporation, GM's marketing department are truly "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes."
GM's site currently says Volt is an electric car that uses gas to create its own electricity. Plug it in, let it charge overnight, and it's ready to run on a pure electric charge for up to 40 miles(2) - gas and emissions free. After that, Volt keeps going, even if you can't plug it in. Nope, an electric car is one powered by batteries only. The problem with GM's neologisms and hair-splitting over the definition of "only" is if the Volt is an electric car, then any car maker with a crappy mild hybrid that can travel 0.5 miles up to 17 mph from its electric motor "only" can split different hairs and call theirs "The next electric car", some of these jokes even have an "EV mode" button!
The sad thing about this marketing clusterfuck is the Volt will be the world's first plug-in hybrid vehicle for sale, and it it undeniably an impressive engineering achievement. Instead of USA! Chevrolet! USA number one! America F*** YEAH! we're pouring thousands of words into this boring non-argument. /EndThread
A program to get it rolled out on the Web too - LibreDocs??
Google Docs can File > Download As... "Open Office" (and PDF for archiving), as can ZOHO Docs. I hope LibreOffice continues to be a good local editor for web documents with ODF as the file format of the exchange. With Google supporting it that seems plausible.
Or do you want a web app that can saves locally as seamlessly as it works remotely? HTML5 web storage makes it possible, the remote infrastructure is trickier. But that codebase would be radically different from Libre/OpenOffice's current C code.
Or do you want a local desktop application that can save to the cloud? Some GVFS/KIO/Git integration could get you part-way there "for free".
Or do you just want anyone to be able to directly view your native LibreOffice documents on a web site? (OO.o already does a good job of exporting as HTML.) Nobody has yet made the code to view a .od? file in a browser. But with Firefox's jar/zip support, most browsers supporting XML and XSLT, and lightning-fast JavaScript interpreters, it's conceivable.
Actually, I would love to have digital copies of my vinyl. But I don't want my digitizations made from my merely excellent Rega turntable and Sumiko Blue Point Special cartridge. I want a digital copy made by someone with a $400,000 half-ton fetishistic engineering turntable bolted to a 5-ton marble slab in an underground vault with a cartridge handmade by the nearly blind Japanese master, running through the discontinued $25,000 Boulder phono pre-amp and then to the latest hand-built by a cranky ex-recording engineer professional ADC converted and stored in some future-proof format like DSD or DXD. And after a team of vestal virgins has lovingly cleaned the record using a record cleaner that costs more than my turntable.
I'm serious, all this stuff exists. I read a review of a $75,000 Sirius System III turntable and the reviewer said the CD-R copies he made from it sounded better than playing the same vinyl on a mere $9,000 Simon Yorke turntable. I'd rather get his digitizations than make my own.
Which raises (not begs) the question, why don't the record companies do this and sell me their even-better digitizations from the original master tapes? There is a small market for better-than-CD digital files, but it requires broad consensus that "This is the closest to the original gold master there will ever be", unlike the f***ed -up debacle that was SACD and DVD-Audio.
Hmm, it varies. In Firefox if I'm logged in to Google a search result has an href with a plain URL but the onmousedown rewrites as I described above. If I log out the href is a Google URL and there's still an onmousedown rewrite. But in Konqueror where Google knows nothing about me, I get a plain href and no onmousedown handler.
So maybe another way to avoid Google tracking is use an obscure browser?
Yes you are really missing something! Just by viewing source you should notice on the a tag
onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','3','AFQjCNElSuk8pqYMVk5pKG9sycYfDSh7zg','UsteGasJKDRPW0uis7I9Ig','0CCsQFjAC')"
class="l"
href="http://example.com/the/original/URL"
So on mouseover you see the original URL, but on click, function rwt ("rewrite"?) sends you to Google first with all that tracking crap, which then redirects you on your way.
If I right-click and Copy Link Location, I get a Google URL in Firefox with this tracking crap. If I feed that to curl, I don't get a status 301 redirect, I get a small piece of HTML back containing both a script that changes the window.location and a meta http-equiv refresh tag.
Disable JavaScript to disable all this.
That's stupid. My browser does malware protection, I don't need Google or Facebook getting involved. And as @spazdor says, do that before presenting the link to me.
You're crazy if you think Google and Facebook intercept links for your benefit. They're doing it to track you, pure and simple.
At least I can infer their outbound links. Link shorteners are Russian roulette. If services like Twitter wanted a better user experience, they would unshorten links when they present a feed to browsers.
Good for you (I loved my 1984 Civic). Your smaller car is ahead over 120,000 miles, except that if your Civic is in good shape you could buy a Prius and your Civic will displace someone else's gas guzzler.
North Americans are still waiting for a small new car that gets 50mpg, let alone a practical mid-size car. No car maker is contemplating hydraulic energy storage for passenger cars. Besides the diesel option, much fuel-efficiency effort is on the spectrum of stop-start -> micro hybrid (brake regen helps to power starter motor and accessories) -> mild hybrid (electric motor assists engine) -> full hybrid (car can travel part-time on electric motor) -> plug-in (cheapest and most efficient way to power that motor for the first X miles). Each step involves more battery, and those efforts are likely to result in battery density and cost improvements that improve the efficiency of electrically-assisted cars faster than alternative solutions.
Unlike conventional lead-acid batteries, NiMH and Li-on batteries aren't particularly "nasty chemicals". (Do you realize there's nickel in the chrome and steel of every car?)
The OP specifically mentioned a Prius vs. some 1992 Honda. Taking 1000 gallons as the embodied energy to build a car, over 120,000 miles Prius cost = 1000 + 2400 gallons. So buying a new Prius and driving it for 120,000 miles is no better than keeping your old 35mpg car on the road for another 120,000 miles. But that a) ignores whether your old car can go that long and b) as I keep saying it ignores what happens to your old car. When your new fuel-efficient purchase doesn't result in someone junking a gas guzzler, think twice. It seems to be decades before the average fuel economy of the US car fleet, let alone its clunkers, reaches that level.
BTW, I don't drive a hybrid and am still driving my old car (as little as I can). But I don't fool myself that I'm doing something great for the environment by doing so, nor do I begrudge someone for buying a new fuel-efficient car because of non-rigorous notions of repair/reuse/recycle.
As @jonored already pointed out, Prius uses NiMH. But lithium is coming, so whatever. Your hyperbole repeats the error of the OP. The onus is entirely on you to demonstrate that producing and eventually recycling 40 pounds of lithium or nickel (the battery weighs hundreds of pounds, but it's not pure metal) is worse for the environment than producing then burning tons of gasoline. Apparently you don't understand concepts like "several orders of magnitude". Neither lithium or nickel is particularly toxic, unlike the LEAD ACID batteries in conventional cars.
There is no lithium shortage. Bolivia and Argentina each have salt flats full of the stuff. The American lithium mine in Kings Canyon shut down because prices were low. And if and when prices rise, it's in every gallon of seawater. The metal in the battery is not the most expensive part and there are no subsidies for lithium or nickel production. If batteries are "massively expensive" then so are the tons of gasoline a well-engineered hybrid or electric vehicle will save in operation.
You don't seem to understand that a battery is a storage medium, not a consumable. After production, there are no byproducts from lithium or nickel whatsoever, it just sits in a battery until recycled. And I proved it avoids the burning of tons of gasoline, which does pollute, even ignoring the CO2.
As money is at least a conservative representation of environmental impact.
No, it's a pretty USELESS representation. You can buy a big truck for less than a Prius that took much more raw materials and pollution to make. You seem to be hoping that the economic analysis of break-even points somehow relates to environmental payback, but it doesn't. Same problem with your nonsensical sentence about cost efficiency, which is also nothing to do with pollution. Drive less and you pollute less, someone more talented than you can do the math to work out how much.
I provided facts and math backing up the comparative environmental benefits of a new Prius vs. a used Honda. You spouted an incoherent stew of false statements and unrelated topics.
I agree if you define "not being stupid" as buying the most economical used car. I picked the Accord because it's a similar size to the Prius. Presumably some buyers get a Prius despite it being a midsize car, because if you buy a smaller new car such as a Mini or Smart, you can only get worse mpg (!). If size and refinement don't matter, definitely get a 40mpg 1992 Civic (35 city / 43 highway) or the stellar 1994 Geo Metro XFi shitbox that Wired mentions and you're ahead on energy efficiency. (Quite a bit worse on smog, but that's a different analysis.)
However, as I pointed out that doesn't work for the auto fleet as a whole. It's not full of 40mpg econocars! Average passenger car mpg was 22.1 mpg in 2001 and if you think many "light trucks" are just car substitutes, it may have gone down since then. If you assume buying a new fuel-efficient car puts a 22 mpg car off the road, you're back to it being more energy-efficient than buying used.
One other point. My comparison was strictly based on weight of car vs. weight of fuel it consumes, the point being a car consumes far more petrol than it weighs. When you change one side of the equation to 1000 gallons of energy to produce the car, you need to change the other side to add the energy it takes to produce the gasoline. Oil companies are notoriously secretive about their production costs and processes, but I've seen estimates of 0.23 gallons to get one gallon in your tank, and it's only getting worse as we burn up the easy oil and shift to boiling tar and drilling in deep water.
Just like buying a used 1992 Honda is more "green" than buying a brand new Prius.
You're so confident you're right, but you aren't. fueleconomy.gov says the 1992 Honda Accord Wagon manual gets 19 city, 25 hwy. Let's take the best and say it gets 25 mpg. Meanwhile the Prius gets 50 mpg. Half as much gasoline. But the allegedly smug Prius buyer has bought 3,042 pounds of evil raw-materials-turned-manufactured-goods into our disposable consumption-based modern world, and obviously that's terrible and he should wise up and hang his head in shame. Let's kick him in the nads for his stupidity, right?
No. Over 120,000 miles that 1992 Accord will use 4800 gallons of gasoline, which at 6.125 lbs each weigh 14.8 tons. Burning that gasoline will emit 46 tons of CO2. Driving a Prius instead halves those numbers.
And that doesn't take into account the pollution from producing, spilling, refining and distributing those TONS of unrecyclable gasoline. The onus is on you and others spouting this nonsense to prove that 1.5 tons of mostly recyclable car is more pollution than 7 additional tons of gasoline going up in smoke. It simply isn't. My basic math lesson here is a gross simplification of why all reputable studies conclude 75-90% of the lifecycle pollution of a car occurs in its operation, not in its manufacture.
The next nail in the coffin of this bullshit meme is your car use doesn't occur in a vacuum. If you're already driving and you get a different car, what happens to your old one? If it's a gas guzzler, it's a win to junk it for the math above. If it isn't, someone else will probably take it and junk their gas guzzler. Another way to consider the problem is even simpler: the primary way to improve the overall efficiency of the car fleet is for people to buy more fuel-efficient cars.
None of this is to say that owning a car is "green". Scott Adams is right to point out it's a loaded term, but not because of this stupid American obsession to find hypocrisy in unrelated actions ("You think you're green with your bicycle, but you wear leather shoes, ya hypocrite!"). Green is just a relative term. A Prius is greener than a 1992 Accord if you drive the distances most Americans do. Driving less is always greener. Not buying a car at all and bicycling is greener still. etc.
These analyses make me laugh. Every other car features COSTS MONEY, so why do people expect this one to pay for itself?! Whip your calculator out for leather seats and satnav and see how far you get. Anyone not driving a 1983 Geo Metro XFi is a chump in purely economic terms, yet lazy journalists don't waste time breathlessly informing BMW drivers of their losses.
It's nice that a well-engineered hybrid reduces your gasoline expenditures. But anyone who expects the hybrid car feature to pay for itself can go stand way at the back of the line behind people who value it for emitting less CO2 (about 10 tons less over 120,000 miles), being quieter, not polluting at a standstill, etc.
Nickel isn't polluting, it just sits there. Presumably you mean the production of a few hundred pounds of NiMH batteries, containing (if I recall correctly) about 20 pounds of nickel. Note that the chrome and steel in a regular car already contains nickel, and that the real toxic villain is the lead-ACID battery in a conventional car
So what makes you think the pollution from manufacturing a few hundred pounds of recyclable batteries is remotely comparable to the TONS of gasoline and CO2 saved over 100,000 miles by driving a more fuel-efficient car? Repeating crap you've heard doesn't make it true.
The amount of energy and resources and toxic chemicals involved in the car manufacturing process FAR outweighs any "statement" you make with a hybrid.
Not true, no matter how worked up you get.
If you drive a 50mpg Prius, over 120,000 miles you'll consume 3 TONS less gasoline and put 10 TONS less CO2 in the air compared with a 35mpg car (here's the math). The gas savings are more than the car weighs! And producing,spilling, refining, and distributing that gasoline is itself resource-intensive and highly polluting. There's no credible evidence that manufacturing a car is on a pound-for-pound basis more polluting than the oil business. Instead, all reputable lifecycle studies (footnoted here) conclude 75-90% of the pollution from a car occurs in its operation.
Also this doesn't consider the follow-on effect of replacing your car. If you replaced your old car before it fell apart and it got decent mpg, then it's going to wind up in the hands of someone who can finally junk her gas guzzler.
It's a fact that one significant way you can help the environment is to increase the fuel efficiency of the car fleet by acquiring a more fuel-efficient car. There are others — there's always some way to be greener still, ranging from driving less to killing yourself.