NYC has been replacing a large chunk of its diesel bus fleet with CNG-powered buses, and there are also hybrid-electric buses (though I don't know if they're being activley acquired or still testing). As for the diesel buses they've had particulate traps in them for some time. You can see into the ends of their exhaust pipes and they appear to be as clean inside as they are outside (although I know that doesn't mean anything WRT CO2 emissions)
Well, hard drive failure is only an issue if the hard drive is on and spinning. If you just hook up the drive when you backup, and power it off afterwards, then isn't better than burning to CDs every so often?
I've had one laptop-drive-in-an-external-case take a powder. It was being used in exactly this fashion, only powered up to recieve files being backed up. Fortunatley I had already gotten into the habit of backing this data (artwork projects) up to multiple external drives, so this only prompted a mental note to buy another drive to replace it.
Since these projects stayed on flash drives while they were works-in-progress, I simply left the files in place rather than deleting them after backing them up. When the drive is (almost) filled up, I stick it in a drawer and buy another one--they're cheap enough to not be a burden, and I get an additional layer of backup (these drives do not see any additional writes and only occasional reads). Nobody's really answered the question of how long the data on an idle flash drive will remain intact, so an additional offsite HDD is in the cards for the next upgrade.
Long-distance trains do not cost all that much to operate, since the freight railroad picks up the tab for track maintenance. The Northeast Corridor generates the most revenue, but it also has expensive maintenance requirements (catenary and high-speed trackage). The Amtrak train that comes closest to turning a profit is the Auto-Train.
The services that appear to be profitable in other countries only talk about revenue vs. operating costs. Include capital expenditures and almost all of them operate at a loss on passenger rail alone. The privatized Japanese lines don't appear to be paying the capital cost of establishing their networks--that was all built by the government under the aegis of a state-owned corporation (that was up to its eyeballs in debt as a result) before it was divvied up among the various private operators.
Exactly, but so long as AMTRAK is in charge of managing this it will never happen. Acela had the potential to steal massive amounts of travel from the airlines. If you could do Boston to NYC in 2 hours by train it would be faster/cheaper than flying
Amtrak already has almost half of the travel in this corridor buttoned up. Ridership is so high that Amtrak is seeking funding to buy additional cars to lengthen Acala trainsets because they're becoming maxed out ridership-wise.
The train needs to run full out the entire time its not stopped. I'm not 100% certain of the route Acela uses, but if it stopped once in RI and once in CT you could be doing 150mph the entire time in between. Even at $100 per ticket thats far better than flying. How many Boston to NY flights are their daily?
Acela makes one stop in RI (Providence) , and three in CT (New London, New Haven and Bridgeport). Dwell time is about a couple of minutes, and acceleration is rapid (with 12,200HP for six cars, it can't be anything but rapid)
Top speeed for Acela is 150MPH (241 Km/H) on two stretches in Rhode Island. From New Haven, CT to New Rochelle, NY, the tracks are owned by Metro-North Railroad, which imposes a 90MPH (145Km/H) limit. Metro-North also disallows use of Acela's tilt feature on its segment because in many places the tracks are too close together (I watched two Metro North trains passing on adjacent tracks at New Rochelle station, and if there was a foot of space between them, it was a generous estimate)
South of NYC, the limit is 135MPH (217Km/H) due to the design of the Pennsylvania Railroad-era catenary (overhead wire), which is not counterweighted, but anchored to the support towers at each end of the wire (they're not continuous, but made up of segments that overlap at their extreme ends). What this means is that the wire cannot remain at a constant tension through temperature changes, and the resulting uneven-ness causes pantographs (the hinged arms on top of the trains that collect current) to skip along the wire, causing both to wear out prematurely from arcing. Anyone who's watched an Acela passing at speed south of NY can see the effect it has on the catenary. Regular trains don't distrurb it much, but have an Acela roar by, and it'll clang and clatter for the better part of a minute after the train's passed.
Replacing this ancient catenary is another capital project awaiting funding. I don't know if the recent appropriation covers this project. It likely doesn't--at least not in full.
That same comparison has been made in regards to the true cost of highway transportation. While I wouldn't expect highway usage to drop enormously if the true costs of upkeep were imposed on a per-user basis (i.e. tolls), because some folks simply don't have a choice in the matter, I don't want to imagine what these hypothetical tolls on insterstates would be like if they had to pay 100% of the cost of their upkeep, (let alone turn a profit) when you consider the condition most of them are in nowadays.
Somewhere I read that federal assistance to states for highway repair are rigged with a number of strings attatched--namely that such improvements must increase capacity (even if they're not necessary). So, in order to get help fixing your roads, you have to make them wider. Which makes them more costly to maintain. Which the states couldn't afford to do on their own before they were widened. And so the merry-go-round goes on and on.
Sometimes it's not purely a cost vs. profit thing. In high-traffic areas, when you see this:
..occurring on a regular basis, does anyone really want to encourage even more people to occupy the road between them and their destination? I see 8-10 lanes with bumper to bumper traffic in that freeway photo, and it looks like it's being widened further. No cheap way to weasel out of that situation. No profitable one either, at least not without putting a whole lot of people in an economic Catch-22 long before there are practical alternatives.
No smugness there at all. There is this lingering perception that nobody uses Amtrak when in fact they're carrying so many passengers that the limiting factor (for the past few years) is literally the number of passenger cars and locomotives owned by the carrier. Yeah, the sensible thing to do when you have that situation is buy more of both. But it's difficult to invest in fleet expansion when for the past thirty years you literally didn't know if you're going to be around the following year. That was Amtrak's existence since its creation, despite Congress generally being in favor of keeping it around.
No passenger rail network makes a profit. Even during the "golden years" when the freight railroads ran the services. It was mostly a loss leader, but freight railroads were able to shoulder the burden until the combination of federal (over) regulation (pre-Staggersand the nascent trucking industry (aided by of the federally subsidized interstate highway system) and the overall decline in freight business during the latter half of the 20th century brought many of them to the brink of bankrupcy (Witness Penn Central, which never made so much as one cent of profit during it's entire eight-year existence). Some passenger networks come close to covering their operating expenses out-of-pocket, but add in capital expenditures necessary to keep the network going, and they all come out in the red.
As for other modes, the airline industry is no stranger to red ink, and nobody in their right mind expects the interstate system to pay for its own upkeep, let alone turn a profit.
All I've heard so far is debate on how long flash RAM will last while being constantly thrashed with read/write cycles. But what I'd like to know is how long data can be expected to remain intact on a typical flash drive that you just throw a bunch of files on and subsequently stick in a drawer and forget about, or at very least infrequently read from.
I keep a lot of files (mostly art projects) backed up on 2 or 3 seperate hard drives, but while any current project is progress, they tend to reside on a flash drive. Oh, they get rewritten to a couple of dozen times between scanning and completion, but once complete (and backed up) I tend to just leave the project folder on the drive, and when the drive gets close to filling up, I stick it in a drawer and buy another one. Should I expect to be able to call those "retired" drives backups as well, or will the integrity of the data likely deteriorate after a few years like a late model 3.5" floppy
(eyes the stack of WFW3.11 disks he bought years ago at a computer show, the functioning Toshiba 1910CS 33MHz Win3.1 laptop in the bookcase, the Zircom parallel-port Ethernet adapter on the shelf, and his home network)
Hmm...........
(I wonder if those thingies some folks use for their sigfiles that report your IP/ISP/browser/OS can recognize a WFW system. Might be fun if they couldn't)
Before I moved to Win95 though I did browse the net on Windows 3.1 for a short while. I was using Netscape + Eudora (and naturally Trumpet Winsock) to do my net stuff on that machine. My Win3.1 machine when I got rid of it was a 486DX 75Mhz with 6MB of RAM, an 80MB hard drive, SVGA graphics, CDROM, and sound card. Strange that it could still do the common web/email tasks I needed of it back then yet anything under a gigahertz with lass than 1GB of ram is considered unusable now:S.
I did almost the exact same thing with almost the exact same specs (Toshiba 2155cds laptop) for several years, (well, only VGA graphics but 20MB RAM). It ran it's factory install of Win3.1 for five straight years till it's HDD died in 1999. No big loss since with a 500Mb HDD, I had long moved all my data and several apps to an Iomega Jaz drive I kept tethered to it.
The same machine was resurrected with a 2Gb HD (WOOO!....uh, ahem) and remains bootable to this day. The webpage linked above though, is ancient, dating back to when XP was replacing ME on new machines, and the collection of hardware there was only for the photo--at that point only the 4015CDS on the left (now my email-collecting machine) was in regular use (I didn't have room for a full-time desktop/tower setup)and the newest laptop (running ME) hadn't yet taken on a full-time role.
In my experience, I've only had one flash drive outright die on me--an "I-Disk Gini" by Pretec. 2GB model, worked fine for a few weeks and then--bam...
"Please insert a disk into drive (x)"
The drive is recognized, it gets a drive letter and all that, but any attempt to actually access it is greeted with the above message. Since then I've run across numerous users of this particular line of drives complaining of the same symptom.
I have flash drives by PNY, Kingston, and Super Talent. No problems with them. I'm trying out an Avixe 8GB drive I bought when I couldn't find any more 8GB Super Talents at my local computer shows.
We've all heard about the longevity of flash drives under repeat write cycles, but what about data that's left on a nearly-full drive with no further write activity? Usually, when I fill one of these up, I just buy another one and treat the existing drive like an archive, so it only rarely gets plugged in, and then it's only to read (since it's almost full anyway). One would think the data should be safe indefinitley, but one has been wrong before.
You'll have to create that 60GB FAT32 partition with Linux, because Windows XP SP2 refuses to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB, but I believe it can access one with no problem?
XP's formatter is coded with a 32GB limit under FAT32. A utility called FAT32format allows you to format up to FAT32's actual limit once you've partitioned the drive and given it a drive letter under XP. I used it on a 160GB drive in an external USB box that I decided had to be accessible to Win9x machines. Worked for me.
- A tiny church in rural Arkansas (I believe) that pickets the funerals of dead servicemembers because they believe god is allowing US soldiers to die because America tolerates Gays and Lesbians. No kidding. Point and laugh, they get media attention, but no one takes them seriously, except as a bunch of asshats.
The only reason I remember this is having listened to a radio talk show that baited his wife and kids (not very difficult) into making some real humdinger statements in a phone interview.
My previous 'full-time' computer, a (now) ancient P-II laptop running Win98se, now functions as an email machine. It just sits on my network checking for new messages. Typically, it'll lock up after a couple of days of idling at the desktop, 3-4 days just running Thunderbird, and 5-7+ days with Thunderbird and an instance of IE6 (of all things) running alongside it. Basically, the more I futz with it, the longer it stays up.
Doesn't prove anything, though. When that machine was new, it used to randomly lock up while it was in use--until I installed a network card.
"...Rather than absorbing water and dirt, moisture will instead bead off the surface of the specially-designed shoes."
...Right after you pull your 3" high shoe out of the 6-inch deep slush puddle that didn't look that deep until you stepped in it. I've watched that happen so often it's become a spectator sport for me every time a good-sized snowstorm hits NYC:)
There are four models: --4GB Flash with a SD slot (accepts SDHC cards) --30GB HDD --80GB HDD --160GB HDD
I got the 4GB version. My collection of music files--at least the ones I'd want to carry around--isn't large enough to tax it (my last device was a 2GB+MiniSD Avayon MP85) and I was only halfway to filling its onboard memory). I'm also not carrying full DVD movies around, so my video storage needs are extremely light. All that and I didn't want a HDD device in the event it gets dropped.
But this does make the environmentalist in me happy, maybe more people will take the train vs. a plane for domestic travel It seems they are:
"Airplanes are getting stuck in lots of traffic jams this summer, but Amtrak is on a roll. Ridership on the passenger rail system is up 6% so far this year, the biggest jump since the late 1970s. On the Acela Express, trains that run at higher speeds between Washington, New York and Boston, the number of riders has surged 20% over the past 10 months. That's enough new passengers to fill 2,000 Boeing 757 jets,"
Nope. I saw the video before this story. The compression being spoken of is the difference in volume between the loudest and softest sounds, not the data rate. That difference is being squeezed so the overall average volume can be made louder. That's what I learned from the YouTube example, and I'm nowhere near being an audiophile. You'll notice it if you watch the video.
Slashdot Mirror
---PCJ
I wonder what game of my youth was about going to an office and working for hours and hours until my soul died
Well it's not from your youth, but there is Five Minutes to Kill Yourself, which takes place in an office.
Knock yourself out...
---PCJ
Well, hard drive failure is only an issue if the hard drive is on and spinning. If you just hook up the drive when you backup, and power it off afterwards, then isn't better than burning to CDs every so often?
I've had one laptop-drive-in-an-external-case take a powder. It was being used in exactly this fashion, only powered up to recieve files being backed up. Fortunatley I had already gotten into the habit of backing this data (artwork projects) up to multiple external drives, so this only prompted a mental note to buy another drive to replace it.
Since these projects stayed on flash drives while they were works-in-progress, I simply left the files in place rather than deleting them after backing them up. When the drive is (almost) filled up, I stick it in a drawer and buy another one--they're cheap enough to not be a burden, and I get an additional layer of backup (these drives do not see any additional writes and only occasional reads). Nobody's really answered the question of how long the data on an idle flash drive will remain intact, so an additional offsite HDD is in the cards for the next upgrade.
---PCJ
The worst thing about Censorship is [comment removed by admin].
Sounds just like when you talk about Candle J-...(oh no, not falling for that old gag).
---PCJ
Long-distance trains do not cost all that much to operate, since the freight railroad picks up the tab for track maintenance. The Northeast Corridor generates the most revenue, but it also has expensive maintenance requirements (catenary and high-speed trackage). The Amtrak train that comes closest to turning a profit is the Auto-Train.
The services that appear to be profitable in other countries only talk about revenue vs. operating costs. Include capital expenditures and almost all of them operate at a loss on passenger rail alone. The privatized Japanese lines don't appear to be paying the capital cost of establishing their networks--that was all built by the government under the aegis of a state-owned corporation (that was up to its eyeballs in debt as a result) before it was divvied up among the various private operators.
---PCJ
Exactly, but so long as AMTRAK is in charge of managing this it will never happen. Acela had the potential to steal massive amounts of travel from the airlines. If you could do Boston to NYC in 2 hours by train it would be faster/cheaper than flying
Amtrak already has almost half of the travel in this corridor buttoned up. Ridership is so high that Amtrak is seeking funding to buy additional cars to lengthen Acala trainsets because they're becoming maxed out ridership-wise.
The train needs to run full out the entire time its not stopped. I'm not 100% certain of the route Acela uses, but if it stopped once in RI and once in CT you could be doing 150mph the entire time in between. Even at $100 per ticket thats far better than flying. How many Boston to NY flights are their daily?
Acela makes one stop in RI (Providence) , and three in CT (New London, New Haven and Bridgeport). Dwell time is about a couple of minutes, and acceleration is rapid (with 12,200HP for six cars, it can't be anything but rapid)
Top speeed for Acela is 150MPH (241 Km/H) on two stretches in Rhode Island. From New Haven, CT to New Rochelle, NY, the tracks are owned by Metro-North Railroad, which imposes a 90MPH (145Km/H) limit. Metro-North also disallows use of Acela's tilt feature on its segment because in many places the tracks are too close together (I watched two Metro North trains passing on adjacent tracks at New Rochelle station, and if there was a foot of space between them, it was a generous estimate)
South of NYC, the limit is 135MPH (217Km/H) due to the design of the Pennsylvania Railroad-era catenary (overhead wire), which is not counterweighted, but anchored to the support towers at each end of the wire (they're not continuous, but made up of segments that overlap at their extreme ends). What this means is that the wire cannot remain at a constant tension through temperature changes, and the resulting uneven-ness causes pantographs (the hinged arms on top of the trains that collect current) to skip along the wire, causing both to wear out prematurely from arcing. Anyone who's watched an Acela passing at speed south of NY can see the effect it has on the catenary. Regular trains don't distrurb it much, but have an Acela roar by, and it'll clang and clatter for the better part of a minute after the train's passed.
Replacing this ancient catenary is another capital project awaiting funding. I don't know if the recent appropriation covers this project. It likely doesn't--at least not in full.
---PCJ
--PCJ
Somewhere I read that federal assistance to states for highway repair are rigged with a number of strings attatched--namely that such improvements must increase capacity (even if they're not necessary). So, in order to get help fixing your roads, you have to make them wider. Which makes them more costly to maintain. Which the states couldn't afford to do on their own before they were widened. And so the merry-go-round goes on and on.
Sometimes it's not purely a cost vs. profit thing. In high-traffic areas, when you see this:
http://www.nationalcorridors.org/df2/df09022008i.jpg
---PCJ
No smugness there at all. There is this lingering perception that nobody uses Amtrak when in fact they're carrying so many passengers that the limiting factor (for the past few years) is literally the number of passenger cars and locomotives owned by the carrier. Yeah, the sensible thing to do when you have that situation is buy more of both. But it's difficult to invest in fleet expansion when for the past thirty years you literally didn't know if you're going to be around the following year. That was Amtrak's existence since its creation, despite Congress generally being in favor of keeping it around.
No passenger rail network makes a profit. Even during the "golden years" when the freight railroads ran the services. It was mostly a loss leader, but freight railroads were able to shoulder the burden until the combination of federal (over) regulation (pre-Staggersand the nascent trucking industry (aided by of the federally subsidized interstate highway system) and the overall decline in freight business during the latter half of the 20th century brought many of them to the brink of bankrupcy (Witness Penn Central, which never made so much as one cent of profit during it's entire eight-year existence). Some passenger networks come close to covering their operating expenses out-of-pocket, but add in capital expenditures necessary to keep the network going, and they all come out in the red.
As for other modes, the airline industry is no stranger to red ink, and nobody in their right mind expects the interstate system to pay for its own upkeep, let alone turn a profit.
---PCJ
Here in the States, AMTRAK is in horrible shape due to mismanagement and a general public disuse of trains.
Amtrak sets fifth straight year of record ridership
Acela trains may expand to meet demand
More Frustrated Fliers Taking to the Rails
Trains over Planes and Automobiles
Uh-huh. Yup, nobody's riding those trains, yesirreebob.
---PCJ
I keep a lot of files (mostly art projects) backed up on 2 or 3 seperate hard drives, but while any current project is progress, they tend to reside on a flash drive. Oh, they get rewritten to a couple of dozen times between scanning and completion, but once complete (and backed up) I tend to just leave the project folder on the drive, and when the drive gets close to filling up, I stick it in a drawer and buy another one. Should I expect to be able to call those "retired" drives backups as well, or will the integrity of the data likely deteriorate after a few years like a late model 3.5" floppy
---PCJ
(eyes the stack of WFW3.11 disks he bought years ago at a computer show, the functioning Toshiba 1910CS 33MHz Win3.1 laptop in the bookcase, the Zircom parallel-port Ethernet adapter on the shelf, and his home network)
Hmm...........
(I wonder if those thingies some folks use for their sigfiles that report your IP/ISP/browser/OS can recognize a WFW system. Might be fun if they couldn't)
---PCJ
I did almost the exact same thing with almost the exact same specs (Toshiba 2155cds laptop) for several years, (well, only VGA graphics but 20MB RAM). It ran it's factory install of Win3.1 for five straight years till it's HDD died in 1999. No big loss since with a 500Mb HDD, I had long moved all my data and several apps to an Iomega Jaz drive I kept tethered to it.
The same machine was resurrected with a 2Gb HD (WOOO!....uh, ahem) and remains bootable to this day. The webpage linked above though, is ancient, dating back to when XP was replacing ME on new machines, and the collection of hardware there was only for the photo--at that point only the 4015CDS on the left (now my email-collecting machine) was in regular use (I didn't have room for a full-time desktop/tower setup)and the newest laptop (running ME) hadn't yet taken on a full-time role.
---PCJ
"Please insert a disk into drive (x)"
The drive is recognized, it gets a drive letter and all that, but any attempt to actually access it is greeted with the above message. Since then I've run across numerous users of this particular line of drives complaining of the same symptom.
I have flash drives by PNY, Kingston, and Super Talent. No problems with them. I'm trying out an Avixe 8GB drive I bought when I couldn't find any more 8GB Super Talents at my local computer shows.
We've all heard about the longevity of flash drives under repeat write cycles, but what about data that's left on a nearly-full drive with no further write activity? Usually, when I fill one of these up, I just buy another one and treat the existing drive like an archive, so it only rarely gets plugged in, and then it's only to read (since it's almost full anyway). One would think the data should be safe indefinitley, but one has been wrong before.
---PCJ
XP's formatter is coded with a 32GB limit under FAT32. A utility called FAT32format allows you to format up to FAT32's actual limit once you've partitioned the drive and given it a drive letter under XP. I used it on a 160GB drive in an external USB box that I decided had to be accessible to Win9x machines. Worked for me.
---PCJ
Kansas, actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_phelps
The only reason I remember this is having listened to a radio talk show that baited his wife and kids (not very difficult) into making some real humdinger statements in a phone interview.
---PCJ
My previous 'full-time' computer, a (now) ancient P-II laptop running Win98se, now functions as an email machine. It just sits on my network checking for new messages. Typically, it'll lock up after a couple of days of idling at the desktop, 3-4 days just running Thunderbird, and 5-7+ days with Thunderbird and an instance of IE6 (of all things) running alongside it. Basically, the more I futz with it, the longer it stays up.
Doesn't prove anything, though. When that machine was new, it used to randomly lock up while it was in use--until I installed a network card.
---PCJ
---PCJ
---PCJ
There are four models:
--4GB Flash with a SD slot (accepts SDHC cards)
--30GB HDD
--80GB HDD
--160GB HDD
I got the 4GB version. My collection of music files--at least the ones I'd want to carry around--isn't large enough to tax it (my last device was a 2GB+MiniSD Avayon MP85) and I was only halfway to filling its onboard memory). I'm also not carrying full DVD movies around, so my video storage needs are extremely light. All that and I didn't want a HDD device in the event it gets dropped.
---PCJ
---PCJ
"Airplanes are getting stuck in lots of traffic jams this summer, but Amtrak is on a roll. Ridership on the passenger rail system is up 6% so far this year, the biggest jump since the late 1970s. On the Acela Express, trains that run at higher speeds between Washington, New York and Boston, the number of riders has surged 20% over the past 10 months. That's enough new passengers to fill 2,000 Boeing 757 jets,"
--Dan Machalaba, Wall St Journal August 23, as quoted from http://www.nationalcorridors.org/df2/df08272007.shtml#Wall
---PCJ
...after oil is pressed from its nuts.That part made me laugh, cry and cringe
This one made me cringe harder
---PCJ
---PCJ
Saturn?
I mean, I've heard the whole thing about "rings around Uranus" but that's a new one to me.
---PCJ