hope you don't have an accident with it anywhere along that chain
Almost the same chain that ordinary gasoline/petrol has at the moment. So it's no less safe, and that well-established infrastructure can cope with the demand and recharge times that meet users current expectations.
fuel cell that is around 60% efficient
That's about 2-3 times as efficient as just burning the fuel to create motive power. The electric motors are likely to be ~95% efficient. That's a huge improvement right there.
Pure electric cars using safe batteries with loads more power that can go 300 miles
The energy density of these 'safe' batteries is way poorer than liquid hydrogen both by volume and weight. It's crazy that half the weight of a 2-ton pure EV is its batteries (with current technology) just to give it a barely acceptable range (followed by several hours to recharge). Obviously research should get that better over time, but it's a got a long way to go to beat hydrogen. A fuel-cell car makes a lot of sense during this transitional period between the dinosaurs and the pure EV of the future - it's a huge improvement in efficiency and pollution but can leverage existing infrastructure.
Your argument seems to be we should ignore this because it's not as good as some imaginary car of the future, rather than we should be interested in this because it's better than the frankly terrible non-imaginary car of the past.
steal Chrysler (the company that made Jeeps) from its shareholders
Haha, you capitalist ideologues make me laugh. What was the alternative? Apparently it was "too big to fail", but that was the only other option, which would have put hundreds of people out of work and closed the company for good. Where were the shareholders when the chips were down? Oh that's right, cashing in their shares before they tanked, thus ensuring they tanked.
As for Jeep being a Fiat, so what? Almost every car is made by someone else these days. BMW makes Rolls Royce and Mini, Land Rover is an Indian company, and so on. In fact, the US has owned most of the world's supposedly local brands through Ford and GM for most of the 20th century (and had no compunction in closing down many of them when things got tough, not giving a fuck for the workers of Saab, Vauxhall, Holden, etc). How does it feel now that the boot is on the other foot? Why is it like this? Because capitalism, that's why. If you don't like it, vote for a better system.
I agree it's pretty stupid, but the stupidity is in making the shifter look exactly like the traditional shifter. Some cars have had sequential shifters for some time now ("flappy paddles") and they stay in the same position whatever gear you're in, so that part of it isn't the problem. The problem is the placement and appearance of the control, which misleads the driver into thinking it works differently than it actually does.
Sequential gearboxes are a good thing in some situations - they're faster to shift than traditional manual or auto boxes (at the expense of making getting into reverse a nuisance), but that really only matters for performance cars. It's pointless putting it into a shitty rental box, but if you do, use flappy paddles, FFS.
It be like: strip a car down to its bare chassis, removing all extraneous weight, seats, anything that's there for comfort or convenience, then keep cutting out more metal - panels, half the floor, roof. Bolt on a huge turbo and nitrous and watch it do a ¼ mile in 8 seconds. Great, but it ain't going to get you to the shops and back.
Wrong. I don't know about Google, but I do know about Safari. When it's in private mode, all of the data that is normally saved to disk for any purpose is stored in encrypted memory, so within a private session, you get the benefit of caching, go forward/back, etc. But once you close the private window, all that encrypted memory is erased and released. Apps using the NSURLSession APIs can do exactly the same thing.
Horrid car. If it hadn't been picked randomly to be the centrepiece of a cultish film, no-one would remember them now except possibly as the reason for an infamous downfall. And being part of a cultish film might be a good enough reason to want to own an original one as a conversation piece, but who in their right minds would want to own a new one, to be used as an actual car?
I've known two young men who were very heavy cannabis users. Both were incredibly intelligent - among the smartest guys I ever met. However, both became manic depressive and that only got worse over time. Eventually both of them (who didn't know each other) committed suicide. Hard to unravel cause and effect, and only two data points but it's made me very wary of heavy pot use. The occasional smoke, not a worry, but habitual use is a killer, I believe.
...is fear itself. Seems these wise words have been largely forgotten. As a nation, the USA is the most lily-livered scaredy cats out there. I'm not talking about individuals, just the national characteristic. Why else spend such vast sums on a military that has more or less nothing to do? (and for which idle hands the devil makes plenty of work, starting wars it can't finish and general meddling). Why else are guns so fetishised? Why else is so much effort being put into monitoring everyone's trivial business? Why else are fingers pointed at harmless scapegoats like ordinary muslims? My country, right or wrong? Think about it.
Why didn't they email me to check I knew these payments were being made? I got nothing from them
Your own fault. If you set up a family group with your children, you'll get a request to authorise any purchase your kids attempt to make. Works fine, reasonably easy to set up. Stop blaming others for your own incompetence.
Switzerland is a tiny country that isn't part of the EU. So it can do what it likes, and the rest of us can totally ignore it.
I doubt if Apple or anyone else is likely to care about this. Even if it became a worldwide standard, a USBLightning charging cable is no problem, and I don't think the cable itself has any DRM - I can buy a generic branded one in my local tech store for a few bucks.
It seems much easier to undo the damage of a wind farm than it does, say, a coal plant.
Very true. Also, it seems much easier to undo the damage of a bumbling ineffective government than it does, say, an idiotic megalomaniac fascist dictator.
When looking for a needle in a haystack, you don't add more hay. This is good news (if even remotely true). I hope the governments of Australia and especially the UK take note. They are obsessed with adding as much hay as they can get away with.
Right, because bad user interface design is my fault, not the designers'. They can do no wrong; I just need to fix my eyesight (not sure what sort of glasses help with contrast enhancement?). In any case I was not saying I could not tell they they *were* buttons, but that you cannot tell very easily when they are enabled vs. when they are disabled.
Have a look at buttons that only have icons some time - if they have text the contrast is more obvious, but icon-only buttons are barely distinct in the two states. The segmented control is especially bad, but pop-up buttons are poor as well.
I went through a similar analysis recently. I had no particular loyalty or bias to any one platform, though I began to lean towards the XBox because of Forza 6, which is the type of game that most interested me. After looking at capabilities, I settled on building a PC for about $1000. That's a lot more money than either console, but you get way more power and an upgrade path that will likely keep up for the next five or more years. The ability of the games on the PC is just better than either console, and I can swap in a better GPU at any time to keep it up there.
Project Cars, DiRT Rally and Assetto Corsa tick the boxes regarding my interest in Forza 6, so not having that on the PC was taken out of the equation.
It does mean running Windows, which as a Mac guy for day to day work is a bit hard to get used to - so many things suck it's a joke, but as a game-launching platform it's adequate. Once in the game, the OS is irrelevant. Steam is fine as a storefront and launcher as well. There might come a time when having Linux as the launcher is also workable, but right now it lags behind in terms of graphics support (e.g. many games require DirectX11) so Windows is a necessary evil.
The latest controls in Mac OS X "El Capitan" are so flat that you can barely tell the difference between a disabled and an enabled control. There has to be at least one of each in a single area to be able to tell that there is a difference. If an area only has one sort, you can't tell by looking which it is - you have to tentatively click to see if it's going to do anything. And if it turns out it's enabled, you probably then have to undo whatever it did.
I was the same but with the 4000 CMOS range. OK, it was slower, but it was far less finicky about fanout, fan-in, power supply voltages and general interfacing. If I needed a fast section of circuitry I might use TTL, but CMOS elsewhere. Just so much less fuss. By the mid-80s it had caught up in speed and eventually surpassed it.
CPU-wise, it was 6502 FTW, though the 8051 wasn't bad as a stop-gap until the 680x0 was cheap enough. 4004? A bit before my time, but also pretty hard to use and do much with compared to the 6502 and other 8-bit devices.
So I have Windows 10 installed, with all the privacy invading stuff turned off. It's really my first time since the early XP era that I've had any extensive dealings with Windows, so it was interesting to see how far it's come since then. For the most part, it was a pleasant surprise, since for a first-time PC build, it all pretty much "just worked" and I had few issues. However, some things are still really, really awful compared to the equivalent on the Mac, though I dislike the fact that the latest Mac OS (10.11) seems to be ever more influenced by Windows, which seems like a backwards step overall.
For example, I added a SSD drive after I had the PC working and Windows installed. I also recently did the same on a 5-year-old iMac, so the experience was directly comparable. On the Mac, the drive was recognised immediately and formatting it with Disk Utility was 5 minutes work, followed by a straightforward reinstall of the OS from a backup. On Windows, what a pain. The drive itself was initially unrecognised by Windows, though appeared in the BIOS as working correctly. Nothing in the Device Manager or Disk Manager. Turned out there was a drive letter conflict (I mean, why the fuck are drive letters still important and why do they still matter in the 21st century?) so I had to force Windows to forget all the extra drives it has ever known (luckily not many as it's a new PC) so that it would recognise the new SSD. Once it had, assigning a different drive letter and formatting it weren't too bad, but getting to that point took over an hour with much googling (on my Mac) to find answers.
Then to change the boot order of the drives needed another trip to the BIOS (and hence another reboot) whereas setting the boot order on the Mac is a simple matter of dragging items in a GUI list in the System Settings and does not require a reboot. I don't want to reopen the pointless debate about Macs and PCs, but when Windows is till this stupid after all this time, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that Windows still sucks.
Another example is audio. At present I only have headphones plugged into the PC, there are no internal or external speakers. Unplugging the headphones to try a different pair disabled audio altogether. Reboot required to bring it back on. WTF? Then there are the audio settings. They are hidden in W10, you have to do a search for 'audio' to reveal a whole bunch of extra options like basic stuff such as system volume. There are no Audio settings showing in Settings by default. I could go on - text is still horrid, too small and hard to read, and why the user has to muck about with 'cleartext optimisation' just to get something vaguely readable is beyond me. Overall interfaces look shitty, grainy, too small and unclear in many ways, because there are no dividing lines for example between a scrollview and another part of the window, so when something is scrolled it looks like the other part of the window is part of the scrolled view - it's not obvious they are separate areas and it is truly confusing.
Yeah, these might seem like trivial differences and they probably are, but they can add hours to the time wasted getting simple stuff working. As a game launching shell, Windows is OK enough, but I pity anyone who has to spend significant time using it, or working with Windows-native apps, which presumably extend all the OS's mistakes into every corner.
a problem tho with apple radio playing on a tv is that tv speakers usually suk where as stereo speakers are often better. I'm not sure if there's a way to direct the sound output within the apple tv itself.
You're thinking about this in the wrong way. If you have a decent-ish home entertainment setup, you'll have a big black box called a receiver which all the HDMI signals are routed through (from Apple TV, your PVR, Bluray player, etc), which then feeds your TV. Most of them have a pass-through mode that allows you to listen to stuff on the TV speakers if you really want to without having to fire up the receiver. The ATV doesn't need a way to route its output, the receiver acts as a big switching station, feeding your big-ass speakers with whatever source you choose. If you're streaming movies from the ATV, or even just playing a DVD, a setup like this is really a must for the full home-cinema experience. It's also great for playing music using Airplay from a server running iTunes.
Slashdot Mirror
hope you don't have an accident with it anywhere along that chain
Almost the same chain that ordinary gasoline/petrol has at the moment. So it's no less safe, and that well-established infrastructure can cope with the demand and recharge times that meet users current expectations.
fuel cell that is around 60% efficient
That's about 2-3 times as efficient as just burning the fuel to create motive power. The electric motors are likely to be ~95% efficient. That's a huge improvement right there.
Pure electric cars using safe batteries with loads more power that can go 300 miles
The energy density of these 'safe' batteries is way poorer than liquid hydrogen both by volume and weight. It's crazy that half the weight of a 2-ton pure EV is its batteries (with current technology) just to give it a barely acceptable range (followed by several hours to recharge). Obviously research should get that better over time, but it's a got a long way to go to beat hydrogen. A fuel-cell car makes a lot of sense during this transitional period between the dinosaurs and the pure EV of the future - it's a huge improvement in efficiency and pollution but can leverage existing infrastructure.
Your argument seems to be we should ignore this because it's not as good as some imaginary car of the future, rather than we should be interested in this because it's better than the frankly terrible non-imaginary car of the past.
using petalobe screwdrivers
Yeah, those 10^15 sided screws are a bugger to not strip. That's why I replace mine with pentalobe screws - much more robust.
steal Chrysler (the company that made Jeeps) from its shareholders
Haha, you capitalist ideologues make me laugh. What was the alternative? Apparently it was "too big to fail", but that was the only other option, which would have put hundreds of people out of work and closed the company for good. Where were the shareholders when the chips were down? Oh that's right, cashing in their shares before they tanked, thus ensuring they tanked.
As for Jeep being a Fiat, so what? Almost every car is made by someone else these days. BMW makes Rolls Royce and Mini, Land Rover is an Indian company, and so on. In fact, the US has owned most of the world's supposedly local brands through Ford and GM for most of the 20th century (and had no compunction in closing down many of them when things got tough, not giving a fuck for the workers of Saab, Vauxhall, Holden, etc). How does it feel now that the boot is on the other foot? Why is it like this? Because capitalism, that's why. If you don't like it, vote for a better system.
I agree it's pretty stupid, but the stupidity is in making the shifter look exactly like the traditional shifter. Some cars have had sequential shifters for some time now ("flappy paddles") and they stay in the same position whatever gear you're in, so that part of it isn't the problem. The problem is the placement and appearance of the control, which misleads the driver into thinking it works differently than it actually does.
Sequential gearboxes are a good thing in some situations - they're faster to shift than traditional manual or auto boxes (at the expense of making getting into reverse a nuisance), but that really only matters for performance cars. It's pointless putting it into a shitty rental box, but if you do, use flappy paddles, FFS.
It be like: strip a car down to its bare chassis, removing all extraneous weight, seats, anything that's there for comfort or convenience, then keep cutting out more metal - panels, half the floor, roof. Bolt on a huge turbo and nitrous and watch it do a ¼ mile in 8 seconds. Great, but it ain't going to get you to the shops and back.
Wrong. I don't know about Google, but I do know about Safari. When it's in private mode, all of the data that is normally saved to disk for any purpose is stored in encrypted memory, so within a private session, you get the benefit of caching, go forward/back, etc. But once you close the private window, all that encrypted memory is erased and released. Apps using the NSURLSession APIs can do exactly the same thing.
Horrid car. If it hadn't been picked randomly to be the centrepiece of a cultish film, no-one would remember them now except possibly as the reason for an infamous downfall. And being part of a cultish film might be a good enough reason to want to own an original one as a conversation piece, but who in their right minds would want to own a new one, to be used as an actual car?
I've known two young men who were very heavy cannabis users. Both were incredibly intelligent - among the smartest guys I ever met. However, both became manic depressive and that only got worse over time. Eventually both of them (who didn't know each other) committed suicide. Hard to unravel cause and effect, and only two data points but it's made me very wary of heavy pot use. The occasional smoke, not a worry, but habitual use is a killer, I believe.
I assume you're trolling. But on the offchance that you're actually swallowing this BS, there's only one response: you big wussy pussy.
...is fear itself. Seems these wise words have been largely forgotten. As a nation, the USA is the most lily-livered scaredy cats out there. I'm not talking about individuals, just the national characteristic. Why else spend such vast sums on a military that has more or less nothing to do? (and for which idle hands the devil makes plenty of work, starting wars it can't finish and general meddling). Why else are guns so fetishised? Why else is so much effort being put into monitoring everyone's trivial business? Why else are fingers pointed at harmless scapegoats like ordinary muslims? My country, right or wrong? Think about it.
Why didn't they email me to check I knew these payments were being made? I got nothing from them
Your own fault. If you set up a family group with your children, you'll get a request to authorise any purchase your kids attempt to make. Works fine, reasonably easy to set up. Stop blaming others for your own incompetence.
Switzerland is a tiny country that isn't part of the EU. So it can do what it likes, and the rest of us can totally ignore it.
I doubt if Apple or anyone else is likely to care about this. Even if it became a worldwide standard, a USBLightning charging cable is no problem, and I don't think the cable itself has any DRM - I can buy a generic branded one in my local tech store for a few bucks.
It seems much easier to undo the damage of a wind farm than it does, say, a coal plant.
Very true. Also, it seems much easier to undo the damage of a bumbling ineffective government than it does, say, an idiotic megalomaniac fascist dictator.
That's "cue" not "queue". If you learn the difference, then next time you won't look so ignorant.
When looking for a needle in a haystack, you don't add more hay. This is good news (if even remotely true). I hope the governments of Australia and especially the UK take note. They are obsessed with adding as much hay as they can get away with.
Right, because bad user interface design is my fault, not the designers'. They can do no wrong; I just need to fix my eyesight (not sure what sort of glasses help with contrast enhancement?). In any case I was not saying I could not tell they they *were* buttons, but that you cannot tell very easily when they are enabled vs. when they are disabled.
Have a look at buttons that only have icons some time - if they have text the contrast is more obvious, but icon-only buttons are barely distinct in the two states. The segmented control is especially bad, but pop-up buttons are poor as well.
I went through a similar analysis recently. I had no particular loyalty or bias to any one platform, though I began to lean towards the XBox because of Forza 6, which is the type of game that most interested me. After looking at capabilities, I settled on building a PC for about $1000. That's a lot more money than either console, but you get way more power and an upgrade path that will likely keep up for the next five or more years. The ability of the games on the PC is just better than either console, and I can swap in a better GPU at any time to keep it up there.
Project Cars, DiRT Rally and Assetto Corsa tick the boxes regarding my interest in Forza 6, so not having that on the PC was taken out of the equation.
It does mean running Windows, which as a Mac guy for day to day work is a bit hard to get used to - so many things suck it's a joke, but as a game-launching platform it's adequate. Once in the game, the OS is irrelevant. Steam is fine as a storefront and launcher as well. There might come a time when having Linux as the launcher is also workable, but right now it lags behind in terms of graphics support (e.g. many games require DirectX11) so Windows is a necessary evil.
The latest controls in Mac OS X "El Capitan" are so flat that you can barely tell the difference between a disabled and an enabled control. There has to be at least one of each in a single area to be able to tell that there is a difference. If an area only has one sort, you can't tell by looking which it is - you have to tentatively click to see if it's going to do anything. And if it turns out it's enabled, you probably then have to undo whatever it did.
It's a travesty.
Don't you mean: Alliterations are awfully asinine?
I was the same but with the 4000 CMOS range. OK, it was slower, but it was far less finicky about fanout, fan-in, power supply voltages and general interfacing. If I needed a fast section of circuitry I might use TTL, but CMOS elsewhere. Just so much less fuss. By the mid-80s it had caught up in speed and eventually surpassed it.
CPU-wise, it was 6502 FTW, though the 8051 wasn't bad as a stop-gap until the 680x0 was cheap enough. 4004? A bit before my time, but also pretty hard to use and do much with compared to the 6502 and other 8-bit devices.
I find this offensive
Suck it up. You have no right NOT to be offended, and in any case your lot have been committing myriad offences for two millennia.
I'm a Mac guy, but believe me, no fanboy (as a longstanding developer, its shortcomings are all too obvious to me). I've long been highly agnostic on the trivial differences between platforms, they are after all the same hardware. I've recently built a PC for gaming since that really isn't the Mac's forté, and the titles I'm interested in are not available for Mac. So to me, Windows is simply a way to launch whatever games I want to play.
So I have Windows 10 installed, with all the privacy invading stuff turned off. It's really my first time since the early XP era that I've had any extensive dealings with Windows, so it was interesting to see how far it's come since then. For the most part, it was a pleasant surprise, since for a first-time PC build, it all pretty much "just worked" and I had few issues. However, some things are still really, really awful compared to the equivalent on the Mac, though I dislike the fact that the latest Mac OS (10.11) seems to be ever more influenced by Windows, which seems like a backwards step overall.
For example, I added a SSD drive after I had the PC working and Windows installed. I also recently did the same on a 5-year-old iMac, so the experience was directly comparable. On the Mac, the drive was recognised immediately and formatting it with Disk Utility was 5 minutes work, followed by a straightforward reinstall of the OS from a backup. On Windows, what a pain. The drive itself was initially unrecognised by Windows, though appeared in the BIOS as working correctly. Nothing in the Device Manager or Disk Manager. Turned out there was a drive letter conflict (I mean, why the fuck are drive letters still important and why do they still matter in the 21st century?) so I had to force Windows to forget all the extra drives it has ever known (luckily not many as it's a new PC) so that it would recognise the new SSD. Once it had, assigning a different drive letter and formatting it weren't too bad, but getting to that point took over an hour with much googling (on my Mac) to find answers.
Then to change the boot order of the drives needed another trip to the BIOS (and hence another reboot) whereas setting the boot order on the Mac is a simple matter of dragging items in a GUI list in the System Settings and does not require a reboot. I don't want to reopen the pointless debate about Macs and PCs, but when Windows is till this stupid after all this time, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that Windows still sucks.
Another example is audio. At present I only have headphones plugged into the PC, there are no internal or external speakers. Unplugging the headphones to try a different pair disabled audio altogether. Reboot required to bring it back on. WTF? Then there are the audio settings. They are hidden in W10, you have to do a search for 'audio' to reveal a whole bunch of extra options like basic stuff such as system volume. There are no Audio settings showing in Settings by default. I could go on - text is still horrid, too small and hard to read, and why the user has to muck about with 'cleartext optimisation' just to get something vaguely readable is beyond me. Overall interfaces look shitty, grainy, too small and unclear in many ways, because there are no dividing lines for example between a scrollview and another part of the window, so when something is scrolled it looks like the other part of the window is part of the scrolled view - it's not obvious they are separate areas and it is truly confusing.
Yeah, these might seem like trivial differences and they probably are, but they can add hours to the time wasted getting simple stuff working. As a game launching shell, Windows is OK enough, but I pity anyone who has to spend significant time using it, or working with Windows-native apps, which presumably extend all the OS's mistakes into every corner.
a problem tho with apple radio playing on a tv is that tv speakers usually suk where as stereo speakers are often better. I'm not sure if there's a way to direct the sound output within the apple tv itself.
You're thinking about this in the wrong way. If you have a decent-ish home entertainment setup, you'll have a big black box called a receiver which all the HDMI signals are routed through (from Apple TV, your PVR, Bluray player, etc), which then feeds your TV. Most of them have a pass-through mode that allows you to listen to stuff on the TV speakers if you really want to without having to fire up the receiver. The ATV doesn't need a way to route its output, the receiver acts as a big switching station, feeding your big-ass speakers with whatever source you choose. If you're streaming movies from the ATV, or even just playing a DVD, a setup like this is really a must for the full home-cinema experience. It's also great for playing music using Airplay from a server running iTunes.
So I call:
if( overflow_usub( a, b, NULL )){...
whoops.
Shiny code for the sake of shiny code produces bloat
Like C++ templates? *cough, cough*