However - engineers engineer things to a spec. They won't build a road with sight-lines and curves for cars moving at 60mph if notified that the project will be signed for 40mph.
Several years ago in West London a scheme was tried on several roads where white lines were stripped from the tarmac and other roadway features drivers would normally use to align themselves in a lne were toned-down or removed, leaving a smooth road surface where pavement was separated from carriageway by a change in surface material (smooth edge between black tarmac and grey traditional pavement-stones), no barriers marked the limit of pedestrian travel, and 'traffic islands' were removed from the centreline where they separated directional traffic
the result was a road thhat forced drivers to consider the flow of traffic ahead, clearances, the actions of pedestrians - in short forcing the sort of situational awareness that good driver training instils as a matter of course. The average speed of traffic did not significantly change but the flow improved, with a detectable reduction in contact incidents with other cars or pedestrians (walkers were generally reckoned safer as drivers could rely less on their commonsense and had to watch them instead) . I think health and safety concerns were an issue though nonetheless. Here's a contemporary news link
.. will almost certainly be non-open-source apps. Good luck to them but I'd have thought their stated aims will be easy - recompile, optimise, repeat until done.
Then try to ship a product without flash because you've optimised away all your concerns but missed out on an important closed-source deal-breaker
The radio frequencies reserved for transmitted television and the satellites used for Sat TV can be deployed to far more useful purposes once TV's deployed off to glass fibre and DSL
Like being able to watch hi-def music videos on your phone wherever in the world you are at the same time as backing up your latest phonecam shots to the cloud...
Agreed. HPs laptops have never been reliable enough to endow their maker with any reputation for quality. They must have earned it on their office/network equipment.... (oh, and the Jornada PDA range)
the wordpress app may be all well and good, but there can't plausibly be an app for every site that would otherwise work in a browser. I don't foresee Apple allowing a GoogleDocs app to allow mobile editing of documents, competing with iWork for iPad....
If it did happen, we might well end up in a world where the majority of Unix-like machines in the world were mobile phones.... (think about is, iPhoneOs is loosely related to the Unix underpinnings of OSX and Android is a Linux system)
QNX Neutrino I remember as a very promising OS, released for x86 desktop-class computers as a distribution that fitted a web browser, ppp, windowing environment and enough drivers to work as a prototype 'live distro', booting from A SINGLE 1.44MB FLOPPY DISK
I spent many hours playing with it on a Dell pentium 133/32mb laptop. when Palm bought BeOS for its software assets hardly any were ever used. I hope RIM does better. they could make excellent products with an OS that light but powerful.
Do you know how much work it would take to put mouse suport in iPhone OS? the answer is 'a trivial amount' given the relationship of iPhone OS to Mac OS and the software development resources Apple has to hand. even a jailbreaker can get a mouse pointer onto an iPhone...
To be fair was talking about the Volt, unlike the Prius which is a very different kind of car and is also built by Japanese. The Volt is built by GM. Which is why it won't be doing 500K or probably even 180K before it finally and irremediably breaks.
MS was dangerous to the competitive Operating System market - and later on, office software.. geeks acknowledged the danger as systems like OS/2 disappeared despite their popularity.
if Apple is a competitive threat, its to the makers of media players and to the producers of content, due to their homogenising influence on the market and their major-media-outlet status. Its less likely to directly affect us....
Your motorcycle would probably be miles ahead in the fuel economy stakes than any car I could tempt you to buy. if you're happy with the risks, go for it, and have fun.
I owned a non-turbo diesel - EU-body Ford Escort with 60bhp 1.8 naturally aspirated 4-cyl Diesel.
due to the less restricted torque curve compared to a TD model (which I've also owned) in normal conditions it would keep pace with a turbo while using less fuel, and actually needed less gear-shifting in normal driving (i only ever buy manual box cars), meaning less stress on the engine & drivetrain and probably being the reason for the better fuel economy.
Give me a container ship crewed by seafarers and mechanics and I'll fill it with 4-year-old diesel midrange cars bought secondhand in right-hand-driving European states - give them a thorough overhaul during the voyage and register them with the US Authorities before docking.
They'll be cheaper than new Volts and the reduced carbon-debt might well make them break even over the vehicle lifespan. I' sorry but we've had cars that can beat the Volt's ICE mileage on general sale here for over a decade - including some gasoline/petrol models (Honda Civic, give a bow..)
I drive a large turbo-diesel saloon (sedan, for americans), a Ford Mondeo 1.8TD. I frequently get overall fuel economy in excess of 55mpg over an entire tank of fuel. and thats in an 11 year old car built using 1980s diesel technology.. but even after 180,000 miles it still does the distance, and can sprint to 3-figure speeds (yes, miles not kilometres/hour) given a lot of time for acceleration (and preferably a tailwind)
Show me one of your electro-gasoline abominations after 180K. Be lucky if it even moves let alone gets 40mpg
A lot of the total carbon emissions from a vehicles lifetime are incurred in construction (extensive high-energy metalworking)
Keeping a car a longer time might use more fuel but less manufacturing carbon emissions result.
Personally I worry that the result of this will be leaden, electronics/batteries-loaded vehicles that lurch and rumble along on their hard suspension due to the extra weight of systems to reduce emissions...
I live in hope of someone designing a mid-sized car with ultralightweight materials and putting a slow-running non-turbo diesel in it with high gear ratios and the maximum possible low-rev torque setup - economy and long life without complications. And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony
'iPad Ready' - my god, Jobs' jesus complex is getting worse if he thinks the internet has to prepare itself for a crappy, locked-down, crippled mono-window browsing device
This story illustrates a whole new sort of corporate stupidity. I propose from now on that such an action should be known as Viacomming, drawn from a new verb. To Viacom. Definition - to stab yourself in both feet by litigating against your own principal shopfront.
I understand that Nuclear submarines have been under the North polar ice cap many times, surely someone's sent one under the Southern ice sheets by now? Obviously the continent would get in the way of going too far under but even so.....
I wonder if the relevant governments would be willing to release confirmatory data.
Slashdot Mirror
However - engineers engineer things to a spec. They won't build a road with sight-lines and curves for cars moving at 60mph if notified that the project will be signed for 40mph.
Several years ago in West London a scheme was tried on several roads where white lines were stripped from the tarmac and other roadway features drivers would normally use to align themselves in a lne were toned-down or removed, leaving a smooth road surface where pavement was separated from carriageway by a change in surface material (smooth edge between black tarmac and grey traditional pavement-stones), no barriers marked the limit of pedestrian travel, and 'traffic islands' were removed from the centreline where they separated directional traffic
the result was a road thhat forced drivers to consider the flow of traffic ahead, clearances, the actions of pedestrians - in short forcing the sort of situational awareness that good driver training instils as a matter of course. The average speed of traffic did not significantly change but the flow improved, with a detectable reduction in contact incidents with other cars or pedestrians (walkers were generally reckoned safer as drivers could rely less on their commonsense and had to watch them instead) . I think health and safety concerns were an issue though nonetheless. Here's a contemporary news link
.. will almost certainly be non-open-source apps. Good luck to them but I'd have thought their stated aims will be easy - recompile, optimise, repeat until done.
Then try to ship a product without flash because you've optimised away all your concerns but missed out on an important closed-source deal-breaker
The radio frequencies reserved for transmitted television and the satellites used for Sat TV can be deployed to far more useful purposes once TV's deployed off to glass fibre and DSL
Like being able to watch hi-def music videos on your phone wherever in the world you are at the same time as backing up your latest phonecam shots to the cloud...
Agreed. HPs laptops have never been reliable enough to endow their maker with any reputation for quality. They must have earned it on their office/network equipment.... (oh, and the Jornada PDA range)
No need, just run a VT420 terminal emulator on WebOS ;-) - probably a lot less bandwidth intensive than any regular web app
the wordpress app may be all well and good, but there can't plausibly be an app for every site that would otherwise work in a browser. I don't foresee Apple allowing a GoogleDocs app to allow mobile editing of documents, competing with iWork for iPad....
If it did happen, we might well end up in a world where the majority of Unix-like machines in the world were mobile phones.... (think about is, iPhoneOs is loosely related to the Unix underpinnings of OSX and Android is a Linux system)
QNX Neutrino I remember as a very promising OS, released for x86 desktop-class computers as a distribution that fitted a web browser, ppp, windowing environment and enough drivers to work as a prototype 'live distro', booting from A SINGLE 1.44MB FLOPPY DISK
I spent many hours playing with it on a Dell pentium 133/32mb laptop. when Palm bought BeOS for its software assets hardly any were ever used. I hope RIM does better. they could make excellent products with an OS that light but powerful.
Do you know how much work it would take to put mouse suport in iPhone OS? the answer is 'a trivial amount' given the relationship of iPhone OS to Mac OS and the software development resources Apple has to hand. even a jailbreaker can get a mouse pointer onto an iPhone...
We might just find that in the middle-distance future, MacBooks and iMacs will have iPhone OS instead of Mac OS
Dare I suggest it isnt a tool for potential clients, but a client for potential tools?
To be fair was talking about the Volt, unlike the Prius which is a very different kind of car and is also built by Japanese. The Volt is built by GM. Which is why it won't be doing 500K or probably even 180K before it finally and irremediably breaks.
MS was dangerous to the competitive Operating System market - and later on, office software.. geeks acknowledged the danger as systems like OS/2 disappeared despite their popularity.
if Apple is a competitive threat, its to the makers of media players and to the producers of content, due to their homogenising influence on the market and their major-media-outlet status. Its less likely to directly affect us....
Your motorcycle would probably be miles ahead in the fuel economy stakes than any car I could tempt you to buy. if you're happy with the risks, go for it, and have fun.
I owned a non-turbo diesel - EU-body Ford Escort with 60bhp 1.8 naturally aspirated 4-cyl Diesel.
due to the less restricted torque curve compared to a TD model (which I've also owned) in normal conditions it would keep pace with a turbo while using less fuel, and actually needed less gear-shifting in normal driving (i only ever buy manual box cars), meaning less stress on the engine & drivetrain and probably being the reason for the better fuel economy.
Give me a container ship crewed by seafarers and mechanics and I'll fill it with 4-year-old diesel midrange cars bought secondhand in right-hand-driving European states - give them a thorough overhaul during the voyage and register them with the US Authorities before docking.
They'll be cheaper than new Volts and the reduced carbon-debt might well make them break even over the vehicle lifespan. I' sorry but we've had cars that can beat the Volt's ICE mileage on general sale here for over a decade - including some gasoline/petrol models (Honda Civic, give a bow..)
50mpg on ICE is ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC.
I drive a large turbo-diesel saloon (sedan, for americans), a Ford Mondeo 1.8TD. I frequently get overall fuel economy in excess of 55mpg over an entire tank of fuel. and thats in an 11 year old car built using 1980s diesel technology.. but even after 180,000 miles it still does the distance, and can sprint to 3-figure speeds (yes, miles not kilometres/hour) given a lot of time for acceleration (and preferably a tailwind)
Show me one of your electro-gasoline abominations after 180K. Be lucky if it even moves let alone gets 40mpg
You can have Light, Strong and Cheap - pick any two. I never said it had to be cheap.
Quotas, perhaps..
A lot of the total carbon emissions from a vehicles lifetime are incurred in construction (extensive high-energy metalworking)
Keeping a car a longer time might use more fuel but less manufacturing carbon emissions result.
Personally I worry that the result of this will be leaden, electronics/batteries-loaded vehicles that lurch and rumble along on their hard suspension due to the extra weight of systems to reduce emissions...
I live in hope of someone designing a mid-sized car with ultralightweight materials and putting a slow-running non-turbo diesel in it with high gear ratios and the maximum possible low-rev torque setup - economy and long life without complications. And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony
'iPad Ready' - my god, Jobs' jesus complex is getting worse if he thinks the internet has to prepare itself for a crappy, locked-down, crippled mono-window browsing device
This story illustrates a whole new sort of corporate stupidity. I propose from now on that such an action should be known as Viacomming, drawn from a new verb. To Viacom. Definition - to stab yourself in both feet by litigating against your own principal shopfront.
I understand that Nuclear submarines have been under the North polar ice cap many times, surely someone's sent one under the Southern ice sheets by now? Obviously the continent would get in the way of going too far under but even so.....
I wonder if the relevant governments would be willing to release confirmatory data.
Anything sufficiently different to be radical (in either a good or bad way) won't be considered a netbook.
Potentially could suppliers be forced into higher standards by the fear of consumer litigation?