If you want to turn off the DSC (dynamic stability control) you can do so from a switch on the console. Of course, this leaves the ABS engaged, but I can definitely notice a difference with the DSC off. For those who dont' know, the DSC system controls the amount of power transferred the engine make. For instance, it prevents wheel spin by reducing the flow of fuel so you can't "peel out" with DSC engaged.
All of these technologies are tools to improve driving safety. The point of ABS isn't to allow drivers to stop without pumping the brakes, the fact of the matter is that computer control allows the car to stop in a significantly shorter distance than any human could manage. Partly because the computer samples and responds several hundred times per second, but also because computers never lose their cool when coming around a corner and seeing a semi truck stopped in the middle of the lane.
A (silly) analogy would be saying that antibitoics are inhibiting the ability of the human immue system to evolve, so we should just let people die.
Let's face it, one reason people "buy" Windows is that the cost is hidden in the cost of the machine. This is also generally true of OS X (the cost is hidden) but the hardware is "cooler." Your average consumer who buys an Apple does so because of design or ease of use.
In order to run Windows on Mac hardware, it would first be necessary to buy Mac hardware, which isn't cheap. (The value proposition of Macs is a separate issue). Then, you have to look at the OSX interface goodness and decide that you want Windows instead. After that, you have to do whatever porting is necessary and install Windows. All this to get cool hardware running a not-so-cool OS. I mean, Apple is the BMW of computers and Wintel is the Ford. Are you really going to buy a 3 series and stick an Escort engine in it?
If and when Windows supports booting without a BIOS, I can see some folks having dual-boot Apple hardware. Especially folks who want Apple's nicely designed hardware but still want to run Windows games.
But an out-and-out port seems unlikely.
Limited usefulness
on
Smart Power
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I can only think of one appliance that runs without intervention--that's the refrigerator. Everything else in my house that requires significant electricity is run on demand. I'm not sure I see how helpful this is going to be overall.
Take this scenario: I am running a load of laundry through the clothes dryer and it's about 1/2-way dry. The dryer "senses" that the grid is under stress and turns off the heating element, but the drum continues to spin. The grid stays under stress for 30 minutes, then things return to normal. The dryer senses that the grid is normal and turns the heating element back on. The element must return to its heated state and dry the clothes the rest of the way. To me, this sounds like a recipe for selling more power, not less.
In any event, having worked for a company that provided metering services to electric utilities, I can say that "grid stress" is almost certainly not the real reason behind a push for this technology. The idea of "grid stress" makes it sound like the transmission mechanisms are under stress. But in reality, the problem is peak power generataion. During peak power usage, utilities rely on "peaker" power generation (sometimes small diesel plants) which frequently cost an order of magnitude more to operate than regular power generation. For instance, if it costs the utility $0.07 KWH to produce power, peaker power may cost $0.70 per KWH. However, most utilities are not set up to charge based on time of consumption, so the flat rate the PUC allows them to charge (say $10.10 per KWH) means that generating this extra power is a loss for them. So anything the utility can do to reduce spikes and eliminate the need for this type of generation is going to save them big money.
This is also why they always have a period before dawn when everyone is awake. When I was in the 82nd, on field exercises we would always wake up around 4:30, well before BMNT (morning twilight). The idea is that historically dawn has been the best time for an attack, because it's the time when people are least alert, so waking everyone up well before dawn is a hedge against an enemy's dawn attack.
Knowing that the military figured this out from experience, and that most people know it instinctively, it's hard not to wonder why someone thought it necessary to quantify this.
I think that you are correct--the outcomes will never be equal, because nothing that goes into making a human life can be perfectly duplicated; niether the nature nor the nurture. Even identical twins are "unequal" in this respect. But the phrase "All men are created equal" is pointing out equality under the law, not economic, physical, or mental equality.
The nub of the issue is that if we operate under the political fiction that everyone is equal, there's a greater chance for equality of opportunity and less chance for political repression. The real problem with rejecting "we are all created equal" isn't that it's not true (because as you have pointed out, economically, socially, physically, and mentally--it isn't) the problem lies in the area of deciding what will be done about it.
As soon as you decide that the little girl with Down's syndrome is "less equal" than the little boy genius, you're on a slippery slope. Should we "waste" precious resources on someone less equal? Does it mean that we provide less educational help for the girl, because it won't benefit her as much? If they both need a kidney transplant and there's only one available, who gets it?
But much more importantly, who decides? If you give the power to decide who is "more equal" to someone, you are giving them the power of life and death over others--a power that has been far too often abused.
Alan Cooper's "The Inmates are Running the Asyulum" and "About Face" books are good overviews of designing for user needs rather than against system internals. (I used to work for Alan).
Donald Norma's "Design of Everyday Things" is an excellent book that will give you a new way of looking at problems. DOET is about non-software (doors, tekettles, etc.) but once you've read it, you will never look at the design of things in quite the same way.
These books aren't step-by-step directions on how to achieve good design. They are more about getting into the right frame of mind so that you can think clearly about what good design might mean. I can't recommend them enough (especially DOET).
There's alo a book called "GUI Design Bloopers" that is an excellent reference on what NOT to do.
For older versions of Word, there was a tool call "compact HTML export" that you could download from MS that resulted in "almost clean" HTML coming out of Word docs. No "mso" tags, no weird bullet styles, no tables used to present 'bulleted' lists. It was great for when someone passed you a Word file that they wanted put on a Web site (I manage a couple of non-profit sites).
Unfortunately, that tool now doesn't work as it once did. I used a newer version the other day, and still got about 100 lines of crud that needed to be cleaned out. DreamWeaver's "Clean up Word HTML" tool has also suffed some degradation, so I'm down to copying out the text and then reformatting it all by hand. Not a difficult task, but it eats up time.
It's the one screwed-up thing about Word that consistently makes me frustrated. I can live with the broken number tokens, the automatic reformatting, and the inability to handle log docs. But this just kills me. \ At this point, I'm going to re-install OO and see if I can get better results.
Google wasn't the first search engine, Lexus wasn't the first luxury car make, and iPod wasn't the first MP3 player. But who owns those markets now? I don't think many folks think of Lycos, Ford, or Creative first for search, luxury cars, or music players. The whole idea that the winner is the one who gets there first with the most may work in war, but I'm skeptical about it's use as a business best practice. In the longer term of the technology game, say more than 6 months, better often wins. (I'm aware of anecdotal counter-arguments)
Do something interesting and cool, do it well, and charge a reasonable price. Your console will be the top seller. Sell the same-old same-thing and you'll lose out to an innovator.
and the setup was a little complicated. In the end, I paid for their "Medianet" unlimited plan, which enables data, then a DUN patch for the Treo. You can probably get a similar patch for any carrier's Treo...
Sure when I'm here in the city VOIP would be fine. However, when I'm driving 360 miles down I-5 to LA, across the rural wasteland that is Central California, access points are few and far between. So relying on VOIP means to call AAA I have to walk 30 miles to the nearest StarBucks:-)
The lack of phone is the deal-breaker for me. That's a bummer too, because now that Palm has gone to Windows, I really would like a Linux option.
It has a thumb keyboard and there are a number of free/open SSH clients for PalmOS. (http://www.sealiesoftware.com/pssh/) The only downside is that for Wi-Fi you need a SDIO card.
I use the built-in bluetooth to connect to my laptop and use the phone as a modem. The nice thing about it is that it's full-featured enough to let me leave my laptop behind about 75% of the time, even on longer trips.
One: Countries like China are somewhat less interested in interoperability with the rest of the (IPv4) Internet (See also "Great Firewall") so they probably aren't as concerned that switching to IPv6 is going to "break" their ability to connect to the rest of the world. In fact, perhaps the need to convert between them address spaces could help enforce the GF?
Two: I wonder if in other cases this will be like the 3rd world an cell phones/wireless networks. In many cases, countries that are just investing in technology can bypass the whole landline stage and jump directly to WiMax or whatever. It seems that counties where there are few existing users will find it less painful to switch to IPv6 since there are fewer people to complain.
I don't care if it's a fuel cell running alcohol or fusion-on-silicon, what I want is a limited set of standard battery sizes. You know, like we used to have the main four sizes: AAA, AA, C, and D. Last time I went to look for a phone battery, there were about 50 different sizes/connectors/capacities. The only way to buy gadget batteries now is online, because it takes too long to find them in the actual store (where they're not searchable/sortable except using the bluez3 row-by-row algorithm)
We need a set of "standard" sizes so that I can swap batteries between devices, buy a few backups and have them work across devices, etc.
762 rounds (from an M-60, current issue MG)
on
Set PHASRs On Stun
·
· Score: 1
will punch through 2 inches of solid aluminum. Can't remember if those were AP rounds or not. A.50 cal will do significantly better.:o)
Makes you wonder, though-- Why not just set some qualified marksman up with a high-power rifle and have 'em put a couple rounds through the engine. In head-on cases, it's an easy traget for a stationary shooter. Steel-sleeved aluminum blocks are pretty much in all cars these days, so I'm guessing that you'd pretty much kill the car.
Of course, physics says that a 3000lb car going 55mph is going to continue moving along its trajectory for a good while, even if you blind the driver or shoot out the engine.
"...this is about power and control. The people who own the copyrights (rarely the authors) want to be able to say no"
This is about power only as it relates to money. The people who control the copyrights aren't worried about "power" to say no, except as it relates to their ability to make money off the works they own. Having worked with publishers, I'd be pretty shocked if you found a publisher more interested in the power to say no than in the almighty dollar. In fact, I'd guess there is no such animal.
Now, whether Google's (or anyone else's) efforts to make copyrighted materials freely available over the Internet will help copyright owners make money, or reduce their ability to make money, is a point that is still being argued. This could go either way, but I find it troubling that the "do no evil" company is so willing to push the limit of legality. Of course, I like Goog, but I'm not a mindless sycophant. Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to start with copyright-free works?
Personally, I think that the answer to the money question is "a little from column A, a little from column B." In some cases, searchable texts will drive book sales. Even full texts can do so. In other cases, it could be that someone who might have purchased a work will decide not to based on free access to it. The Baen Free Library is a case in point, both ways. I have read some Sci-Fi books there that I now will not purchase (since I have already read them and found them only moderately worth-while). I have also purchased some books that are continuations of series that I started reading online.
But seeing that this is Slashdot, I expect most opinions to be of the all-or-nothing variety.
at Microsoft is "Never admit mistakes." This isn't just a Microsoft problem, all corporations seem to suffer from it, but it's why you'll never see MS-BSD.
To sell BSD, or any other "non-Windows-based" OS is to admit that they have failed on some level. Either at security (so you had to switch to a "real" permissions model) or stability, or whatever. If Microsoft were to admit this, the Linux and Apple fanboys would have a field day, technology analysts would be screaming about doom of Biblical proporations... You know, Biblical proportions: 30 days of darkness, dogs and cats living together, utter chaos.
And (like most corporations) an admission of failure isn't something that you're going to see MS giving anytime soon. The closest I've ever seen them come was the Clippy ads where that stupid paperclip was put out of business by Office XP Which, if you haven't seen these, you should find them-with Gilbert Gotfreid as the voice of Clippy, who is perfectly obnoxious sounding when saying "It looks like you're writing a letter" and a funny ending with Clippy in a bar.
(That never happens on Slashdot!) Point well taken.
I admit that there _are_ colleges and universities that are mixed, or even where Apple is prefered (art schools?). I just think it's unlikely that there are going to be many college graduates who are completely clueless about Windows, as Dvorak is suggesting.
Whining or not, the idea that "newer" observers are not familiar with Windows shows how completely out of touch Dvorak is (at least on this point). Colleges (where writers are trained) are so PC-centric these days that it's almost unbelievable. At private schools where computers (usually laptops) are an obligatory item, the college frequently will provide one as part of the tuition package... and you can almost gaurantee that it will be a Dell.
Most journalism students in college these days grew up in the Windows-centered world that computing has become. I think you'll find that Apple has almost completely lost the educational market, and that most elementary and secondary schools use and teach Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to turn off the DSC (dynamic stability control) you can do so from a switch on the console. Of course, this leaves the ABS engaged, but I can definitely notice a difference with the DSC off. For those who dont' know, the DSC system controls the amount of power transferred the engine make. For instance, it prevents wheel spin by reducing the flow of fuel so you can't "peel out" with DSC engaged.
All of these technologies are tools to improve driving safety. The point of ABS isn't to allow drivers to stop without pumping the brakes, the fact of the matter is that computer control allows the car to stop in a significantly shorter distance than any human could manage. Partly because the computer samples and responds several hundred times per second, but also because computers never lose their cool when coming around a corner and seeing a semi truck stopped in the middle of the lane.
A (silly) analogy would be saying that antibitoics are inhibiting the ability of the human immue system to evolve, so we should just let people die.
Let's face it, one reason people "buy" Windows is that the cost is hidden in the cost of the machine. This is also generally true of OS X (the cost is hidden) but the hardware is "cooler." Your average consumer who buys an Apple does so because of design or ease of use.
In order to run Windows on Mac hardware, it would first be necessary to buy Mac hardware, which isn't cheap. (The value proposition of Macs is a separate issue). Then, you have to look at the OSX interface goodness and decide that you want Windows instead. After that, you have to do whatever porting is necessary and install Windows. All this to get cool hardware running a not-so-cool OS. I mean, Apple is the BMW of computers and Wintel is the Ford. Are you really going to buy a 3 series and stick an Escort engine in it?
If and when Windows supports booting without a BIOS, I can see some folks having dual-boot Apple hardware. Especially folks who want Apple's nicely designed hardware but still want to run Windows games.
But an out-and-out port seems unlikely.
I can only think of one appliance that runs without intervention--that's the refrigerator. Everything else in my house that requires significant electricity is run on demand. I'm not sure I see how helpful this is going to be overall.
Take this scenario: I am running a load of laundry through the clothes dryer and it's about 1/2-way dry. The dryer "senses" that the grid is under stress and turns off the heating element, but the drum continues to spin. The grid stays under stress for 30 minutes, then things return to normal. The dryer senses that the grid is normal and turns the heating element back on. The element must return to its heated state and dry the clothes the rest of the way. To me, this sounds like a recipe for selling more power, not less.
In any event, having worked for a company that provided metering services to electric utilities, I can say that "grid stress" is almost certainly not the real reason behind a push for this technology. The idea of "grid stress" makes it sound like the transmission mechanisms are under stress. But in reality, the problem is peak power generataion. During peak power usage, utilities rely on "peaker" power generation (sometimes small diesel plants) which frequently cost an order of magnitude more to operate than regular power generation. For instance, if it costs the utility $0.07 KWH to produce power, peaker power may cost $0.70 per KWH. However, most utilities are not set up to charge based on time of consumption, so the flat rate the PUC allows them to charge (say $10.10 per KWH) means that generating this extra power is a loss for them. So anything the utility can do to reduce spikes and eliminate the need for this type of generation is going to save them big money.
This is also why they always have a period before dawn when everyone is awake. When I was in the 82nd, on field exercises we would always wake up around 4:30, well before BMNT (morning twilight). The idea is that historically dawn has been the best time for an attack, because it's the time when people are least alert, so waking everyone up well before dawn is a hedge against an enemy's dawn attack.
Knowing that the military figured this out from experience, and that most people know it instinctively, it's hard not to wonder why someone thought it necessary to quantify this.
Unless he knows a wild-eyed professor with a Delorean and 1.21 jigawatts of electricity
I think that you are correct--the outcomes will never be equal, because nothing that goes into making a human life can be perfectly duplicated; niether the nature nor the nurture. Even identical twins are "unequal" in this respect. But the phrase "All men are created equal" is pointing out equality under the law, not economic, physical, or mental equality.
The nub of the issue is that if we operate under the political fiction that everyone is equal, there's a greater chance for equality of opportunity and less chance for political repression. The real problem with rejecting "we are all created equal" isn't that it's not true (because as you have pointed out, economically, socially, physically, and mentally--it isn't) the problem lies in the area of deciding what will be done about it.
As soon as you decide that the little girl with Down's syndrome is "less equal" than the little boy genius, you're on a slippery slope. Should we "waste" precious resources on someone less equal? Does it mean that we provide less educational help for the girl, because it won't benefit her as much? If they both need a kidney transplant and there's only one available, who gets it?
But much more importantly, who decides? If you give the power to decide who is "more equal" to someone, you are giving them the power of life and death over others--a power that has been far too often abused.
Of course!
Donald NORMAN's "Design of Everyday Things"
Sheesh
Alan Cooper's "The Inmates are Running the Asyulum" and "About Face" books are good overviews of designing for user needs rather than against system internals. (I used to work for Alan).
Donald Norma's "Design of Everyday Things" is an excellent book that will give you a new way of looking at problems. DOET is about non-software (doors, tekettles, etc.) but once you've read it, you will never look at the design of things in quite the same way.
These books aren't step-by-step directions on how to achieve good design. They are more about getting into the right frame of mind so that you can think clearly about what good design might mean. I can't recommend them enough (especially DOET).
There's alo a book called "GUI Design Bloopers" that is an excellent reference on what NOT to do.
HTH.
For older versions of Word, there was a tool call "compact HTML export" that you could download from MS that resulted in "almost clean" HTML coming out of Word docs. No "mso" tags, no weird bullet styles, no tables used to present 'bulleted' lists. It was great for when someone passed you a Word file that they wanted put on a Web site (I manage a couple of non-profit sites).
Unfortunately, that tool now doesn't work as it once did. I used a newer version the other day, and still got about 100 lines of crud that needed to be cleaned out. DreamWeaver's "Clean up Word HTML" tool has also suffed some degradation, so I'm down to copying out the text and then reformatting it all by hand. Not a difficult task, but it eats up time.
It's the one screwed-up thing about Word that consistently makes me frustrated. I can live with the broken number tokens, the automatic reformatting, and the inability to handle log docs. But this just kills me.
\
At this point, I'm going to re-install OO and see if I can get better results.
Google wasn't the first search engine, Lexus wasn't the first luxury car make, and iPod wasn't the first MP3 player. But who owns those markets now? I don't think many folks think of Lycos, Ford, or Creative first for search, luxury cars, or music players. The whole idea that the winner is the one who gets there first with the most may work in war, but I'm skeptical about it's use as a business best practice. In the longer term of the technology game, say more than 6 months, better often wins. (I'm aware of anecdotal counter-arguments)
Do something interesting and cool, do it well, and charge a reasonable price. Your console will be the top seller. Sell the same-old same-thing and you'll lose out to an innovator.
and the setup was a little complicated. In the end, I paid for their "Medianet" unlimited plan, which enables data, then a DUN patch for the Treo. You can probably get a similar patch for any carrier's Treo...
Sure when I'm here in the city VOIP would be fine. However, when I'm driving 360 miles down I-5 to LA, across the rural wasteland that is Central California, access points are few and far between. So relying on VOIP means to call AAA I have to walk 30 miles to the nearest StarBucks :-)
The lack of phone is the deal-breaker for me. That's a bummer too, because now that Palm has gone to Windows, I really would like a Linux option.
It has a thumb keyboard and there are a number of free/open SSH clients for PalmOS. (http://www.sealiesoftware.com/pssh/) The only downside is that for Wi-Fi you need a SDIO card.
I use the built-in bluetooth to connect to my laptop and use the phone as a modem. The nice thing about it is that it's full-featured enough to let me leave my laptop behind about 75% of the time, even on longer trips.
One: Countries like China are somewhat less interested in interoperability with the rest of the (IPv4) Internet (See also "Great Firewall") so they probably aren't as concerned that switching to IPv6 is going to "break" their ability to connect to the rest of the world. In fact, perhaps the need to convert between them address spaces could help enforce the GF?
Two: I wonder if in other cases this will be like the 3rd world an cell phones/wireless networks. In many cases, countries that are just investing in technology can bypass the whole landline stage and jump directly to WiMax or whatever. It seems that counties where there are few existing users will find it less painful to switch to IPv6 since there are fewer people to complain.
iPV6
:o)
It's the lowercase inital "i" that will drive adoption.
I don't care if it's a fuel cell running alcohol or fusion-on-silicon, what I want is a limited set of standard battery sizes. You know, like we used to have the main four sizes: AAA, AA, C, and D. Last time I went to look for a phone battery, there were about 50 different sizes/connectors/capacities. The only way to buy gadget batteries now is online, because it takes too long to find them in the actual store (where they're not searchable/sortable except using the bluez3 row-by-row algorithm)
We need a set of "standard" sizes so that I can swap batteries between devices, buy a few backups and have them work across devices, etc.
That was FUNNY!
Thx for the laugh
will punch through 2 inches of solid aluminum. Can't remember if those were AP rounds or not. A .50 cal will do significantly better. :o)
Makes you wonder, though-- Why not just set some qualified marksman up with a high-power rifle and have 'em put a couple rounds through the engine. In head-on cases, it's an easy traget for a stationary shooter. Steel-sleeved aluminum blocks are pretty much in all cars these days, so I'm guessing that you'd pretty much kill the car.
Of course, physics says that a 3000lb car going 55mph is going to continue moving along its trajectory for a good while, even if you blind the driver or shoot out the engine.
"...this is about power and control. The people who own the copyrights (rarely the authors) want to be able to say no"
This is about power only as it relates to money. The people who control the copyrights aren't worried about "power" to say no, except as it relates to their ability to make money off the works they own. Having worked with publishers, I'd be pretty shocked if you found a publisher more interested in the power to say no than in the almighty dollar. In fact, I'd guess there is no such animal.
Now, whether Google's (or anyone else's) efforts to make copyrighted materials freely available over the Internet will help copyright owners make money, or reduce their ability to make money, is a point that is still being argued. This could go either way, but I find it troubling that the "do no evil" company is so willing to push the limit of legality. Of course, I like Goog, but I'm not a mindless sycophant. Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to start with copyright-free works?
Personally, I think that the answer to the money question is "a little from column A, a little from column B." In some cases, searchable texts will drive book sales. Even full texts can do so. In other cases, it could be that someone who might have purchased a work will decide not to based on free access to it. The Baen Free Library is a case in point, both ways. I have read some Sci-Fi books there that I now will not purchase (since I have already read them and found them only moderately worth-while). I have also purchased some books that are continuations of series that I started reading online.
But seeing that this is Slashdot, I expect most opinions to be of the all-or-nothing variety.
Dan
Oh,wait. You said execution...
:o)
at Microsoft is "Never admit mistakes." This isn't just a Microsoft problem, all corporations seem to suffer from it, but it's why you'll never see MS-BSD.
To sell BSD, or any other "non-Windows-based" OS is to admit that they have failed on some level. Either at security (so you had to switch to a "real" permissions model) or stability, or whatever. If Microsoft were to admit this, the Linux and Apple fanboys would have a field day, technology analysts would be screaming about doom of Biblical proporations... You know, Biblical proportions: 30 days of darkness, dogs and cats living together, utter chaos.
And (like most corporations) an admission of failure isn't something that you're going to see MS giving anytime soon. The closest I've ever seen them come was the Clippy ads where that stupid paperclip was put out of business by Office XP Which, if you haven't seen these, you should find them-with Gilbert Gotfreid as the voice of Clippy, who is perfectly obnoxious sounding when saying "It looks like you're writing a letter" and a funny ending with Clippy in a bar.
(That never happens on Slashdot!) Point well taken.
I admit that there _are_ colleges and universities that are mixed, or even where Apple is prefered (art schools?). I just think it's unlikely that there are going to be many college graduates who are completely clueless about Windows, as Dvorak is suggesting.
and I'm sure it's not right for your... idiom...
Whining or not, the idea that "newer" observers are not familiar with Windows shows how completely out of touch Dvorak is (at least on this point). Colleges (where writers are trained) are so PC-centric these days that it's almost unbelievable. At private schools where computers (usually laptops) are an obligatory item, the college frequently will provide one as part of the tuition package... and you can almost gaurantee that it will be a Dell.
Most journalism students in college these days grew up in the Windows-centered world that computing has become. I think you'll find that Apple has almost completely lost the educational market, and that most elementary and secondary schools use and teach Windows.
This is just nonsense.