I'm not saying the Mazdaspeed3 or Japanese cars in general are bad cars. No doubt stock for stock, the Mazdaspeed3 would totally blow the doors off all but heavily modded TDI Jetta's performance wise. I was just pointing out how your "torque conspiracy" argument was totally flawed.
Diesel cars only make sense here in the US for two kinds of people: ones that drive over 15,000 miles a year who refuse to drive a gas-powered bottom of the line econobox (this could change if US auto makers and foreign subsidiaries bring more appealing economy cars here), or diesel enthusiasts. Show me a gas car available here in the US that can accelerate from 0-60 in 8 seconds or less, has heated leather interior, power everything, stability control; that can manage 42+ MPG even when you accelerate like a banshee and set the cruise at 80 with the A/C on, and I'll ditch my TDI in a heartbeat.
FYI: Honda and Subaru are two Japanese companies that are already bringing their diesels over to the US.
No, that is not the fact you're wrong. First of all, your Mazdaspeed3 has a 2.3L engine. The VW TDI's in cars here in the US are mostly either 1.9L or 2.0L. That is not equivalent to the TDI you're comparing it to above.
Do you think it is by mere coincidence that almost every piece of heavy machinery is powered by a diesel engine as opposed to a gas engine? Quite simply, diesel engines make more usable torque.
What follows is a broad generalization. Look at the dyno charts for a turbodiesel engine, and you'll notice they have a fat torque curve almost immediately off of idle all the way up until about a grand short of redline. Gas engines on the other hand build their peak torque up slowly until right before redline. Translation? The gas engine wastes more time and energy downshifting to keep you inside of that torque curve.
The VW diesels we have here in the US are a poor example anyways because they're designed with emissions and economy as the top priority, not performance. In Europe there are a wide variety of VW TDI options to chose from, for example: a 2.0L 4-cyl Common Rail diesel that pounds out 197HP/295lb-ft at 1,800 RPMs stock. By the way, It's not uncommon for someone to merely change the ECU firmware on a completely otherwise stock TDI, to bust out an additional 30HP/75lb-ft while still managing 45+ MPG. You can go even farther if you're willing to upgrade the clutch and other driveline components.
So you're saying you can get free wifi roaming on supported handsets? Free as in, comes out of your normal airtime right? I did not know this.
I don't want to pay extra for wifi, because I don't need unlimited calling. I'm not interested in paying any more than I already do. I only have 300 "daytime minutes", unlimited nights/weekends and 500txt/mo for $45/mo after all the taxes and fees. Even with only 300 minutes, I've never went over.
How hard is the wifi roaming on the phone's battery?
Same here, I HATE Verizon. But I'm stuck with them for the coverage. GSM calls don't even work in my house unless I'm standing in front of my living room window.
Now, if I could get 802.11 roaming to make up for the loss of coverage in my house FOR A REASONABLE PRICE, I'd switch to a T-Mobile based Android in a second.
How unfortunate. Isn't t-mobile the smallest network in the US, with the least coverage, and no 3G/high-speed data whatsoever?
It was bad enough when Apple locked the iphone to AT&T, but at least they have some 3G and good coverage (after acquiring Cingular.) But t-mobile? That's not going to be good for business:(
T-Mobile works off of Sprint.
Which does have 3-G and was the first large service provider to offer it.
Uh WRONG, T-Mobile is a GSM provider like AT&T/Cingular is. They have roaming agreements with AT&T, and therefore have similar coverage. They're way behind on the 3G, but they've begun to roll it out to markets.
Verizon, Sprint and Alltel OTOH are CDMA, you could say Cricket "works off Sprint", as they are also CDMA.
Oh, like those wonderful kernel-mode print drivers? Yeah, I don't miss our old NT4 print server so much really. One misbehaving HP print driver could cause so much havoc.
Btw, have you tried using an expensive old g3 mac (your five year old example). Good luck finding software thats not purposely broken so that it wont run on your revision of the OS. Thats the most hilarious part. Even if the software would work fine, there are locks on most programs to tell you what os revision you can run them on. You know the odd program that complains when you run it on 2k, but doesnt on XP? thats par the course for mac
My parents are still rockin a 500Mhz G3 iMac with a 30GB HD, and 320MB of RAM in it running 10.4 (Tiger). It was purchased around Christmas of 2000 so it's going on about 8 years old now. They use it for basic email/web/iPhoto use. My mom plays some lame-ass card and casino games I bought her for Christmas 2 years ago on it. My dad still runs iTunes on it to manage his 3rd gen iPod. The G3 won't encode video worth a damn obviously, nor even play back h264 or pretty much any MPEG4 video. The only thing that drags ass on it are web pages loaded with crazy flash advertisements, Firefox 2.0 with Adblock Plus takes care of that though. Overall it's been incredibly low maintenance for me compared to the POS Win98 machine that it replaced, so I'm happy with it. And it does what they need quietly and reliably, without taking up much space, so they're happy with it.
Please show me a usable Windows XP box that's 8 years old and running the necessary on-access anti-virus scanner. I'm sure you can get XP to run on a 450MHz P3 with 512MB of RAM, but go ahead and put AV software on it and try to run some programs made in the past 3 years on it, then tell me how well that works out for ya.
What a dumb arrogant statement. Microsoft has their own fucking products that don't run correctly under regular user accounts. Dynamics GP is one example. We run Dynamics for our ERP system, and we have to change NTFS permissions on various folders, and permissions on a handful of registry keys to get it to run correctly.
I haven't used SFU since v2.0 on NT4, but I never attempted to compile anything on it.
I'd imagine that's pretty painful, given the Unix kernels do stuff a bit differently than the NT kernel with its "limited support for POSIX API" and all.
The FCC can levy hefty fines per TV they see without one of the information tags.
Um... I have never seen one of these tags on the cheap obsolete TV's they sell everywhere (especially Walmart). Besides the box saying SDTV, there's nothing that indicates that those TV's are going to suck at best (if they have a built-in ATSC tuner) after the cut over. In fact, I'm sure there's quite a few uninformed people that have already seen this SDTV badge on a box and thought: This must be one of them new fangled digital TV's, this is what I need to buy.
How far did the install process get? Obviously, it's not going to be able to install the OS if it doesn't recognize your storage controller. If the Live CD wouldn't even boot... perhaps Ubuntu tried (and failed) to use your hard drive for temporary swap space. Though, if that were the case, I'd expect it to show some kind of error message (which you didn't mention) though.
Windows installer has always done this on servers and workstations that have exotic RAID controllers. If you can't supply a *floppy containing the **drivers, in the ***EXACT format that the Windows installer expects to see it. You get greeted with a vague error message about no storage devices found, and a countdown to reboot.
They've finally fixed this crap for the desktop. The Windows Vista installer, which will accept storage drivers during the installation from a variety of modern media such as: CD, USB flash drive, etc. I'd assume this long awaited feature will appear in the next server version of Windows.
*legacy technology that many machines don't even have anymore, nor will the damn Windows installer even recognize a USB floppy drive unless the BIOS properly emulates it.
**drivers now days often won't even fit on a single floppy
***Promise for example, can't seem to figure this shit out, which often requires you to delete files, move them from folders to the root of the disk, edit config files, etc.
You might as well point out how "professional" the annoying cartoon dog found in the search dialogs of Windows XP is. Or, how about the beloved Clippy?
They did do this (though not via VM's) back in the day with the NT kernel. You could have different subsystems such as OS/2, POSIX (Which has now been replaced by Services For Unix), and Win32 running as kernel mode processes. Of course, they've since abandoned the other subsystems in favor of Win32.
You can also do a timing attack on the privilege escalation mechanism, if you're clever. Since the window it displays is just another window, with no way of ensuring:
* It's owned by the application you think owns it.
* It's displayed by the security framework, not a trojan.
Not like anyone else actually drops the arrow down and pays attention to it, but... the security framework does tell you exactly what binary (and it's path) is requesting your authentication at the bottom of the window, and it also tells you what right the application is requesting ie. system.install.root.admin
AFAIK, it would be a bitch to get Windowserver to allow a window of the exact same size to pop up over existing window in the exact same coordinates, from a different process, and steal the security framework's keyboard focus. Take a look at/var/log/windowserver.log to see what I'm talking about... all kinds of squawking in there...
kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXOrderWindow: Operation on a window 0x1 not owned by caller SecurityAgent
kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXGetWindowShape: Invalid window -1
So while it could be done, you'd have to hijack the Security framework at least, I don't think a simple window popover would work.
Yeah... a certain lot of IBM Deathstar(TM) 40GB and 80GB drives were famous 'round here for the dreaded "click of death".
And what's up with SMART technology rarely ever predicting their imminent failure. As I glance over at the box of ~40 failed drives that need to be destroyed, 2 of them predicted their failure with the SMART info. The rest, spontaneously died as Win2K silently logged disk errors in the System log instead of... maybe POPPING UP A FREAKIN' DIALOG TELLING THE USER THAT A DRIVE WAS REPEATEDLY MALFUNCTIONING!
I've been burned 3 times (yeah, I know, should've learned my damn lesson after the first mishap) by evil device driver updates provided through Windows Update. I thought the same thing as you...
if it ain't broke, don't fix it, i.e. don't update your BIOS if everything works fine sort of philosophy. But it was OFFICIAL man. You also have to remember, this is after MS giving all that PR about WHQL or official approved drivers and software.
Yeah, they're supposedly Windows Logo Qualified WHQL WTF$$%!@*#& drivers
First time it was an LT Win Modem update on my parent's Win98 machine. Wasted 2 days trying to resurrect that POS modem before I finally gave up and slapped a $40 USR hardware modem in it's place.
Second time was a Win2003 Web Server at my work, this "update" irreversibly trashed the NIC drivers. Even though device manager didn't indicate a problem with the NIC, it refused to pass traffic. Rolling back to the previous driver via Microsoft's mechanism did NOT fix the problem. Fortunately, this one was easily reversed by reverting to the pre-update broken mirror drive.
Last time was my girlfriend's Win98 machine, which had an Intel i810 board with all integrated Intel components, so I figured it HAD to be safe, this wasn't a machine full of crazy weird-ass hardware. Yeah, well that "update" hosed the NIC drivers. Fortunately this one was simply resolved with a re-install of the driver from Intel's site.
Lesson learned, DON'T install driver "updates" via Windows Update!
I've always wondered, does anyone actually enable the driver updates on their WSUS servers? I can't imagine how much space that would take, with all those insanely large HP, Canon, etc. print drivers! Downloading EVERY device driver "update" in Microsoft's catalog!? Ugh!
Just because M$ stops its support, does NOT mean the OS will stop in its tracks.
What happens when Microsoft decides to stop providing product activation support for XP (or any other product)? Then your copy of XP will be dead after 30 days.
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
on
Vista is Watching You
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However, many genres naturally have an interface that is too complicated for your average console games platform. Can you imagine controlling a complex real-time strategy title like Supreme Commander via a little handheld unit with a few twiddly things and pushy bits on it? How about a role-playing game where you need to give detailed orders to many party members with many specific abilities?
Hmm... all the major consoles support USB keyboards. Is the problem simply that the console game developers don't support these keyboards?
Well, the specifications, and typical consensus amongst people on the internet say EV-DO is many times faster than EDGE. Though, I don't use EV-DO for Slingplayer, I use it for work... VPN connectivity, file transfers, remote administration tools; which are typically bursty traffic. I perceive it to be much faster, especially considering my situation is the opposite of yours... I don't even have GSM coverage at all in my home, unless I stand in my driveway, where I get 1 bar, whereas I get a full CDMA signal. We have 2 of each type card here at work that the sales people take when they travel, they prefer the EV-DO cards, and fight and bitch over who gets them.
It's hilarious because AT&T won't even show you where they have 3G/HSDPA coverage unless you zoom into the city level! Hmm... wonder why that is?
You must be comparing 3G/HSDPA to 1xRTT (that would be faster). Because EDGE is not faster than EV-DO (it also has higher latency) nor is it faster than EV-DO rev. A.
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Same goes for Indiana, no SS# on my license.
I'm not saying the Mazdaspeed3 or Japanese cars in general are bad cars. No doubt stock for stock, the Mazdaspeed3 would totally blow the doors off all but heavily modded TDI Jetta's performance wise. I was just pointing out how your "torque conspiracy" argument was totally flawed.
Diesel cars only make sense here in the US for two kinds of people: ones that drive over 15,000 miles a year who refuse to drive a gas-powered bottom of the line econobox (this could change if US auto makers and foreign subsidiaries bring more appealing economy cars here), or diesel enthusiasts. Show me a gas car available here in the US that can accelerate from 0-60 in 8 seconds or less, has heated leather interior, power everything, stability control; that can manage 42+ MPG even when you accelerate like a banshee and set the cruise at 80 with the A/C on, and I'll ditch my TDI in a heartbeat.
FYI: Honda and Subaru are two Japanese companies that are already bringing their diesels over to the US.
No, that is not the fact you're wrong. First of all, your Mazdaspeed3 has a 2.3L engine. The VW TDI's in cars here in the US are mostly either 1.9L or 2.0L. That is not equivalent to the TDI you're comparing it to above.
Do you think it is by mere coincidence that almost every piece of heavy machinery is powered by a diesel engine as opposed to a gas engine? Quite simply, diesel engines make more usable torque.
What follows is a broad generalization. Look at the dyno charts for a turbodiesel engine, and you'll notice they have a fat torque curve almost immediately off of idle all the way up until about a grand short of redline. Gas engines on the other hand build their peak torque up slowly until right before redline. Translation? The gas engine wastes more time and energy downshifting to keep you inside of that torque curve.
The VW diesels we have here in the US are a poor example anyways because they're designed with emissions and economy as the top priority, not performance. In Europe there are a wide variety of VW TDI options to chose from, for example: a 2.0L 4-cyl Common Rail diesel that pounds out 197HP/295lb-ft at 1,800 RPMs stock. By the way, It's not uncommon for someone to merely change the ECU firmware on a completely otherwise stock TDI, to bust out an additional 30HP/75lb-ft while still managing 45+ MPG. You can go even farther if you're willing to upgrade the clutch and other driveline components.
P.S. Let us know when your turbocharged Mazdaspeed3 hits 300,000 miles with only routine maintenance and no major engine work. There are some diesels that have logged over a million miles!
So you're saying you can get free wifi roaming on supported handsets? Free as in, comes out of your normal airtime right? I did not know this.
I don't want to pay extra for wifi, because I don't need unlimited calling. I'm not interested in paying any more than I already do. I only have 300 "daytime minutes", unlimited nights/weekends and 500txt/mo for $45/mo after all the taxes and fees. Even with only 300 minutes, I've never went over.
How hard is the wifi roaming on the phone's battery?
Same here, I HATE Verizon. But I'm stuck with them for the coverage. GSM calls don't even work in my house unless I'm standing in front of my living room window.
Now, if I could get 802.11 roaming to make up for the loss of coverage in my house FOR A REASONABLE PRICE, I'd switch to a T-Mobile based Android in a second.
How unfortunate. Isn't t-mobile the smallest network in the US, with the least coverage, and no 3G/high-speed data whatsoever?
It was bad enough when Apple locked the iphone to AT&T, but at least they have some 3G and good coverage (after acquiring Cingular.) But t-mobile? That's not going to be good for business :(
T-Mobile works off of Sprint.
Which does have 3-G and was the first large service provider to offer it.
Uh WRONG, T-Mobile is a GSM provider like AT&T/Cingular is. They have roaming agreements with AT&T, and therefore have similar coverage. They're way behind on the 3G, but they've begun to roll it out to markets.
Verizon, Sprint and Alltel OTOH are CDMA, you could say Cricket "works off Sprint", as they are also CDMA.
Oh, like those wonderful kernel-mode print drivers? Yeah, I don't miss our old NT4 print server so much really. One misbehaving HP print driver could cause so much havoc.
Probably a USB Mass Storage Device... ME and 89SE often had no support for these without a driver from the manufacturer.
Please show me a usable Windows XP box that's 8 years old and running the necessary on-access anti-virus scanner. I'm sure you can get XP to run on a 450MHz P3 with 512MB of RAM, but go ahead and put AV software on it and try to run some programs made in the past 3 years on it, then tell me how well that works out for ya.
Gigabyte has had this feature for a while on their boards
What a dumb arrogant statement. Microsoft has their own fucking products that don't run correctly under regular user accounts. Dynamics GP is one example. We run Dynamics for our ERP system, and we have to change NTFS permissions on various folders, and permissions on a handful of registry keys to get it to run correctly.
I haven't used SFU since v2.0 on NT4, but I never attempted to compile anything on it.
I'd imagine that's pretty painful, given the Unix kernels do stuff a bit differently than the NT kernel with its "limited support for POSIX API" and all.
You just install SFU on said Windows box from the MSDN, and curl bash.
How far did the install process get? Obviously, it's not going to be able to install the OS if it doesn't recognize your storage controller. If the Live CD wouldn't even boot... perhaps Ubuntu tried (and failed) to use your hard drive for temporary swap space. Though, if that were the case, I'd expect it to show some kind of error message (which you didn't mention) though.
Windows installer has always done this on servers and workstations that have exotic RAID controllers. If you can't supply a *floppy containing the **drivers, in the ***EXACT format that the Windows installer expects to see it. You get greeted with a vague error message about no storage devices found, and a countdown to reboot.
They've finally fixed this crap for the desktop. The Windows Vista installer, which will accept storage drivers during the installation from a variety of modern media such as: CD, USB flash drive, etc. I'd assume this long awaited feature will appear in the next server version of Windows.
*legacy technology that many machines don't even have anymore, nor will the damn Windows installer even recognize a USB floppy drive unless the BIOS properly emulates it. **drivers now days often won't even fit on a single floppy ***Promise for example, can't seem to figure this shit out, which often requires you to delete files, move them from folders to the root of the disk, edit config files, etc.
You might as well point out how "professional" the annoying cartoon dog found in the search dialogs of Windows XP is. Or, how about the beloved Clippy?
Metallica - Load (shortly before they killed Napster)
They did do this (though not via VM's) back in the day with the NT kernel. You could have different subsystems such as OS/2, POSIX (Which has now been replaced by Services For Unix), and Win32 running as kernel mode processes. Of course, they've since abandoned the other subsystems in favor of Win32.
Not like anyone else actually drops the arrow down and pays attention to it, but... the security framework does tell you exactly what binary (and it's path) is requesting your authentication at the bottom of the window, and it also tells you what right the application is requesting ie. system.install.root.admin
AFAIK, it would be a bitch to get Windowserver to allow a window of the exact same size to pop up over existing window in the exact same coordinates, from a different process, and steal the security framework's keyboard focus. Take a look at
kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXOrderWindow: Operation on a window 0x1 not owned by caller SecurityAgent
kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXGetWindowShape: Invalid window -1
So while it could be done, you'd have to hijack the Security framework at least, I don't think a simple window popover would work.
Maxtor... there's your problem!
Yeah... a certain lot of IBM Deathstar(TM) 40GB and 80GB drives were famous 'round here for the dreaded "click of death".
And what's up with SMART technology rarely ever predicting their imminent failure. As I glance over at the box of ~40 failed drives that need to be destroyed, 2 of them predicted their failure with the SMART info. The rest, spontaneously died as Win2K silently logged disk errors in the System log instead of... maybe POPPING UP A FREAKIN' DIALOG TELLING THE USER THAT A DRIVE WAS REPEATEDLY MALFUNCTIONING!
Yeah, they're supposedly Windows Logo Qualified WHQL WTF$$%!@*#& drivers
First time it was an LT Win Modem update on my parent's Win98 machine. Wasted 2 days trying to resurrect that POS modem before I finally gave up and slapped a $40 USR hardware modem in it's place.
Second time was a Win2003 Web Server at my work, this "update" irreversibly trashed the NIC drivers. Even though device manager didn't indicate a problem with the NIC, it refused to pass traffic. Rolling back to the previous driver via Microsoft's mechanism did NOT fix the problem. Fortunately, this one was easily reversed by reverting to the pre-update broken mirror drive.
Last time was my girlfriend's Win98 machine, which had an Intel i810 board with all integrated Intel components, so I figured it HAD to be safe, this wasn't a machine full of crazy weird-ass hardware. Yeah, well that "update" hosed the NIC drivers. Fortunately this one was simply resolved with a re-install of the driver from Intel's site.
Lesson learned, DON'T install driver "updates" via Windows Update!
I've always wondered, does anyone actually enable the driver updates on their WSUS servers? I can't imagine how much space that would take, with all those insanely large HP, Canon, etc. print drivers! Downloading EVERY device driver "update" in Microsoft's catalog!? Ugh!
Well, the specifications, and typical consensus amongst people on the internet say EV-DO is many times faster than EDGE. Though, I don't use EV-DO for Slingplayer, I use it for work... VPN connectivity, file transfers, remote administration tools; which are typically bursty traffic. I perceive it to be much faster, especially considering my situation is the opposite of yours... I don't even have GSM coverage at all in my home, unless I stand in my driveway, where I get 1 bar, whereas I get a full CDMA signal. We have 2 of each type card here at work that the sales people take when they travel, they prefer the EV-DO cards, and fight and bitch over who gets them.
It's hilarious because AT&T won't even show you where they have 3G/HSDPA coverage unless you zoom into the city level! Hmm... wonder why that is?
You must be comparing 3G/HSDPA to 1xRTT (that would be faster). Because EDGE is not faster than EV-DO (it also has higher latency) nor is it faster than EV-DO rev. A.