This allows for neat features that require cooperation between several system components, which would be more difficult to implement in the Linux world. For instance, in FreeBSD you can press ^T while cp is copying some huge file, and this will send SIGINFO to cp, causing it to print a progress report to STDERR. Handy.
Wow, nifty, I never knew about that! I just tried it out on Mac OS 10.5.
I was not so lucky, after wasting my time with the automated system, I had to talk to the "real" people, because I had replaced defective motherboards in several machines.
With the OEM copy that came with the computer they quit using when they bought the mac. They may be not quite 'legal' due to OEM licensing restrictions, but they are genuine.
It's a violation of MS's EULA to use an OEM copy of Windows on a different computer (motherboard). Installing an OEM copy on a different computer will trigger WPA and require a call to MS's clearinghouse to get it activated successfully. Though, in my experience, the people on the other end could care less if you're trying to activate a copy of Windows on some different hardware, they'll give you the key anyways after you sit on hold for 45 minutes.
aren't the latest version of Flash and most other Browser plugins both X86 and Windows specific
Nope, there're also Flash plugins for Nokia n-series (which I believe is Symbian OS running on ARM), x86 Linux, PPC Mac OS, x86 Mac OS... someone even mentioned their Archos media tablet running an ARM CPU with a full-featured Flash plugin.
And aren't some #$%! webpages still pretty much IE only?
Most of these are things like Intranet sites, and other poorly supported corporate garbage. I can only think of one website I use regularly off the top of my head: hp.com B2B is awful, it works in other browsers, but it is buggy as HELL. I haven't encountered any other websites in years that are IE only.
If it ain't X86 compatible, it ain't shit. 99% of those netbooks are running Windows XP
I know I don't represent the masses of benevolent Windows netbook users, but I could personally give two shits about a netbook running Windows. As long as it has a decent mainstream browser, full Flash plugin support, and has the balls to play full-screen video smoothly with the latest codecs, I don't care if it's running Linux. I don't want to run Quicken or Outlook on the damn thing, that's why you have VPN and an RDP client on it to connect to your real computers as needed.
Yes, because it's quite simple to backport fixes to a codebase that is 10 years out of sync with your mainline.
I call bullshit, 2003 Server is basically the same codebase as XP with some extended (server) features. This is purely a strategic move to scare people into upgrading. You can even copy DLL's from 2003 to XP to enable server features like multiple concurrent users in Terminal Services. Perhaps we can do the same thing to fix TCP/IP in XP?
Their reasoning that XP is safe because it comes with the firewall enabled by default is bullshit too, soon as you join the machine to AD it's going to be vulnerable to any rouge device on the local broadcast domain.
this map would beg to differ http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_maps.asp, but of course you guys over east think you're midwest so I can see how you would think that wind isnt that great of an option...but for us in NE, SD, ND Michigan (along the lakes), it is fantastic.
That's the same map I linked to, and both southern halves of Indiana and Ohio are white, aka 0, aka not ideal.
WTF would someone mod that troll for!? Anyways, however dumb his claim about the sky color in Ohio may be. He's pretty much right about solar energy in the Midwest for the most part, I live in SE Indiana: have a look for yourself. Wind power doesn't look much better for us either.
Look at Saturn, the first console to support internet-based play.
Not entirely true, the NES had the woefully unsuccessful Teleplay Modem, and Sega's own Genesis had Sega Channel that preceded the modem in the Saturn. Though I guess they technically didn't connect to teh interwebs, nor did all of them have online multiplayer features, but some did before Saturn.
i recently heard on OPB (oregon public broadcasting) that a local municipality (can't remember which one) had just upgraded their 911 service to handle incoming text message emergency's. you will now be able to text your emergency to 911 operators who can decipher your message with their new text shorthand dictionary, i kid you not, and then dispatch the appropriate emergency response.
lol
E911 text capability isn't really that bad of an idea. I've been on vacations before where I barely had coverage, calls would cut out and drop, but I was able to send and receive text messages with ease.
As a person that lives in a region powered mostly by coal, this whole lets tax the fuck outta coal cap & trade bandwagon annoys the shit out of me. I'm sure it doesn't concern all you hippies living out on the East and West coasts with your fancy solar, wind and wave power, your energy will be relatively cheap in the foreseeable future. Oh well, screw everyone else for our agenda! Right?
Explain exactly how places like Southern Indiana for example, are going to be able to completely replace coal fired plants with wind, or solar power. I don't see it being viable, EVER, especially not with current technology. Throw the extra demand on the grid due to everyone plugging their electric cars (that btw, are woefully inefficient in northern climates, especially if you like premium features like... heat and defrost) in, and it becomes even more unrealistic!
I'm all for nuclear power (which AC treehugger above doesn't even acknowledge as a "green" source of power), but even with that; assuming you can get a nuclear plant approved and built in a reasonable amount of time (which you can't with current retarded legislation), where the hell is the funding going to come from for that? The economy is shit right now, all we need is more taxes and higher energy costs, which raise the cost of pretty much everything else produced. Guess where most of your corn comes from?
There are a lot of hacks required for backwards compatibility of x86. Hell, switch to a new architecture.
They tried this with Itanium and PowerPC (so long Mac G4 and G5 support!). It failed, consumers clearly want x86 cruft. Yeah, we're talking about the same consumers that actually bought P4's. We can additionally thank IBM for sucking so bad on the PowerPC alliance.
No doubt, cars like the S2000 and Mazda RXs are fun to drive, they rev to the moon! I've always wanted to build a roadster with a little 300HP V6 2-stroke outboard engine; it'd need a lot of gears or a CV tranny to keep that engine in it's powerband, and a crazy exhaust with a bunch of expansion chambers, but it'd be awesome.
Have you ever even driven a diesel? Put an additional 800lbs of passenger and cargo weight into any stock vtec 4cyl, and watch it's acceleration drop tremendously. Try to pass somebody on a two-lane country road in a loaded down vtec... no thanks, I'll take the turbodiesel for daily driving.
Assuming you live in the US, you're probably seeing either a lot of poorly maintained TDIs, or pre-04 TDIs with larger aftermarket injector nozzles.
The 04 and newer TDIs have extremely precise injection systems that pretty much eliminate any smoke during hard acceleration, that is, assuming they haven't been modded. If a newer (>04) stock TDI is "belching" thick black smoke like a diesel truck, there are some serious mechanical problems that need to be addressed.
My 04 TDI didn't smoke at all until I had the ECU remapped ("chipped") with a more aggressive firmware that added 30HP and 70lb-ft of torque. Even now, it only smokes lightly (not belch) when I have the pedal down to the floor between 3-5k RPMs. That said, I have seen other older, heavily modded TDIs that are capable of creating large clouds of opaque smoke as they shred the pavement with crazy amounts of torque.
The new common-rail TDI's (09 and up) have advanced emissions systems that pretty much eliminate most of the soot. Here's a video where they actually put a coffee filter on the exhaust of a new Toureg TDI and it comes off without a trace of soot on it.
GM got such a bad rap on the diesel and for the most part it was unfair.
The GM diesel where sold to people that didn't know how to maintain them and by dealers that really didn't know how to maintain them.
Unfortunately, the dealer problems still persist with VW diesels, it's well known amongst TDI owners that the majority of dealers screw up simple timing belt replacements in TDIs way too often. Just take a look in the forums over at tdiclub.com and search for "dealer timing belt". It may be as minor as the injection timing being set incorrectly, resulting in a minor loss of power and MPG's, or they get cheap and lazy and don't replace the idler pulley or water pump, causing the timing belt to break soon after and the valves to crash into the pistons. Good news for me, I never go to the stealership, I work on my own vehicles anyways. Also, taking your PD TDI to an oil change place that doesn't use the correct 505.01 rated oil can cause costly camshaft, follower and injector damage.
There were also some serious design flaws with the early GM diesels, they blew head gaskets and warped heads like crazy. This really damaged the reputation of diesel engines amongst people in the US in general.
Thermodynamically, yes, it is possible to have massive coils and tons of compressor capacity to pull it off without resistive heat. Take your scientist hat off for a moment and look at the real world facts...
Nobody does that because it's not financially feasible to get an air-to-air heat pump system large enough to heat an entire house, in a northern climate, without the assistance of auxiliary heat. A Geothermal system can do it reasonably (still very expensive), but you can't have a Geothermal system in a vehicle. Also, air-to-air heat pumps accumulate frost on the outside coil during operation, in defrost cycles, they essentially switch into AC mode. Most people don't like freezing cold air coming out of their vents in the winter when this occurs, so this is another reason that the auxiliary heating elements are necessary.
Also, have you ever noticed how much bigger (coil capacity) a high-efficiency heat pump already is in comparison to it's air conditioner counterpart? Where are you going to cram all this coil space in a little compact car? How efficient is it going to be with the frequent defrost cycles? Especially when the evaporator coil is being constantly blasted by rain/snow/ice in the front of the car!
As far as I know, there aren't any cars that use heat pumps to heat the car. You know why? Heat pumps work great to heat buildings because they can run for long periods to keep the temperature stable, but their efficiency goes out the window if you let the building cool off significantly and try to heat it back up. In Midwest and Northern climates, auxiliary heat ($$resistance heat coils$$) have to run along with the heat pump to raise the temperature (more than 3 degrees) in a reasonable amount of time (less than several hours) when it's below about 35 degrees. Whats worse, even with modern heat pump technology, when the temperature drops below 0F it's necessary to run the auxiliary heat constantly along with the heat pump to even keep up with the heat losses in the (heavily insulated) building.
I have a programmable thermostat and a heat pump at home. I found that during the heating season, it's actually cheaper to keep the temperature constant than to allow the house to cool down during the work days and nights for those exact reasons.
How many people want to get in their car in 20 degree weather, turn on the heat and get some nice 70 degree air coming out of the vents to warm them? *cricket noises*
Slashdot Mirror
This allows for neat features that require cooperation between several system components, which would be more difficult to implement in the Linux world. For instance, in FreeBSD you can press ^T while cp is copying some huge file, and this will send SIGINFO to cp, causing it to print a progress report to STDERR. Handy.
Wow, nifty, I never knew about that! I just tried it out on Mac OS 10.5.
Does Cloud Computing have mirrors on the ceiling or pink champagne on ice?
I was not so lucky, after wasting my time with the automated system, I had to talk to the "real" people, because I had replaced defective motherboards in several machines.
It's a violation of MS's EULA to use an OEM copy of Windows on a different computer (motherboard). Installing an OEM copy on a different computer will trigger WPA and require a call to MS's clearinghouse to get it activated successfully. Though, in my experience, the people on the other end could care less if you're trying to activate a copy of Windows on some different hardware, they'll give you the key anyways after you sit on hold for 45 minutes.
Nobody that thinks "RAID=Backup" qualifies as an "IT guy", that's a disaster waiting to happen.
Don't forget Alpha, a lot of the same engineers went to work on Itanium at Intel, but we all know how well that's turned out so far.
Nope, there're also Flash plugins for Nokia n-series (which I believe is Symbian OS running on ARM), x86 Linux, PPC Mac OS, x86 Mac OS... someone even mentioned their Archos media tablet running an ARM CPU with a full-featured Flash plugin.
Most of these are things like Intranet sites, and other poorly supported corporate garbage. I can only think of one website I use regularly off the top of my head: hp.com B2B is awful, it works in other browsers, but it is buggy as HELL. I haven't encountered any other websites in years that are IE only.
You can also add the majority of Cisco network hardware to the list of things utilizing PowerPC CPUs.
I know I don't represent the masses of benevolent Windows netbook users, but I could personally give two shits about a netbook running Windows. As long as it has a decent mainstream browser, full Flash plugin support, and has the balls to play full-screen video smoothly with the latest codecs, I don't care if it's running Linux. I don't want to run Quicken or Outlook on the damn thing, that's why you have VPN and an RDP client on it to connect to your real computers as needed.
Yes, because it's quite simple to backport fixes to a codebase that is 10 years out of sync with your mainline.
I call bullshit, 2003 Server is basically the same codebase as XP with some extended (server) features. This is purely a strategic move to scare people into upgrading. You can even copy DLL's from 2003 to XP to enable server features like multiple concurrent users in Terminal Services. Perhaps we can do the same thing to fix TCP/IP in XP?
Their reasoning that XP is safe because it comes with the firewall enabled by default is bullshit too, soon as you join the machine to AD it's going to be vulnerable to any rouge device on the local broadcast domain.
this map would beg to differ http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_maps.asp, but of course you guys over east think you're midwest so I can see how you would think that wind isnt that great of an option...but for us in NE, SD, ND Michigan (along the lakes), it is fantastic.
That's the same map I linked to, and both southern halves of Indiana and Ohio are white, aka 0, aka not ideal.
WTF would someone mod that troll for!? Anyways, however dumb his claim about the sky color in Ohio may be. He's pretty much right about solar energy in the Midwest for the most part, I live in SE Indiana: have a look for yourself. Wind power doesn't look much better for us either.
Look at Saturn, the first console to support internet-based play.
Not entirely true, the NES had the woefully unsuccessful Teleplay Modem, and Sega's own Genesis had Sega Channel that preceded the modem in the Saturn. Though I guess they technically didn't connect to teh interwebs, nor did all of them have online multiplayer features, but some did before Saturn.
i recently heard on OPB (oregon public broadcasting) that a local municipality (can't remember which one) had just upgraded their 911 service to handle incoming text message emergency's. you will now be able to text your emergency to 911 operators who can decipher your message with their new text shorthand dictionary, i kid you not, and then dispatch the appropriate emergency response. lol
E911 text capability isn't really that bad of an idea. I've been on vacations before where I barely had coverage, calls would cut out and drop, but I was able to send and receive text messages with ease.
As a person that lives in a region powered mostly by coal, this whole lets tax the fuck outta coal cap & trade bandwagon annoys the shit out of me. I'm sure it doesn't concern all you hippies living out on the East and West coasts with your fancy solar, wind and wave power, your energy will be relatively cheap in the foreseeable future. Oh well, screw everyone else for our agenda! Right?
Explain exactly how places like Southern Indiana for example, are going to be able to completely replace coal fired plants with wind, or solar power. I don't see it being viable, EVER, especially not with current technology. Throw the extra demand on the grid due to everyone plugging their electric cars (that btw, are woefully inefficient in northern climates, especially if you like premium features like... heat and defrost) in, and it becomes even more unrealistic!
I'm all for nuclear power (which AC treehugger above doesn't even acknowledge as a "green" source of power), but even with that; assuming you can get a nuclear plant approved and built in a reasonable amount of time (which you can't with current retarded legislation), where the hell is the funding going to come from for that? The economy is shit right now, all we need is more taxes and higher energy costs, which raise the cost of pretty much everything else produced. Guess where most of your corn comes from?
They tried this with Itanium and PowerPC (so long Mac G4 and G5 support!). It failed, consumers clearly want x86 cruft. Yeah, we're talking about the same consumers that actually bought P4's. We can additionally thank IBM for sucking so bad on the PowerPC alliance.
Here's the website with those infomercials.
This I gotta see - have any video?
I didn't search very much, but I've seen lots of "chipped", otherwise stock diesel trucks running low 13's at the local dragstrip...
Here's a PSD excursion running a 14.9, not even trying, barely any smoke at all.
Nice... yeah, VAG-COM is definitely on my wish list, then I'll have to get it running under WINE on my mininote.
No doubt, cars like the S2000 and Mazda RXs are fun to drive, they rev to the moon! I've always wanted to build a roadster with a little 300HP V6 2-stroke outboard engine; it'd need a lot of gears or a CV tranny to keep that engine in it's powerband, and a crazy exhaust with a bunch of expansion chambers, but it'd be awesome.
Have you ever even driven a diesel? Put an additional 800lbs of passenger and cargo weight into any stock vtec 4cyl, and watch it's acceleration drop tremendously. Try to pass somebody on a two-lane country road in a loaded down vtec... no thanks, I'll take the turbodiesel for daily driving.
Assuming you live in the US, you're probably seeing either a lot of poorly maintained TDIs, or pre-04 TDIs with larger aftermarket injector nozzles.
The 04 and newer TDIs have extremely precise injection systems that pretty much eliminate any smoke during hard acceleration, that is, assuming they haven't been modded. If a newer (>04) stock TDI is "belching" thick black smoke like a diesel truck, there are some serious mechanical problems that need to be addressed.
My 04 TDI didn't smoke at all until I had the ECU remapped ("chipped") with a more aggressive firmware that added 30HP and 70lb-ft of torque. Even now, it only smokes lightly (not belch) when I have the pedal down to the floor between 3-5k RPMs. That said, I have seen other older, heavily modded TDIs that are capable of creating large clouds of opaque smoke as they shred the pavement with crazy amounts of torque.
The new common-rail TDI's (09 and up) have advanced emissions systems that pretty much eliminate most of the soot. Here's a video where they actually put a coffee filter on the exhaust of a new Toureg TDI and it comes off without a trace of soot on it.
Unfortunately, the dealer problems still persist with VW diesels, it's well known amongst TDI owners that the majority of dealers screw up simple timing belt replacements in TDIs way too often. Just take a look in the forums over at tdiclub.com and search for "dealer timing belt". It may be as minor as the injection timing being set incorrectly, resulting in a minor loss of power and MPG's, or they get cheap and lazy and don't replace the idler pulley or water pump, causing the timing belt to break soon after and the valves to crash into the pistons. Good news for me, I never go to the stealership, I work on my own vehicles anyways. Also, taking your PD TDI to an oil change place that doesn't use the correct 505.01 rated oil can cause costly camshaft, follower and injector damage.
There were also some serious design flaws with the early GM diesels, they blew head gaskets and warped heads like crazy. This really damaged the reputation of diesel engines amongst people in the US in general.
Thermodynamically, yes, it is possible to have massive coils and tons of compressor capacity to pull it off without resistive heat. Take your scientist hat off for a moment and look at the real world facts...
Nobody does that because it's not financially feasible to get an air-to-air heat pump system large enough to heat an entire house, in a northern climate, without the assistance of auxiliary heat. A Geothermal system can do it reasonably (still very expensive), but you can't have a Geothermal system in a vehicle. Also, air-to-air heat pumps accumulate frost on the outside coil during operation, in defrost cycles, they essentially switch into AC mode. Most people don't like freezing cold air coming out of their vents in the winter when this occurs, so this is another reason that the auxiliary heating elements are necessary.
Also, have you ever noticed how much bigger (coil capacity) a high-efficiency heat pump already is in comparison to it's air conditioner counterpart? Where are you going to cram all this coil space in a little compact car? How efficient is it going to be with the frequent defrost cycles? Especially when the evaporator coil is being constantly blasted by rain/snow/ice in the front of the car!
As far as I know, there aren't any cars that use heat pumps to heat the car. You know why? Heat pumps work great to heat buildings because they can run for long periods to keep the temperature stable, but their efficiency goes out the window if you let the building cool off significantly and try to heat it back up. In Midwest and Northern climates, auxiliary heat ($$resistance heat coils$$) have to run along with the heat pump to raise the temperature (more than 3 degrees) in a reasonable amount of time (less than several hours) when it's below about 35 degrees. Whats worse, even with modern heat pump technology, when the temperature drops below 0F it's necessary to run the auxiliary heat constantly along with the heat pump to even keep up with the heat losses in the (heavily insulated) building.
I have a programmable thermostat and a heat pump at home. I found that during the heating season, it's actually cheaper to keep the temperature constant than to allow the house to cool down during the work days and nights for those exact reasons.
How many people want to get in their car in 20 degree weather, turn on the heat and get some nice 70 degree air coming out of the vents to warm them? *cricket noises*