I heard the NPR broadcast. GM maintained that although there was always a long waiting list to get the cars, when they contacted everyone on the waiting list, they could only get 50 serious people to lease them. That is their claim. It cannot be easily verified independently.
I do know that my girlfriend signed up on the waiting list for a hybrid vehicle. But when it came time to buy it, she did not want to. Her car was paid off and so she would have to have a car payment again.
So maybe it would have been more if they could buy them instead of lease them.
One EV enthusiast explained why he did not lease an EV1. So summarize, for the cost of a three year lease, he purchased an electric car. He admits that the EV1 was much nicer than what he bought/built. For his $20,000, he got a modified Volkswagon that drops to 25 MPH on the freeway if the freeway goes uphill to steeply.
For $15,000, you can get one of these.
From the NPR story, it sounded like GM wanted to end the EV1 because they are essentially prototypes and they don't have plants to build spare parts for them. They don't think that they could recoup the cost of tooling up plants for the spare parts.
The demand for electric vehicles depends on how much you would sell them for. I think a lot of people would buy a mass-produced electric car if it cost the same as a gas powered one. But that isn't the case today. It costs a lot of money to create a new car model and get all the regulatory approvals.
There are only so many people willing to go to the trouble of custom making electric cars, so the supply will remain small.
I applaud the evironmentalists for trying to block the truck that took the last EV1s off to be destroyed. I am not that committed. But because they are, it made it a news story. The story aired the same day that oil futures hit a new record of $56.46 per barrel and GM Stock dropped %14. So this is something worth talking about.
After reading the article, I got the impression that their PBX infrastructure was aging and that they had trouble getting replacement parts. They consider spending a million bucks to upgrade the land line. But because almost no one makes long distance calls anymore, they don't think they could re-coup the cost. You could charge a flat fee that covers the cost, but then it would be so high that no one would opt in.
So the universities are getting out of the phone business. Why should they try to compete in the phone business? They are in the education business.
For me, I'll never miss copying and pasting between two files by doing:
ma to mark the start of the block j as many times as it took to get to the end of the block, counting in my head as I go 'a to return to the top of the block:.,+6w/tmp/ken1
Then in another window, or after exiting and running vi on the second file.
move to where you want the block of code:r/tmp/ken1
That is so much faster than Copy, Paste.
I used vi for years. Then I leared emacs and enjoyed the directory navigation and being able to have lots of files open. JDEE is not to bad for java in emacs.
But after starting to use Eclipse, I hardly ever write code in emacs and never in vi.
The bug was that after installing Fedora on a system with Windows XP, the master boot record would be corrupted and you couldn't boot Windows XP anymore.
This is the bugzilla entry. It was present in Core 2.
I was tracking Red Hat Linux distributions up through 9. I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue. Most folks on/. seem to think this is a "feature." But I only have one computer at home and I need to have Windows XP available.
So I am stuck with Windows XP, Redhat 9, and Debian stable on my machine. I can't get Debian to work properly with everything I have on Redhat 9.
At work, people ask me what I think about Linux. I wish I could recommend an up to date distribution that I use at home, but I can't. I am not going to spend about USD $1000 for a seperate machine to run Fedora on.
Red Hat thought their precious name was too important to give out for the $40 or so the box set used to cost.
Well at work we program in Java which means that Windows works fine for what we do. Why would I want to recommend that they switch to a distribution I haven't tried out first at home? Being the only Linux person at work means that if I recommend it, I support it. In exchange for that hassle, I would like RedHat to allow me to track their latest stuff for a reasonable charge.
There are inteligent, capable people both with and without degrees. There are idiots both with and without degrees.
The following statements are prejudice:
1) I would never hire someone without a degree 2) I would never hire someone with a degree 3) I would never hire someone with a PhD
Some folks who work in technical fields and do not have degrees are pretty sensitive about the subject. They do not want someone to devalue their experience and knowledge just because they did not get a piece of paper.
I got a degree. It was not in Computer Science. I enjoyed all the learning I did in college. I enjoyed learning a foreign langauge and then travelling to that country afterwards. I enjoyed learning Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Philosophy, and Political Science. I enjoyed having professors that really knew what they were talking about.
Every now and then I say something that shows I assume that all my fellow programmers have degrees. I just forget that not everyone got to where I did by the same path. But if they feel secure about themselves, they will realize that I didn't mean to insult them, I just forgot.
I use Eclipse. It is free. It is also pretty good. They have plugins for things like Source Safe or CVS revision control. I don't care so much for their SQL plugin. I use vienna or Oracle sqlplus for that.
You can't print from it in Linux but you can in Windows. You would have to ask the eclipse folks why they didn't bother to write a function to print pages out in Postscript.
I used to code in C (7 years). I used to code in C++ (another 7 years). I have used Perl and Python. I prefer Java for the following reasons:
1) I like programming in an object oriented style. 2) C++ has lots of gotchas. My favorite is having to recompile client code for a class when the size of instances changes. 3) Java has a thriving job market. Smalltalk was to hard to get ahold of a widely used compiler (fork over a thousand dollars or more). And then once you learned it, you had to move to the few towns in which there was a job. 4) You can write cross-platform code that uses serial ports, network sockets, GUI code, encryption and much more without doing #ifdef or automake or autoconf stuff. You just write the code once, as they say. 5) I work on big programs that take a year to write. So the power of the language to help me organize things makes a big difference. So Perl, in particular, is out! C code gets hard (for me) to manage after about 15,000 lines.
I use an IDE written in Java all day and I do not think it is horribly slow. Emacs, of course, runs more quickly, but I have to remember a lot of strange key combinations to get anything done and it looks like crap.
I guess YMMV. Hate and loathe all you want. It leaves more work for me. You are entitled to your opinion.
I notice that debian, for example, has glib 1.2 and glib 2.0.1. If you have apps that depend on glib 1.2, you cannot remove it from your system and only have glib 2.
The same is true of the JRE. You may run some Java apps that were written against 1.3 and other Java apps that were written against 1.4.
Even if apps that run using older APIs are open source, someone still has to do the work of updating the software to use the new version of the APIs.
It is not just a joke. There is a story of fliers being circulated in Allegheny County, PA that say:
Voters will be able to vote on both November 2 and November 3. In an attempt to limit voter conflict Allegheny County is requesting that the following actions be made:
Party Voting Date Republican November 2 Democrat November 3
I have not visited this web site before, so I will not vouch for their credibility, but they have a lot of stories of voter intimidation and suppression. Here is a map of their stories
My experience wasn't quite as bad as yours but is related.
When I updated my address with the Califonia DMV, I checked the box to have them update my voter registration. That was about 3 months ago.
Last month, I called the county voter registration office and they said I wasn't registered. So I drove down in person and submitted a change of address there. I confirmed it last week over the phone and was on the updated list of registered voters for my polling place. They had the main list printed Oct 22 and another list with the folks who registered afterwards.
There are election monitoring web sites. I would reccommend you go to http://www.commoncause.org and click on the voter experience link. They are collecting accounts of voting experiences (including irregularities). If this is a pattern, they can do something about it.
I have been working complex, graphical Java apps for a couple of years now. I have previously had many years of C and C++ experience.
Java with Swing is very flexible, especially with respect to event handling. It is complicated, but after a while, you get further up the learning curve.
For us, the result is fast enough. We might be able to get faster results with C++ but we don't for a variety of reasons.
Our app is cross platform and we use: JDBC for database access XML parsers JBoss for JMS messaging Serial port communication Socket communication Eclipse for development
All these components are free as in beer. We can keep bumping up to newer versions and hire more programmers without adding licensing costs. The serial/socket stuff in Java has a nice common interface built on top of java.io classes. And we dont have to port it. No #ifdef WINDOWS stuff.
At a previous job, we used a proprietary messaging system with C++ and the cost of it was astounding. JBoss/JMS is free. Their answer to porting issues was simple: no Unix is allowed in our plant.
Our customers are always asking for custom graphics and we have always been able to do this with Swing.
SWT might be better, but we now have a considerable body of code that we reuse and I don't think we can afford to convert it all.
Java is actively supported and there are always new Apache or Sun libraries coming out. The libraries are all well documented.
My only complaints with our setup are: 1) Eclipse does not have a screen builder, so we hand craft our screen code by hand. 2) Eclipse will print source files on Windows, but not on any Unix platform.
We are not doing 3D game programming or anything like that so the performance is quite acceptable.
I helped develop a intranet website that cut the amount of time it took to handle customer service calls. When it was put into production, it caused people to get laid off too.
So don't use computers or web ordering. Get on the phone and place your orders with a real person. Or you might cause them to be laid off too.
Oh, by the way. I got laid off of that job too. Maybe it was karma.
Maybe as programmers we should implement systems that make things take more time instead of less.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Just imagine the chaos that would result if television/radio transmissions were regulated at the state level.
Maybe you would send one delegate from each state to the ITU.
Or better yet, let each individual decide on what frequencies and how much power they will transmit.
If more people kept comic books and magazines for 40 years or so, then they would not be worth so much.
On doing more searches, I found that Corbin Motors went bankrupt in March 31, 2003.
It seems I leave things out a lot.
/. to accept the parent to this.
It took three tries to get
The $15,000 electric car is a Corbin Sparrow.
I think I saw one in Davis, CA.
I heard the NPR broadcast. GM maintained that although there was always a long waiting list to get the cars, when they contacted
everyone on the waiting list, they could only get 50 serious people to lease them.
That is their claim. It cannot be easily verified independently.
I do know that my girlfriend signed up on the waiting list for a hybrid vehicle. But when
it came time to buy it, she did not want to. Her car was paid off and so she would have to have
a car payment again.
So maybe it would have been more if they could buy them instead of lease them.
One EV enthusiast explained why he did not lease an EV1. So summarize, for the cost of a three year lease, he purchased an electric car.
He admits that the EV1 was much nicer than what he bought/built.
For his $20,000, he got a modified Volkswagon that drops to 25 MPH on the freeway if the freeway goes uphill to steeply.
For $15,000, you can get one of
these.
From the NPR story, it sounded like GM wanted to end the EV1 because they are essentially prototypes and they don't have plants to build spare parts for them.
They don't think that they could recoup the cost of tooling up plants for the spare parts.
The demand for electric vehicles depends on how much you would sell them for.
I think a lot of people would buy a mass-produced electric car if it cost the same as a gas powered one.
But that isn't the case today.
It costs a lot of money to create a new car model and get all the regulatory approvals.
There are only so many people willing to go to the trouble of custom making electric cars, so the supply will remain small.
I applaud the evironmentalists for trying to block the truck that took the last EV1s off to be destroyed.
I am not that committed. But because they are, it made it a news story.
The story aired the same day that oil futures hit
a new record of $56.46 per barrel and GM Stock dropped %14.
So this is something worth talking about.
Maybe they should get David Spade to do rebate fulfillment.
(I replied to the wrong parent before. -- I'm lame.)
Maybe they should get David Spade to do rebate fulfillment.
I guess it would work better as a link.
Cascades Volcano Observatory
Here are some pictures taken today. They show the ash plume.
M SH 04/framework.html
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/Images/
I would say the concept of getting paid for programming.
After reading the article, I got the impression that their PBX infrastructure was aging and that they had trouble getting replacement parts.
They consider spending a million bucks to upgrade the land line. But because almost no one makes long distance calls anymore, they don't think they could re-coup the cost.
You could charge a flat fee that covers the cost, but then it would be so high that no one would opt in.
So the universities are getting out of the phone business. Why should they try to compete in the phone business? They are in the education business.
For me, I'll never miss copying and pasting between two files by doing:
:.,+6w /tmp/ken1
:r /tmp/ken1
ma to mark the start of the block
j as many times as it took to get to the end of the block, counting in my head as I go
'a to return to the top of the block
Then in another window, or after exiting and running vi on the second file.
move to where you want the block of code
That is so much faster than Copy, Paste.
I used vi for years. Then I leared emacs and enjoyed the directory navigation and being able to have lots of files open.
JDEE is not to bad for java in emacs.
But after starting to use Eclipse, I hardly ever write code in emacs and never in vi.
YMMV
The bug was that after installing Fedora on a system with Windows XP, the master boot record would be corrupted and you couldn't boot Windows XP anymore.
This is the bugzilla entry. It was present in Core 2.
115980
Comment 161 says it is also present in Fedora Core 3. I guess it does not affect everyone who installs Fedora on a system with Windows XP on it.
I was tracking Red Hat Linux distributions up through 9. /. seem to think this is a "feature."
I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue.
Most folks on
But I only have one computer at home and I need to have Windows XP available.
So I am stuck with Windows XP, Redhat 9, and Debian stable on my machine.
I can't get Debian to work properly with everything I have on Redhat 9.
At work, people ask me what I think about Linux. I wish I could recommend an up to date distribution that I use at home, but I can't.
I am not going to spend about USD $1000 for a seperate machine to run Fedora on.
Red Hat thought their precious name was too important to give out for the $40 or so the box set used to cost.
Well at work we program in Java which means that Windows works fine for what we do.
Why would I want to recommend that they switch to a distribution I haven't tried out first at home?
Being the only Linux person at work means that if I recommend it, I support it.
In exchange for that hassle, I would like RedHat to allow me to track their latest stuff for a reasonable charge.
There are inteligent, capable people both with and without degrees.
There are idiots both with and without degrees.
The following statements are prejudice:
1) I would never hire someone without a degree
2) I would never hire someone with a degree
3) I would never hire someone with a PhD
Some folks who work in technical fields and do not have degrees are pretty sensitive about the subject.
They do not want someone to devalue their experience and knowledge just because they did not get a piece of paper.
I got a degree. It was not in Computer Science. I enjoyed all the learning I did in college.
I enjoyed learning a foreign langauge and then travelling to that country afterwards.
I enjoyed learning Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Philosophy, and Political Science.
I enjoyed having professors that really knew what they were talking about.
Every now and then I say something that shows I assume that all my fellow programmers have degrees.
I just forget that not everyone got to where I did by the same path.
But if they feel secure about themselves, they will realize that I didn't mean to insult them, I just forgot.
I use Eclipse. It is free. It is also pretty good.
They have plugins for things like Source Safe or CVS revision control.
I don't care so much for their SQL plugin. I use vienna or Oracle sqlplus for that.
You can't print from it in Linux but you can in Windows. You would have to ask the eclipse folks why they didn't bother to write
a function to print pages out in Postscript.
So I just wrote a javaprint shell script.
I used to code in C (7 years). I used to code in C++ (another 7 years).
I have used Perl and Python.
I prefer Java for the following reasons:
1) I like programming in an object oriented style.
2) C++ has lots of gotchas. My favorite is having to recompile client code for a class when the size of instances changes.
3) Java has a thriving job market. Smalltalk was to hard to get ahold of a widely used compiler (fork over a thousand dollars or more).
And then once you learned it, you had to move to the few towns in which there was a job.
4) You can write cross-platform code that uses serial ports, network sockets, GUI code, encryption and much more without doing #ifdef or automake or autoconf stuff.
You just write the code once, as they say.
5) I work on big programs that take a year to write. So the power of the language to help me organize things makes a big difference.
So Perl, in particular, is out!
C code gets hard (for me) to manage after about 15,000 lines.
I use an IDE written in Java all day and I do not think it is horribly slow. Emacs, of course, runs more quickly, but I have to remember a lot of strange key combinations to get anything done and it looks like crap.
I guess YMMV. Hate and loathe all you want. It leaves more work for me.
You are entitled to your opinion.
I have heard of it jokingly referred to as "German COBOL."
If you enter the world of SAP, be prepared for a thousand acronyms.
I recently read an article in the New Yorker magazine about an influential blog called "The Note."
They said it was very influential in Washington, DC politics. It is said to be read by the "Gang of 500" political elites.
I suspect the Drudge Report is another influential one. The page rank is an effect of influence and not a cause.
Page ranking can measure who's web site links to a blog. But it doesn't measure who reads it and how influential they are.
It is just like the glib library under linux.
I notice that debian, for example, has glib 1.2 and glib 2.0.1.
If you have apps that depend on glib 1.2, you cannot remove it from your system and only have glib 2.
The same is true of the JRE. You may run some Java apps that were written against 1.3 and other Java apps that were written against 1.4.
Even if apps that run using older APIs are open source, someone still has to do the work of updating the software to use the new version of the APIs.
I did a google search to find out how much shopping carts cost. All I got was software for web sites.
Oh well.
It is not just a joke. There is a story of fliers being circulated in Allegheny County, PA that say:
Voters will be able to vote on both November 2 and November 3. In an attempt to limit voter conflict Allegheny County is requesting that the following actions be made:
Party Voting Date
Republican November 2
Democrat November 3
Here is an scanned image of the
flyer.
I have not visited this web site before, so I will not vouch for their credibility, but they have a lot of stories of voter intimidation and suppression.
Here is a map of their stories
by state.
My experience wasn't quite as bad as yours but is related.
When I updated my address with the Califonia DMV, I checked the box to have them update my voter registration. That was about 3 months ago.
Last month, I called the county voter registration office and they said I wasn't registered.
So I drove down in person and submitted a change of address there.
I confirmed it last week over the phone and was on the updated list of registered voters for my polling place. They had the main list printed Oct 22 and another list with the folks who registered afterwards.
There are election monitoring web sites. I would reccommend you go to http://www.commoncause.org and click on the voter experience link.
They are collecting accounts of voting experiences (including irregularities).
If this is a pattern, they can do something about it.
I have been working complex, graphical Java apps for a couple of years now.
I have previously had many years of C and C++ experience.
Java with Swing is very flexible, especially with respect to event handling.
It is complicated, but after a while, you get further up the learning curve.
For us, the result is fast enough. We might be able to get faster results with C++ but we don't for a variety of reasons.
Our app is cross platform and we use:
JDBC for database access
XML parsers
JBoss for JMS messaging
Serial port communication
Socket communication
Eclipse for development
All these components are free as in beer. We can keep bumping up to newer versions and hire more programmers without adding licensing costs.
The serial/socket stuff in Java has a nice common interface built on top of java.io classes.
And we dont have to port it. No #ifdef WINDOWS stuff.
At a previous job, we used a proprietary messaging system with C++ and the cost of it was astounding.
JBoss/JMS is free.
Their answer to porting issues was simple: no Unix is allowed in our plant.
Our customers are always asking for custom graphics and we have always been able to do this with Swing.
SWT might be better, but we now have a considerable body of code that we reuse and I don't think we can afford to convert it all.
Java is actively supported and there are always new Apache or Sun libraries coming out.
The libraries are all well documented.
My only complaints with our setup are:
1) Eclipse does not have a screen builder, so we hand craft our screen code by hand.
2) Eclipse will print source files on Windows, but not on any Unix platform.
We are not doing 3D game programming or anything like that so the performance is quite acceptable.
I helped develop a intranet website that cut the amount of time it took to handle customer service calls.
:)
When it was put into production, it caused people to get laid off too.
So don't use computers or web ordering. Get on the phone and place your orders with a real person.
Or you might cause them to be laid off too.
Oh, by the way. I got laid off of that job too. Maybe it was karma.
Maybe as programmers we should implement systems that make things take more time instead of less.