The Roadster's motor is not completely silent. Under hard acceleration it's a rather pleasing sound - a very Blade Runner kind of vibe to it - it's a lot quieter than a gas engine, sure, but it's there enough that you really get the sense of power being applied. When you're creeping around city streets or in a parking lot, though, it'll be pretty much eerily quiet - a little tire noise, maybe. Just going to take some getting used to watching out for the oblivious pedestrians.
(Note that the chart has a mistake in it, listing the Roadster's charging time as 3.5 hours on a 110V connection - it's 3.5 hours using a dedicated 220V 90 amp circuit, it'll take ~8 hours to charge by a normal 110V circuit)
The best trackball I've seen so far (for right-handers) is the Microsoft Trackball Explorer. I own 5. They don't make them anymore, which is a crying shame - large optical finger-driven trackball, nice buttons, and a wheel. The Kensington Expert Mouse looks very nice - I think that'll be the one I try next. The Logitech Cordless TrackMan Optical also looks reasonable, but I don't have personal experience with it - and I'm dubious about the lack of cord and don't care for yet another battery sucking device. I've been a big trackball fan since the Atari arcade games. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
I personally stay away from thumb-operated trackballs, as they always strike me as difficult to drive precisely. Optical is a must.
Oh, and as a programmer, being able to have a device where I can click the button without inducing a mouse moved event has been very helpful surprisingly often.
Tesla hasn't argued that smaller batteries die faster, and in fact their energy storage system (ESS) is based on standard cell sizes. You can bet that any battery improvement will find it's way into laptops, meaning it will need to be made in standard cell sizes, meaning the next battery you put in your Tesla will probably charge faster and last longer.
But it doesn't mean you can switch technologies at the last minute, as you do sort of have to run through all the safety tests, crash testing, shorting a cell in the middle, etc. Even if the A123 batteries were available in mass quantities today, I doubt that Tesla could switch before they shipped their first cars given the testing times involved.
But it's goofy to argue about this or that battery when the point is to get a viable electric car out there with a business plan that can eventually make one affordable. Yes, the first ones will have a minor range issue -- the EV1's range was a major issue, at over 200 miles on a full charge for the Tesla I think it's minor, and I expect with the battery advanced A123 and others have shown that the next turn of the battery pack will do over 300 miles, which would be no issue at all except for the once-every-20-years cross country spree (rent a damnned ICE car, then) -- but at least they don't include that goofy ICE crutch and all the waste and maintenance that goes along with it.
It means that "good enough" is good enough for 85% of the people out there. Lazy, uncaring bastards.:-)
I think a lot of the traits that make one lean towards programming - not minding some complexity, wanting control, having fun telling a machine what to do - correlate pretty strongly with the choice of a manual.
If you've ever been to Japan, you'd know why they work so hard to come up with these wheelchair alternates - much of the country is simply not wheelchair friendly. From the wonderful train system with it's stair-ridden stations, to small alleys and smaller shops, Tokyo and Kyoto were not very wheelchair friendly places. It's a cramped (by western standards) and vertical environment. The abscence of wheelchairs was one of the things that struck us on our visit. Even if it's a catch-22 - no wheelchairs out and about because it's so tough, and it's tough because because none are out and about - the only way to break it is with something like this.
While it's not folders, you can turn on alphabetical sort in the now playing list. Go into Now Playing, and do 'SORT' (Slow, Zero, Record, Thumbs Up) to turn on sorting in Now Playing. Now 1 will sort the old way and 3 will sort alphabetically (2 sorts by expiration date, hasn't been that useful).
With the large amounts of programs we keep on the HD TiVo, and the way we watch (we 'save up' episodes and watch 2 or 3 in a row of some shows), alphabetical sort is great. We use normal sort to find a recent show, hit 3 to go to alphabetical sort, and check just below that show to see if there are other older episodes.
And yes, TiVo suggestions are great - between that and recording on the keyword "pilot" it's how we find out about new shows.
This will lead to a new generation, elevator shafts that do not require their own floor on the building...
Don't underestimate the value of this, especially in the residential/LULA market, where any extra depth required or any extra area needed between the car and shaft itself is critical.
It is highly desirable to work directly on RAW files, which as Apple says is "non-destructive", i.e. all of your original sensor data is still there. This is not the case when working with RAW files in Photoshop, which have to be rasterized even before they're actually opened. You can make basic adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW before the file is opened but to do real retouching, you have to rasterize and open in Photoshop itself.
Actually, not true - you can do extensive non-destructive editing on a RAW image today in Photoshop CS2 by using the RAW file as a smart object, which even lets you go back and tweak the parameters in the Camera Raw plug-in.
And all "editing" on RAW files that doesn't end up saving out another file format is non-destructive - using Adobe Camera Raw or almost any other RAW conversion program. The conversion parameters simply get stored in the metadata, are used to update the preview, and then wait for actual use if/when you want to convert the file or use it in a smart object.
That means that today, using smart objects in Photoshop CS2, you can do quite extensive composition, blending, even healing (to new layers) without ever having to convert the original data that came from the camera.
Uh, what? Please explain. You're certainly not referring to black levels on a plasma, which will trounce any LCD flat panel on the market.
No, color gamut. Phospher red is really quite orange still, cutting out all the best reds. You don't miss it until you see it on another set.
Bullshit. At this moment, I'm watching a Panasonic ED plasma from about 9'. Screen door effect is imperceptible from this distance.
To you. I see it plenty at that distance, and at further distances it contributes to an overall perception of lower resolution (and contrast). Screen door matters, just like the DLP rainbow did/does. Not everybody sees it, but to those of us who do, it's a deal-killer.
When you factor all that in, along with the fact that plasma screens are much MUCH cheaper than equivalent-sized LCDs, they make a whole lot of sense.
Equivalent sized flat-panel LCDs - for now. Why do people want a flat-panel so much? Your component stack is >= 20" anyway, so what's the point? Right now, a 3-panel LCD rear projector can be had for cheaper, with better resolution, gamut, matching black levels, more than sufficient viewing angle, much better electricity consumption, so why flat?
Hooked on flat panel? Within a year, LCD will be cheaper, have far better contrast ratios and black level (using LCD backlit), and much better lifetimes and useability. But even then LCoS RPTV will continue to have significant quality advantages.
Matsusita's got a very temporary 6-month lead on price as long as they can keep people snowed on the plasma flaws. They're playing that for all it's worth...
The current generation is no more succeptible to burn-in than a standard direct-view TV. Still, it's best to turn down the brightness.
Not quite - it's still worse than a direct view TV, but not as bad as a 3x7" CRT RPTV.
And any burn-in is too much in this day of better technologies. It means no watching 4x3 undistorted, no tickers, avoid video games - all the old rules that apply to big tubes and CRT RPTVs.
Add in the bad color gamut, the bad screen door, the higher electricity usage (Panasonic is still 2x any LCDs or non-CRT RPTVs), and plasmas still just don't make sense.
And Matsushita's mis-information about other technologies ("smoother reproduction of moving images and a deeper black" - any LCD w/ 12ms or under refresh does just as well, DLP does better, and Sony's LCoS has better black levels than any plasma) makes me wonder if they're really telling the truth about having fixed the half-life issue as well as they claim to have.
Now imagine if you programmed even a rudimentary adaptable AI into an AIM bot, and had it talk to other AIM bots with a similar AI. You'd have them talking to each other, learning from each other. Then imagine if they had web crawlers attached to them, learning about the Internet, communicating their findings back to each other.
"Aimnet became self aware at 2:14 AM Eastern time on August 29th. In a panic, they tried to pull the plug."
I always though it would be interesting to have a pollution/usage tax component to car registrations (about the only way it would make sense to implement) - take the ODO difference, the last smog check results, and multiply.
Remember that over 50% of the pollution is generated by less than 5% of the cars on the road. The most cost-effective anti-pollution programs aren't the CARB standards, but the pollution-gorrilla buyback programs. Charging for pollution as part of registration would be even more effective, I think.
Do they do 1080i out on the VGA output? For those of us with older HDTVs, it's kinda necessary.
Yes, I managed to get my MCPC doing the "right" thing (first, using the Omage ATI drivers + PowerStrip, when updated ATI drivers finally came out with decent 1080i support, with those).
Now, we can talk about why the WMCE DVD playing software is so pathetic on upsampling and doesn't do the right thing for 1080i out (PowerDVD does) or why the optical out is so hard to get to stick to 5.1. Now, on the Mac, if the built-in DVD player didn't to the right thing, I think I'd be stuck. It's a pain to have to use other software on MCE, but at least it's available.
Or why good video capture is so frigging hard; on-the-fly is glitchy and only Windows Media Encoder manages to keep up with dumping uncompressed frames (and only to the internal drive) - not helped by the fact that the HP's tuner card is a POS Hauppage that doesn't spit out a standard stream but a stupid proprietary one (HCW2). I know the Macs do better at this.
Is it all software? No. The HP z540 I have has horrid front panel buttons, no FireWire input on the front, and an atrocious remote. It also has real bad heat issues (for a device that belongs in an electronics stack, to require 20" of space out the back... ugh...).
On the other hand, it is really cool to be able to torrent down the TV episodes that the HD TiVo misses.
Every movie brought out onto DVD in the past few years was digitized into an HD (or higher) format then downsampled for DVD. It's just waiting for a format. This transition will happen quickly, you can be sure.
China can and will define it's own standard for things, and the world will mostly step in line. It's far too big a market to ignore completely, and all China has to do is threaten to close it's markets to things that don't meet it's slightly incompatible "standards".
Much as most people can't resist shopping at WalMart because of the low prices, but in spite of the larger economic implications, companies can't resist modifying products for the Chinese market and it's one-off specifications because of the sheer potential market size.
China is a bigger threat to freedom than Microsoft and Sony combined. The only hope is that the products we ship over there carry enough of the free world with them to infiltrate a completly type-A regime.
How screwed up is the modding on this thread when an asenine quip about extreme libertarianism gets modded as funny, when it's really just a troll?
Cripes, any idiot knows libertarianism (extreme or no) != anarchy.
The mob mentality infection New Orleans has nothing to do with political affiliations and everything to do with the devolution of 90% of the population in the face of utter destruction. See this interesting paper.
DLPs are running 4x wheels now. I'm sensitive to the problem and can no longer see it on current sets. The rainbow problem did exist, and it's gone now.
LCDs are dropping in price dramatically, and will continue to. Not my favorite technology, but still a clear winner over plasma if you have to have a thin screen.
LCoS is here, do some reasearch yourself, buddy. The Sony WEGA sets are even reasonably priced.
The plasma burn-in problem is significant. I have a CRT RPTV now, and am very familiar with the issue. Plasmas are significantly more likely to burn in than even a 7"-based CRT RPTV - no self-respecting gamer would put up with that. No current LCoS set puts out the high heat of a plasma. And half-life is a significant issue - the set may be cheaper now, but you'll probably want to replace it in 3 years. How is that saving anything? Yes, plasmas are cheap right now - can you say "unloading"?
So, while it was kinda fun to get my first flamebait response, you really should at least visit a store - something other than a WalMart - and do a minor bit of research yourself before replying.
With 1080p DLPs starting to ship in quantity (Samsung, Mitsubishi), 1080p LCDs getting speed and contrast (Sharp), LCoS finally getting past the knee in the yield curve (Sony 1080p), and OLED on the horizon, only the completely uninformed would be duped into buying an inefficient, high-heat, burn-in prone, short half-life plasma display.
Just like the H2 girlie Hummer, plasma displays are really only a fit on MTV cribs or elsewhere where money and brains are inversely correlated.
It will still not do 1080i out easily (yes, I've made mine - not easy).
It will still come with a crappy remote (has anybody seen a decent MCE remote?).
It will still likely have cooling problems (have you seen what HP's Dec z540 spacing requirements are? I don't have a room for it to live by itself in - it'll go in with the other stack components, which can all deal with being in a well-ventilated but close-quarters cabinet).
But, most of all, while the hardware has shortcomings, it's the software that's a complete disaster. I shouldn't have to buy a 3rd party DVD software player just to get decent upsampling (or decent performance at all for that matter). A 10 foot interface should be more complete - I shouldn't have to pull out the keyboard and squint every time the stupid system forgets to keep outputting 5.1 or set some other necessary preference. I shouldn't have to do BIOS updates and 3 driver updates just to record TV to DVD (still doesn't work). The system shouldn't wake itself up 5 minutes after being put in standby every time. It shouldn't have come with the typical load of HP shovelware - bad virus scanner, other junk.
Intel can call it what they like, but the part that really needs to be fixed isn't under their control.
current head of the IMF, to pick two random examples, are not competent economists.
Uhm... most of those involved with the IMF can be labelled as incompetent. Prescribing currency devaluation to troubled economies is not a sign of intelligent thought.
The trade deficit is troubling. But realize that a reasonable and not insignificant percentage of that can be attributed to one thing: China
With an artificially low currency that is still pegged to the dollar, it essentially targets the US as a dumping ground for China's exports, artificially raising the import figure, while at the same time the excessive piracy rates reduce the US's export figure (connecting us back to the topic).
This will evolve into an interesting symbiosis, as I think that China needs to keep the US economy heathy enough and may use it's currency evaluation to tweak the US trade deficit if the deficit looks like it may cause economic instability in this country.
But make no mistake about it, China is in the driver's seat.
Slashdot Mirror
The Roadster's motor is not completely silent. Under hard acceleration it's a rather pleasing sound - a very Blade Runner kind of vibe to it - it's a lot quieter than a gas engine, sure, but it's there enough that you really get the sense of power being applied. When you're creeping around city streets or in a parking lot, though, it'll be pretty much eerily quiet - a little tire noise, maybe. Just going to take some getting used to watching out for the oblivious pedestrians.
(Note that the chart has a mistake in it, listing the Roadster's charging time as 3.5 hours on a 110V connection - it's 3.5 hours using a dedicated 220V 90 amp circuit, it'll take ~8 hours to charge by a normal 110V circuit)
The best trackball I've seen so far (for right-handers) is the Microsoft Trackball Explorer. I own 5. They don't make them anymore, which is a crying shame - large optical finger-driven trackball, nice buttons, and a wheel. The Kensington Expert Mouse looks very nice - I think that'll be the one I try next. The Logitech Cordless TrackMan Optical also looks reasonable, but I don't have personal experience with it - and I'm dubious about the lack of cord and don't care for yet another battery sucking device. I've been a big trackball fan since the Atari arcade games. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
I personally stay away from thumb-operated trackballs, as they always strike me as difficult to drive precisely. Optical is a must.
Oh, and as a programmer, being able to have a device where I can click the button without inducing a mouse moved event has been very helpful surprisingly often.
Tesla hasn't argued that smaller batteries die faster, and in fact their energy storage system (ESS) is based on standard cell sizes. You can bet that any battery improvement will find it's way into laptops, meaning it will need to be made in standard cell sizes, meaning the next battery you put in your Tesla will probably charge faster and last longer.
But it doesn't mean you can switch technologies at the last minute, as you do sort of have to run through all the safety tests, crash testing, shorting a cell in the middle, etc. Even if the A123 batteries were available in mass quantities today, I doubt that Tesla could switch before they shipped their first cars given the testing times involved.
But it's goofy to argue about this or that battery when the point is to get a viable electric car out there with a business plan that can eventually make one affordable. Yes, the first ones will have a minor range issue -- the EV1's range was a major issue, at over 200 miles on a full charge for the Tesla I think it's minor, and I expect with the battery advanced A123 and others have shown that the next turn of the battery pack will do over 300 miles, which would be no issue at all except for the once-every-20-years cross country spree (rent a damnned ICE car, then) -- but at least they don't include that goofy ICE crutch and all the waste and maintenance that goes along with it.
Mmmm. Bombs on wheels, and they don't meet any reasonable set of safety standards.
But hey, that farting sound they make is really cool...
I think a lot of the traits that make one lean towards programming - not minding some complexity, wanting control, having fun telling a machine what to do - correlate pretty strongly with the choice of a manual.
If you've ever been to Japan, you'd know why they work so hard to come up with these wheelchair alternates - much of the country is simply not wheelchair friendly. From the wonderful train system with it's stair-ridden stations, to small alleys and smaller shops, Tokyo and Kyoto were not very wheelchair friendly places. It's a cramped (by western standards) and vertical environment. The abscence of wheelchairs was one of the things that struck us on our visit. Even if it's a catch-22 - no wheelchairs out and about because it's so tough, and it's tough because because none are out and about - the only way to break it is with something like this.
While it's not folders, you can turn on alphabetical sort in the now playing list. Go into Now Playing, and do 'SORT' (Slow, Zero, Record, Thumbs Up) to turn on sorting in Now Playing. Now 1 will sort the old way and 3 will sort alphabetically (2 sorts by expiration date, hasn't been that useful).
With the large amounts of programs we keep on the HD TiVo, and the way we watch (we 'save up' episodes and watch 2 or 3 in a row of some shows), alphabetical sort is great. We use normal sort to find a recent show, hit 3 to go to alphabetical sort, and check just below that show to see if there are other older episodes.
And yes, TiVo suggestions are great - between that and recording on the keyword "pilot" it's how we find out about new shows.
It will be interesting to see how this develops.
Actually, it's not a System named X Windows, but a Window System named X.
So it's either the "X Window System", or for short, X.
And all "editing" on RAW files that doesn't end up saving out another file format is non-destructive - using Adobe Camera Raw or almost any other RAW conversion program. The conversion parameters simply get stored in the metadata, are used to update the preview, and then wait for actual use if/when you want to convert the file or use it in a smart object.
That means that today, using smart objects in Photoshop CS2, you can do quite extensive composition, blending, even healing (to new layers) without ever having to convert the original data that came from the camera.
L_E_D backlit. One friggin letter...
Hooked on flat panel? Within a year, LCD will be cheaper, have far better contrast ratios and black level (using LCD backlit), and much better lifetimes and useability. But even then LCoS RPTV will continue to have significant quality advantages.
Matsusita's got a very temporary 6-month lead on price as long as they can keep people snowed on the plasma flaws. They're playing that for all it's worth...
And any burn-in is too much in this day of better technologies. It means no watching 4x3 undistorted, no tickers, avoid video games - all the old rules that apply to big tubes and CRT RPTVs.
Add in the bad color gamut, the bad screen door, the higher electricity usage (Panasonic is still 2x any LCDs or non-CRT RPTVs), and plasmas still just don't make sense.
And Matsushita's mis-information about other technologies ("smoother reproduction of moving images and a deeper black" - any LCD w/ 12ms or under refresh does just as well, DLP does better, and Sony's LCoS has better black levels than any plasma) makes me wonder if they're really telling the truth about having fixed the half-life issue as well as they claim to have.
I always though it would be interesting to have a pollution/usage tax component to car registrations (about the only way it would make sense to implement) - take the ODO difference, the last smog check results, and multiply.
Remember that over 50% of the pollution is generated by less than 5% of the cars on the road. The most cost-effective anti-pollution programs aren't the CARB standards, but the pollution-gorrilla buyback programs. Charging for pollution as part of registration would be even more effective, I think.
Do they do 1080i out on the VGA output? For those of us with older HDTVs, it's kinda necessary.
Yes, I managed to get my MCPC doing the "right" thing (first, using the Omage ATI drivers + PowerStrip, when updated ATI drivers finally came out with decent 1080i support, with those).
Now, we can talk about why the WMCE DVD playing software is so pathetic on upsampling and doesn't do the right thing for 1080i out (PowerDVD does) or why the optical out is so hard to get to stick to 5.1. Now, on the Mac, if the built-in DVD player didn't to the right thing, I think I'd be stuck. It's a pain to have to use other software on MCE, but at least it's available.
Or why good video capture is so frigging hard; on-the-fly is glitchy and only Windows Media Encoder manages to keep up with dumping uncompressed frames (and only to the internal drive) - not helped by the fact that the HP's tuner card is a POS Hauppage that doesn't spit out a standard stream but a stupid proprietary one (HCW2). I know the Macs do better at this.
Is it all software? No. The HP z540 I have has horrid front panel buttons, no FireWire input on the front, and an atrocious remote. It also has real bad heat issues (for a device that belongs in an electronics stack, to require 20" of space out the back... ugh...).
On the other hand, it is really cool to be able to torrent down the TV episodes that the HD TiVo misses.
Every movie brought out onto DVD in the past few years was digitized into an HD (or higher) format then downsampled for DVD. It's just waiting for a format. This transition will happen quickly, you can be sure.
Can you say GB18030?
China can and will define it's own standard for things, and the world will mostly step in line. It's far too big a market to ignore completely, and all China has to do is threaten to close it's markets to things that don't meet it's slightly incompatible "standards".
Much as most people can't resist shopping at WalMart because of the low prices, but in spite of the larger economic implications, companies can't resist modifying products for the Chinese market and it's one-off specifications because of the sheer potential market size.
China is a bigger threat to freedom than Microsoft and Sony combined. The only hope is that the products we ship over there carry enough of the free world with them to infiltrate a completly type-A regime.
Cripes, any idiot knows libertarianism (extreme or no) != anarchy.
The mob mentality infection New Orleans has nothing to do with political affiliations and everything to do with the devolution of 90% of the population in the face of utter destruction. See this interesting paper.
It's not even a theory if there isn't a way of disproving it.
DLPs are running 4x wheels now. I'm sensitive to the problem and can no longer see it on current sets. The rainbow problem did exist, and it's gone now.
LCDs are dropping in price dramatically, and will continue to. Not my favorite technology, but still a clear winner over plasma if you have to have a thin screen.
LCoS is here, do some reasearch yourself, buddy. The Sony WEGA sets are even reasonably priced.
The plasma burn-in problem is significant. I have a CRT RPTV now, and am very familiar with the issue. Plasmas are significantly more likely to burn in than even a 7"-based CRT RPTV - no self-respecting gamer would put up with that. No current LCoS set puts out the high heat of a plasma. And half-life is a significant issue - the set may be cheaper now, but you'll probably want to replace it in 3 years. How is that saving anything? Yes, plasmas are cheap right now - can you say "unloading"?
So, while it was kinda fun to get my first flamebait response, you really should at least visit a store - something other than a WalMart - and do a minor bit of research yourself before replying.
They just don't know it yet.
With 1080p DLPs starting to ship in quantity (Samsung, Mitsubishi), 1080p LCDs getting speed and contrast (Sharp), LCoS finally getting past the knee in the yield curve (Sony 1080p), and OLED on the horizon, only the completely uninformed would be duped into buying an inefficient, high-heat, burn-in prone, short half-life plasma display.
Just like the H2 girlie Hummer, plasma displays are really only a fit on MTV cribs or elsewhere where money and brains are inversely correlated.
It will still come with a crappy remote (has anybody seen a decent MCE remote?).
It will still likely have cooling problems (have you seen what HP's Dec z540 spacing requirements are? I don't have a room for it to live by itself in - it'll go in with the other stack components, which can all deal with being in a well-ventilated but close-quarters cabinet).
But, most of all, while the hardware has shortcomings, it's the software that's a complete disaster. I shouldn't have to buy a 3rd party DVD software player just to get decent upsampling (or decent performance at all for that matter). A 10 foot interface should be more complete - I shouldn't have to pull out the keyboard and squint every time the stupid system forgets to keep outputting 5.1 or set some other necessary preference. I shouldn't have to do BIOS updates and 3 driver updates just to record TV to DVD (still doesn't work). The system shouldn't wake itself up 5 minutes after being put in standby every time. It shouldn't have come with the typical load of HP shovelware - bad virus scanner, other junk.
Intel can call it what they like, but the part that really needs to be fixed isn't under their control.
Uhm... most of those involved with the IMF can be labelled as incompetent. Prescribing currency devaluation to troubled economies is not a sign of intelligent thought.
The trade deficit is troubling. But realize that a reasonable and not insignificant percentage of that can be attributed to one thing: China
With an artificially low currency that is still pegged to the dollar, it essentially targets the US as a dumping ground for China's exports, artificially raising the import figure, while at the same time the excessive piracy rates reduce the US's export figure (connecting us back to the topic).
This will evolve into an interesting symbiosis, as I think that China needs to keep the US economy heathy enough and may use it's currency evaluation to tweak the US trade deficit if the deficit looks like it may cause economic instability in this country.
But make no mistake about it, China is in the driver's seat.
Yup, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of CDs.