PAE doesn't "hide" memory, really. You can only address 4GB (i.e. a 32-bit address space) of virtual memory at once but that can be *anywhere* across the 36-bit physical address space. As long as no individual app needs more than 4GB of memory you're (mostly) OK. The kernel can alter the mappings as it needs to poke at anywhere interesting in all of physical RAM. It's less efficient than mapping it all in at once but you can manage quite well.
Most of what you said was exactly the sort of thing I was thinking - if the DLC wasn't done in time for the game to go Gold then it *couldn't* be on the disk, so it's not necessarily an example of evil. However, regarding...
Should they have simply let the DLC lie on a HDD somewhere for a few weeks?
I guess I'd have hoped that they'd have continued to work on expanding the DLC further rather than timing its release to start nickel and diming the customers the instant the game is released. If they'd kept working on it perhaps they could have made it even better (and it will probably be good, BioWare know their stuff) and released it further down the line when it looks less cynical and where people have started wishing for extra content to continue playing.
I think that's doing a little of a disservice to both of them. Particularly Plan 9, which was both finished and sold as a commercial product - and is still developed actively and deployed. It's also a very nice OS, which to a geek possibly matters more than its commercial success. But HURD as I understood it had quite a nice architecture and was basically the first (to be planned, at least) GPL OS so it's certainly significant even if not successful.
From de Icaza's article: 'To him, ridiculous statements like Linus "does not believe in Freedom" are somewhat normal [1].'
Isn't that true, though? I always thought Linus came down heavily on the side of open source as an engineering philosophy and against the ideological side of software freedom? I'd have expected Linus to agree with the sentiment RMS is expressing, to be honest, as I believe it matches his real world stance.
RMS is obnoxious in the things he says or the way he says them sometimes. He also frequently comes across as patronizing in the way he states his beliefs as if they are Truth. But at least the guy is pretty consistent. I'm not sure having a hardliner such as him is as helpful now as it was was but you can at least rely on him to take a fairly consistent take and articulate his principles well, even if you don't believe in them. I respect him, even though he's maddening sometimes.
Re:I'm reminded, surreally of Space: 1999
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With Space: 1999 it was better not to think about the science. Even by TV sci-fi standards it was... erk.
Like how the explosion was (if I recall correctly) on the dark side of the moon, yet propelled them away from the Earth instead of wiping out humanity. Or, heck, the fact that the explosion involved "magnetic radiation"!;-)
Your comment about delta-v reminds me of the very first ep tho - they were all jammed into their seats / onto the floor as the moon blasted away. Eventually they were able to get up and move around again - fair enough - then one of them comments "we're decelerating!".
No - just no! Argggh, make it stop.
Re:I'm reminded, surreally of Space: 1999
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Yeah, OK, I was leaning towards 70s as being "pretty darn likely" then had an attack of self-doubt;-)
And the opening music - yeah! My friends and I spent quite a lot of time randomly pulling out imaginary musical musical instruments and launching into the theme. It was awesome.
Re:The bold new face of science fiction!
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1. Scientists are evil scheming power hungry liars that screw everything up.
And yet, no matter how long I work at my PhD, I don't get the chance to gain power or influence, destroy the world or control people. This sucks, it was seriously mis-sold to me.
2. Politicians are selfless and caring human beings who will gladly give up their lives for you.
When watching BSG that hadn't occurred to me but... yeah. *boggle*
3. Thirty year old gamers living with their mom are solving for the Grand Unified Theory by playing Warcraft 18 hours a day.
Well, at least they didn't leave out the patronization.
*sigh* to me it feels like the era of good science fiction is over.
Fortunately, now that economic and epidemiology research is being conducted on WoW, Everquest, etc they can at least claim to be furthering science in some sense!
Hopefully they won't upset the Alions by misusing the Star Gate!
I'm reminded, surreally of Space: 1999
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The Wikipedia article on SG:U seems to imply that, whilst they're stuck on a starship they can't actually drive the thing where they want to go and are restricted to hopping on and off via its onboard stargate when they get near interesting things. So it's a bit like Voyager but somebody stole their steering wheel.
Space: 1999, a British sci-fi (60s or 70s, I'd guess) had a similar setup but it was based on the slightly more bonkers-sounding premise that the crew were stuck on a moonbase and that the entire moon had been catapulted across the galaxy. When the moon went through an interesting neighbourhood they'd sometimes hop off and take a look around, then they'd jump back on again before it left. Surreal stuff! Despite the dodgy science and costumes they actually had some quite good episodes with interesting plot ideas.
As an SG1 fan, I'd just like to say "Please let it be good! Please let it be good!". That is all.
True, though it depends on how frequent "occasional" is.
I'd expect that using a big enough hash value would make the probability of corruption due to collisions less than the probability of corruption due to cosmic rays hitting your RAM / whatever, which could affect any filesystem. If "occasional" corruption was "once in a hundred years" that'd be acceptable to me as the storage I'm using is less reliable than that. Some would want a larger hash value.
The git revision control system (not that I'm a huge fan of it) is actually content addressable in this way (not sure what, if any, checks it does to detect collisions) and is used successfully for large scale development. As far as I know they haven't had problems with collisions.
Gets more thorny if you start introducing an attacker though, since every time a crypographic hash gets broken you'd need to worry about deliberate collisions, rather than randomly occurring ones. Which would leave you looking at rewriting all the data on your filesystem with a new hash. Erk.
The conservative but post-hoc solution would be to have scrubber processes identify duplicate disk and memory areas and unify them in storage to save space. There's been talk of having btrfs support duplicate block elimination, I think. And code went into Linux recently to unify in-memory pages (for the benefit of KVM guests but presumably it could be applied to other processes too). It's a bit ugly doing it that way but at least you can guarantee it works. Question is whether it'd be worth it. I wonder whether it would perform better or worth than a content addressable system in the end.
I wonder if everybody has looked at using static linking + content addressable filesystem as a replacement for DLLs. Every app would ship with all required libraries linked statically and the elimination of duplicated data would be handled by the filesystem and memory management code so that you don't waste disk / RAM. If you used a suitable protocol you could even save on bandwidth by not downloading file blocks that you already have somewhere on your disk, so the increased executable size would become less of a problem.
Something can be unethical even if you have a right to do it. The retailer might, depending on local retail law be *legally* allowed to do this. *shrug* - they may even be protected in their right to do this. It doesn't matter - ethics is not the same as legal rights. It's not illegal to break wind in a lift but it's still something we'd rather people didn't do.
It's fair to point out that their behaviour could possibly not be as unethical as it is suggested - depending on the underlying circumstances they may believe they have good reason to do this. But you also seem to be asserting their right to control their site as a counterargument to their behaviour being unethical. Firstly, I'd say that commenting on the ethics of their policies doesn't affect their ability to administer their site, so it's fair comment and not infringing their rights. Secondly, the fact that they may have the right to choose what goes on their site (and that other people don't have the right to *prevent* them doing this) does not affect the ethical dimension of their behaviour at all. You can have a right to do something but still be behaving bad for exercising that right in certain ways.
I agree with the point that the company isn't necessarily being evil. But whether they're behaving well or badly really is rather separate from whether they're behaving within their rights.
Before making my assertions I double checked the history of railways on wikipedia and got a bit confused, which was why I stuck with the conservative "passenger railway". Apparently the Ancient Greeks (who else!) used rails to haul carts around; once I read that I decided that it wasn't the time to get into the specifics of who invented what and decided to assert something safely minimal!
British railways are better than they were a decade ago. We went through a phase of having so many railways that you could pretty much use them like buses, since they connected to every tiny village. There are villages near here that must have only a few hundred people now, having probably expanded - they had stations. Dr Beeching cut out most of the tiny branch lines, as well as some fairly major lines. It was meant to improve efficiency, I think. The railways became quite poor and were privatised on what I understand were some fairly dodgy competition assumptions - I think part of the idea was that train companies would compete on the same line but that's not how it's implemented, so the "market" only exists at all when the franchise is up for tender. The trains are back to a state of being reasonably reliable, though they're quite expensive (it's not as much cheaper than flying as you'd hope, depending on when you book tickets - a bit crazy in a country this small).
In Europe they're doing much better than us. At least France and Germany, possibly others, have a separate high speed rail network. Our only high speed line is for connecting London with the tunnel to France; they're just now bringing that line into commuter use for people who happen to live along it. There's been talk of a longer stretch of high-speed, Europe-compatible line to perhaps serve commuting and the channel tunnel. An article in Private Eye magazine (a satirical and investigative journalism mag - but I digress) mentioned that we used to have a high speed, European-compatible line to link to the Channel Tunnel, which was built by a crazy businessman in the late 19th (yes, really!) century (long before the tunnel was built). It got shut down, now we need a new one:-(
Some of our fast trains are still quite fast, just not up to European standards. My experience of travelling by Amtrack in the States was actually very pleasant compared to British trains, to be honest. I understand that the rail service in the States is somewhat patchy, though, so this seems unlikely to be representative of the rest of the country. It is a sad decline indeed since days of the railroads as a way to open up the Wild West. I think a high speed rail network, if it ever happens, would be a good thing for the US. Sometimes flying or driving is just necessary but it seems a shame to do it when a train could do it faster, cheaper and with less energy cost. But then, I don't really know anything about the US-specific issues. I just hope that some Federal oversight (or inter-state co-operation) can be applied so that any high speed links are suitable for joining up at a later date.
The British invented the passenger railway and yet our rail networks are still horrible.
They're not the worst in the world, just a source of continual mild disappointment. The best thing about them is that we get to moan about them. It's a bit like our weather, really, except that we didn't invent drizzle (that I know of).
I think the niche of electric sports cars, so far occupied by Tesla, has been an incredibly cunning strategy. Consider some strengths and weaknesses of an electric car:
+ Instant high acceleration; high torque available at any time, at any speed + Shiny and novel and impressive - Heavy and bulky batteries - Short range - Have to charge it a lot - Expensive
And the requirements and constraints of a sports car: Need: Good speed and acceleration Need: Shiny and novel and impressive (i.e. expensive), so you can show off But: Drinks fuel faster, may have shorter range. But: You probably won't go very far in it, or very often. But: Often have lots of interior luxuries stripped out in the name of weight saving.
Bingo! The requirements of a sports car are - to a reasonable extent - satisfied well by an electric motor. You get incredible acceleration, whenever you want. You get something impressive and futuristic-sounding and exotic. The constraints that lightweight sports cars have *already* do well to mask the disadvantages of an electric vehicle - with a sports car you probably expect reduced range, you don't want to use it all the time (so charging time not an issue, just keep it in the garage plugged in), you don't expect to carry groceries (bulk of the batteries doesn't matter), you don't expect lots of luxuries (so they can be stripped out to somewhat compensate for battery weight). And if you wanted a sports car you were already prepared to spend something expensive (and probably susceptible to image-based marketing - so the futuristic, green, responsible but exciting thing an electric sports car has will probably work on you!).
As a bonus, sports cars are usually expensive in terms of fuel, whilst an electric car is going to be cheap. Probably even in the US, even more so in other markets.
Genius. Goes to show that all those companies trying to make practical, electric town cars might have been starting from the wrong place!
I thought Microsoft had been being honest about their products' flaws for decades - once they've got a new one lined up to sell. Any company is going to keep product flaws quiet until they have a new one. I did have the impression MS had historically put more emphasis than many companies on the old product being *bad*, as well as the new one being good. Which would mean this announcement is somewhat in keeping as they're coming out with WM7 at some point...
I had a conversation with a friend along the lines of:
Me: "And they used technology from their little robot man, so it's not like that was entirely useless!" Friend: "Well, given they used it to make a unicycle..."
It's true. I generally say they cost about half what a bike of/equivalent quality/ would cost. The unicycles on that page are higher quality ones.
Look at the wheel sizes - a 36" wheel is ~10" wider than a standard bicycle wheel, so it's custom hardware rather than just a bike with bits removed. They often have aluminium rims to save weight, which pushes up the price. And tyres that size aren't common or cheap. There's potentially other stuff like the high quality / low weight materials in other parts. A 36" or even a 29" is for people who are serious about riding distances. I used to do a hundred miles in a month on my 36".
A small unicycle is much cheaper and also easier to learn and do tricks on. A 20" wheel, like your stereotypical circus unicycle, can be had for much less. I got my first unicycle for the equivalent of about $60, although I fear it was probably made in a horrible 3rd world sweatshop. An advantage of unicycle.com is that they take some care over the welfare conditions in their factories and they don't sell junk, although cheaper unicycles are always going to be less robust. You can't commute on a 20", it's too slow unless you get an (extremely expensive!) hub gearing system.
Intel's Moblin boots incredibly fast. Their early prototypes got to desktop in 5 seconds. Here's a video of Moblin 2.0, possibly taking a bit longer than that but it's also probably a nicer desktop;-)
Moblin's aim, AFAIK, is to get you to a full *usable* desktop as quickly as possible. So unlike what Windows (unless they've improved this since XP, when I last checked!) and some Linux distros do you don't get your quickly loaded desktop bogged down by loads of services starting in the background. You get there, you're done (although you may still have to wait for the network to connect but whatever you do won't be wallowing whilst other stuff loads).
You can't coast on a normal unicycle, no. There are occasional novelty unis with a coaster hub installed but the problem is that - whilst you can zoom down hills very quickly - they make balance much harder. Dare I say, they are an impractical form of unicycle;-) Normal balancing on a unicycle relies on you being able to apply back pressure on the pedals to keep the unicycle under your centre of mass. Your balance has to be waaaaay better to ride without that.
Putting a basket on one would be awkward also, I'm afraid. The falling off mechanic for a unicycle typically involves you landing on your feet (and, assuming you're not going faster than you can run!, probably running to a stop. Obviously that's still somewhat more injury-prone than a bike). The unicycle tends to bounce away at this point. They're robust so it doesn't matter to the cycle, you just wouldn't want your shopping on board at the time!
Also, mounting stuff on your uni tends to alter the handling, which can be awkward. To carry stuff, I usually put it in (or strap it to) my rucksack. I've done shopping like this, or carried a smaller unicycle strapped to my back. You have to ride carefully within your limits, since if you fall and roll on the ground you'll squash your shopping. Once I was skilled, riding within my limits in this way wasn't a problem. It's trickier riding whilst carrying a load but you get used to it.
I have also ridden back from the shops with carrier bags in one or, I think, both hands. The unicycle does have the advantage of freeing up your hands like this! You need to be very confident in your skills before you try that, though! And I did have the advantage of not sharing the road with cars.
Yeah. Does sound like it probably makes things worse. I think saying "double" made sense from a rhetorical perspective as it emphasizes the point that there are now two relatively unrelated things that could go wrong but I do think it's a bit unfair. The "Google Chrome in particular" line still irks me, though.
I've posted a follow up to my original comment suggesting anyone who reads it should make sure they read all the discussion beneath it.
Regarding replacing Trident, yes it's use by other things. What I was wondering was whether they'd provided a library to wrap the Trident implementation. Such a wrapper could perhaps pass everything through to Trident by default but have the option of passing stuff to the Chrome rendering engine instead. That way they could avoid breaking things.
I should probably just stop speculating idly and actually read the articles concerned though:-S
Yeah, it's true. In the places I've ridden I've actually not found it too much of an issue - as long as you're riding *somewhere* people don't interrupt me. There's very little jeering here, most attention is positive if people notice at all. But where I live (Cambridge, UK), there are loads of bikes so people tend to filter out cyclists and sometimes don't notice me at all. I'm not even the only unicyclist commuter in town.
I imagine there are places where riding a unicycle would be a lot more awkward. And if you don't like people staring at you anyhow it's a bit of a pain.
Other advantage is that I have a couple of large wheeled unicycles that can go quite fast - I've hit 17mph in the past and that's not their maximum potential. People get just enough time to notice me and then I'm already gone.
I commuted to work by unicycle for several years and have done hundreds of miles in total. Modern unicycles have come a long way from the old days of a circus exhibit. There are lot of people who ride very long distances on them. A unicycle won't suit most people for commuting but it actually has more plus points than you'd think...
* Lighter weight than a bike, relatively easy to pick up and carry, or wheel along. * Takes less space than a bike to store indoors. * Cheaper than a bike of equivalent quality. * Once you're skilled you can "idle" on the spot (or just hop occasionally to shift the thing back under your centre of mass) so you may not have to put a foot down when waiting in traffic or at lights. * Potentially very mechanically simple. * Good exercise, including for your core muscles due to the postural component of keeping balanced.
It's also a good attention grabber, if you like that sort of thing. I've observed that a lot of geeks, particularly computer geeks, seem to like unicycling. My guess is that this is because, relative to a bike, it requires a high degree of mental engagement but in a non-intellectual way. So you get to exercise your brain but in a way which distracts you from the pressures of logical thought processes.
There are some commuting unicycles here: http://www.unicycle.com/shopping/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=1&subcat=7&cat=Commuter Note that handlebars are available, which allows experienced riders to take some weight of their "bits". Combined with modern saddles, a unicycle is a lot less punishing to your nether regions than you'd expect, though you obviously still need to take care!
Finally, at the high end of the price range, there are unicycles with the Schlumpf (and Kris Holm-Schlumpf) hub-based gearing system. No exposed gearing but you can get something like a 1.5:1 increase in gear ratio, allowing you go go much faster whilst still having the wheel be small and light. In some ways I'd think this would be the best urban commuting unicycle for experienced riders.
There are clear disadvantages to a unicycle to but I figure some folks here might be interested anyhow. Because an unpowered unicycle has made such a good commuting vehicle for me I wouldn't be surprised if an electrical one is actually more practical than you'd expect.
[if anyone wants to find out more, the rec.sport.unicycling newsground, also available as a forum http://unicyclist.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=3 will be able to answer your questions or you can just reply to me here - it's arguably even on topic!]
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PAE doesn't "hide" memory, really. You can only address 4GB (i.e. a 32-bit address space) of virtual memory at once but that can be *anywhere* across the 36-bit physical address space. As long as no individual app needs more than 4GB of memory you're (mostly) OK. The kernel can alter the mappings as it needs to poke at anywhere interesting in all of physical RAM. It's less efficient than mapping it all in at once but you can manage quite well.
Most of what you said was exactly the sort of thing I was thinking - if the DLC wasn't done in time for the game to go Gold then it *couldn't* be on the disk, so it's not necessarily an example of evil. However, regarding ...
Should they have simply let the DLC lie on a HDD somewhere for a few weeks?
I guess I'd have hoped that they'd have continued to work on expanding the DLC further rather than timing its release to start nickel and diming the customers the instant the game is released. If they'd kept working on it perhaps they could have made it even better (and it will probably be good, BioWare know their stuff) and released it further down the line when it looks less cynical and where people have started wishing for extra content to continue playing.
"Wait a minit. HURD is just another Plan 9."
I think that's doing a little of a disservice to both of them. Particularly Plan 9, which was both finished and sold as a commercial product - and is still developed actively and deployed. It's also a very nice OS, which to a geek possibly matters more than its commercial success. But HURD as I understood it had quite a nice architecture and was basically the first (to be planned, at least) GPL OS so it's certainly significant even if not successful.
Linux containers give you jail-type functionality and - unlike VServer and OpenVZ - are in the mainline. http://lxc.sourceforge.net/
The OpenVZ people have, I understand, been a strong force in getting the container stuff into mainline.
There was an LSM implementing BSD-style Jails but I'm not sure what happened to it ... http://kerneltrap.org/node/3823
I'd go for self-built polished concrete with inset optic fibres - like this guy: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/09/how-to_polished_concrete_desk.html
From de Icaza's article: 'To him, ridiculous statements like Linus "does not believe in Freedom" are somewhat normal [1].'
Isn't that true, though? I always thought Linus came down heavily on the side of open source as an engineering philosophy and against the ideological side of software freedom? I'd have expected Linus to agree with the sentiment RMS is expressing, to be honest, as I believe it matches his real world stance.
RMS is obnoxious in the things he says or the way he says them sometimes. He also frequently comes across as patronizing in the way he states his beliefs as if they are Truth. But at least the guy is pretty consistent. I'm not sure having a hardliner such as him is as helpful now as it was was but you can at least rely on him to take a fairly consistent take and articulate his principles well, even if you don't believe in them. I respect him, even though he's maddening sometimes.
With Space: 1999 it was better not to think about the science. Even by TV sci-fi standards it was ... erk.
Like how the explosion was (if I recall correctly) on the dark side of the moon, yet propelled them away from the Earth instead of wiping out humanity. Or, heck, the fact that the explosion involved "magnetic radiation"! ;-)
Your comment about delta-v reminds me of the very first ep tho - they were all jammed into their seats / onto the floor as the moon blasted away. Eventually they were able to get up and move around again - fair enough - then one of them comments "we're decelerating!".
No - just no! Argggh, make it stop.
Yeah, OK, I was leaning towards 70s as being "pretty darn likely" then had an attack of self-doubt ;-)
And the opening music - yeah! My friends and I spent quite a lot of time randomly pulling out imaginary musical musical instruments and launching into the theme. It was awesome.
1. Scientists are evil scheming power hungry liars that screw everything up.
And yet, no matter how long I work at my PhD, I don't get the chance to gain power or influence, destroy the world or control people. This sucks, it was seriously mis-sold to me.
2. Politicians are selfless and caring human beings who will gladly give up their lives for you.
When watching BSG that hadn't occurred to me but ... yeah. *boggle*
3. Thirty year old gamers living with their mom are solving for the Grand Unified Theory by playing Warcraft 18 hours a day.
Well, at least they didn't leave out the patronization.
*sigh* to me it feels like the era of good science fiction is over.
Fortunately, now that economic and epidemiology research is being conducted on WoW, Everquest, etc they can at least claim to be furthering science in some sense!
Hopefully they won't upset the Alions by misusing the Star Gate!
The Wikipedia article on SG:U seems to imply that, whilst they're stuck on a starship they can't actually drive the thing where they want to go and are restricted to hopping on and off via its onboard stargate when they get near interesting things. So it's a bit like Voyager but somebody stole their steering wheel.
Space: 1999, a British sci-fi (60s or 70s, I'd guess) had a similar setup but it was based on the slightly more bonkers-sounding premise that the crew were stuck on a moonbase and that the entire moon had been catapulted across the galaxy. When the moon went through an interesting neighbourhood they'd sometimes hop off and take a look around, then they'd jump back on again before it left. Surreal stuff! Despite the dodgy science and costumes they actually had some quite good episodes with interesting plot ideas.
As an SG1 fan, I'd just like to say "Please let it be good! Please let it be good!". That is all.
True, though it depends on how frequent "occasional" is.
I'd expect that using a big enough hash value would make the probability of corruption due to collisions less than the probability of corruption due to cosmic rays hitting your RAM / whatever, which could affect any filesystem. If "occasional" corruption was "once in a hundred years" that'd be acceptable to me as the storage I'm using is less reliable than that. Some would want a larger hash value.
The git revision control system (not that I'm a huge fan of it) is actually content addressable in this way (not sure what, if any, checks it does to detect collisions) and is used successfully for large scale development. As far as I know they haven't had problems with collisions.
Gets more thorny if you start introducing an attacker though, since every time a crypographic hash gets broken you'd need to worry about deliberate collisions, rather than randomly occurring ones. Which would leave you looking at rewriting all the data on your filesystem with a new hash. Erk.
The conservative but post-hoc solution would be to have scrubber processes identify duplicate disk and memory areas and unify them in storage to save space. There's been talk of having btrfs support duplicate block elimination, I think. And code went into Linux recently to unify in-memory pages (for the benefit of KVM guests but presumably it could be applied to other processes too). It's a bit ugly doing it that way but at least you can guarantee it works. Question is whether it'd be worth it. I wonder whether it would perform better or worth than a content addressable system in the end.
I wonder if everybody has looked at using static linking + content addressable filesystem as a replacement for DLLs. Every app would ship with all required libraries linked statically and the elimination of duplicated data would be handled by the filesystem and memory management code so that you don't waste disk / RAM. If you used a suitable protocol you could even save on bandwidth by not downloading file blocks that you already have somewhere on your disk, so the increased executable size would become less of a problem.
Ethics != Rights
Something can be unethical even if you have a right to do it. The retailer might, depending on local retail law be *legally* allowed to do this. *shrug* - they may even be protected in their right to do this. It doesn't matter - ethics is not the same as legal rights. It's not illegal to break wind in a lift but it's still something we'd rather people didn't do.
It's fair to point out that their behaviour could possibly not be as unethical as it is suggested - depending on the underlying circumstances they may believe they have good reason to do this. But you also seem to be asserting their right to control their site as a counterargument to their behaviour being unethical. Firstly, I'd say that commenting on the ethics of their policies doesn't affect their ability to administer their site, so it's fair comment and not infringing their rights. Secondly, the fact that they may have the right to choose what goes on their site (and that other people don't have the right to *prevent* them doing this) does not affect the ethical dimension of their behaviour at all. You can have a right to do something but still be behaving bad for exercising that right in certain ways.
I agree with the point that the company isn't necessarily being evil. But whether they're behaving well or badly really is rather separate from whether they're behaving within their rights.
Before making my assertions I double checked the history of railways on wikipedia and got a bit confused, which was why I stuck with the conservative "passenger railway". Apparently the Ancient Greeks (who else!) used rails to haul carts around; once I read that I decided that it wasn't the time to get into the specifics of who invented what and decided to assert something safely minimal!
British railways are better than they were a decade ago. We went through a phase of having so many railways that you could pretty much use them like buses, since they connected to every tiny village. There are villages near here that must have only a few hundred people now, having probably expanded - they had stations. Dr Beeching cut out most of the tiny branch lines, as well as some fairly major lines. It was meant to improve efficiency, I think. The railways became quite poor and were privatised on what I understand were some fairly dodgy competition assumptions - I think part of the idea was that train companies would compete on the same line but that's not how it's implemented, so the "market" only exists at all when the franchise is up for tender. The trains are back to a state of being reasonably reliable, though they're quite expensive (it's not as much cheaper than flying as you'd hope, depending on when you book tickets - a bit crazy in a country this small).
In Europe they're doing much better than us. At least France and Germany, possibly others, have a separate high speed rail network. Our only high speed line is for connecting London with the tunnel to France; they're just now bringing that line into commuter use for people who happen to live along it. There's been talk of a longer stretch of high-speed, Europe-compatible line to perhaps serve commuting and the channel tunnel. An article in Private Eye magazine (a satirical and investigative journalism mag - but I digress) mentioned that we used to have a high speed, European-compatible line to link to the Channel Tunnel, which was built by a crazy businessman in the late 19th (yes, really!) century (long before the tunnel was built). It got shut down, now we need a new one :-(
Some of our fast trains are still quite fast, just not up to European standards. My experience of travelling by Amtrack in the States was actually very pleasant compared to British trains, to be honest. I understand that the rail service in the States is somewhat patchy, though, so this seems unlikely to be representative of the rest of the country. It is a sad decline indeed since days of the railroads as a way to open up the Wild West. I think a high speed rail network, if it ever happens, would be a good thing for the US. Sometimes flying or driving is just necessary but it seems a shame to do it when a train could do it faster, cheaper and with less energy cost. But then, I don't really know anything about the US-specific issues. I just hope that some Federal oversight (or inter-state co-operation) can be applied so that any high speed links are suitable for joining up at a later date.
The British invented the passenger railway and yet our rail networks are still horrible.
They're not the worst in the world, just a source of continual mild disappointment. The best thing about them is that we get to moan about them. It's a bit like our weather, really, except that we didn't invent drizzle (that I know of).
I think the niche of electric sports cars, so far occupied by Tesla, has been an incredibly cunning strategy. Consider some strengths and weaknesses of an electric car:
+ Instant high acceleration; high torque available at any time, at any speed
+ Shiny and novel and impressive
- Heavy and bulky batteries
- Short range
- Have to charge it a lot
- Expensive
And the requirements and constraints of a sports car:
Need: Good speed and acceleration
Need: Shiny and novel and impressive (i.e. expensive), so you can show off
But: Drinks fuel faster, may have shorter range.
But: You probably won't go very far in it, or very often.
But: Often have lots of interior luxuries stripped out in the name of weight saving.
Bingo! The requirements of a sports car are - to a reasonable extent - satisfied well by an electric motor. You get incredible acceleration, whenever you want. You get something impressive and futuristic-sounding and exotic. The constraints that lightweight sports cars have *already* do well to mask the disadvantages of an electric vehicle - with a sports car you probably expect reduced range, you don't want to use it all the time (so charging time not an issue, just keep it in the garage plugged in), you don't expect to carry groceries (bulk of the batteries doesn't matter), you don't expect lots of luxuries (so they can be stripped out to somewhat compensate for battery weight). And if you wanted a sports car you were already prepared to spend something expensive (and probably susceptible to image-based marketing - so the futuristic, green, responsible but exciting thing an electric sports car has will probably work on you!).
As a bonus, sports cars are usually expensive in terms of fuel, whilst an electric car is going to be cheap. Probably even in the US, even more so in other markets.
Genius. Goes to show that all those companies trying to make practical, electric town cars might have been starting from the wrong place!
I thought Microsoft had been being honest about their products' flaws for decades - once they've got a new one lined up to sell. Any company is going to keep product flaws quiet until they have a new one. I did have the impression MS had historically put more emphasis than many companies on the old product being *bad*, as well as the new one being good. Which would mean this announcement is somewhat in keeping as they're coming out with WM7 at some point...
I had a conversation with a friend along the lines of:
Me: "And they used technology from their little robot man, so it's not like that was entirely useless!" ..."
Friend: "Well, given they used it to make a unicycle
It's true. I generally say they cost about half what a bike of /equivalent quality/ would cost. The unicycles on that page are higher quality ones.
Look at the wheel sizes - a 36" wheel is ~10" wider than a standard bicycle wheel, so it's custom hardware rather than just a bike with bits removed. They often have aluminium rims to save weight, which pushes up the price. And tyres that size aren't common or cheap. There's potentially other stuff like the high quality / low weight materials in other parts. A 36" or even a 29" is for people who are serious about riding distances. I used to do a hundred miles in a month on my 36".
A small unicycle is much cheaper and also easier to learn and do tricks on. A 20" wheel, like your stereotypical circus unicycle, can be had for much less. I got my first unicycle for the equivalent of about $60, although I fear it was probably made in a horrible 3rd world sweatshop. An advantage of unicycle.com is that they take some care over the welfare conditions in their factories and they don't sell junk, although cheaper unicycles are always going to be less robust. You can't commute on a 20", it's too slow unless you get an (extremely expensive!) hub gearing system.
Intel's Moblin boots incredibly fast. Their early prototypes got to desktop in 5 seconds. Here's a video of Moblin 2.0, possibly taking a bit longer than that but it's also probably a nicer desktop ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqmuPFZ1RWo
Moblin's aim, AFAIK, is to get you to a full *usable* desktop as quickly as possible. So unlike what Windows (unless they've improved this since XP, when I last checked!) and some Linux distros do you don't get your quickly loaded desktop bogged down by loads of services starting in the background. You get there, you're done (although you may still have to wait for the network to connect but whatever you do won't be wallowing whilst other stuff loads).
You can't coast on a normal unicycle, no. There are occasional novelty unis with a coaster hub installed but the problem is that - whilst you can zoom down hills very quickly - they make balance much harder. Dare I say, they are an impractical form of unicycle ;-) Normal balancing on a unicycle relies on you being able to apply back pressure on the pedals to keep the unicycle under your centre of mass. Your balance has to be waaaaay better to ride without that.
Putting a basket on one would be awkward also, I'm afraid. The falling off mechanic for a unicycle typically involves you landing on your feet (and, assuming you're not going faster than you can run!, probably running to a stop. Obviously that's still somewhat more injury-prone than a bike). The unicycle tends to bounce away at this point. They're robust so it doesn't matter to the cycle, you just wouldn't want your shopping on board at the time!
Also, mounting stuff on your uni tends to alter the handling, which can be awkward. To carry stuff, I usually put it in (or strap it to) my rucksack. I've done shopping like this, or carried a smaller unicycle strapped to my back. You have to ride carefully within your limits, since if you fall and roll on the ground you'll squash your shopping. Once I was skilled, riding within my limits in this way wasn't a problem. It's trickier riding whilst carrying a load but you get used to it.
I have also ridden back from the shops with carrier bags in one or, I think, both hands. The unicycle does have the advantage of freeing up your hands like this! You need to be very confident in your skills before you try that, though! And I did have the advantage of not sharing the road with cars.
Yeah. Does sound like it probably makes things worse. I think saying "double" made sense from a rhetorical perspective as it emphasizes the point that there are now two relatively unrelated things that could go wrong but I do think it's a bit unfair. The "Google Chrome in particular" line still irks me, though.
I've posted a follow up to my original comment suggesting anyone who reads it should make sure they read all the discussion beneath it.
Regarding replacing Trident, yes it's use by other things. What I was wondering was whether they'd provided a library to wrap the Trident implementation. Such a wrapper could perhaps pass everything through to Trident by default but have the option of passing stuff to the Chrome rendering engine instead. That way they could avoid breaking things.
I should probably just stop speculating idly and actually read the articles concerned though :-S
Yeah, it's true. In the places I've ridden I've actually not found it too much of an issue - as long as you're riding *somewhere* people don't interrupt me. There's very little jeering here, most attention is positive if people notice at all. But where I live (Cambridge, UK), there are loads of bikes so people tend to filter out cyclists and sometimes don't notice me at all. I'm not even the only unicyclist commuter in town.
I imagine there are places where riding a unicycle would be a lot more awkward. And if you don't like people staring at you anyhow it's a bit of a pain.
Other advantage is that I have a couple of large wheeled unicycles that can go quite fast - I've hit 17mph in the past and that's not their maximum potential. People get just enough time to notice me and then I'm already gone.
I commuted to work by unicycle for several years and have done hundreds of miles in total. Modern unicycles have come a long way from the old days of a circus exhibit. There are lot of people who ride very long distances on them. A unicycle won't suit most people for commuting but it actually has more plus points than you'd think ...
* Lighter weight than a bike, relatively easy to pick up and carry, or wheel along.
* Takes less space than a bike to store indoors.
* Cheaper than a bike of equivalent quality.
* Once you're skilled you can "idle" on the spot (or just hop occasionally to shift the thing back under your centre of mass) so you may not have to put a foot down when waiting in traffic or at lights.
* Potentially very mechanically simple.
* Good exercise, including for your core muscles due to the postural component of keeping balanced.
It's also a good attention grabber, if you like that sort of thing. I've observed that a lot of geeks, particularly computer geeks, seem to like unicycling. My guess is that this is because, relative to a bike, it requires a high degree of mental engagement but in a non-intellectual way. So you get to exercise your brain but in a way which distracts you from the pressures of logical thought processes.
There are some commuting unicycles here:
http://www.unicycle.com/shopping/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=1&subcat=7&cat=Commuter
Note that handlebars are available, which allows experienced riders to take some weight of their "bits". Combined with modern saddles, a unicycle is a lot less punishing to your nether regions than you'd expect, though you obviously still need to take care!
Finally, at the high end of the price range, there are unicycles with the Schlumpf (and Kris Holm-Schlumpf) hub-based gearing system. No exposed gearing but you can get something like a 1.5:1 increase in gear ratio, allowing you go go much faster whilst still having the wheel be small and light. In some ways I'd think this would be the best urban commuting unicycle for experienced riders.
There are clear disadvantages to a unicycle to but I figure some folks here might be interested anyhow. Because an unpowered unicycle has made such a good commuting vehicle for me I wouldn't be surprised if an electrical one is actually more practical than you'd expect.
[if anyone wants to find out more, the rec.sport.unicycling newsground, also available as a forum http://unicyclist.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=3 will be able to answer your questions or you can just reply to me here - it's arguably even on topic!]