That switches SO from making a huge window that takes over the whole monitor, to making one which at least has a title bar for you grab and minimize/move. It doesn't change the basic suckage: StarOffice puts everything as windows within a big window, instead of using the window manager I picked and configured to my tastes.
The whole idea of having one window and then implementing your own window manager with in it is broken. StarOffice should really use X, instead of just poping up an xwindow and then re-implementing X and a window manager within it.
It has the feel of being designed by people who thought windows was great, or those who used Sun's CDE. Unless they hire some smart people who cultivate a sophisticated sense of annoyance at the condescending UI stupidities common today, the most they can ever hope to do is be equivalent to MS Office, which means that they are doomed.
Really ? Do you know if the talk is posted somewhere -- his talks don't seem to be archived on his site. (I don't know if anyone would have that recorded or transcribed, anyway.)
It seems to me that the classical no-fetters-for-software argument would say that society would benefit if all the timber mills used the efficient algorithm, thus forcing them to compete in other ways. What should happen is that one company's advantage in a better cut-planner should be only temporary, not artificially extended through government granted monopoly, so that the business has to keep getting better instead of resting on it's one accomplishment. Of course, some of us, including me, believe that the ability to imitate or copy what others are doing should not be restricted even if it is bad for the economy, and that more freedom for individuals is always good.
As for as the software itself, this could be a really interesting project. Ideally, you would want a fairly easy way to specify input and output formats, so that it could be extended to floor plans and circuit layout and other areas were there are already well-estabished formats. You should also be able to plug and play the optimization algorithm and the fitness metrics. This would be really fun to design and implement. It could easily be a thesis project.
I completely agree. Almost every netnews reader completely outclasses slashcode style we discussion groups, let alone that much worse stuff that is used on zdnet or yahoo or other places.
In the past, Taco and Co. have mentioned a usenet interface to slashdot as a possible future feature. This is desparately needed. I will explain why:
-- Web based discussion boards generally lack the ability to quickly see what posts are new when revisting a discussion. In gnus (my newsreader of choice) the old posts would be marked; I could re-read them if necessary but I can also quickly read the replies. -- You need to allow more flexibility for posters in composition. Yes, I know I could compose this post in emacs and then cut-and-paste it in, but I should be able to read and post from pine or trn or emacs or whatever I want. Browsers just aren't as configureable; when mozilla allows you to use elisp or guile or something to write your own editting modes for forms, that will be a start. -- You use less bandwidth. -- To address the lack of HTML complaint: you can post html if you want, many newsreaders will parse it. But actually html is not well suited to short email and post like messages. Sure, I could have composed this using html tags to make a bulletized list. But why ? What about links, you say ? XEmacs (and most other readers) will recognize a URL and make it clickable -- and it's harder to disguise a link to goatse.cx as something else. This sounds like the complaint of someone who hasn't used the netnews enough.
One last thought: I have been trying to get the time to learn how to use gnus score files. It seems to me that if you set up a way to share score files, and to continuous "meta-moderate" a selection of other people's score files as you browsed/read, then you would have a much better way of doing slashdot. Essentially you could automaticaly find that set of moderators that most aggreed with your preferences.
As for educational related use of newsgroups -- I think the main benefit is that one person's question, and the answer, is seen by everyone; so that those people who never ask questions and never visit the professor/TA will benefit by lurking and listening to the more aggressive ones.
I'll tell you what I'm doing about it -- moving. And quiting my job to do it, and unfortunately shafting the understaffed company I work for in the process.
And I consider only $6,000 a year to be too much -- roughly 1/10 my pre-tax dollars. (I live in the Boston area; I've lived outside of town in Woburn, and in Cambridge proper close to MIT, and in Somerville near Inman Sq., but I always found a place I could pack with sometimes annoying housemates.) I'm planning to move in with my brother in Austin, TX, but even there rents are exploding. I think I'll try to find a trailer park that has DSL or cable modem access.
In the long term, I'm afraid I will end up living in Houston. I hate the air there, and by that I mean the humidity and heat even before the pollution is mixed in. But as the largest city in the world with no zoning laws, I think it has more promise as a flexible place where people like me can always move into the slum of the decade. I plan to be starting a company, and I want to be able to rent space very cheaply in some trashed strip mall or deserted industrial park.
It's unfortunate I suppose, but huge, unplanned, car dependent, sprawling type of city just offers more flexibility and opportunity. Places like Boston just fall into this old-world mode of limited resources controlled by older conservative classes, and it is just too constricting, no matter how cool you think the brownstones of the north end or whatever are. The only thing I fear is lack of access to smart people; I think you just have to plan in a lot of extra costs in recruiting trips and etc to keep pulling in the cutting edge from MIT, CMU, etc. I think Austin is close to having the best of both worlds, cheap and large universities, but they are sliding towards the high rent mode. Everytime I hear those shiny-faced "dialog-builders" and "concerned about the community" types talking about how Austin needs to control it's growth, I visualize $2,000 rents and write the place off mentally.
Maybe someone living in Houston can comment on the situation there ? What about other more mid-western places -- Des Moines, Kansas City, etc ? I'd prefer to be more north, even North Dakota, but I'm afraid I would never be able to hire anyone who would move up there.
I totally agree that these new service oriented companies are disasters. However, any government regulation is going to have to well thought out and carefully crafted, and the same people that passed the DMCA are unlikely to figure out how to do it. I would suggest that you will have better reform results by focusing on tape recording (with notice) phone calls with salesman and customer support, and then making well documented compliants when they don't follow through. If you feel you are ignored, you should forward all of your documentation to your state's attorney general and consider direct legal action such as small claims court. Your local TV station might broadcast a story on a well documented case of abuse.
The panacea of "we'll get a law" rarely pays off, especially when the problem is as ill-defined as simply bad business practices by a certain ill-defined class of companies.
I think the real problem is that we put up with it, especially here in America. How many people actually sit down and carefully read their long distence phone bill ? A large portion of those $1.54 "connection fees" and "access fees" are simply illegal; if you refuse to pay them and write enough letters, they eventually disappear from your bill. I suspect it will take something like a major depression to make Americans start complaining and fighting these types of abuses.
My experience with phone company's incompetance or fraud (couldn't figure out which) lead me to rely on pre-paid celluar deals for communication -- I always pay in cash, and make sure they never get my name or credit card number. It's more expensive than the other deals, but I suspect all the minor little surprises in roaming charges, exceeding your plan minutes, and the like, make up for it. The fact that they can't send a bill to a pre-paid account means they have to actually charge an honest price at which they make a profit, instead of advertising something too cheaply and shafting everyone in the fine print.
I plan to try out the cybiko -- look at www.cybiko.com -- later in the summer. I have not had a close look at their developers kit yet. Nor have I talked to anyone who has one, let alone has actually hacked on it, which I would really like to do before I pay that much. Does anyone here have any experience with them ?
I know you can get www.freewwweb.com working, because I helped a co-worker set it up for his home machine. As I am moving to a new place where there is no cable modem/DSL, I plan to use it myself. He set it up first in windows, then copied the information to kppp to connect from linux. The only hitch was that he removed dollar signs from the password as stored on the windows side, before it would start working.
For linux instructions, check out this link, just one of several revealed in a quick google search: teledyn.
I would like to second the request for some type of "modem sniffer" program. Several times I have been faced with the task of making a dialup connection that worked under windows work with linux; often these had been set up by a program distributed by the ISP and it was difficult to figure out what it did; a modem-logger type of program would have been very useful. I just spent fifteen minutes searching freshmeat and other places which have network sniffers, but I didn't see anything that looked useful for debuging the initial part of the dialup connection.
If you try to download the technical documents from www.wapforum.org it asks you to click through a license agreement. While the license agreement doesn't ask you to treat the document as a trade secret, I still find it offensive.
(As near as I can tell, the license agreement is meaningless; perhaps someone with more legal understanding can explain what they get from this that is not already granted to them by law ?)
You might also be interested in this slashdot article which talks about patent and licensing related issues in WAP.
On the whole, there seems to be enough uncertainty associated with the WAP licensing/patent issue that I decided not to use it for what I was working on.
I think when you said "It's like Gnutella; who do you persecute?" you hit the nail on the head. But reverse engineering is not the best tactic. Like pirating the music files, it's best to pass the alledgely illegal act downward to the masses.
But the trick is not to implement the Microsoft extensions; after all, to follow the analogy, the Gnutella authors didn't pirate all the mp3's. Even if the authors are anonymous, let's keep it hard to claim the product itself is illegal.
What you want to do is make a kerberos implementation in which one may specify the meaning of that the key "extension" bytes on the command line. As in "kinit -byte26 128" instead of just "kinit". (Actually, I'm not sure how it would work on the command line, the above example is surely wrong -- the key here is that any information gleaned from MS trade secrets is specified by the user, not in the program which you distribute. Perhaps it won't be in the command line, but in a configuration file the user will have to generate. Perhaps a generic kerberos like protocol description language is needed.)
If users around the world look up the spec and make bash aliases for kinit so they don't even have to remember it or waste the keystrokes, it's a widely distributed crime, let MS go after all of them. You just passed the ability to comply to the MS extension to the world, and let them choose whether or not to do it.
This strategy fits in with the general trend of successful challenges to these restrictions: just make it easy for people to do it, provide them the tools.
The open publication of the extension spec is a bait to get someone into a position vulnerable to legal harassment. We can trump this by simply passing on the trick to more people than all the lawyers in Redmond can list in a Excell spreadsheet; don't nibble at it yourself, for God's sake.
I would like to be able to walk in a store and pay cash for a phone, and pre-pay for a certain number of minutes in cash, and then walk out having never revealed my name or other personal information. Of course, I should also be able to return with the phone and more cash and add more minutes.
I realize that releasing the drivers is not trivial for nVidia. As you say, and I believe, "There is significant stuff in those drivers which nVidia does better than everyone else and which could be used in drivers for other cards. If they released it, they would lose a significant competitive advantage that they currently have."
But that stuff is not really available to me until they release the source. So they are in a have-your-cake-or-eat-it situation: do they want to sell their technology, or just keep it ? If they aren't selling it, why am I giving them money ?
They could release it under a license that would force a competitor to also release all specs to use it on a card. (It might be hard to enforce.) Then they could at least provide to *me* the ability to exercise their product to the fullest and continue to use it as long as it works. And nVidia would do just fine as long as their stuff worked better.
I don't expect nVidia to forfit a wad of cash to give me a gift. I just wish they would forfit a useful piece of computer equipment in exchange for *me* giving *them* a wad of cash.
If not, they can at least be more clear in the advertising. I didn't see "This video card's performance is limited by secret software you can't change or extend" written on the box. I didn't see "This video card might work with the next version of your OS if we still give a damn about you" written on the box. They want to pretend like they are selling something in the way that one sells a hammer or a toaster. But they are really selling something closer to the way that IBM and SGI used to sell mainframes -- tied up with a rat's nest of service dependancies, so it took a spreadsheet to figure out how much it really cost. nVidia wants to extend the Windows-world type of business model to linux: they are reserving the ability to improve certain things to themselves. The fact that their card works at all while many other cards don't is irrelevant to the principle of the matter. They see as integral to their business model a limitation on my abilities.
We should fight the expansion of that type of business. It is far too pervasive. If nVidia is so awesome, why can't they survive without keeping secretes about how to use their cards ?
Let's re-visit that quotation: "There is significant stuff in those drivers which nVidia does better than everyone else and which could be used in drivers for other cards. If they released it, they would lose a significant competitive advantage that they currently have."
Can I interpret this to mean that a large part of an nVidia card's performance comes from the software in the driver ? In that case, maybe nVidia's *hardware* isn't so awesome compared to other video cards, but the edge comes from *software* ? But wait, aren't they supposed to be a *hardware* company ?
If a major part nVidia's value that they are selling is in the software, if they are largely a software driver company, why should we treat them any differently from MicroSoft or SGI or anyother company that sells closed software, with all the limitations inherently associated with it ?
If nVidia did release their complete specs, then other companies probably would learn from them, and nVidia would actually have to make better hardware. Immagine that, a hardware company having to make good hardware to stay in business. Now that sounds like capitalism.
Until then, I'm going to stick to this ancient S3 with 2 MGs of video RAM.
My brother and I bought a used Lucent 56k winmodem at a used computer place. Lucent offered binary drivers for it.
But without the code, you have to use the kernel version that the binary module was compiled against. So for future kernel upgrades, you are dependant on Lucent seeing fit to recompile their driver. It is as if we don't really own that modem, we are just leasing it while we ue this kernel. We don't have the same freedoms as if we had bought a piece of hardware that was *really* being sold.
Would you buy a car for which the company kept secrete the method of doing some key maintainance, so that they could shaft you at dealership in a couple of years ?
If nVidia was really selling hardware like a bunch of true-blue capitalists, then they would just release everything you could ever want to know about that card, thus making it more valuable to you. But instead, they have to hold something back. This limits what I can do with the card now and in the future.
Not that nVidia isn't far from lonely in their little effeminate neuroses. The basic pattern is this: a company does work and produces something of value (software, hardware, whatever) and then they want to sell it and get money. But then they get all breathy and twitchy because they don't trust themselves to be able to continue to do good work, so they try for some manipulative contorted way of selling it but somehow still owning it -- not give the source code to keep you on the leash, not tell you how the card works so they stop releasing drivers and force you to buy the newest one, etc.
That's the problem with capitalism these days -- nobody has any fucking rocks. Why do I want to buy a video card from a bunch of Marys who don't even trust themselves to be able to stay in the black without some strings attaching me to them so they can pull on me in the future ?
I could see it if it was some ultra-low margin type of business where you needed to eke out every cent to just stay in the black. But this is the computer industry, for God's sake. It's the biggest boom ever, and their screwing around with this stuff, hiding piddly little things that would cost them nothing to release so they try to scratch another few bucks out later on -- or worse, some of these companies have no clear idea how keeping the secrete helps the bottom line, they do it out of an instinctive lack of confidence.
I support capitalism. When some real capitalists have a nice card for sale, we might do business.
Regardless of nVidia's current support of Linux, they are still purposely circumcribing the utility of the card to keep me tied to them. Why should I do business with a company that sees fit to damage the goods as part of some plan to manipulate me and my wallet ? Like Intel secretely marking down the speed on some CPUs when they thought they needed more CPUs in the low end of the market, rather then just marking down the over supplied high end.
I don't want nVidia's "support" (well, that would be nice, I guess), I just want the information which makes me not dependant on that support. nVidia can't sell me an unfettered piece of equipment. Fuck 'em. So they licensed some technology from other companies that won't let them do it ? So what ?
I'm going to wait until someone has something for sale, and buy that.
Just find one person on your team who can get DSL/CableModem or other broadband access.
Then get them to give you an account. If it really is a smaller group, and you trust them, a single user account with ssh access should be enough. You shouldn't even need to have root access. If you want to do the web thing, you will need root access to install apache with the ssl stuff, so you can have a private password protected area. If you get a domain name and map it to the box, apache can give a separate web page based on the URL you are using to connect, so you don't even have to interfere with the donor's web site if they are running one.
If someone has access to machines outside the firewall at their workplace, they can put it there, but without talking it over with the company people it's kind of illigit. Not that it hasn't been done.
I gave a friend of mine root access to my cable modem box, and he did half a web-based startup off of it, through a round or two of funding and lots of users. I never noticed because I have this expensive connection I share with my roommates and yet we are all at work or school all our waking hours and we never get to use it, because non of us have a life. Start-up dude never even told me, because they had all these non-disclosure secrecy agreements everyone was bound by. Months and months later, after I was seeing this company on subway advertisement, My friend mentions to me "Oh yeah, you know blahblah.com ? That's the secrete startup I'm doing. All the foo services have been running on your machine until recently. Thanks." It was kind of weird. I'm glad someone got some use out of that cable modem.
Anyway. You can do the CVS through the ssh connection too -- it involves setting the environment variable CVS_RSH to ssh, and it's in the cvs manual.
Yeah, that makes total sense. It can't be just heat. You wouldn't expect that there to be a positive correlation between climate or exercising in sweats with cancer, would you ?
So what is it about the EM radiation that causes the damage ? Why is the EM from a leaking microwave oven bad for you ?
This reminds me of that whole debate about whether living in the proximity of powerlines and transformers increased the incidence of cancer. No one ever made a convencing study as I remember, and they never did offer a good physical description of how that energy could harm you.
I know one professor who teaches a bio-electronics class (6.121J) and I can ask him.
Even if they are a square wave, they still are emitting energy at high frequencies. Instead of just a sign wave at the clock frequency, it is that plus higher frequencies at smaller amplitudes.
A lot of people in the posts above are suggesting that the low power means that this is nothing to worry about, just more un-informed hyteria. While I totally admitt to the un-informed part, you have to realize that the "always-on" nature of the computer means that damage can accumulate over a long period of time. I spend more than half my waking hours (at least during the week) in a room with more than 3 computers within a few feet. Many people (especially college students) sleep in a room with computers close to the bed.
I don't understand the very much about the physics of how RF does biological damage; I've read about how "harder" radiation, such as gamma and particle radiation, works. Basically, you want to assure yourself that the radiation is not enough to produce a free radical next to a DNA strand, so that the radical can combine with the DNA and break it. Now, because of the way that your cells repair DNA, you can tolerate a certain amount of damage; kind of like an error-correcting code will keep all the information as long as only a certain portion of the bits are lost or flipped.
Particle radiation can make chemical changes just by hitting the molecules, but RF level radiation does damage (or can do damage) by simply heating an area, which can damge DNA or produce free radicals or oxygen which will damage it.
So while I think the power observations are very pertinent, I don't think they can be the basis of dismisal of the danger. I think you have to be able to say that the amount of heating your body might receive from several computers 24/7 is on the order of what you get anyway from the electrical system, or something like that. There must be some effect, but as long as it is below what you can measure it is probably below the level at which DNA repair will protect you from cancer.
So one final question -- someone (the first post) mentions that ham radio hobbists get cataracts more often. What is the physical mechanism that causes that ? I know that exposure to too much UV light is supposed to increase the incidence of cataracts. I have glasses with an anti-UV coating that the eyeglass specialist recommended on those grounds.
Yeah, but a lot of people run their computers with the case open, or without a case at all (you can just screw everthing into a plastic milk crate, or worse; just look at some of the overclocked systems -- a pile of wires and boards on the kitchen table or in the freezer or in cooled mineral oil).
Before I buy a chip running at that frequency, I'd like to see some specs on exactly what I can and cannot do with it. If I need to keep it in a case that meets certain specifications, I should know that; is it safe to just not screw in the panels on the case, or should I always have everything tightened up before powering on ? I would prefer to have the processor package do all the necessary shielding for me.
What about those guys doing wearable computing ? I know Steve Mann and that Media Lab freak club were walking around MIT with computers butt packs for a while. For what processors they had there was probably no danger, but with a gigahertz plus processor hanging over the genital area or close to your body at all -- cancer at least only affects the person who decided ot wear the thing, a birth defect punishes a child for the parent's negligence.
I would prefer to get the information from an independent source; if AMD or Intel said that it was dangerous if not run as shipped, the information would be suspect because they might just be trying to scare off the overclockers, and if they said it would always be safe, they might just be hiding the truth for marketing reasons.
So I would like to see some overclockers and someone with access to the right kind of equipment test the newest processors at some really high clock rates (even if the processor was unstable at that rate) and publish the results. The "right kind of equipment" is the kicker here -- I've heard those electrical isolation chambers they use to test the meeting of FCC specs are very expensive.
I am planning to buy a really fast alpha in a few months after I move to my new place. I've heard rumours of 1.4 and 1.6 GH by then. I'll just get some really long keyboard and monitor cables until I see some trustable information on this issue. Whatever the manufacturer says, I'll still trust 1/R^2 -- you can't beat basic physics.
Incidentally -- does anyone know if these expensive flat screen monitors produce signifcantly less EM radiation than the good old cathode ray tube ? I think the fact that they use less power is a good sign.
I would use CVS. I use it myself extensively. As for your "secure" requirement, what I do is I have the cvs repository on a machine which I connect to with ssh. You can set the environment variable "CVS_RSH" equal to "ssh" and it will use ssh to talk to the remote repository.
As for frontends to it, there exist a number of them. The cvs homepage has a list. I use pcl-cvs, an X/Emacs package, and also the command line.
I don't understand what you mean by " deal with potentially live Web based code" and "impair the developer's ability to work with their favorite tools (Dreamweaver, Editplus)." It seems that by "live Web based code" you seem to think that a web site will be running right out of the repository, or something. You should have a repository to keep track of versions, and you can check out a particular version from that. Normally, you should check out a copy to a "development server" where you edit and test and debug. The world cannot see or access this, or if they can, it is not the main one on your company's site. Then you check your modified code back into the repository on a special tag or branch. Others check it out to their development servers and validate your work, maybe merging with their own, and you update your copy to get and examine their changes. At somepoint every one agrees that it is stable, and then you do a single checkout to the "production server", the live site.
So CVS should not have to be integrated with Dreamweaver or Editplus or whatever else GUI nonsense you are crippling yourself with. (Hint: emacs has a variety of html editing modes. Try them out and use one. Plain old Fundamental mode works great too.)
You mention developer retraining. In about a page you can list the basic commands which will allow each developer to check things in and out, veiw differences (even in ediff, if you use pcl-cvs) and mark versions. Teaching the use of CVS is simple.
( I have a simple little text file how-to that I wrote for members of my team when we first started -- it tells how to set things up and check out your first copy and etc. Email me if you want it.)
But the real problem is not the training associated with CVS at all; the commands are pretty simple and book (the one by Pers Cederqvist that comes with the distribution as a postscript file) is great. The problem is training developers to use configuration management at all. You have to talk with all of them and develop a plan of how to label branches, a naming scheme, etc. Many of them will check out one copy and hack for weeks and then feel frustrated and betrayed because the version has evolved so far that everything is impossible to merge.
You are going to have those problems no matter what management system you use.
My advice is to set up and use CVS, and focus on building a culture of development under configuration management among your co-workers. If you have to switch from CVS to something else it won't be that big a deal; getting people to use configuration management at all is the big step.
You asked for real world experience; I have none in the application server area at all, except for an abortative project that never really got off the ground.
Here's one idea we considered: just write a unix based application with an X windows interface to do what we wanted to, and then use VNC (to see a demo, get an account at workspot.com -- see the slashdot article on them a few weeks ago) to provide the web access side with almost no work.
The idea was that we knew how to write applications for unix well, and VNC would give us a painless web interface for free. We would set up the user's accounts with a.xinitrc that would launch the application full-screen, so they wouldn't even have to know that they were using unix/Xwindows.
Well, VNC isn't really painless, as you will see if you check out workspot. If I launch it on my cable modem box and attach from work, it is great, but when you have a machine with many users it gets slow and annoying. Plus, don't trick yourself into believing that there is very much you will avoid with this route -- you will still have to solve all the problems with database access, locking transactions, concurancy, or whatever you had to solve before -- you just get to do it in a standard unix application instead of a nasty mess of wired together scripts and stuff.
It's been done though -- apparently the big diesels on some of the commercial rigs had a computer controller that behaved one way in the EPA's test rig and another way on the road. I read a lot of stories about it but I never found out exactly how they did it -- maybe they only shifted into "fuel-efficient but dirty" mode when they had been running a long time. Here's one of the stories.
"Most people treat giant land crawlers as their primary vehicle, and thus must be regulated. "
I disagree that the regulation has to differentiate between types of vehicles.
Essentially the problem here is that the price you pay for a gallon at the pump doesn't reflect the cost burning it inflicts on the rest of us. (At least, that is the theory; I'm actually rather suspicous of that, but it a whole other subject and flame war.)
If you simply taxed gas appropriately, and eliminated all those taxes on this type of vehicle versus that, then SUV drivers would pay more.
Instead, the current system tries to make these inherently bogus judgements -- a driver of a small light car should not be taxed, that big truck is necessary for business so let's forgive him, let's punish the guy with muscle car, etc.
A non vehicle specific system like a gas tax would automatically cover a lot of other behavior besides selection in vehicle size -- the frequency of trips, car pooling, good maintainence, etc.
Punishing the SUVers is easy to talk about because it is emotionally satisfying. Yes, they piss me off too. It is instinctive to try to map the tax to the behavior you detest, and punish the SUV driving yuppie who uses his 2-ton vehicle to carry a cell phone, and avoid the hard working plumber who needs a big vehicle, and reward the commuter driving a light cheap car.
But society generally works better with simple systems like a gas tax -- it hits right at the heart of the problem, it doesn't involve a creating a new lobbying industry to set the tax levels of every new model of vehicle, and it is sort of self-adaptable in that other fuel-wasting behavior is covered and a very efficient or alternative fuel SUV is automatically exempt.
Firstly, I whole heartedly agree with you that the modern car styles suck.
I think that because of the battery weights, the older bigger styles of cars may be better targets for diesel-electric hybrids. You have to haul a lot of battery with the current technologies.
Check out the US Army HumVee project here and a little more information here. Several minutes of dedicated web searching should turn up more informative links, but hear's the gist I remember from news stories:
The original point was to reduce IR and noise signals, in particular to not have a good IR signal for a missile to home in on (but don't those electric motors get really hot ? anyway . ..)
The batteries in the bed of the vehicle provided some protection from large anti-vehicle landmines (this might be wrong, I'm remembering it, it wasn't in the linked stories above)
It could climb a steeper grade due to the weight of batteries lowering the center of mass
Better fuel mileage
better acceleration (I was surprised to learn that most electric motors can accelerate a car pretty well, if the car isn't loaded down with batteries to give it a decent range)
smaller payload due to all that battery weight
I would hope to see fleet vehicles like the postal service trucks or delivery trucks like UPS/FedEx start using this technology.
I have wondered what kind of diesel generator they have. I wonder if you could do better than a piston engine with a small turbine whose rotors or blades were permanent magnents forming the armature of a high-speed generator.
Anyway, I would not mind having an econoline van with this type of setup on a smaller scale.
For playing around with a litle roll-your-own stuff, I have been thinking about the cybiko. You can check it out at www.cybiko.com. The problem is that it is not clear that the development kit (libraries and etc so you can cross-compile and executatble and download it onto the device) includes access to the networking stuff. (In this case, the roll-your-own part would be in software, the hardware is already there.)
The price is $150, which is several times the impulse buy level, so I can't just buy it and see. Also, you'd need more than one to really do anything.
My interests are in mobile wireless routing protocols; this little toy actually does some of that, because messages from two disconnected devices will hop through a device that can talk to both. It sounds really cool.
Slashdot Mirror
That switches SO from making a huge window that takes over the whole monitor, to making one which at least has a title bar for you grab and minimize/move. It doesn't change the basic suckage: StarOffice puts everything as windows within a big window, instead of using the window manager I picked and configured to my tastes.
The whole idea of having one window and then implementing your own window manager with in it is broken. StarOffice should really use X, instead of just poping up an xwindow and then re-implementing X and a window manager within it.
It has the feel of being designed by people who thought windows was great, or those who used Sun's CDE. Unless they hire some smart people who cultivate a sophisticated sense of annoyance at the condescending UI stupidities common today, the most they can ever hope to do is be equivalent to MS Office, which means that they are doomed.
Really ? Do you know if the talk is posted somewhere -- his talks don't seem to be archived on his site. (I don't know if anyone would have that recorded or transcribed, anyway.)
It seems to me that the classical no-fetters-for-software argument would say that society would benefit if all the timber mills used the efficient algorithm, thus forcing them to compete in other ways. What should happen is that one company's advantage in a better cut-planner should be only temporary, not artificially extended through government granted monopoly, so that the business has to keep getting better instead of resting on it's one accomplishment. Of course, some of us, including me, believe that the ability to imitate or copy what others are doing should not be restricted even if it is bad for the economy, and that more freedom for individuals is always good.
As for as the software itself, this could be a really interesting project. Ideally, you would want a fairly easy way to specify input and output formats, so that it could be extended to floor plans and circuit layout and other areas were there are already well-estabished formats. You should also be able to plug and play the optimization algorithm and the fitness metrics. This would be really fun to design and implement. It could easily be a thesis project.
I completely agree. Almost every netnews reader completely outclasses slashcode style we discussion groups, let alone that much worse stuff that is used on zdnet or yahoo or other places.
In the past, Taco and Co. have mentioned a usenet interface to slashdot as a possible future feature. This is desparately needed. I will explain why:
-- Web based discussion boards generally lack the ability to quickly see what posts are new when revisting a discussion. In gnus (my newsreader of choice) the old posts would be marked; I could re-read them if necessary but I can also quickly read the replies.
-- You need to allow more flexibility for posters in composition. Yes, I know I could compose this post in emacs and then cut-and-paste it in, but I should be able to read and post from pine or trn or emacs or whatever I want. Browsers just aren't as configureable; when mozilla allows you to use elisp or guile or something to write your own editting modes for forms, that will be a start.
-- You use less bandwidth.
-- To address the lack of HTML complaint: you can post html if you want, many newsreaders will parse it. But actually html is not well suited to short email and post like messages. Sure, I could have composed this using html tags to make a bulletized list. But why ? What about links, you say ? XEmacs (and most other readers) will recognize a URL and make it clickable -- and it's harder to disguise a link to goatse.cx as something else. This sounds like the complaint of someone who hasn't used the netnews enough.
One last thought: I have been trying to get the time to learn how to use gnus score files. It seems to me that if you set up a way to share score files, and to continuous "meta-moderate" a selection of other people's score files as you browsed/read, then you would have a much better way of doing slashdot. Essentially you could automaticaly find that set of moderators that most aggreed with your preferences.
As for educational related use of newsgroups -- I think the main benefit is that one person's question, and the answer, is seen by everyone; so that those people who never ask questions and never visit the professor/TA will benefit by lurking and listening to the more aggressive ones.
I'll tell you what I'm doing about it -- moving. And quiting my job to do it, and unfortunately shafting the understaffed company I work for in the process.
And I consider only $6,000 a year to be too much -- roughly 1/10 my pre-tax dollars. (I live in the Boston area; I've lived outside of town in Woburn, and in Cambridge proper close to MIT, and in Somerville near Inman Sq., but I always found a place I could pack with sometimes annoying housemates.) I'm planning to move in with my brother in Austin, TX, but even there rents are exploding. I think I'll try to find a trailer park that has DSL or cable modem access.
In the long term, I'm afraid I will end up living in Houston. I hate the air there, and by that I mean the humidity and heat even before the pollution is mixed in. But as the largest city in the world with no zoning laws, I think it has more promise as a flexible place where people like me can always move into the slum of the decade. I plan to be starting a company, and I want to be able to rent space very cheaply in some trashed strip mall or deserted industrial park.
It's unfortunate I suppose, but huge, unplanned, car dependent, sprawling type of city just offers more flexibility and opportunity. Places like Boston just fall into this old-world mode of limited resources controlled by older conservative classes, and it is just too constricting, no matter how cool you think the brownstones of the north end or whatever are. The only thing I fear is lack of access to smart people; I think you just have to plan in a lot of extra costs in recruiting trips and etc to keep pulling in the cutting edge from MIT, CMU, etc. I think Austin is close to having the best of both worlds, cheap and large universities, but they are sliding towards the high rent mode. Everytime I hear those shiny-faced "dialog-builders" and "concerned about the community" types talking about how Austin needs to control it's growth, I visualize $2,000 rents and write the place off mentally.
Maybe someone living in Houston can comment on the situation there ? What about other more mid-western places -- Des Moines, Kansas City, etc ? I'd prefer to be more north, even North Dakota, but I'm afraid I would never be able to hire anyone who would move up there.
I totally agree that these new service oriented companies are disasters. However, any government regulation is going to have to well thought out and carefully crafted, and the same people that passed the DMCA are unlikely to figure out how to do it. I would suggest that you will have better reform results by focusing on tape recording (with notice) phone calls with salesman and customer support, and then making well documented compliants when they don't follow through. If you feel you are ignored, you should forward all of your documentation to your state's attorney general and consider direct legal action such as small claims court. Your local TV station might broadcast a story on a well documented case of abuse.
The panacea of "we'll get a law" rarely pays off, especially when the problem is as ill-defined as simply bad business practices by a certain ill-defined class of companies.
I think the real problem is that we put up with it, especially here in America. How many people actually sit down and carefully read their long distence phone bill ? A large portion of those $1.54 "connection fees" and "access fees" are simply illegal; if you refuse to pay them and write enough letters, they eventually disappear from your bill. I suspect it will take something like a major depression to make Americans start complaining and fighting these types of abuses.
My experience with phone company's incompetance or fraud (couldn't figure out which) lead me to rely on pre-paid celluar deals for communication -- I always pay in cash, and make sure they never get my name or credit card number. It's more expensive than the other deals, but I suspect all the minor little surprises in roaming charges, exceeding your plan minutes, and the like, make up for it. The fact that they can't send a bill to a pre-paid account means they have to actually charge an honest price at which they make a profit, instead of advertising something too cheaply and shafting everyone in the fine print.
I plan to try out the cybiko -- look at www.cybiko.com -- later in the summer. I have not had a close look at their developers kit yet. Nor have I talked to anyone who has one, let alone has actually hacked on it, which I would really like to do before I pay that much. Does anyone here have any experience with them ?
When is the linux port ?
For linux instructions, check out this link, just one of several revealed in a quick google search: teledyn.
I would like to second the request for some type of "modem sniffer" program. Several times I have been faced with the task of making a dialup connection that worked under windows work with linux; often these had been set up by a program distributed by the ISP and it was difficult to figure out what it did; a modem-logger type of program would have been very useful. I just spent fifteen minutes searching freshmeat and other places which have network sniffers, but I didn't see anything that looked useful for debuging the initial part of the dialup connection.
(As near as I can tell, the license agreement is meaningless; perhaps someone with more legal understanding can explain what they get from this that is not already granted to them by law ?)
You might also be interested in this slashdot article which talks about patent and licensing related issues in WAP.
On the whole, there seems to be enough uncertainty associated with the WAP licensing/patent issue that I decided not to use it for what I was working on.
I think when you said "It's like Gnutella; who do you persecute?" you hit the nail on the head. But reverse engineering is not the best tactic. Like pirating the music files, it's best to pass the alledgely illegal act downward to the masses.
But the trick is not to implement the Microsoft extensions; after all, to follow the analogy, the Gnutella authors didn't pirate all the mp3's. Even if the authors are anonymous, let's keep it hard to claim the product itself is illegal.
What you want to do is make a kerberos implementation in which one may specify the meaning of that the key "extension" bytes on the command line. As in "kinit -byte26 128" instead of just "kinit". (Actually, I'm not sure how it would work on the command line, the above example is surely wrong -- the key here is that any information gleaned from MS trade secrets is specified by the user, not in the program which you distribute. Perhaps it won't be in the command line, but in a configuration file the user will have to generate. Perhaps a generic kerberos like protocol description language is needed.)
If users around the world look up the spec and make bash aliases for kinit so they don't even have to remember it or waste the keystrokes, it's a widely distributed crime, let MS go after all of them. You just passed the ability to comply to the MS extension to the world, and let them choose whether or not to do it.
This strategy fits in with the general trend of successful challenges to these restrictions: just make it easy for people to do it, provide them the tools.
The open publication of the extension spec is a bait to get someone into a position vulnerable to legal harassment. We can trump this by simply passing on the trick to more people than all the lawyers in Redmond can list in a Excell spreadsheet; don't nibble at it yourself, for God's sake.
I would like to be able to walk in a store and pay cash for a phone, and pre-pay for a certain number of minutes in cash, and then walk out having never revealed my name or other personal information. Of course, I should also be able to return with the phone and more cash and add more minutes.
Does anyone know of where I can get such a deal ?
In what countries is this common ?
Some people consider that good. I think that they should at least make it so the locator feature can be disabled by the user.
I am listening. Let me explain.
I realize that releasing the drivers is not trivial for nVidia. As you say, and I believe, "There is significant stuff in those drivers which nVidia does better than everyone else and which could be used in drivers for other cards. If they released it, they would lose a significant competitive advantage that they currently have."
But that stuff is not really available to me until they release the source. So they are in a have-your-cake-or-eat-it situation: do they want to sell their technology, or just keep it ? If they aren't selling it, why am I giving them money ?
They could release it under a license that would force a competitor to also release all specs to use it on a card. (It might be hard to enforce.) Then they could at least provide to *me* the ability to exercise their product to the fullest and continue to use it as long as it works. And nVidia would do just fine as long as their stuff worked better.
I don't expect nVidia to forfit a wad of cash to give me a gift. I just wish they would forfit a useful piece of computer equipment in exchange for *me* giving *them* a wad of cash.
If not, they can at least be more clear in the advertising. I didn't see "This video card's performance is limited by secret software you can't change or extend" written on the box. I didn't see "This video card might work with the next version of your OS if we still give a damn about you" written on the box. They want to pretend like they are selling something in the way that one sells a hammer or a toaster. But they are really selling something closer to the way that IBM and SGI used to sell mainframes -- tied up with a rat's nest of service dependancies, so it took a spreadsheet to figure out how much it really cost. nVidia wants to extend the Windows-world type of business model to linux: they are reserving the ability to improve certain things to themselves. The fact that their card works at all while many other cards don't is irrelevant to the principle of the matter. They see as integral to their business model a limitation on my abilities.
We should fight the expansion of that type of business. It is far too pervasive. If nVidia is so awesome, why can't they survive without keeping secretes about how to use their cards ?
Let's re-visit that quotation: "There is significant stuff in those drivers which nVidia does better than everyone else and which could be used in drivers for other cards. If they released it, they would lose a significant competitive advantage that they currently have."
Can I interpret this to mean that a large part of an nVidia card's performance comes from the software in the driver ? In that case, maybe nVidia's *hardware* isn't so awesome compared to other video cards, but the edge comes from *software* ? But wait, aren't they supposed to be a *hardware* company ?
If a major part nVidia's value that they are selling is in the software, if they are largely a software driver company, why should we treat them any differently from MicroSoft or SGI or anyother company that sells closed software, with all the limitations inherently associated with it ?
If nVidia did release their complete specs, then other companies probably would learn from them, and nVidia would actually have to make better hardware. Immagine that, a hardware company having to make good hardware to stay in business. Now that sounds like capitalism.
Until then, I'm going to stick to this ancient S3 with 2 MGs of video RAM.
My brother and I bought a used Lucent 56k winmodem at a used computer place. Lucent offered binary drivers for it.
But without the code, you have to use the kernel version that the binary module was compiled against. So for future kernel upgrades, you are dependant on Lucent seeing fit to recompile their driver. It is as if we don't really own that modem, we are just leasing it while we ue this kernel. We don't have the same freedoms as if we had bought a piece of hardware that was *really* being sold.
Would you buy a car for which the company kept secrete the method of doing some key maintainance, so that they could shaft you at dealership in a couple of years ?
If nVidia was really selling hardware like a bunch of true-blue capitalists, then they would just release everything you could ever want to know about that card, thus making it more valuable to you. But instead, they have to hold something back. This limits what I can do with the card now and in the future.
Not that nVidia isn't far from lonely in their little effeminate neuroses. The basic pattern is this: a company does work and produces something of value (software, hardware, whatever) and then they want to sell it and get money. But then they get all breathy and twitchy because they don't trust themselves to be able to continue to do good work, so they try for some manipulative contorted way of selling it but somehow still owning it -- not give the source code to keep you on the leash, not tell you how the card works so they stop releasing drivers and force you to buy the newest one, etc.
That's the problem with capitalism these days -- nobody has any fucking rocks. Why do I want to buy a video card from a bunch of Marys who don't even trust themselves to be able to stay in the black without some strings attaching me to them so they can pull on me in the future ?
I could see it if it was some ultra-low margin type of business where you needed to eke out every cent to just stay in the black. But this is the computer industry, for God's sake. It's the biggest boom ever, and their screwing around with this stuff, hiding piddly little things that would cost them nothing to release so they try to scratch another few bucks out later on -- or worse, some of these companies have no clear idea how keeping the secrete helps the bottom line, they do it out of an instinctive lack of confidence.
I support capitalism. When some real capitalists have a nice card for sale, we might do business.
Regardless of nVidia's current support of Linux, they are still purposely circumcribing the utility of the card to keep me tied to them. Why should I do business with a company that sees fit to damage the goods as part of some plan to manipulate me and my wallet ? Like Intel secretely marking down the speed on some CPUs when they thought they needed more CPUs in the low end of the market, rather then just marking down the over supplied high end.
I don't want nVidia's "support" (well, that would be nice, I guess), I just want the information which makes me not dependant on that support. nVidia can't sell me an unfettered piece of equipment. Fuck 'em. So they licensed some technology from other companies that won't let them do it ? So what ?
I'm going to wait until someone has something for sale, and buy that.
Just find one person on your team who can get DSL/CableModem or other broadband access.
Then get them to give you an account. If it really is a smaller group, and you trust them, a single user account with ssh access should be enough. You shouldn't even need to have root access. If you want to do the web thing, you will need root access to install apache with the ssl stuff, so you can have a private password protected area. If you get a domain name and map it to the box, apache can give a separate web page based on the URL you are using to connect, so you don't even have to interfere with the donor's web site if they are running one.
If someone has access to machines outside the firewall at their workplace, they can put it there, but without talking it over with the company people it's kind of illigit. Not that it hasn't been done.
I gave a friend of mine root access to my cable modem box, and he did half a web-based startup off of it, through a round or two of funding and lots of users. I never noticed because I have this expensive connection I share with my roommates and yet we are all at work or school all our waking hours and we never get to use it, because non of us have a life. Start-up dude never even told me, because they had all these non-disclosure secrecy agreements everyone was bound by. Months and months later, after I was seeing this company on subway advertisement, My friend mentions to me "Oh yeah, you know blahblah.com ? That's the secrete startup I'm doing. All the foo services have been running on your machine until recently. Thanks." It was kind of weird. I'm glad someone got some use out of that cable modem.
Anyway. You can do the CVS through the ssh connection too -- it involves setting the environment variable CVS_RSH to ssh, and it's in the cvs manual.
Yeah, that makes total sense. It can't be just heat. You wouldn't expect that there to be a positive correlation between climate or exercising in sweats with cancer, would you ?
So what is it about the EM radiation that causes the damage ? Why is the EM from a leaking microwave oven bad for you ?
This reminds me of that whole debate about whether living in the proximity of powerlines and transformers increased the incidence of cancer. No one ever made a convencing study as I remember, and they never did offer a good physical description of how that energy could harm you.
I know one professor who teaches a bio-electronics class (6.121J) and I can ask him.
Even if they are a square wave, they still are emitting energy at high frequencies. Instead of just a sign wave at the clock frequency, it is that plus higher frequencies at smaller amplitudes.
A lot of people in the posts above are suggesting that the low power means that this is nothing to worry about, just more un-informed hyteria. While I totally admitt to the un-informed part, you have to realize that the "always-on" nature of the computer means that damage can accumulate over a long period of time. I spend more than half my waking hours (at least during the week) in a room with more than 3 computers within a few feet. Many people (especially college students) sleep in a room with computers close to the bed.
I don't understand the very much about the physics of how RF does biological damage; I've read about how "harder" radiation, such as gamma and particle radiation, works. Basically, you want to assure yourself that the radiation is not enough to produce a free radical next to a DNA strand, so that the radical can combine with the DNA and break it. Now, because of the way that your cells repair DNA, you can tolerate a certain amount of damage; kind of like an error-correcting code will keep all the information as long as only a certain portion of the bits are lost or flipped.
Particle radiation can make chemical changes just by hitting the molecules, but RF level radiation does damage (or can do damage) by simply heating an area, which can damge DNA or produce free radicals or oxygen which will damage it.
So while I think the power observations are very pertinent, I don't think they can be the basis of dismisal of the danger. I think you have to be able to say that the amount of heating your body might receive from several computers 24/7 is on the order of what you get anyway from the electrical system, or something like that. There must be some effect, but as long as it is below what you can measure it is probably below the level at which DNA repair will protect you from cancer.
So one final question -- someone (the first post) mentions that ham radio hobbists get cataracts more often. What is the physical mechanism that causes that ? I know that exposure to too much UV light is supposed to increase the incidence of cataracts. I have glasses with an anti-UV coating that the eyeglass specialist recommended on those grounds.
Yeah, but a lot of people run their computers with the case open, or without a case at all (you can just screw everthing into a plastic milk crate, or worse; just look at some of the overclocked systems -- a pile of wires and boards on the kitchen table or in the freezer or in cooled mineral oil).
Before I buy a chip running at that frequency, I'd like to see some specs on exactly what I can and cannot do with it. If I need to keep it in a case that meets certain specifications, I should know that; is it safe to just not screw in the panels on the case, or should I always have everything tightened up before powering on ? I would prefer to have the processor package do all the necessary shielding for me.
What about those guys doing wearable computing ? I know Steve Mann and that Media Lab freak club were walking around MIT with computers butt packs for a while. For what processors they had there was probably no danger, but with a gigahertz plus processor hanging over the genital area or close to your body at all -- cancer at least only affects the person who decided ot wear the thing, a birth defect punishes a child for the parent's negligence.
I would prefer to get the information from an independent source; if AMD or Intel said that it was dangerous if not run as shipped, the information would be suspect because they might just be trying to scare off the overclockers, and if they said it would always be safe, they might just be hiding the truth for marketing reasons.
So I would like to see some overclockers and someone with access to the right kind of equipment test the newest processors at some really high clock rates (even if the processor was unstable at that rate) and publish the results. The "right kind of equipment" is the kicker here -- I've heard those electrical isolation chambers they use to test the meeting of FCC specs are very expensive.
I am planning to buy a really fast alpha in a few months after I move to my new place. I've heard rumours of 1.4 and 1.6 GH by then. I'll just get some really long keyboard and monitor cables until I see some trustable information on this issue. Whatever the manufacturer says, I'll still trust 1/R^2 -- you can't beat basic physics.
Incidentally -- does anyone know if these expensive flat screen monitors produce signifcantly less EM radiation than the good old cathode ray tube ? I think the fact that they use less power is a good sign.
I would use CVS. I use it myself extensively. As for your "secure" requirement, what I do is I have the cvs repository on a machine which I connect to with ssh. You can set the environment variable "CVS_RSH" equal to "ssh" and it will use ssh to talk to the remote repository.
As for frontends to it, there exist a number of them. The cvs homepage has a list. I use pcl-cvs, an X/Emacs package, and also the command line.
I don't understand what you mean by " deal with potentially live Web based code" and "impair the developer's ability to work with their favorite tools (Dreamweaver, Editplus)." It seems that by "live Web based code" you seem to think that a web site will be running right out of the repository, or something. You should have a repository to keep track of versions, and you can check out a particular version from that. Normally, you should check out a copy to a "development server" where you edit and test and debug. The world cannot see or access this, or if they can, it is not the main one on your company's site. Then you check your modified code back into the repository on a special tag or branch. Others check it out to their development servers and validate your work, maybe merging with their own, and you update your copy to get and examine their changes. At somepoint every one agrees that it is stable, and then you do a single checkout to the "production server", the live site.
So CVS should not have to be integrated with Dreamweaver or Editplus or whatever else GUI nonsense you are crippling yourself with. (Hint: emacs has a variety of html editing modes. Try them out and use one. Plain old Fundamental mode works great too.)
You mention developer retraining. In about a page you can list the basic commands which will allow each developer to check things in and out, veiw differences (even in ediff, if you use pcl-cvs) and mark versions. Teaching the use of CVS is simple.
( I have a simple little text file how-to that I wrote for members of my team when we first started -- it tells how to set things up and check out your first copy and etc. Email me if you want it.)
But the real problem is not the training associated with CVS at all; the commands are pretty simple and book (the one by Pers Cederqvist that comes with the distribution as a postscript file) is great. The problem is training developers to use configuration management at all. You have to talk with all of them and develop a plan of how to label branches, a naming scheme, etc. Many of them will check out one copy and hack for weeks and then feel frustrated and betrayed because the version has evolved so far that everything is impossible to merge.
You are going to have those problems no matter what management system you use.
My advice is to set up and use CVS, and focus on building a culture of development under configuration management among your co-workers. If you have to switch from CVS to something else it won't be that big a deal; getting people to use configuration management at all is the big step.
You asked for real world experience; I have none in the application server area at all, except for an abortative project that never really got off the ground.
.xinitrc that would launch the application full-screen, so they wouldn't even have to know that they were using unix/Xwindows.
Here's one idea we considered: just write a unix based application with an X windows interface to do what we wanted to, and then use VNC (to see a demo, get an account at workspot.com -- see the slashdot article on them a few weeks ago) to provide the web access side with almost no work.
The idea was that we knew how to write applications for unix well, and VNC would give us a painless web interface for free. We would set up the user's accounts with a
Well, VNC isn't really painless, as you will see if you check out workspot. If I launch it on my cable modem box and attach from work, it is great, but when you have a machine with many users it gets slow and annoying. Plus, don't trick yourself into believing that there is very much you will avoid with this route -- you will still have to solve all the problems with database access, locking transactions, concurancy, or whatever you had to solve before -- you just get to do it in a standard unix application instead of a nasty mess of wired together scripts and stuff.
Just a thought.
It's been done though -- apparently the big diesels on some of the commercial rigs had a computer controller that behaved one way in the EPA's test rig and another way on the road. I read a lot of stories about it but I never found out exactly how they did it -- maybe they only shifted into "fuel-efficient but dirty" mode when they had been running a long time. Here's one of the stories.
"Most people treat giant land crawlers as their primary vehicle, and thus must be regulated. "
I disagree that the regulation has to differentiate between types of vehicles.
Essentially the problem here is that the price you pay for a gallon at the pump doesn't reflect the cost burning it inflicts on the rest of us. (At least, that is the theory; I'm actually rather suspicous of that, but it a whole other subject and flame war.)
If you simply taxed gas appropriately, and eliminated all those taxes on this type of vehicle versus that, then SUV drivers would pay more.
Instead, the current system tries to make these inherently bogus judgements -- a driver of a small light car should not be taxed, that big truck is necessary for business so let's forgive him, let's punish the guy with muscle car, etc.
A non vehicle specific system like a gas tax would automatically cover a lot of other behavior besides selection in vehicle size -- the frequency of trips, car pooling, good maintainence, etc.
Punishing the SUVers is easy to talk about because it is emotionally satisfying. Yes, they piss me off too. It is instinctive to try to map the tax to the behavior you detest, and punish the SUV driving yuppie who uses his 2-ton vehicle to carry a cell phone, and avoid the hard working plumber who needs a big vehicle, and reward the commuter driving a light cheap car.
But society generally works better with simple systems like a gas tax -- it hits right at the heart of the problem, it doesn't involve a creating a new lobbying industry to set the tax levels of every new model of vehicle, and it is sort of self-adaptable in that other fuel-wasting behavior is covered and a very efficient or alternative fuel SUV is automatically exempt.
I think that because of the battery weights, the older bigger styles of cars may be better targets for diesel-electric hybrids. You have to haul a lot of battery with the current technologies.
Check out the US Army HumVee project here and a little more information here. Several minutes of dedicated web searching should turn up more informative links, but hear's the gist I remember from news stories:
- The original point was to reduce IR and noise signals, in particular to not have a good IR signal for a missile to home in on (but don't those electric motors get really hot ? anyway . .
.) - The batteries in the bed of the vehicle provided some protection from large anti-vehicle landmines (this might be wrong, I'm remembering it, it wasn't in the linked stories above)
- It could climb a steeper grade due to the weight of batteries lowering the center of mass
- Better fuel mileage
- better acceleration (I was surprised to learn that most electric motors can accelerate a car pretty well, if the car isn't loaded down with batteries to give it a decent range)
- smaller payload due to all that battery weight
I would hope to see fleet vehicles like the postal service trucks or delivery trucks like UPS/FedEx start using this technology.I have wondered what kind of diesel generator they have. I wonder if you could do better than a piston engine with a small turbine whose rotors or blades were permanent magnents forming the armature of a high-speed generator.
Anyway, I would not mind having an econoline van with this type of setup on a smaller scale.
The price is $150, which is several times the impulse buy level, so I can't just buy it and see. Also, you'd need more than one to really do anything.
My interests are in mobile wireless routing protocols; this little toy actually does some of that, because messages from two disconnected devices will hop through a device that can talk to both. It sounds really cool.
That's unfortunate that the pricing structure is set up that way.
Have you ever seen someone telnet to the POP3 port and scan the subject lines of the emails by typing in POP commands ?
They can get enough information to filter spam without downloading the whole email.
It would seem that the key would be making it easy to use and setup with your account -- as a plugin to the Netscape mail handler, perhaps.