Anyone storing data about you must conform to the Data Protection Act, where it explicitly states "it is immaterial that it is intended to be so processed or to form part of such a system only after being transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area". Your data IS protected because you are a UK citizen. The Data Protection Registrar takes any breaches very seriously and can be contacted via their web site.
You can write good code in VB, only elitist morons hear the word "BASIC" and think it's beneath them.
I've published BASIC apps on a decent platform (Acorn RISC OS) and it was fine. However VB is not the same as BASIC. VB is just a wierd abomination that imho is only second to Javascript. It certainly is beneath anyone that considers themselves a professional software engineer.
High level languages are the future. People who think if it isn't written in C or ASM will be left in the past.
Knowing a higher level language will give an edge. It's not the be all and end all though. The language and the syntax are only a small part of what you need for maintainable code. Good basis in algorithms, standardised coding style, version control, resuable libraries, etc. People have been promoting "next generation" languages and even "visually generated no need for coding" languages since the early 80s. The fact is that for noddy projects VB will suffice for amateurs, but the moment projects become complex it falls apart.
The easier it is to write, the easier it is to maintain, and the easier it is to use good code form and techniques. It doesn't mean any idiot can fire it up and write good code, writing good code is a skill. Just like anyone can learn to speak english, but it doesn't make them a good poet or author.
Being able to write good code is language independant. Someone that knows how to architect their code will be able to do it in VB, C, or even assembler. To follow your analogy, just because they can't speak english doesn't mean they aren't a good poet or author.
On the other hand it may save time, if your dump is closer than the out-of-town discount store? Seriously though, that statement isn't true. When you're a broke student, there are other things you would spend an afternoon doing that looking around a dump but $100 is $100. That will buy a lot of beer at student prices.
I guess you could argue in theory you could somehow get a job that lasted just on afternoon and then buy the computer, but as student jobs (from what I remember) paid $5-$10/hour the dump is still a good option.
I'd have much preferred it if Bruce Campbell was playing the lead.
I also love Bruce Campbell, but I don't think he would suit the role of cliched battle hardened marine. With Bruce's comic face, when he gets hurt you actually wince. The Doom character you expect to take punishment until the bad guys are dead, then to patch himself up and reattach limbs with needle and thread.
Be thankful. Our Doctors in the UK are still using MS-DOS 6.22 and Word Perfect.
What's wrong with that? Virus and trojan free, doesn't consume massive amounts of resources (memory and cpu), not overwhelmed with unnecessary features. Stick on a basic DOS based browser and you have a cheap thin-client. Sounds just what the non-technical minded doctors and the tax paying public needs.
If you live in the UK then talk to Powergen about getting a micro-chp (Combined Heat and Power) generator. Normal gas water heaters are very inefficient. The micro-chp appliance captures that waste energy using a Sterling engine, and provides it as electricity. If you have your heating on, you should get 1kW of free electricity.
Solar voltaics can provide backup, as can a micro-chp station. This old article talks about micro-chp, but basically when you are heating your house you get 1kW/h of free electricity. Connect this to a fuel cell, and when you are producing excess electricity then you store it up in hydrogen. When you burst it can be taken directly from the fuel cell without paying the national grid. Use white LEDs for lighting, a VIA mini-itx for your server, and your electricity bills will be only for your cooking and heating.
I remember an interview with a British officer, where they explained why they were wearing berets instead of helmets. He said the moment they arrived they switched from helmets to berets to appear more human and 'with' rather than 'against' the local population. They received a bulletin where it was stated there was an increased risk to troops. They wore helmets for one day and the officer ordered them back into berets, despite the increase in risk to British lives, as they instantly perceived increased hostility from the locals. This kind of intelligence is worth its weight in gold.
No matter how you measure it? You must be on crack. These random bombings have been going on as far as I remember.
Just in the last month there have been bombings in France, Egypt, indonesia, israel, palestine, and of course all over Iraq. That's just in one month. Since the start of the war (when saddam left power) there have been devestating bombings all over the world. remember Bali, Spain, and the hotel bombing in kenya.
The Corsicans have been bombing France for the past couple of decades. The '97 bomb killed twice as many in Egypt as the more recent bombing did. You think Israel has only been suffering bomb attacks since the last month? The Bali bomb was over 2 years ago... hence still during Saddams reign. Similar with Kenya, their worst being 1998 and 2002.
Anyway, trying to tie it to Saddam makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHAT SO EVER. That's like saying for the English we were getting bombed by the IRA when Saddam was still in power and after he was removed we aren't any more... therefore by our measure the world is a better place after Saddam had been removed. There is no connection.
Let's hear it for the 'good old Saddam days', when we only had events such as 9/11, genocides across central Europe (Bosnia, Serbia, etc), and probably the same amount of bombings as before. Absolute tosh.
The world is much worse off since Saddam has been removed from power no matter how you measure it.
You are wrong, imho. Iran and Libya have been scared into stopping their nuclear programs, the US now knows who its real allies are (eg they used to count France as an ally), and the straw man of the "war on terror" has seen new alliances and even Putin declare solidarity (in a manner) with Bush. I personally think the world is a better place. Then again, I'm not frightened of my own shadow thinking there is a terrorist hiding around every corner. If you believe media propaganda, every person in an online chat room is a paedophile. You need to be able to step back to see the world as it really is.
Finally, for everyone pushing Gaim, don't forget to mention Gaim-encryption to go along with it.
This is what puts me off trying Miranda. After exhorting my friends to install GAIM so we can all chat securely, I can hardly install another IM client and go all the way back to square one. Can we have a standard method of encryption that will work in all IM clients please? At least get the most popular OS clients working with compatible plug-ins.
On the one hand, that makes sense, but on the other hand it seems really unfair for Rackspace to lose their business over this. They're just as much the victim here as their clients are.
Rackspace is not the victim. They are a business, and their job is to best serve their customer. They have failed to do this, and even to explain their reasons to the paying customer, and so anyone hosting at Rackspace would be right in taking their business elsewhere.
It may well be that law enforcement had good reason to seize the drives. There may well be some international treaty to make the seizure legal. The failure of Rackspace to communicate who has presented a court order and why seems difficult to fathom at this point.
I'm having a great time reading this thread. The same people who say things like "I would never run IE" are coming out and acting thrilled about this. What about the requirement of having IE to run this? I guess it is okay when it has something to do with Gmail. Hmmmm.
I have all the essential freedoms a person can have. And I sure as hell own my car, my house, my television, my computer etc. etc. etc. so I obviously have property!
I presume you are in the UK? Try living in France. You may think you 'own' a property but you don't. Want to move an electricity meter a few feet to the left? You need to repeatedly go to the 'syndic' to get forms filled out in duplicate, followed by an official EDF quotation that may take weeks, followed by it has to be moved by an official representative that can charge what-ever they like. Took me 2 months and around $1,000 to move my meters 2m. If you move then by law you need to change your car number plate to match the town you are in... where you get ping-ponged between town halls and government departments. Even putting up a sattelite dish has taken my friend over 4 months with no results as he's not allowed to install it himself and it has to go through 'official' (incompetant) channels. You DON'T have "all the essential freedoms a person can have". You have a system to frustrate and knock people down at every opportunity, to make sure they know where their place is. I would agree with the American that it is a "subordinated 'chattel' population" here.:-( Often when suffering under the useless beaurocracy here, the banks or syndics etc, I wish I had a loud American with me that would let loose and give them a piece of their mind, as I know they would never accept what the residents and I have to put up with all the time.
Either you were trying to be funny (I find the statement above in particular amusing), or you aren't in the journalism business.
With the appalling grammar and the duplicated articles, I don't think Slashdot is either. It has strived to stay a "community" site.
Generally, readers prefer information from "the source".
Not true. We don't have time to listen to thousands of people plugging their commercial software. We want someone else to have done some research for us, filtering out the best stuff and then listing the advantages and disadvantages compared to similar stuff.
I hate to break it to you, but a large part of "journalism" is driven by press releases. Over half of the content of typical magazines and newspapers is of the nature of this article.
This is why we only buy these rags when we are desperate for something to read on the plane.
I can also say you're not a struggling self-employed tech professional if you think Xamlon is going about it's promotion the wrong way.
Nothing wrong with the submitter, people may throw as much spam as they want at the Slashdot Inbox. The fault is with the editor that posted it, when there are so many better stories being rejected.
This guy managed to get column inches on two huge websites for next to nothing. I'd say they've made a promotional coup!
Indeed and well done to him. However it was a coup at the expense of the reader.
Wired is the magazine that geeks look at on the shelf to find out what non-geeks read to find out what geeks think, and in doing so they can try and design world-changing software that the non-geeks want inspired by what the non-geeks think the geeks are doing. Makes sense?
Phillip.
Re:demographics and buying habits
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 4, Funny
If people stop buying what the stars are wearing/using and don't respond to peer pressure, then buyers will fragment and the long tail will rise in importance.
Won't happen here in France. When I walk through the streets around 1/2 people are wearing "Von Dutch" t-shirts. I'm seriously considering paying President Chirac or Koffi Annan to wear one in public, in the hope that they will then be considered uncool and consigned to the bin.
If this ever happens to you do not ever attempt to turn the ignition all the way off... In most cases you will lose both your power steering and your power braking.
Far worse than this. If you turn the ignition all the way off then the moment you turn the wheel the steering lock will engage (making it impossible to turn the steering wheel).
I can understand migrating away from Linux, but.. to Windows?!?! WTF? 1991 called, they want their computer back!
"There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
Yep, sounds like an OS problem. [rolls eyes]
Sounds like a "someone trying a random app on the cheap from Freshmeat" problem.
Really, picking on cars for emissions is by now a dead horse. The exhaust from a modern, emissions-controlled car is so clean that it is difficult to kill yourself by leaving the car running with the garage closed. There are bigger fish to fry, like tractor trailers, that emit far dirtier emissions than any modern car.
If you've ever been to a large congested city you will know emissions is NOT a dead horse. Pollution is appalling. And modern cars slowly degrade into no-so-efficient cars.
The use of hydrogen makes cars more dangerous, too. To put it simply, a compressed fuel is a dangerous fuel. Any accident that breaches the H2 tank turns the vehicle into a fuel-air explosive. I don't think the public will stand for too many fireballs on the highway. Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, cars almost never explode and rarely catch fire in accidents.
I think we've seen enough posts disproving this. A gasoline car is FAR more likely to explode that a hydrogen powered car. In fact, didn't Ford and GM have to recall an entire makes of car specifically because they exploded far too often in accidents?
Worse still, a mass changeover to hydrogen as our vehicle fuel would cause huge economic upheaval.
As in create more jobs? Start up new fields in innovation? Threaten the established cartels used to creaming enourmous profits into being more competative?
Hydrogen consumes huge amounts of power to produce, and it adds no energy to our system; it merely acts as a relatively convenient energy storage vessel. Petroleum, on the other hand, consumes very little energy to reach its refined state and contributes a large portion of our total energy use.
Hydrogen is zero-polluting and efficient at the end-generation side. There are many ways of generating hydrogen, and even the polluting methods can be done out of the heavily-populated towns. Upgrading the extraction process will reduce pollution. Upgrading technology for reducing petrol pollution means replacing every car each time.
Hydrogen makes nice PR, but it will never power vehicles until oil has become so expensive due to scarcity that we've already migrated to other, renewable energy sources.
How are these other renewable energy sources going to power a car? Battery technology doesn't give that much hope at the moment. Also pollution will indirectly drive up costs of petrol though its burden on the health care industry, sick-days at work, etc.
If it were mandated today that hydrogen must replace gasoline for vehicles, energy prices across the board would probably triple.
Probably, but the things you want don't come at the click of your fingers. You have to work hard towards it; the extraction process needs to be refined and many of the alternatives followed up, fuel-cell components need to be commoditised, business deals need to be done to make creating the intrastructure economical.
I'm a little surprised to be hearing anything about hydrogen cars these days. Hydrogen fueled cars were heavily hyped a few years ago when the automakers were strong-arming the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to drop its near-term mandate for electric vehicles in favor of a promise for a few magical hydrogen-fueled cars some years in the future. The scam worked: CARB rescinded the EV mandate, many working EVs were pulled from their satisfied owners, and that's why you hear so little about hydrogen these days.
I think this is partly true. It's outrageous how the car manufacturers crushed the electric car industry. Those that advertised themselves as selling electric cars would actually only lease them, and as soon as they had pulled the wool over the eyes of the government then had them forcibly recalled and destroyed (the owners not allowed to purchase them full-price despite their pleas).
However, hydrogen power is continually advancing. When producing a break-through, announcements come quick and fast. The process of refining this into a commercially cheap solution for mass production is a little more arduous and takes more patience.
The simple facts are that hydrogen is not a source of energy, but rather an energy carrier, like electricity. And hydrogen is a rather poor energy carrier at that; it's far less efficient than the electric power grid, which already exists and goes almost everywhere. Hydrogen isn't even a good energy storage medium in a car, due to its extremely low density.
The grid doesn't go everywhere, unless you want to tie a particularly long cable to your EV. Hydrogen can be produced anywhere there is electricty (or even only sunlight) and water (using electrolysis). Hydrogen is good enough for a car as it is light, unlike batteries, and a small form factor tank can power a vehicle for hundreds of kilometres.
The fact is that there's nothing a hydrogen fuel-cell car can do that isn't already done better, more efficiently and more cheaply by a battery EV. Just when new battery technologies like nickel metal hydride and lithium-ion were starting to prove their worth in EVs, CARB pulls the rug out from under them.
The fact is battery technology hasn't moved on much for decades. In cars the batteries are too heavy and to slow to recharge. And not just in cars either. Manufacturers are now starting to produce fuel-cells for laptops and mobile phones.
A hydrogen car that uses an ICE misses the whole point. It doesn't improve efficiency much, given that it is still limited by the thermal efficiency of a heat engine.
It misses one of the two points. The two advantages of a hydrogen powered fuel-cell car are (a) it's efficiency and (b) lack of pollution. This car misses the mark on (a) but (b) is still very important. I think BMW are seeing this as a stop-gap solution that will make them money. The big car manufacturers are sucking in huge government subsidies to produce a hydrogen infrastructure supposedly to run the fuel-cell cars. BMW produce a car that can tap into the infrastructure being paid for by everyone else, make virtually no changes to their production line as the technology is the same as the gasoline internal combusion engine, and sell it as the first production "100% green" car (albeit a bit of a gas-guzzler).
Moreover, although burning hydrogen doesn't produce carbon emmisions, producing hydrogen does.
Not necessarily. There are numerous methods of extracting hydrogen (currently small scale) that produce no carbon emissions.
Finally, the higher combustion temperature increases the formation of NOx pollutants.
Not heard anything about this. Links?
The reason for all the effort to create a new hydrogen fueling infrastructure is to take advantage of fuel cells/electric motors. A car with a hydrogen burning ICE is just an ordinary car that you can't refill at a gas station.
Soon hydrogen will be at every gas station (soon being the next few years). You missed the other advantage is that the torque of the electric motor means a fuel-cell car will accelerate far quicker so you can beat the old ICE cars at the lights.
I agree, Lynx is still an important browser. Not long ago you could browse around in your favourite browser and when you found the app you needed you could just paste url of the.rpm or.gz into your term window to grab with wget. This no longer works for many downloads as they use no longer have direct links to the files but dynamic urls with redirects that throw wget. With Lynx you hit the download page, hit a couple of keys, and the file downloads no problem. Much faster than downloading the file locally and trying to upload over a painfully slow ADSL connection.
until then, the attack ad proposition stands as sound
Unless it backfires. In your earlier post: The popularity of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 prove that the public is receptive to serious Bush-bashing.
On the other hand some of us thought Bush was the worst thing to happen to the US until the Michael Moore came up with that misleading one-sided 'documentary' and now we have some sympathy for Bush (eek).* I guess you are talking about playing a numbers game though.
want to argue virtue? you're in the wrong world buddy
Wrong country, you mean?
Phillip. * not a US resident so I don't get a vote anyway
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone storing data about you must conform to the Data Protection Act, where it explicitly states "it is immaterial that it is intended to be so processed or to form part of such a system only after being transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area". Your data IS protected because you are a UK citizen. The Data Protection Registrar takes any breaches very seriously and can be contacted via their web site.
Phillip.
You can write good code in VB, only elitist morons hear the word "BASIC" and think it's beneath them.
I've published BASIC apps on a decent platform (Acorn RISC OS) and it was fine. However VB is not the same as BASIC. VB is just a wierd abomination that imho is only second to Javascript. It certainly is beneath anyone that considers themselves a professional software engineer.
High level languages are the future. People who think if it isn't written in C or ASM will be left in the past.
Knowing a higher level language will give an edge. It's not the be all and end all though. The language and the syntax are only a small part of what you need for maintainable code. Good basis in algorithms, standardised coding style, version control, resuable libraries, etc. People have been promoting "next generation" languages and even "visually generated no need for coding" languages since the early 80s. The fact is that for noddy projects VB will suffice for amateurs, but the moment projects become complex it falls apart.
The easier it is to write, the easier it is to maintain, and the easier it is to use good code form and techniques. It doesn't mean any idiot can fire it up and write good code, writing good code is a skill. Just like anyone can learn to speak english, but it doesn't make them a good poet or author.
Being able to write good code is language independant. Someone that knows how to architect their code will be able to do it in VB, C, or even assembler. To follow your analogy, just because they can't speak english doesn't mean they aren't a good poet or author.
Phillip.
That assumes that your time is worth nothing.
On the other hand it may save time, if your dump is closer than the out-of-town discount store? Seriously though, that statement isn't true. When you're a broke student, there are other things you would spend an afternoon doing that looking around a dump but $100 is $100. That will buy a lot of beer at student prices.
I guess you could argue in theory you could somehow get a job that lasted just on afternoon and then buy the computer, but as student jobs (from what I remember) paid $5-$10/hour the dump is still a good option.
Phillip.
I'd have much preferred it if Bruce Campbell was playing the lead.
I also love Bruce Campbell, but I don't think he would suit the role of cliched battle hardened marine. With Bruce's comic face, when he gets hurt you actually wince. The Doom character you expect to take punishment until the bad guys are dead, then to patch himself up and reattach limbs with needle and thread.
Phillip.
Be thankful. Our Doctors in the UK are still using MS-DOS 6.22 and Word Perfect.
What's wrong with that? Virus and trojan free, doesn't consume massive amounts of resources (memory and cpu), not overwhelmed with unnecessary features. Stick on a basic DOS based browser and you have a cheap thin-client. Sounds just what the non-technical minded doctors and the tax paying public needs.
Phillip.
If you live in the UK then talk to Powergen about getting a micro-chp (Combined Heat and Power) generator. Normal gas water heaters are very inefficient. The micro-chp appliance captures that waste energy using a Sterling engine, and provides it as electricity. If you have your heating on, you should get 1kW of free electricity.
Phillip.
Solar voltaics can provide backup, as can a micro-chp station. This old article talks about micro-chp, but basically when you are heating your house you get 1kW/h of free electricity. Connect this to a fuel cell, and when you are producing excess electricity then you store it up in hydrogen. When you burst it can be taken directly from the fuel cell without paying the national grid. Use white LEDs for lighting, a VIA mini-itx for your server, and your electricity bills will be only for your cooking and heating.
Phillip.
I remember an interview with a British officer, where they explained why they were wearing berets instead of helmets. He said the moment they arrived they switched from helmets to berets to appear more human and 'with' rather than 'against' the local population. They received a bulletin where it was stated there was an increased risk to troops. They wore helmets for one day and the officer ordered them back into berets, despite the increase in risk to British lives, as they instantly perceived increased hostility from the locals. This kind of intelligence is worth its weight in gold.
Phillip.
No matter how you measure it? You must be on crack. These random bombings have been going on as far as I remember.
Just in the last month there have been bombings in France, Egypt, indonesia, israel, palestine, and of course all over Iraq. That's just in one month. Since the start of the war (when saddam left power) there have been devestating bombings all over the world. remember Bali, Spain, and the hotel bombing in kenya.
The Corsicans have been bombing France for the past couple of decades. The '97 bomb killed twice as many in Egypt as the more recent bombing did. You think Israel has only been suffering bomb attacks since the last month? The Bali bomb was over 2 years ago... hence still during Saddams reign. Similar with Kenya, their worst being 1998 and 2002.
Anyway, trying to tie it to Saddam makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHAT SO EVER. That's like saying for the English we were getting bombed by the IRA when Saddam was still in power and after he was removed we aren't any more... therefore by our measure the world is a better place after Saddam had been removed. There is no connection.
Let's hear it for the 'good old Saddam days', when we only had events such as 9/11, genocides across central Europe (Bosnia, Serbia, etc), and probably the same amount of bombings as before. Absolute tosh.
The world is much worse off since Saddam has been removed from power no matter how you measure it.
You are wrong, imho. Iran and Libya have been scared into stopping their nuclear programs, the US now knows who its real allies are (eg they used to count France as an ally), and the straw man of the "war on terror" has seen new alliances and even Putin declare solidarity (in a manner) with Bush. I personally think the world is a better place. Then again, I'm not frightened of my own shadow thinking there is a terrorist hiding around every corner. If you believe media propaganda, every person in an online chat room is a paedophile. You need to be able to step back to see the world as it really is.
Phillip.
Finally, for everyone pushing Gaim, don't forget to mention Gaim-encryption to go along with it.
This is what puts me off trying Miranda. After exhorting my friends to install GAIM so we can all chat securely, I can hardly install another IM client and go all the way back to square one. Can we have a standard method of encryption that will work in all IM clients please? At least get the most popular OS clients working with compatible plug-ins.
Phillip.
i installed it, and then it was like: "this will take a few hours to index" and I bailed on it.
Yeah, I did the same thing. Instead I went back to installing Gentoo.
Phillip.
On the one hand, that makes sense, but on the other hand it seems really unfair for Rackspace to lose their business over this. They're just as much the victim here as their clients are.
Rackspace is not the victim. They are a business, and their job is to best serve their customer. They have failed to do this, and even to explain their reasons to the paying customer, and so anyone hosting at Rackspace would be right in taking their business elsewhere.
We just had this discussion where someone used a fake Hotmail account to email ISPs and succeeded in closing down legitimate sites. The best provider is the Dutch provider xs4all. You pays your money and you take the consequences.
It may well be that law enforcement had good reason to seize the drives. There may well be some international treaty to make the seizure legal. The failure of Rackspace to communicate who has presented a court order and why seems difficult to fathom at this point.
Phillip.
Yeah, because hardly any companies are driven by their bottom lines...
Which why you don't want your language to be controled by a company which in turn has a marketing-driven bottom-line.
Phillip.
I'm having a great time reading this thread. The same people who say things like "I would never run IE" are coming out and acting thrilled about this. What about the requirement of having IE to run this? I guess it is okay when it has something to do with Gmail. Hmmmm.
Selective zealotry at its worse.
We're thrilled that IE users are able to catch up with what Linux users have had for ages.
Phillip.
I have all the essential freedoms a person can have. And I sure as hell own my car, my house, my television, my computer etc. etc. etc. so I obviously have property!
:-( Often when suffering under the useless beaurocracy here, the banks or syndics etc, I wish I had a loud American with me that would let loose and give them a piece of their mind, as I know they would never accept what the residents and I have to put up with all the time.
I presume you are in the UK? Try living in France. You may think you 'own' a property but you don't. Want to move an electricity meter a few feet to the left? You need to repeatedly go to the 'syndic' to get forms filled out in duplicate, followed by an official EDF quotation that may take weeks, followed by it has to be moved by an official representative that can charge what-ever they like. Took me 2 months and around $1,000 to move my meters 2m. If you move then by law you need to change your car number plate to match the town you are in... where you get ping-ponged between town halls and government departments. Even putting up a sattelite dish has taken my friend over 4 months with no results as he's not allowed to install it himself and it has to go through 'official' (incompetant) channels. You DON'T have "all the essential freedoms a person can have". You have a system to frustrate and knock people down at every opportunity, to make sure they know where their place is. I would agree with the American that it is a "subordinated 'chattel' population" here.
Phillip.
Either you were trying to be funny (I find the statement above in particular amusing), or you aren't in the journalism business.
With the appalling grammar and the duplicated articles, I don't think Slashdot is either. It has strived to stay a "community" site.
Generally, readers prefer information from "the source".
Not true. We don't have time to listen to thousands of people plugging their commercial software. We want someone else to have done some research for us, filtering out the best stuff and then listing the advantages and disadvantages compared to similar stuff.
I hate to break it to you, but a large part of "journalism" is driven by press releases. Over half of the content of typical magazines and newspapers is of the nature of this article.
This is why we only buy these rags when we are desperate for something to read on the plane.
I can also say you're not a struggling self-employed tech professional if you think Xamlon is going about it's promotion the wrong way.
Nothing wrong with the submitter, people may throw as much spam as they want at the Slashdot Inbox. The fault is with the editor that posted it, when there are so many better stories being rejected.
This guy managed to get column inches on two huge websites for next to nothing. I'd say they've made a promotional coup!
Indeed and well done to him. However it was a coup at the expense of the reader.
Phillip.
Wired is the magazine that geeks look at on the shelf to find out what non-geeks read to find out what geeks think, and in doing so they can try and design world-changing software that the non-geeks want inspired by what the non-geeks think the geeks are doing. Makes sense?
Phillip.
If people stop buying what the stars are wearing/using and don't respond to peer pressure, then buyers will fragment and the long tail will rise in importance.
Won't happen here in France. When I walk through the streets around 1/2 people are wearing "Von Dutch" t-shirts. I'm seriously considering paying President Chirac or Koffi Annan to wear one in public, in the hope that they will then be considered uncool and consigned to the bin.
Phillip.
If this ever happens to you do not ever attempt to turn the ignition all the way off... In most cases you will lose both your power steering and your power braking.
Far worse than this. If you turn the ignition all the way off then the moment you turn the wheel the steering lock will engage (making it impossible to turn the steering wheel).
Phillip.
Yep, sounds like an OS problem. [rolls eyes]
Sounds like a "someone trying a random app on the cheap from Freshmeat" problem.
Phillip.
Really, picking on cars for emissions is by now a dead horse. The exhaust from a modern, emissions-controlled car is so clean that it is difficult to kill yourself by leaving the car running with the garage closed. There are bigger fish to fry, like tractor trailers, that emit far dirtier emissions than any modern car.
If you've ever been to a large congested city you will know emissions is NOT a dead horse. Pollution is appalling. And modern cars slowly degrade into no-so-efficient cars.
The use of hydrogen makes cars more dangerous, too. To put it simply, a compressed fuel is a dangerous fuel. Any accident that breaches the H2 tank turns the vehicle into a fuel-air explosive. I don't think the public will stand for too many fireballs on the highway. Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, cars almost never explode and rarely catch fire in accidents.
I think we've seen enough posts disproving this. A gasoline car is FAR more likely to explode that a hydrogen powered car. In fact, didn't Ford and GM have to recall an entire makes of car specifically because they exploded far too often in accidents?
Worse still, a mass changeover to hydrogen as our vehicle fuel would cause huge economic upheaval.
As in create more jobs? Start up new fields in innovation? Threaten the established cartels used to creaming enourmous profits into being more competative?
Hydrogen consumes huge amounts of power to produce, and it adds no energy to our system; it merely acts as a relatively convenient energy storage vessel. Petroleum, on the other hand, consumes very little energy to reach its refined state and contributes a large portion of our total energy use.
Hydrogen is zero-polluting and efficient at the end-generation side. There are many ways of generating hydrogen, and even the polluting methods can be done out of the heavily-populated towns. Upgrading the extraction process will reduce pollution. Upgrading technology for reducing petrol pollution means replacing every car each time.
Hydrogen makes nice PR, but it will never power vehicles until oil has become so expensive due to scarcity that we've already migrated to other, renewable energy sources.
How are these other renewable energy sources going to power a car? Battery technology doesn't give that much hope at the moment. Also pollution will indirectly drive up costs of petrol though its burden on the health care industry, sick-days at work, etc.
If it were mandated today that hydrogen must replace gasoline for vehicles, energy prices across the board would probably triple.
Probably, but the things you want don't come at the click of your fingers. You have to work hard towards it; the extraction process needs to be refined and many of the alternatives followed up, fuel-cell components need to be commoditised, business deals need to be done to make creating the intrastructure economical.
But it WILL come.
Phillip.
I'm a little surprised to be hearing anything about hydrogen cars these days. Hydrogen fueled cars were heavily hyped a few years ago when the automakers were strong-arming the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to drop its near-term mandate for electric vehicles in favor of a promise for a few magical hydrogen-fueled cars some years in the future. The scam worked: CARB rescinded the EV mandate, many working EVs were pulled from their satisfied owners, and that's why you hear so little about hydrogen these days.
I think this is partly true. It's outrageous how the car manufacturers crushed the electric car industry. Those that advertised themselves as selling electric cars would actually only lease them, and as soon as they had pulled the wool over the eyes of the government then had them forcibly recalled and destroyed (the owners not allowed to purchase them full-price despite their pleas).
However, hydrogen power is continually advancing. When producing a break-through, announcements come quick and fast. The process of refining this into a commercially cheap solution for mass production is a little more arduous and takes more patience.
The simple facts are that hydrogen is not a source of energy, but rather an energy carrier, like electricity. And hydrogen is a rather poor energy carrier at that; it's far less efficient than the electric power grid, which already exists and goes almost everywhere. Hydrogen isn't even a good energy storage medium in a car, due to its extremely low density.
The grid doesn't go everywhere, unless you want to tie a particularly long cable to your EV. Hydrogen can be produced anywhere there is electricty (or even only sunlight) and water (using electrolysis). Hydrogen is good enough for a car as it is light, unlike batteries, and a small form factor tank can power a vehicle for hundreds of kilometres.
The fact is that there's nothing a hydrogen fuel-cell car can do that isn't already done better, more efficiently and more cheaply by a battery EV. Just when new battery technologies like nickel metal hydride and lithium-ion were starting to prove their worth in EVs, CARB pulls the rug out from under them.
The fact is battery technology hasn't moved on much for decades. In cars the batteries are too heavy and to slow to recharge. And not just in cars either. Manufacturers are now starting to produce fuel-cells for laptops and mobile phones.
Phillip.
A hydrogen car that uses an ICE misses the whole point. It doesn't improve efficiency much, given that it is still limited by the thermal efficiency of a heat engine.
It misses one of the two points. The two advantages of a hydrogen powered fuel-cell car are (a) it's efficiency and (b) lack of pollution. This car misses the mark on (a) but (b) is still very important. I think BMW are seeing this as a stop-gap solution that will make them money. The big car manufacturers are sucking in huge government subsidies to produce a hydrogen infrastructure supposedly to run the fuel-cell cars. BMW produce a car that can tap into the infrastructure being paid for by everyone else, make virtually no changes to their production line as the technology is the same as the gasoline internal combusion engine, and sell it as the first production "100% green" car (albeit a bit of a gas-guzzler).
Moreover, although burning hydrogen doesn't produce carbon emmisions, producing hydrogen does.
Not necessarily. There are numerous methods of extracting hydrogen (currently small scale) that produce no carbon emissions.
Finally, the higher combustion temperature increases the formation of NOx pollutants.
Not heard anything about this. Links?
The reason for all the effort to create a new hydrogen fueling infrastructure is to take advantage of fuel cells/electric motors. A car with a hydrogen burning ICE is just an ordinary car that you can't refill at a gas station.
Soon hydrogen will be at every gas station (soon being the next few years). You missed the other advantage is that the torque of the electric motor means a fuel-cell car will accelerate far quicker so you can beat the old ICE cars at the lights.
Phillip.
I agree, Lynx is still an important browser. Not long ago you could browse around in your favourite browser and when you found the app you needed you could just paste url of the .rpm or .gz into your term window to grab with wget. This no longer works for many downloads as they use no longer have direct links to the files but dynamic urls with redirects that throw wget. With Lynx you hit the download page, hit a couple of keys, and the file downloads no problem. Much faster than downloading the file locally and trying to upload over a painfully slow ADSL connection.
Phillip.
until then, the attack ad proposition stands as sound
Unless it backfires. In your earlier post:
The popularity of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 prove that the public is receptive to serious Bush-bashing.
On the other hand some of us thought Bush was the worst thing to happen to the US until the Michael Moore came up with that misleading one-sided 'documentary' and now we have some sympathy for Bush (eek).* I guess you are talking about playing a numbers game though.
want to argue virtue? you're in the wrong world buddy
Wrong country, you mean?
Phillip.
* not a US resident so I don't get a vote anyway