Regardless of the complexity the outlet would need to be pretty high power. Lets say you have a 415V (RMS phase-phase voltage) 32A three phase outlet and make the same assumptions I made above. You are still talking nearly an hour to get the equivilent of a liter of petrol. Sorry that should have said the equivilent of a gallon of petrol
Essentially there are several things that come together to make vista look very bad.
The XP->vista release cycle was very long. Developers have a habbit of designing so things perform acceptablly on the hardware they use and no better. The combination of the long release cycle and big improvements in hardware during the earlier part of that cycle mean that on the same hardware the performance difference between XP and vista is huge.
The rapid improvements in hardware have slowed right down recently (as you mentioned). So a year after vistas release people are still getting new boxes that run slower with vista than thier old boxes ran with XP.
The budget ultraportable market has opened up. This market produces machines that are similar in specs to machines from the time of XP's release. The result is they perform very acceptablly under XP but I dread to think what vista would be like on them.
The underlying issue (software expanding to fill the availible space/performance) is the same as ever but it is getting noticed far more this time due to the above issues. The fact that MS has failed to deliver any killer improvements isn't helping either.
(BTW, the difference in efficiency between gasoline and electric "motors" in vehicles is gas is about 30% efficient and electric is about 96% efficient. Adding in the tire rolling resistance, transmission and differential losses, parasitic loses - oil pump, water pump, alternator power steering, etc. - a gas engine actually only gets about 15% efficiency in power actually delivered to the road.) So if we assume the rest of the car design is the same (or at least and that the batteries have some losses my guestimate of twice as efficient was in the right ballpark. I dunno how practical electric cars stack up on efficiancy from charge socket to wheels.
I was just wondering about how COMPLEX a charging station would be as opposed to something reasonably simple like, maybe, an OUTLET.:o) To charge at decent speed you need a complex charger. Whether that should be placed in the car or the charging station is somewhat open to debate but it certainly needs to exist.
Regardless of the complexity the outlet would need to be pretty high power. Lets say you have a 415V (RMS phase-phase voltage) 32A three phase outlet and make the same assumptions I made above. You are still talking nearly an hour to get the equivilent of a liter of petrol.
And you probablly need some kind of control interface to allow the charging station to control how much power each vehircle is allowed to draw.
So not that complex but it would need a new standard for power connectors with a control interface added and it would need a lot of high power wiring switches, metering etc. and of course a big supply from the utility.
Heck, if only the power connector is outdoor and weatherperoofed, and all the locked switches and meters were inside a small building, the most expensive part might be the cable carrying power to the outlets.) The most expensive part would probablly be getting the electricity supplier to put in a new service capable of supplying the needed power.
For some reason when people quote air travel prices they quote cheap advance fares but when they quote train prices they seem to generally quote the full fare.
If you book in advance on a train that isn't too busy (or if you book a long way in advance on virtually any train) you can go from london to glasgow by train for under £20
I would think that a vehicle that could plug into any 50-60Hz, 90-260VAC source would make the absolute most sense. Unfortunately if you want to plug into normal sockets your charge rate will be pretty slow. Particualarlly on those weedy 15A/120V sockets americans tend to use. According to wikipedia and google calculator a US gallon of gasoline contains 36.6 KWH. Lets assume that your electric car is twice as efficiant as your petrol car. That means you would need about 18KWH of electricity to get the equivilent of a gallon of gasoline.
on an ordinary british socket that would be about 6 hours charge time to get the equivilent of a gallon of gasoline. On an ordinary american socket it would be about 10 hours charge time to get the equivilent of a gallon of gasoline.
The car would also need some way to configure how much power it was allowed to draw as different sockets arround the world have different max currents and sometimes issues further back would mean you may not want to draw the sockets maximum current rating. Educating the users on this would also be an issue.
Those were primarily for winter use: Block heaters to keep oil and fuel from gelling. How much power do theese block heaters take? My guess is not very much (a quick google seems to say arround 400W and i would assume that they would have thermostats so they aren't drawing power constantly.
Charging an electric car would require several kilowats of power for many hours on end. In a moderate sized car park full of electric cars that could easilly add up to some serious power.
Expanding this to residential customers would require a substantial overhaul of distribution network Why the hell would it require that?
The way we do it in the UK is to simply replace the meter when someone moves to a dual-rate tarrif. On a modern setup the dual-rate meter gets it's control signal by radio, older installs use time clock. Replacing a bit of kit when a customer changes thier package is no big deal.
Sure if everyone moved at once it would be a problem but IMO that is unlikely because if you only have a single rate meter it is rather hard to compare the cost of a single-rate and a dual-rate tarrif.
The trouble with trying to buy stuff made in countries with a similar development level to yours is the definition of "made in". Generally the final manufacturing process (which is the one the "made in" generally reffers to) is a relatively insignificant part of the overall manufacturing process.
This (poor-quality) snapshot of the Bird's Nest from a moving taxi: Bird's Nest [pallium.com] might give you an idea of what visibility was like while I was there. When following your link my browser gives a redirect loop error..
They fail. If they've removed it with no intention of making it available again it should be 410 Gone [w3.org], not 404 Not Found [w3.org]. Indeed but it is only a SHOULD not a MUST and keeping the information as to whether the condition is temporary or permanent (indeed that may not even have been decided at the point the content is removed) would be a PITA so noone does it.
I also can't help but wonder what kind of experience the folks who I see hit our site with WebTV and the PSP browser are having... There is a webtv viewer that you can run on a PC to find out how painfull your site is to use on webtv.
Given that upgrading to a new service pack on a box that is already in production can be somewhat risky I would try and use SP3 for new deployments unless there was a good reason not to.
When a new SP for windows comes out you have two years to migrate before MS drops security updates for the old one.
The largest operating system security problem is lack of separation between the ordinary user and administrator account. Unfortunately Lack of seperation between the ordinary user and the administrator is also partly a human problem and it's much more of an issue on desktops than on servers (unless you have a company so homogenous that everyone uses the same tools and IT can manage every machine).
On self administered desktops most people wont want to log out and log back in or better use a seperate terminal for admin stuff. So they either run as admin all the time (very bad) or they log in as a normal user and use user upgrade tools like gksu or runas or UAC (marginally better but once someone has access to your user account they can easilly intercept your attempts to use user upgrade tools on most systems).
and anyway for many nafarious uses you don't really need admin rights, especailly on a typical desktop where what the user can do isn't too restricted.
"Meager market share" does not explain this phenomenon because Linux is strong in the server market, making it more lucrative to exploit because of increased computing power, bandwidth and sensitive client/business information. The different use case from desktops makes it much harder to hit servers with social engineering attacks than desktops.
However, all new consoles have USB ports, so it solves the keyboard+mouse problem. HD televisions solve the minimum resolution requirement problem. That is true, what it doesn't solve is a more fundamnental issue of typical setups.
Consoles are typically plugged into your TV and you hold the controller in your hand, the controllers are designed arround this use and the games are designed arround the controllers.
Pcs are typically used on a desk, the keyboard and mouse are designed arround this use and the games are designed arround the keyboard and mouse.
So afaict for most people doing keyboard/mouse gaming on thier console would mean either making your console part of thier PC setup rather than part of thier TV setup (not impossible but would require a widescreen flatpanel and either repeated changing of cables or a KVM switch) or radically changing the furniture they use for thier TV setup.
Well the alternative to the closed consoles is a PC running windows (or at a push linux but that has a much smaller selection of titles). Though even there it isn't really much of a free market as for the major components (CPU, GPU) there are only a couple of choices.
The thing is the closed nature of consoles actually works well for games. I can buy a console game and be pretty damn sure it will work as well for me as it worked for the reviewer and with no hassle. OTOH buying a PC game requires me to do a fair bit of work researching hardware requirements and still there is the risk that it may not get on with my hardware.
And from the software developers point of view piracy is kept far more under control, yes there are modchips but taking your console to have it's hardware modified by some small stall at a market is a much higher barrier to many people than downloading a crack for a game or copying a friends pre-cracked copy.
that are source-compatible with Mac OS X applications through a toolkit called GNUstep, an LGPL reimplementation of the OpenStep API that Apple now calls Cocoa. Do you have any evidence that openstep has a high degree of compatibtility with current cocoa and that developers actually bother to recompile thier apps against it?
IIRC linux based nats (which seems to be most home routers nowadays) tend to use a port preservative strategy, that is they only modify the port if not modifying it would conflict with an existing mapping.
Afaict the naming is rather confusing, the "core duo" series of processors were not based on the core microarchitecture they were based on the P6 microarchitecture (that is thier basic design was based on the line that started from the PPro)
The core microarchitecture is used in the core 2 range of chips and thier corresponding xeons.
IBM made the processors for the higher end macs until very recently, they also did the actual manufacturing of the cyrix 6x86 chips and sold some of them under thier brand.
Who is forbidding them from selling theese chips and under what authority?
My experiance with intel graphics on linux has been terrible. They supposedly support 3D but planetpenguin-racer was unplayable and google earth causes X to crash (and I get many sporadic X crashes at other times too).
nvidia cards can be a bit of a pain to set up especially because they need a propietry driver to get 3D and nvidia cant/won't maintain one driver that works with all of them but once set up they seem to work decently under linux.
Actually there have been 64 bit versions of windows for quite some time, first for alpha, then for itanium and finally for x64.
IMO the real reason 64 bit didn't catch on sooner is it is only in the past couple of years that 4GB of memory has come down to prices where ordinary people can afford it. The ability to use more memory is the only major reason to move to 64 bit.
Ms has also been putting pressure on hardware vendors to support 64 bit through the vista logo program.
It doesn't help that a lot of motherboards don't support more than 4GB of address space even with a 64 bit OS rendering using a 64 bit OS pretty pointless.
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My guess is the strike would be announced in advance and there would be a controlled shutdown before the strike happened.
Regardless of the complexity the outlet would need to be pretty high power. Lets say you have a 415V (RMS phase-phase voltage) 32A three phase outlet and make the same assumptions I made above. You are still talking nearly an hour to get the equivilent of a liter of petrol.
Sorry that should have said the equivilent of a gallon of petrol
Essentially there are several things that come together to make vista look very bad.
The XP->vista release cycle was very long. Developers have a habbit of designing so things perform acceptablly on the hardware they use and no better. The combination of the long release cycle and big improvements in hardware during the earlier part of that cycle mean that on the same hardware the performance difference between XP and vista is huge.
The rapid improvements in hardware have slowed right down recently (as you mentioned). So a year after vistas release people are still getting new boxes that run slower with vista than thier old boxes ran with XP.
The budget ultraportable market has opened up. This market produces machines that are similar in specs to machines from the time of XP's release. The result is they perform very acceptablly under XP but I dread to think what vista would be like on them.
The underlying issue (software expanding to fill the availible space/performance) is the same as ever but it is getting noticed far more this time due to the above issues. The fact that MS has failed to deliver any killer improvements isn't helping either.
(BTW, the difference in efficiency between gasoline and electric "motors" in vehicles is gas is about 30% efficient and electric is about 96% efficient. Adding in the tire rolling resistance, transmission and differential losses, parasitic loses - oil pump, water pump, alternator power steering, etc. - a gas engine actually only gets about 15% efficiency in power actually delivered to the road.)
So if we assume the rest of the car design is the same (or at least and that the batteries have some losses my guestimate of twice as efficient was in the right ballpark. I dunno how practical electric cars stack up on efficiancy from charge socket to wheels.
I was just wondering about how COMPLEX a charging station would be as opposed to something reasonably simple like, maybe, an OUTLET. :o)
To charge at decent speed you need a complex charger. Whether that should be placed in the car or the charging station is somewhat open to debate but it certainly needs to exist.
Regardless of the complexity the outlet would need to be pretty high power. Lets say you have a 415V (RMS phase-phase voltage) 32A three phase outlet and make the same assumptions I made above. You are still talking nearly an hour to get the equivilent of a liter of petrol.
And you probablly need some kind of control interface to allow the charging station to control how much power each vehircle is allowed to draw.
So not that complex but it would need a new standard for power connectors with a control interface added and it would need a lot of high power wiring switches, metering etc. and of course a big supply from the utility.
Heck, if only the power connector is outdoor and weatherperoofed, and all the locked switches and meters were inside a small building, the most expensive part might be the cable carrying power to the outlets.)
The most expensive part would probablly be getting the electricity supplier to put in a new service capable of supplying the needed power.
For some reason when people quote air travel prices they quote cheap advance fares but when they quote train prices they seem to generally quote the full fare.
If you book in advance on a train that isn't too busy (or if you book a long way in advance on virtually any train) you can go from london to glasgow by train for under £20
I would think that a vehicle that could plug into any 50-60Hz, 90-260VAC source would make the absolute most sense.
Unfortunately if you want to plug into normal sockets your charge rate will be pretty slow. Particualarlly on those weedy 15A/120V sockets americans tend to use. According to wikipedia and google calculator a US gallon of gasoline contains 36.6 KWH. Lets assume that your electric car is twice as efficiant as your petrol car. That means you would need about 18KWH of electricity to get the equivilent of a gallon of gasoline.
on an ordinary british socket that would be about 6 hours charge time to get the equivilent of a gallon of gasoline. On an ordinary american socket it would be about 10 hours charge time to get the equivilent of a gallon of gasoline.
The car would also need some way to configure how much power it was allowed to draw as different sockets arround the world have different max currents and sometimes issues further back would mean you may not want to draw the sockets maximum current rating. Educating the users on this would also be an issue.
Those were primarily for winter use: Block heaters to keep oil and fuel from gelling.
How much power do theese block heaters take? My guess is not very much (a quick google seems to say arround 400W and i would assume that they would have thermostats so they aren't drawing power constantly.
Charging an electric car would require several kilowats of power for many hours on end. In a moderate sized car park full of electric cars that could easilly add up to some serious power.
Expanding this to residential customers would require a substantial overhaul of distribution network
Why the hell would it require that?
The way we do it in the UK is to simply replace the meter when someone moves to a dual-rate tarrif. On a modern setup the dual-rate meter gets it's control signal by radio, older installs use time clock. Replacing a bit of kit when a customer changes thier package is no big deal.
Sure if everyone moved at once it would be a problem but IMO that is unlikely because if you only have a single rate meter it is rather hard to compare the cost of a single-rate and a dual-rate tarrif.
The cost of losses in the powerplant and grid is already built into the price you pay for the electricty.
The trouble with trying to buy stuff made in countries with a similar development level to yours is the definition of "made in". Generally the final manufacturing process (which is the one the "made in" generally reffers to) is a relatively insignificant part of the overall manufacturing process.
This (poor-quality) snapshot of the Bird's Nest from a moving taxi: Bird's Nest [pallium.com] might give you an idea of what visibility was like while I was there.
When following your link my browser gives a redirect loop error..
They fail. If they've removed it with no intention of making it available again it should be 410 Gone [w3.org], not 404 Not Found [w3.org].
Indeed but it is only a SHOULD not a MUST and keeping the information as to whether the condition is temporary or permanent (indeed that may not even have been decided at the point the content is removed) would be a PITA so noone does it.
I also can't help but wonder what kind of experience the folks who I see hit our site with WebTV and the PSP browser are having...
There is a webtv viewer that you can run on a PC to find out how painfull your site is to use on webtv.
Unfortunately it no longer seems to be availible from MS but http://web.archive.org/web/20050406064513/developer.msntv.com/tools/viewer/ seems to have a copy (though sometimes copies of files on archive.org are incomplete but at the very least you can get a filename to google from there)
But they also can't install SP3 on their XP machines
SP3 DOES NOT INSTALL IE7
Given that upgrading to a new service pack on a box that is already in production can be somewhat risky I would try and use SP3 for new deployments unless there was a good reason not to.
When a new SP for windows comes out you have two years to migrate before MS drops security updates for the old one.
Then either you downgraded explorer to a very old version or you didn't actually manage to remove the core of IE.
The largest operating system security problem is lack of separation between the ordinary user and administrator account.
Unfortunately Lack of seperation between the ordinary user and the administrator is also partly a human problem and it's much more of an issue on desktops than on servers (unless you have a company so homogenous that everyone uses the same tools and IT can manage every machine).
On self administered desktops most people wont want to log out and log back in or better use a seperate terminal for admin stuff. So they either run as admin all the time (very bad) or they log in as a normal user and use user upgrade tools like gksu or runas or UAC (marginally better but once someone has access to your user account they can easilly intercept your attempts to use user upgrade tools on most systems).
and anyway for many nafarious uses you don't really need admin rights, especailly on a typical desktop where what the user can do isn't too restricted.
"Meager market share" does not explain this phenomenon because Linux is strong in the server market, making it more lucrative to exploit because of increased computing power, bandwidth and sensitive client/business information.
The different use case from desktops makes it much harder to hit servers with social engineering attacks than desktops.
Another thing to remember is the PSP is very similar techincally to the PS2, so a lot of PSP titles get ported accross.
I think that is likely to mean a continuing stream of titles for the PS2 for some time.
However, all new consoles have USB ports, so it solves the keyboard+mouse problem. HD televisions solve the minimum resolution requirement problem.
That is true, what it doesn't solve is a more fundamnental issue of typical setups.
Consoles are typically plugged into your TV and you hold the controller in your hand, the controllers are designed arround this use and the games are designed arround the controllers.
Pcs are typically used on a desk, the keyboard and mouse are designed arround this use and the games are designed arround the keyboard and mouse.
So afaict for most people doing keyboard/mouse gaming on thier console would mean either making your console part of thier PC setup rather than part of thier TV setup (not impossible but would require a widescreen flatpanel and either repeated changing of cables or a KVM switch) or radically changing the furniture they use for thier TV setup.
Well the alternative to the closed consoles is a PC running windows (or at a push linux but that has a much smaller selection of titles). Though even there it isn't really much of a free market as for the major components (CPU, GPU) there are only a couple of choices.
The thing is the closed nature of consoles actually works well for games. I can buy a console game and be pretty damn sure it will work as well for me as it worked for the reviewer and with no hassle. OTOH buying a PC game requires me to do a fair bit of work researching hardware requirements and still there is the risk that it may not get on with my hardware.
And from the software developers point of view piracy is kept far more under control, yes there are modchips but taking your console to have it's hardware modified by some small stall at a market is a much higher barrier to many people than downloading a crack for a game or copying a friends pre-cracked copy.
that are source-compatible with Mac OS X applications through a toolkit called GNUstep, an LGPL reimplementation of the OpenStep API that Apple now calls Cocoa.
Do you have any evidence that openstep has a high degree of compatibtility with current cocoa and that developers actually bother to recompile thier apps against it?
IIRC linux based nats (which seems to be most home routers nowadays) tend to use a port preservative strategy, that is they only modify the port if not modifying it would conflict with an existing mapping.
Afaict the naming is rather confusing, the "core duo" series of processors were not based on the core microarchitecture they were based on the P6 microarchitecture (that is thier basic design was based on the line that started from the PPro)
The core microarchitecture is used in the core 2 range of chips and thier corresponding xeons.
IBM made the processors for the higher end macs until very recently, they also did the actual manufacturing of the cyrix 6x86 chips and sold some of them under thier brand.
Who is forbidding them from selling theese chips and under what authority?
I notice that there are two chips "crossfired" together on one card, does this mean that it can't be "crossfired" with a second card?
My experiance with intel graphics on linux has been terrible. They supposedly support 3D but planetpenguin-racer was unplayable and google earth causes X to crash (and I get many sporadic X crashes at other times too).
nvidia cards can be a bit of a pain to set up especially because they need a propietry driver to get 3D and nvidia cant/won't maintain one driver that works with all of them but once set up they seem to work decently under linux.
Actually there have been 64 bit versions of windows for quite some time, first for alpha, then for itanium and finally for x64.
IMO the real reason 64 bit didn't catch on sooner is it is only in the past couple of years that 4GB of memory has come down to prices where ordinary people can afford it. The ability to use more memory is the only major reason to move to 64 bit.
Ms has also been putting pressure on hardware vendors to support 64 bit through the vista logo program.
It doesn't help that a lot of motherboards don't support more than 4GB of address space even with a 64 bit OS rendering using a 64 bit OS pretty pointless.