The BMWs don't run on water, they run on liquid hydrogen, and the reason why we haven't seen them on the market is because putting the infrastructure in place to supply liquid hydrogen is a bitch of a job. We're more likely to see fuel cell cars instead. Also, apparently the emergency authorities aren't at all keen on the prospect of what would happen in an accident if liquid hydrogen got spilt all over the place, and I can sort of see why.
"Hayes is visibly excited about the fact that 'his' product will soon be released into the wild. At the end of our interview, I asked him what it's like to work as a designer within a technology-oriented company. He picks up the table cloth between his fingers. "Table cloth right? Microsoft is the table cloth. Everything is influenced by technology. So the brand team has to come up, and understand and integrate the technology. As an industrial designer, I'm only as good as the technology we use. It's kind of the common language that connects everyone. But it also needs to be balanced out."
WHAT THE HELL IS HE ON ABOUT?
Re:I've got news for them...
on
Yahoo's Geek Statue
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you install Greasemonkey, there's a script for it which will add a delete button to the page alongside the "archive" one Google seems to think you should use for even the most useless messages.
I present here an email from a friend of mine, edited only to change the names of the people involved:
I sent that email at work, as you know, and then decided not to go in the following week. I phoned the director I sent the mail to and said that I couldn't work with my boss anymore and that I wanted to be made redundant. He negotiated with Clive and they agreed to make my position redundant. So far so good.
Pete and I go to Dublin on the Thursday to meet up with some American friends of ours and come back on the Saturday night to find that Clive has HAND-DELIVERED a big A4 envelope. To cut a long story short, he'd installed google desktop search on my PC before I arrived and this evil little piece of software copies every single email and document you write and stores it in a folder hidden to all but the PC administrator. So he goes into this and finds my blog via an email. On it I have openly called him a cunt and ridiculed him. I also have a whole category entitled 'Things that 'Tasha Says' dedicated to the complete inanity of my colleague, Natasha. He has studiously printed out all the offending pages as well as copies of emails like the one I sent to you saying that the doctor thing was made up in that last email I sent and accompanied the whole lot with a letter saying that they were no longer making me redundant. Indeed I was being sacked for gross misconduct. ACE. I console myself with the fact that I'd essentially quit anyway.
That seems likely to me. This show also had a sequence showing a diver in a shark cage getting attacked by a big squid (not a 40-foot giant, it was probably the size of the man or a bit bigger). It squeezed through the horizontal gap in the cage which they would normally dangle the shark bait through, came in and bit a lump out of the guy, who unsurprisingly was absolutely shitting himself. seem to remember it leaving a perfectly circular hole in his wetsuit.
Sperm whales can't get enough of them, apparently. I once saw some utterly incredible TV footage where they'd stuck a camera to the back of a sperm whale in the hope of seeing a giant squid when it went hunting. The camera was designed to pop off once it reached a certain depth so that they could recover it. They didn't find any squid, but the whale behaviour was amazing. There was a whale on either side of the one carrying the camera as they went diving down, and all the way they were chattering away to each other. At one point, they stopped (the depth was displayed in the corner of the screen), had a bit of a discussion, then the whale on the right swam right up to the camera and the screen was filled with whale eye. A few seconds of staring later, they had another chat among themselves and carried on. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the camera-carrier had said "hey, there's something stuck to my back, would you check it out?" and the other whale had a look, said words to the effect of "move on, nothing to see here" and off they went...
Pardon me for butting in here, but when somebody's getting all Princess Di about their righteous work with the disabled, you don't really expect to see them calling somebody a "fucktard" in the same paragraph. It has something of a detrimental effect on your credibility. Y'know?
It's not Teide that's the problem, it's a harmless big old thing unless you live on Tenerife. It's La Palma, another Canary Island, that people are worried about. And I believe that work is underway to break it up in manageable chunks by explosives, so that the "huge lump of rock landing in the sea" scenario never happens. As usual, the risk's probably massively overhyped for the sake of making a better story.
The last American car I drove was a Mustang, of the type that's been recently superceded by the latest model. My overriding impression of that car was that it was cheap and nasty. Crappy materials used in the interior, an engine that huffed and puffed a lot but didn't actually propel the car very quickly, and yes, thin, flimsy-feeling panels poorly put together.
Now, I realise they are very cheap compared to European cars in general, but for you to suggest that Americans wouldn't buy cars made out of lighter materials seems to fly in the face of the fact that they do.
Why aren't diesel engines allowed to be sold in those states you mentioned?
America's really missing a trick here. Diesel engines are making absolutely incredible progress over here - for larger cars such as the one you mention, they're making up 80% of sales in some cases. They're much smoother and quieter than they used to be, they feel faster due to how they deliver the power in a more usable and accessible manner, and they're amazingly efficient. Diesel cars hold their value much better too, so you get more back on them at resale. It's getting to the point where you need a good reason not to buy one, and they really do make hybrids look like nothing more than a neat but pointless gimmick.
The car manufacturers in America keep churning out the gas guzzlers because they're profitable. Simple as that. Your SUVs are shitty low-tech dinosaurs with pushrod engines and live-axle suspension - the R&D costs for that kind of technology were recouped an awfully long time ago, so profits on making them are consequently high. Market them well and you make loads of dough - it's so much easier than spending buckets of money on cars that are ever more efficient, better equipped, safer, and better to drive, like you have to do to compete in Europe, where few people besides builder's merchants would consider the kind of dinosaur pickup trucks people lap up in America. Problem is, though, it's really hard to make any money selling cars in Europe.
And as for European cars not being as safe - you must be mad. Smaller, lighter cars with lower centres of gravity are inherently safer, before you even take into account the safety bells and whistles fitted as standard to every car on the market nowadays. I'd far rather crash in a Renault than a Ford pickup.
Sitting here in Europe as I am, cars like the Ford Crown Victoria baffle me. I've been in the back of one a few times since they're often used as taxis, and my impression was "hang on, this car's three-quarters of a mile long and I've got no legroom". It's like the Tardis in reverse. And the luggage capacity wasn't all that great either, due to some spectacularly bad design of the trunk/boot/whatever, with all sorts of things encroaching on the space. I don't really understand why anyone would buy one of these giant, unwieldy slugs when something as small as a Honda Civic is spacious enough that my sister, who's 5'6", was able to get up and walk into the passenger seat from the back row.
And of course, size=safety is a total fallacy. Size=weight=bigger bang when you hit something. And in a car like the Crown Victoria, which seems to have been completely unaffected by the last 30 years or so of progress in car design, I wouldn't be too confident that it'll crumple in a passenger-friendly way if I stuck it in a wall. Most fairly small cars are incredibly safe these days - check out the Euro-NCAP tests to see how our silly little European econoboxes cope with being flung at walls and stuff, and all whilst getting hybrid-style fuel ecnonomy out of their diesel engines.
Not having a go at you personally, you understand, I just don't see the point of these cramped, inefficient, slow, thirsty behemoths in this day and age.
Actually, the Dyson absolutely wipes the floor with the competition, if you'll pardon the pun.
Vacuum cleaners were a pretty unsexy bunch of products till Dyson turned up - everybody needed one, everybody had one, and they were all pretty much of a muchness. Then along comes Jeremy D. with his mad device which pulls massive amounts of dust out of the carpet right after you've been over it with a conventional cleaner, and never loses power no matter how much dust it's taken in. Vacuum cleaners actually became the subject of dinner party conversations - who could've seen that coming?
The quirky design and the neat way it stores its accessories and all that - that's just window-dressing. Dyson went from being a company that nobody had ever heard of to market leaders, despite costing far more than anybody else's products, because they were loads better. There's no way they'd have had the balls to charge what they did for their products, despite having no reputation or "brand" whatsoever, unless they were confident it was a far superior product.
Any vacuum cleaner that isn't a Dyson is dirt cheap these days, presumably because it's the only way they can sell 'em. Other manufacturers can't produce competing products because it's patented up to the eyeballs - I seem to remember Electrolux or somebody producing something along the same lines, but they had to withdraw it due to patent infringements.
Don't go thinking they sell just because of the design - I mean, who really cares what their vacuum cleaner looks like? What matters is that it does the job. Dysons do the job far better than anything else.
Yes, but that requires the designer to really think about what they're implementing, which is something they seldom do when there's a good-enough-for-most answer already in existence. UI designers are mostly sheep. Chancers. There's very few original thinkers among them. I know this because I am one.
Not really - these days she gets around in a one-off custom-built Bentley knocked together for her a few years back. It's pretty plush, I'd be amazed if it doesn't have a radio.
Slashdot Mirror
The BMWs don't run on water, they run on liquid hydrogen, and the reason why we haven't seen them on the market is because putting the infrastructure in place to supply liquid hydrogen is a bitch of a job. We're more likely to see fuel cell cars instead. Also, apparently the emergency authorities aren't at all keen on the prospect of what would happen in an accident if liquid hydrogen got spilt all over the place, and I can sort of see why.
Jesus Christ, it's David Brent.
"Hayes is visibly excited about the fact that 'his' product will soon be released into the wild. At the end of our interview, I asked him what it's like to work as a designer within a technology-oriented company. He picks up the table cloth between his fingers. "Table cloth right? Microsoft is the table cloth. Everything is influenced by technology. So the brand team has to come up, and understand and integrate the technology. As an industrial designer, I'm only as good as the technology we use. It's kind of the common language that connects everyone. But it also needs to be balanced out."
WHAT THE HELL IS HE ON ABOUT?
If you install Greasemonkey, there's a script for it which will add a delete button to the page alongside the "archive" one Google seems to think you should use for even the most useless messages.
For every Gary Coleman, there's a Stevie Wonder.
I present here an email from a friend of mine, edited only to change the names of the people involved:
I sent that email at work, as you know, and then
decided not to go in the following week. I phoned the director I sent the
mail to and said that I couldn't work with my boss anymore and that I wanted
to be made redundant. He negotiated with Clive and they agreed to make my
position redundant. So far so good.
Pete and I go to Dublin on the Thursday to meet up with some American
friends of ours and come back on the Saturday night to find that Clive has
HAND-DELIVERED a big A4 envelope. To cut a long story short, he'd installed
google desktop search on my PC before I arrived and this evil little piece
of software copies every single email and document you write and stores it
in a folder hidden to all but the PC administrator. So he goes into this
and finds my blog via an email. On it I have openly called him a cunt and
ridiculed him. I also have a whole category entitled 'Things that 'Tasha
Says' dedicated to the complete inanity of my colleague, Natasha. He has
studiously printed out all the offending pages as well as copies of emails
like the one I sent to you saying that the doctor thing was made up in that
last email I sent and accompanied the whole lot with a letter saying that
they were no longer making me redundant. Indeed I was being sacked for gross
misconduct. ACE. I console myself with the fact that I'd essentially quit
anyway.
That seems likely to me. This show also had a sequence showing a diver in a shark cage getting attacked by a big squid (not a 40-foot giant, it was probably the size of the man or a bit bigger). It squeezed through the horizontal gap in the cage which they would normally dangle the shark bait through, came in and bit a lump out of the guy, who unsurprisingly was absolutely shitting himself. seem to remember it leaving a perfectly circular hole in his wetsuit.
Sperm whales can't get enough of them, apparently. I once saw some utterly incredible TV footage where they'd stuck a camera to the back of a sperm whale in the hope of seeing a giant squid when it went hunting. The camera was designed to pop off once it reached a certain depth so that they could recover it. They didn't find any squid, but the whale behaviour was amazing. There was a whale on either side of the one carrying the camera as they went diving down, and all the way they were chattering away to each other. At one point, they stopped (the depth was displayed in the corner of the screen), had a bit of a discussion, then the whale on the right swam right up to the camera and the screen was filled with whale eye. A few seconds of staring later, they had another chat among themselves and carried on. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the camera-carrier had said "hey, there's something stuck to my back, would you check it out?" and the other whale had a look, said words to the effect of "move on, nothing to see here" and off they went...
You might only have two digits, pal, but mine's palindromic. Therefore my dad could beat your dad in a fight.
(I'll now sit here and wait for UID #314159 to turn up and swing his dick about)
Pardon me for butting in here, but when somebody's getting all Princess Di about their righteous work with the disabled, you don't really expect to see them calling somebody a "fucktard" in the same paragraph. It has something of a detrimental effect on your credibility. Y'know?
It's not Teide that's the problem, it's a harmless big old thing unless you live on Tenerife. It's La Palma, another Canary Island, that people are worried about. And I believe that work is underway to break it up in manageable chunks by explosives, so that the "huge lump of rock landing in the sea" scenario never happens. As usual, the risk's probably massively overhyped for the sake of making a better story.
That would imply they were any good to start with...
Not in Europe. I'm reliably informed MSN Instant Messenger's market share here is over 90%, compared to (I think) less than 50% in North America.
I'd say it's obsolete now. I mean, really, why not just have done with it and do your daily commute in a John Deere?
The last American car I drove was a Mustang, of the type that's been recently superceded by the latest model. My overriding impression of that car was that it was cheap and nasty. Crappy materials used in the interior, an engine that huffed and puffed a lot but didn't actually propel the car very quickly, and yes, thin, flimsy-feeling panels poorly put together.
Now, I realise they are very cheap compared to European cars in general, but for you to suggest that Americans wouldn't buy cars made out of lighter materials seems to fly in the face of the fact that they do.
Why aren't diesel engines allowed to be sold in those states you mentioned?
America's really missing a trick here. Diesel engines are making absolutely incredible progress over here - for larger cars such as the one you mention, they're making up 80% of sales in some cases. They're much smoother and quieter than they used to be, they feel faster due to how they deliver the power in a more usable and accessible manner, and they're amazingly efficient. Diesel cars hold their value much better too, so you get more back on them at resale. It's getting to the point where you need a good reason not to buy one, and they really do make hybrids look like nothing more than a neat but pointless gimmick.
The Smart has a clutchless semi-automatic gearbox, actually. But it's utterly awful to use.
The car manufacturers in America keep churning out the gas guzzlers because they're profitable. Simple as that. Your SUVs are shitty low-tech dinosaurs with pushrod engines and live-axle suspension - the R&D costs for that kind of technology were recouped an awfully long time ago, so profits on making them are consequently high. Market them well and you make loads of dough - it's so much easier than spending buckets of money on cars that are ever more efficient, better equipped, safer, and better to drive, like you have to do to compete in Europe, where few people besides builder's merchants would consider the kind of dinosaur pickup trucks people lap up in America. Problem is, though, it's really hard to make any money selling cars in Europe.
And as for European cars not being as safe - you must be mad. Smaller, lighter cars with lower centres of gravity are inherently safer, before you even take into account the safety bells and whistles fitted as standard to every car on the market nowadays. I'd far rather crash in a Renault than a Ford pickup.
Sitting here in Europe as I am, cars like the Ford Crown Victoria baffle me. I've been in the back of one a few times since they're often used as taxis, and my impression was "hang on, this car's three-quarters of a mile long and I've got no legroom". It's like the Tardis in reverse. And the luggage capacity wasn't all that great either, due to some spectacularly bad design of the trunk/boot/whatever, with all sorts of things encroaching on the space. I don't really understand why anyone would buy one of these giant, unwieldy slugs when something as small as a Honda Civic is spacious enough that my sister, who's 5'6", was able to get up and walk into the passenger seat from the back row.
And of course, size=safety is a total fallacy. Size=weight=bigger bang when you hit something. And in a car like the Crown Victoria, which seems to have been completely unaffected by the last 30 years or so of progress in car design, I wouldn't be too confident that it'll crumple in a passenger-friendly way if I stuck it in a wall. Most fairly small cars are incredibly safe these days - check out the Euro-NCAP tests to see how our silly little European econoboxes cope with being flung at walls and stuff, and all whilst getting hybrid-style fuel ecnonomy out of their diesel engines.
Not having a go at you personally, you understand, I just don't see the point of these cramped, inefficient, slow, thirsty behemoths in this day and age.
Radiohead seem to have done quite nicely.
So... not getting much, then? ;)
And there's also the fact that it wasn't a BBC comedy at all, and in fact went out on Channel 4...
Actually, the Dyson absolutely wipes the floor with the competition, if you'll pardon the pun.
Vacuum cleaners were a pretty unsexy bunch of products till Dyson turned up - everybody needed one, everybody had one, and they were all pretty much of a muchness. Then along comes Jeremy D. with his mad device which pulls massive amounts of dust out of the carpet right after you've been over it with a conventional cleaner, and never loses power no matter how much dust it's taken in. Vacuum cleaners actually became the subject of dinner party conversations - who could've seen that coming?
The quirky design and the neat way it stores its accessories and all that - that's just window-dressing. Dyson went from being a company that nobody had ever heard of to market leaders, despite costing far more than anybody else's products, because they were loads better. There's no way they'd have had the balls to charge what they did for their products, despite having no reputation or "brand" whatsoever, unless they were confident it was a far superior product.
Any vacuum cleaner that isn't a Dyson is dirt cheap these days, presumably because it's the only way they can sell 'em. Other manufacturers can't produce competing products because it's patented up to the eyeballs - I seem to remember Electrolux or somebody producing something along the same lines, but they had to withdraw it due to patent infringements.
Don't go thinking they sell just because of the design - I mean, who really cares what their vacuum cleaner looks like? What matters is that it does the job. Dysons do the job far better than anything else.
Yes, but that requires the designer to really think about what they're implementing, which is something they seldom do when there's a good-enough-for-most answer already in existence. UI designers are mostly sheep. Chancers. There's very few original thinkers among them. I know this because I am one.
I can't imagine why anybody would want to bomb people as magnanimous, tolerant, learned and humble as yourself. I really can't.
Not really - these days she gets around in a one-off custom-built Bentley knocked together for her a few years back. It's pretty plush, I'd be amazed if it doesn't have a radio.