I don't think the idea really is to completely abolish gasoline and diesel powered vehicles.
I think it's more-so to clear up the air and produce less pollution in the cities. The average North American (that doesn't live out in the country) drives less than 60 miles a day (~95km).
If this is true, an eletric car would be worth it for most people. Even if you go double that distance, it would still be worth it for you.
I, personally, am interested to see how Tesla's Model S does on the roads. The estimated arrival date of the Model S in Canada (where I live) is in 2012... I am highly considering putting money away so I could buy it. The cost of electricity is about 8 cents a kilowatt-hour here. I currently drive about 300km (~183 miles) a week.
A model S (if I don't botch my math) would cost me about $4.25/week to drive (assuming my driving routines don't change much). This calculation is based on the following: the Tesla Roadster (note Roadster, I can't seem to quickly find specs on the Model S) battery is rated at 53kWh which they claim is about 220 miles (~355km) of driving. 300km/333km = 85% (rounded) total used capacity a week. 53kWh x 85% = 45.05kWh usage. 45.05kWh x $0.08 == $3.60 a week.
My current car gets about 425km in the city on a 45L tank (about 625km on the highway). The current rate right now is 99.9 cents per litre. It's costing me about $31.73 a week in fuel.
A $28.13 savings every week. $28.23 x 52 weeks in a year == $1,462.76 savings a year just for going electric.
Imagine if 20% of North America's population did this (~337,168,480 people according to this link). That's a huge savings.
(Although keeping the radio on as people got out of the car would not really be a bad thing.)
My car (and a lot of other cars I've driven/been driven in) keep the radio on until driver's door has been opened.
That's actually as good reason to redesign how cars function so that the engine will operate without the key, and the key unlocks shifting into gear.
Easily possible. How do you think command start works? Turns the engine on, starts everything up accept 'accessories' (basically just the radio and anything plugged into the 'accessory' cigarette-lighter plug in my car -- so my Sirius Radio doesn't kick in until I put the key in and turn it to the 'On' position) however A/C or Heat kicks in, headlights turn on, etc.
(I'm sorry, if bad people have gotten into your car interior, they have better ways to cost you money than sit there and waste your gas. Like, oh, opening your gas tank and pouring sugar in, and waiting for you to start the car.)
Or, y'know, steal stuff. Generally that's what they are after. Also, some cars (not all) don't require access to the interior to open the gas-cap cover.
For the most part I do agree with you. And a lot of it is possible in some cars. Just pointing a few things out.:-)
These days, the model is very much based on some really funky group keying and key revocation, which allows the sattelite provider to revoke individual keys because each receiver has a unique key rather than a group sharing a common key.
Among other things, this makes piracy MUCH harder, because the sattelite providers can buy pirated receivers, take them to the lab, find out the key used, and revoke it, disabling that entire batch of pirated receivers without affecting normal customers.
I'm no expert in this subject. But:
If every box has a unique key and the process of pirating a box is essentially cloning the box and it's specific unique key... The satellite company should be smart enough to log what each key is doing. If one key is booting up 1,000/day... you think they'd be able to detect that in some kind of log file (or a hash table/high performance monster of a database) of what every box in North America is doing. If they do this, they can flag and restrict that key.
I think Google needs to start investing some time and money into buying or building Nuclear Power Facilities.
It could pay off for them, because they certainly don't need all of the power they would generate, and could sell some back to the Country/State/Region they build it in.
Sounds like a win-win to me.
P.S. - Please don't start a flame war about how Nuclear Power is 'unclean' or 'dangerous' -- in today's society it is cleaner, more efficient and just as safe, if not safer, than coal-fired generators.
More advanced hardware should deliver a performance benefit no matter what is running on it.
Not if your code is not tuned for this new "advanced hardware". Surely there are new compile flags to consider, and if you are not tuning your code for the new processor features it could very well be slower than before.
I use my local Credit Union as well. They rock. $5/month unlimited everything included(web/atm/interac). Upto $1500 immediate withdrawal after deposit in ATM and $2500 maximum daily withdrawal.
I used to be with RBC. I used them for 16 years and it wasn't until recent when I tried to buy a new car (vs paying cash previously on used cars) that I ever had any problems. RBC wouldn't even bat it's eyelashes at me when I applied for a loan. I ended up going through Wells Fargo (through the Dealer -- that was my biggest mistake) on a 6 year loan and a 19.5% interest payment. After 9 months of paying $418/month on my loan but only $160 of that was going on the principal I decided to shop my options. I went to the Credit Union and after a week or so got a loan to buy out Wells Fargo. $16,000 @ 5.75% interest means I have the car paid off in about 3 years instead of 6.
I've since moved all of my banking and the wife's banking to the Credit Union.
make webcams work (they don't in the majority of cases at the moment)
Who uses webcams? Text is much more efficient and doesn't hog bandwidth. aMSN kicks ass for those who still use MSN/Live Messenger.
stop regressions in graphics drivers
That's not entirely upto the Kernel dev's... Ati/nVidia/Intel all have their own driver packages that aren't included in the kernel. 9/10 times it's their problem, not the kernel dev's.
get other hardware working, e.g. iPods;
Definitely not a Linux developer issue. Apple changes the iPod connectivity system and obfuscates it so often it's not worth the hassle. There are some solutions out there, though. Your mileage may vary though, depending on which model/revision/colour iPod you own.
make dual-screen work without spending 20 minutes fucking around
This depends on which set of drivers you are using. ati-config has an option to set it up nearly instantly. nvidia-config does, too. I haven't dealt with Intel video cards for a long time so I'm unsure of their options.
get GNOME on to QT and develop a decent HIG (sorry, the current GNOME HIG is an excuse to put off doing anything about bugs, see Apple's for how this should be done)
Not going to happen. There are alternatives to GNOME and KDE (and GTK/QT respectively). But you wouldn't want to use those because they aren't "pretty". Seeing as how you're a fan of Apple (and probably a douchebag-mac-fuck) that just won't do for you because fashion and beauty is everything to people like you.
finally pick one -- namely.deb -- package format and stick to it; so developers aren't put-off by the idea of spending days creating packages for different platforms.
Also probably never going to happen..deb is not a good choice for some people (like me). Gentoo seems to have it right. Gentoo employs a ports-like system borrowed from BSD. Since you're such a fan of Apple, you could appreciate that. Seeing as Mac OSX is a fusion of MacOS and FreeBSD (_basically_ -- NOT getting into the technical aspect of this)
I'm sure some smug twat will pop-up and say how they don't care about Linux on the desktop, my answer is: why are you bothering to reply, if you don't care? There are obviously loads of people who do care, just look around at all the advocates. They told me Linux is ready for the desktop, and I tried it, only to find everything's slower, my iPod didn't work, then upgrading hosed my sound and video!
I guess I'm a twat... but who's holding the iPod? Anyway. I'm replying because I want to maybe set you straight on a few things. You are obviously a Mac user because you are very imaginative. We all know only fruity apple guys are imaginative, right? Perhaps your experience using Linux sucked, but my family uses it for _all_ tasks (from messaging, to e-mail, to programming, to book-keeping, to writing a letter, to watching Media on the TV, to the firmware in my networking equipment) and it works great. I don't understand the speed comment you made. I've used Mac OS/X and every version of Windows. Speed certainly is not an issue here. Ubuntu may be your problem there (never used it past installing and wiping because I didn't like it)
If you're thinking of advocating Linux to someone: stop! Go and do some work on getting drivers working instead, your time won't be wasted and you won't lose any friends.
I'm guessing you are some hip-cool teen that doesn't seem to comprehend anything past "Ohhnoooes! My iPood Odesn't work! WTFBBQ:cry:/wrist" That's fine. We don't want your business anyway. Maybe one day when you grow up and realize life is more important than your iPod will you understand.
Thank you, and have a good night. Sincerely,
Cory Christison
He owned a blog that he literally put up everything that happened in his life.
He added pages of an essay he was writing for History to his blog as he finished and edited them.
A few days after he turned in his paper he was asked to speak to the Dean where he was accused of plagiarism because Google turned up his blog (he uses a pseudo-name, and has google-analytics installed on his blog)
Took him a few meetings with the education board to prove that it was his blog and his own writing.
What a bitch, eh? The fact that the teacher merely typed it in Google and said "Good enough". He didn't bother to look for any pictures or any information that would hint that it was this particular persons blog.
In fact, the whole KDE4 thing looks like they want to deliberately lose every user who wants a simple, clean, responsive, effective UI. They overhyped the API changes so much, they forgot about the users. Why do you force me to use Fluxbox?
Nothing wrong with Fluxbox, but XFCE is a great "in-between" for KDE/GNOME and Fluxbox. More of an actual platform than just a window manager.
I've already given up on Azureus, they did the same thing with Vuze.
There is a setting somewhere in the config to turn that off. I can't remember what I did but my 'Vuze' looks and acts just like Azureus did.
.I'd end up paying 1.000 bucks on hardware, 250 on OS, and 50 on the game just to stay where I am now.
You don't need Vista Ultimate to play video games, do you? Home Premium is only $140 where I buy my hardware (in Canadian Currency) as far as I know it should be able to play games just as well as Ultimate.
One of my old jobs was graphic design at a small advertising firm.
The office was in a small window-front retail spot down town in a mid-sized city Saskatchewan, Canada. I started in January.
Our heat was shared with a meat shop next door. The thermostat was in the meat shop, where it was generally warmer due to various freezers running (heat expelling from the back of them).
My office got very, very cold. One morning (9:00AM or so) it was so cold, my LCD display was lagging with a 15 second delay. Almost every day the store-front window would be all frosted up and would not dissipate until 2:00PM or so.
I would have to go next door and ask the guys in the meat shop to turn the heat up. They'd turn it up 1-2 degree's... which didn't help me at all and I have a feeling they'd just turn it back after I left.
Then when summer rolled around there was no air conditioning.
Gotta love living in one of the only area's in North America where the temperature goes from one extreme to the next. -45C(-49F) winter, +45C(113F) summer.
VirtualBox is cross platform and open source (used to be Sun xVM Product). It's really nice. The (Qt-based) UI could use a bit of work, but I've found it to be much, much faster and more stable than VMware Workstation(v4-v6). My use was WinXP Pro on Gentoo mostly for Photoshop CS2... but it's now running flawlessly under WINE so it doesn't get used much anymore. Still use AnyDVD HD every so often but it's becoming less and less frequent.
This is a very, very simple method. You seem to want to make it out to be the best thing in the world. The problem is, it needs some form of descriptive characteristic.
In my own little personal CMS/framework I do it similarly, except with a 1-16 character string. This way I can set some form of description.
It's really, very easy to do. Basically need a table with (id,parentid,page_title,page_content). parentid is the id of the parent section, leave NULL if it is the top level. This way you can seek in the DB with a simple SELECT * FROM `pages` WHERE `id`="aboutus" LIMIT 1.
You can use parentid to form a breakcrumb to trace back to which section it relates to... this maintains hierarchy. An easier way is to do a select all and hold it in an array (or hash table -- depending on your language) to make it really speedy. Hell, skip the DB. Store it in a file as a serialized string. (for VERY low traffic sites, anyway)
This method also works VERY well with URL rewriting.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the idea really is to completely abolish gasoline and diesel powered vehicles.
I think it's more-so to clear up the air and produce less pollution in the cities. The average North American (that doesn't live out in the country) drives less than 60 miles a day (~95km).
If this is true, an eletric car would be worth it for most people. Even if you go double that distance, it would still be worth it for you.
I, personally, am interested to see how Tesla's Model S does on the roads. The estimated arrival date of the Model S in Canada (where I live) is in 2012... I am highly considering putting money away so I could buy it. The cost of electricity is about 8 cents a kilowatt-hour here. I currently drive about 300km (~183 miles) a week.
A model S (if I don't botch my math) would cost me about $4.25/week to drive (assuming my driving routines don't change much).
This calculation is based on the following: the Tesla Roadster (note Roadster, I can't seem to quickly find specs on the Model S) battery is rated at 53kWh which they claim is about 220 miles (~355km) of driving. 300km/333km = 85% (rounded) total used capacity a week. 53kWh x 85% = 45.05kWh usage. 45.05kWh x $0.08 == $3.60 a week.
My current car gets about 425km in the city on a 45L tank (about 625km on the highway). The current rate right now is 99.9 cents per litre. It's costing me about $31.73 a week in fuel.
A $28.13 savings every week. $28.23 x 52 weeks in a year == $1,462.76 savings a year just for going electric.
Imagine if 20% of North America's population did this (~337,168,480 people according to this link). That's a huge savings.
(Although keeping the radio on as people got out of the car would not really be a bad thing.)
My car (and a lot of other cars I've driven/been driven in) keep the radio on until driver's door has been opened.
That's actually as good reason to redesign how cars function so that the engine will operate without the key, and the key unlocks shifting into gear.
Easily possible. How do you think command start works? Turns the engine on, starts everything up accept 'accessories' (basically just the radio and anything plugged into the 'accessory' cigarette-lighter plug in my car -- so my Sirius Radio doesn't kick in until I put the key in and turn it to the 'On' position) however A/C or Heat kicks in, headlights turn on, etc.
(I'm sorry, if bad people have gotten into your car interior, they have better ways to cost you money than sit there and waste your gas. Like, oh, opening your gas tank and pouring sugar in, and waiting for you to start the car.)
Or, y'know, steal stuff. Generally that's what they are after. Also, some cars (not all) don't require access to the interior to open the gas-cap cover.
For the most part I do agree with you. And a lot of it is possible in some cars. Just pointing a few things out. :-)
These days, the model is very much based on some really funky group keying and key revocation, which allows the sattelite provider to revoke individual keys because each receiver has a unique key rather than a group sharing a common key.
Among other things, this makes piracy MUCH harder, because the sattelite providers can buy pirated receivers, take them to the lab, find out the key used, and revoke it, disabling that entire batch of pirated receivers without affecting normal customers.
I'm no expert in this subject. But:
If every box has a unique key and the process of pirating a box is essentially cloning the box and it's specific unique key... The satellite company should be smart enough to log what each key is doing.
If one key is booting up 1,000/day... you think they'd be able to detect that in some kind of log file (or a hash table/high performance monster of a database) of what every box in North America is doing.
If they do this, they can flag and restrict that key.
No reverse engineering and a lot of time saved.
Again, I'm no expert in this area.
I think Google needs to start investing some time and money into buying or building Nuclear Power Facilities.
It could pay off for them, because they certainly don't need all of the power they would generate, and could sell some back to the Country/State/Region they build it in.
Sounds like a win-win to me.
P.S. - Please don't start a flame war about how Nuclear Power is 'unclean' or 'dangerous' -- in today's society it is cleaner, more efficient and just as safe, if not safer, than coal-fired generators.
Did you
or
If not, that could be your problem right there.
Not if your code is not tuned for this new "advanced hardware". Surely there are new compile flags to consider, and if you are not tuning your code for the new processor features it could very well be slower than before.
I use my local Credit Union as well. They rock. $5/month unlimited everything included(web/atm/interac). Upto $1500 immediate withdrawal after deposit in ATM and $2500 maximum daily withdrawal.
I used to be with RBC. I used them for 16 years and it wasn't until recent when I tried to buy a new car (vs paying cash previously on used cars) that I ever had any problems. RBC wouldn't even bat it's eyelashes at me when I applied for a loan. I ended up going through Wells Fargo (through the Dealer -- that was my biggest mistake) on a 6 year loan and a 19.5% interest payment. After 9 months of paying $418/month on my loan but only $160 of that was going on the principal I decided to shop my options. I went to the Credit Union and after a week or so got a loan to buy out Wells Fargo. $16,000 @ 5.75% interest means I have the car paid off in about 3 years instead of 6.
I've since moved all of my banking and the wife's banking to the Credit Union.
Who uses webcams? Text is much more efficient and doesn't hog bandwidth. aMSN kicks ass for those who still use MSN/Live Messenger.
That's not entirely upto the Kernel dev's... Ati/nVidia/Intel all have their own driver packages that aren't included in the kernel. 9/10 times it's their problem, not the kernel dev's.
Definitely not a Linux developer issue. Apple changes the iPod connectivity system and obfuscates it so often it's not worth the hassle.
There are some solutions out there, though. Your mileage may vary though, depending on which model/revision/colour iPod you own.
This depends on which set of drivers you are using. ati-config has an option to set it up nearly instantly. nvidia-config does, too. I haven't dealt with Intel video cards for a long time so I'm unsure of their options.
Not going to happen. There are alternatives to GNOME and KDE (and GTK/QT respectively). But you wouldn't want to use those because they aren't "pretty". Seeing as how you're a fan of Apple (and probably a douchebag-mac-fuck) that just won't do for you because fashion and beauty is everything to people like you.
Also probably never going to happen. .deb is not a good choice for some people (like me). Gentoo seems to have it right. Gentoo employs a ports-like system borrowed from BSD. Since you're such a fan of Apple, you could appreciate that. Seeing as Mac OSX is a fusion of MacOS and FreeBSD (_basically_ -- NOT getting into the technical aspect of this)
I guess I'm a twat... but who's holding the iPod?
Anyway. I'm replying because I want to maybe set you straight on a few things. You are obviously a Mac user because you are very imaginative. We all know only fruity apple guys are imaginative, right?
Perhaps your experience using Linux sucked, but my family uses it for _all_ tasks (from messaging, to e-mail, to programming, to book-keeping, to writing a letter, to watching Media on the TV, to the firmware in my networking equipment) and it works great.
I don't understand the speed comment you made. I've used Mac OS/X and every version of Windows. Speed certainly is not an issue here. Ubuntu may be your problem there (never used it past installing and wiping because I didn't like it)
I'm guessing you are some hip-cool teen that doesn't seem to comprehend anything past "Ohhnoooes! My iPood Odesn't work! WTFBBQ :cry: /wrist"
That's fine. We don't want your business anyway. Maybe one day when you grow up and realize life is more important than your iPod will you understand.
Thank you, and have a good night.
Sincerely,
Cory Christison
Something like this happened to a friend of mine.
He owned a blog that he literally put up everything that happened in his life.
He added pages of an essay he was writing for History to his blog as he finished and edited them.
A few days after he turned in his paper he was asked to speak to the Dean where he was accused of plagiarism because Google turned up his blog (he uses a pseudo-name, and has google-analytics installed on his blog)
Took him a few meetings with the education board to prove that it was his blog and his own writing.
What a bitch, eh? The fact that the teacher merely typed it in Google and said "Good enough". He didn't bother to look for any pictures or any information that would hint that it was this particular persons blog.
Check out Sonata (a UI for MPD). They work great.
Nothing wrong with Fluxbox, but XFCE is a great "in-between" for KDE/GNOME and Fluxbox. More of an actual platform than just a window manager.
There is a setting somewhere in the config to turn that off. I can't remember what I did but my 'Vuze' looks and acts just like Azureus did.
Just curious if this particular individual is a room-mate.
If so, is he paying his portion of bills/rent?
If so, leave him be. All he can hurt is himself.
If not, kick him out. Maybe he'll come to his senses.
I have an HTPC based on a Jetway NC81-LF using onboard video (ATI HD 3200 Mobile Chip)
This little guy plays my BD rips no problem (I use Linux, no currently possible way to play direct from disc)
So even integrated chips can play this stuff. People like myself do not need any more than that.
Talk about typos!
I need to learn how to press that Preview button first. Is there a way it always Previews before posting (while logged in)?
Either that is a typo of I missed the memo.
In all honesty, it could be a fun project to try and hack iPhone OS or whatever they call it onto one of these.
To the best of my knowledge the iPhone and iPod Touch are ARM-based.
You don't need Vista Ultimate to play video games, do you?
Home Premium is only $140 where I buy my hardware (in Canadian Currency) as far as I know it should be able to play games just as well as Ultimate.
They don't work out too well.
I _really_ hope that is sarcasm.
Canada is not a communist country, y'know.
How do you feel about "Dr." Phil?
One of my old jobs was graphic design at a small advertising firm.
The office was in a small window-front retail spot down town in a mid-sized city Saskatchewan, Canada. I started in January.
Our heat was shared with a meat shop next door. The thermostat was in the meat shop, where it was generally warmer due to various freezers running (heat expelling from the back of them).
My office got very, very cold. One morning (9:00AM or so) it was so cold, my LCD display was lagging with a 15 second delay. Almost every day the store-front window would be all frosted up and would not dissipate until 2:00PM or so.
I would have to go next door and ask the guys in the meat shop to turn the heat up. They'd turn it up 1-2 degree's... which didn't help me at all and I have a feeling they'd just turn it back after I left.
Then when summer rolled around there was no air conditioning.
Gotta love living in one of the only area's in North America where the temperature goes from one extreme to the next. -45C(-49F) winter, +45C(113F) summer.
Ah shoot. It's in the table under "Write, edit, and review documents" section.
Sorry about that.
Yes it does.
Reference between Word and OO Writer (it's the 10th option down or so in the table):
http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/word_processing/Word-to-OOo.html
VirtualBox is cross platform and open source (used to be Sun xVM Product).
It's really nice. The (Qt-based) UI could use a bit of work, but I've found it to be much, much faster and more stable than VMware Workstation(v4-v6). My use was WinXP Pro on Gentoo mostly for Photoshop CS2... but it's now running flawlessly under WINE so it doesn't get used much anymore. Still use AnyDVD HD every so often but it's becoming less and less frequent.
... I use the old fashioned method of communication.
This is a very, very simple method. You seem to want to make it out to be the best thing in the world. The problem is, it needs some form of descriptive characteristic.
In my own little personal CMS/framework I do it similarly, except with a 1-16 character string. This way I can set some form of description.
It's really, very easy to do. Basically need a table with (id,parentid,page_title,page_content). parentid is the id of the parent section, leave NULL if it is the top level. This way you can seek in the DB with a simple SELECT * FROM `pages` WHERE `id`="aboutus" LIMIT 1.
You can use parentid to form a breakcrumb to trace back to which section it relates to... this maintains hierarchy. An easier way is to do a select all and hold it in an array (or hash table -- depending on your language) to make it really speedy. Hell, skip the DB. Store it in a file as a serialized string. (for VERY low traffic sites, anyway)
This method also works VERY well with URL rewriting.