FWIW, I think you linked twice to the same image...
My 2 cents on dashes? I've owned all three and found Japanese car dashes hard to use, the Mercedes dash (and the entire car) was way too plain, and the Cadillac to be perfect -- a thousand engineers creating the perfect car for an engineer. So how about an American car's dash as the best balance of features, comfort, ease-of-use and luxury?
Thanks for the TechNet link. I slogged through that font nightmare and am left with a question, a comment and a rant.
Q. Has anyone found Vista SP1 to still be slow at file copying? If not, great. If so, I want half an hour of my life back.
Comment: I tried Vista on a laptop gifted to us and found that trying to delete a file often invoked a stunned response from Vista and an interminable delay. Since no "copy" process was involved, and no network was connected to the laptop, what the heck was going on? And does SP1 solve this?
Rant: Media player in Vista is changed for the worse when it comes to the File Open dialog box. Used to be you could Alt+F,O,Shift-TAB,,Enter and be playing a file. They changed the z-order (or whatever it is called in a dbox) and it takes innumerable tabs to get you into your list of files. And then they changed what information is shown about files, and how they are sorted. Well, you get the idea. I don't suppose SP1 fixed this.
I wouldn't call baseball or soccer exciting, but football and hockey are. Maybe you just haven't played them?
Also, the first thing I thought of when I read your post was "Tiger Woods". Next thing I know, Sportscenter is showing Tiger practicing six hours per day, getting ready to come back to golf after his tournament-of-the-century 2008 US Open win (with one good leg). If watching Tiger pull it off yet again isn't impressive and blood-quickening, I don't know what is.
You do realize that this will only effect hybrid or electric cars right?
Yes. This will only affect some present and most future cars. Sorry to have disturbed you with it.
...your 2nd paragraph yields number of cars affected...
Ok, let's agree on less than 10% of passenger cars today. I can add that it affects zero% of my car(s) -- an equally irrelevant fact.
The second thing is, if these shocks produce a gain of around 10% in energy recovered, then we can do some math on the economics of it.
We sure can, and the bottom line is that for 5% of the cost of a $20K car, you can get 10% better fuel economy. [2.5% of a $40K car, 1% of a $100K car, 0.1% of one of these] This "spend 5%, get 10%" thing should already be a clue but here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation anyway: over 150,000 miles, a 25mpg car will use 6,000 gallons of fuel. 10% of that is 600 gallons. At today's price, that is about $1,200, FTW. 5 or 10 years from now it will be higher.
Also, 10% more energy translates to a savings in weight somewhere else. For example, the batteries can be 10% smaller, and a 10% battery weight savings could lead to a further 10% gain. Yes, adding a small "Shock Energy Recovery System" to each wheel would add weight, but most likely not equal to 10% of 68KG. And those 68KG only take a Prius for about 5 miles (currently). The next gen is going for 11 miles of electric-only range, so scale the battery weight accordingly. And that is the point -- if you scale the battery range to 50 miles for example, the weight goes to 680KG, and the SERS savings becomes 68KG since it is not necessary to scale the size/weight/cost of the SERS system.
My guess is that their effectiveness is going to go as the shock absorption abilities go and will only be effective for that typical 5 years then severely degrade after that like regular shocks and struts seem to do.
Bad guess -- electrical systems last vastly longer than purely mechanical systems like a shock absorber. SERS could be an induced system, without physical contact, and thus without wear.
And how about just having an extended vehicle range? If you live 5.5 miles from work, your present day Prius will still have to fire up its gas engine. Add SERS and you don't need the gas. If you presently change the oil every 6 months, now you change it every 6.6 months. And unlike engines, and batteries, the SERS can be designed to not wear out at all -- so you extend the total life of your car, bringing further savings.
I think I'd like to let the marketplace decide, rather than choosing to not offer this product because it might just break even in some initial/present day cases. If SERS causes excitement and optimism, people will want to move toward electric and electric/hybrid systems even more -- and that would bring lower prices and more savings.
The future is in plastics, and SERS-like systems. I find your post well reasoned...for a 1900s buggy whip manufacturer.
Thanks everyone for your kindness. The total idiocy in my "correction" was only apparent to me after I came back from the Dog Obedience class I had rushed off to.
I've used YG for too long and am growing tired of their latest tactics: [1] putting arbitrary spaces in any long char string (including URLs), [2] arbitrarily not delivering email.
What other free alternatives do/.ers recommend/use? (I would prefer to not host a listserv...)
I think you make some good points, but this math didn't check out:
Our system keeps kids in school for less than 8% of their time each year.
By my calculations:
Total hours in a year: 24*365=8760
8% of that would be: 0.08*8760=700.8
Our local "K thru 5" keeps them from 8am to 2pm, minus lunch and recess breaks of about an hour.
The average number of school days in a year is 180 [Source: http://ask.yahoo.com/20050509.html%5D
So, total hours "kept": 180*5=900
"Kept" percentage is more like ~10.3%
And middle and high school days are even longer so their percentages are higher.
FWIW, despite the calculation inaccuracy, I think this percentage is pretty much useless as a metric of how much we are investing in our kids.
For one thing, it counts time they would be asleep, etc. A more realistic maximum availability is 8 hours per day, or less. Also, adults don't work on weekends, so why should kids be expected to? And younger children are barely getting over temper tantrums, etc. and can not realistically be expected to log 8 hours per day.
I think you could increase the number of days at school by about a month each year without harming the kids, but that only adds 20 or so days, for a net bump from 10% to 11.4%.
A smarter area to focus on is what the *#(!*% they are actually studying. It has become truly depressing to watch kids go into middle school not knowing how to do long division, multiply 2-digit by 2-digit numbers, spell simple words, or have an interest in reading. But boy are they good with making a pumpkin or snowflake out of paper! Modern school textbooks have a few sentences and gigantic pictures on every page. Class sizes are now over 30 and so kids don't have to read -- they can just pause at a word and the teacher will quickly fill in the missing syllables for them.
Money has carefully and steadily been removed from the school system for decades. It is a deliberate dumbing down of the golden M generation and it is not about to be corrected by upgrading their Apple II to a virus-laden PC and keeping them in front of it for a longer period of time.
On the topic of chiropractic, here is an alternative treatment (the person who invented it, and those who administer it today are chiros, btw): SAM
I've taken this treatment and have proved it to myself. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of others have also. Still, I predict a thorough thrashing in this forum. By people who have not taken it. Who mainly will not even critique the treatment itself but rather myself, or some generalized person "like" me.
In fairness, we don't know how their site "degrades" for 800x600 users. He just said he will drop support for it. It may still be perfectly usable. Maybe only the ads become invisible for those with.LE. 800 horizontal points of light...
I've given up on expecting most sites to be fluid, res. wise, but I still expect most to make reasonable choices. Unfortunately all too many sites are now assuming people have 1024 pixels of width -- forgetting that those running a 1920x1200 desktop might like a "two up" arrangement where their browser takes up half of that -- i.e. 960 pixels. So, for those with no imagination who like to rigidly code their site's width, please consider raising/lowering the bar to 960, not 1024. </rant>.
Minor nitpick but Wiki says the death zone is 7,000 to 8,000 meters (23,000 to 26,200 ft). The reason I checked is I had thought it was above 18,000 feet (the height of Everest base camp).
Comcast recently announced HD bundles that will go for $115 to $180 per month. When you add in what they charge for high speed Internet, you hit $230/month already.
The flaw in parent's math, btw, is that the $44B is mainly one-time investments. The visually stunning, if you like graphs, promote-our-site page is nearly content-free but at least the PDF link (first footnote) reveals that only about $2.2B (over ~3 years) would go to subsidize the on-going costs of end-users (scroll down the PDF to the "Lifeline/linkup..." and "Every child online..." sections. Oh, watch out it is a PDF by the way.
So, Comcast is already hiking their rates, by $60 to $120/month, and in 3 years that works out to $31.75 to $63.5B of variable, not one-time, income. True, the increase is on the TV side of things, but considering their new Internet bandwidth cap it is easy to see them offering an HD/all-you-can-eat Internet upgrade that would be in the same ballpark as their HDTV upgrade.
Comcast rate increases alone (without the need for infrastructure improvements, mind you) make the $44B government plan-so-it will-never-happen look like chump change.
It's really interesting to hear the changing styles as the years and decades go by. But would I have paid to get the rap crap that started to show up big time since about 1998 or so? No freaking way - the RIAA cannot claim lost sales there, or for any country songs that are included - because I hate both.
My musical tastes go back to the days of High Fidelity mono as well. My take on rap is that it is not a musical genre but an attitude. And prior to the summer of 2008 I would have agreed with you about country music being a conflict in terms.
Then I had to work with a crew that listened to country and, surprise, surprise, there were/are some tunes there that I actually like. Examples: The Lost Trailers - Holler Back, Rascal Flatts - Bob That Head, Alan Jackson - Good Time, Kid Rock - All Summer Long and several from Brad Paisley.
I'm not giving country an all-access pass, but in 2008 the most well-produced, and lyrically audible, new music I heard was on country stations. It doesn't mean I'm tuning out Mark and Brian, but it shows that we need to keep an open mind. I hope you aren't missing out, Gorschkov.
By the time I got to college the 3.5" disks were starting to come out and this trick didn't work on them.
Maybe not with a hole punch, but it did work. 720 disks lacked the notch that 1440's had. One end of a pair of scissors and a few minutes pressure brought you almost three-quarters of a megabyte more diskspace! Could life get better?
I wonder how much collective time was spent gaining paltry amounts of unreliable storage. How about just the time cost to format the media before it started coming out pre-formatted?
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, I think you linked twice to the same image...
My 2 cents on dashes? I've owned all three and found Japanese car dashes hard to use, the Mercedes dash (and the entire car) was way too plain, and the Cadillac to be perfect -- a thousand engineers creating the perfect car for an engineer. So how about an American car's dash as the best balance of features, comfort, ease-of-use and luxury?
Thanks for the TechNet link. I slogged through that font nightmare and am left with a question, a comment and a rant.
Q. Has anyone found Vista SP1 to still be slow at file copying? If not, great. If so, I want half an hour of my life back.
Comment: I tried Vista on a laptop gifted to us and found that trying to delete a file often invoked a stunned response from Vista and an interminable delay. Since no "copy" process was involved, and no network was connected to the laptop, what the heck was going on? And does SP1 solve this?
Rant: Media player in Vista is changed for the worse when it comes to the File Open dialog box. Used to be you could Alt+F,O,Shift-TAB,,Enter and be playing a file. They changed the z-order (or whatever it is called in a dbox) and it takes innumerable tabs to get you into your list of files. And then they changed what information is shown about files, and how they are sorted. Well, you get the idea. I don't suppose SP1 fixed this.
Comedy:
Definitely, Maybe
Ghost Town
Documentaries:
Flow
National Geographic's In The Womb series
Drama:
Red
Futile, unless the hacks are being done by RIAA, IFPI, MPAA employees.
False flag operations are no one's exclusive domain.
I wouldn't call baseball or soccer exciting, but football and hockey are. Maybe you just haven't played them?
Also, the first thing I thought of when I read your post was "Tiger Woods". Next thing I know, Sportscenter is showing Tiger practicing six hours per day, getting ready to come back to golf after his tournament-of-the-century 2008 US Open win (with one good leg). If watching Tiger pull it off yet again isn't impressive and blood-quickening, I don't know what is.
And Tom's Hardware -- I can't use the CPU graphs anymore, for example.
Let's respond point by point.
...your 2nd paragraph yields number of cars affected...
You do realize that this will only effect hybrid or electric cars right?
Yes. This will only affect some present and most future cars. Sorry to have disturbed you with it.
Ok, let's agree on less than 10% of passenger cars today. I can add that it affects zero% of my car(s) -- an equally irrelevant fact.
The second thing is, if these shocks produce a gain of around 10% in energy recovered, then we can do some math on the economics of it.
We sure can, and the bottom line is that for 5% of the cost of a $20K car, you can get 10% better fuel economy. [2.5% of a $40K car, 1% of a $100K car, 0.1% of one of these] This "spend 5%, get 10%" thing should already be a clue but here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation anyway: over 150,000 miles, a 25mpg car will use 6,000 gallons of fuel. 10% of that is 600 gallons. At today's price, that is about $1,200, FTW. 5 or 10 years from now it will be higher.
Also, 10% more energy translates to a savings in weight somewhere else. For example, the batteries can be 10% smaller, and a 10% battery weight savings could lead to a further 10% gain. Yes, adding a small "Shock Energy Recovery System" to each wheel would add weight, but most likely not equal to 10% of 68KG. And those 68KG only take a Prius for about 5 miles (currently). The next gen is going for 11 miles of electric-only range, so scale the battery weight accordingly. And that is the point -- if you scale the battery range to 50 miles for example, the weight goes to 680KG, and the SERS savings becomes 68KG since it is not necessary to scale the size/weight/cost of the SERS system.
My guess is that their effectiveness is going to go as the shock absorption abilities go and will only be effective for that typical 5 years then severely degrade after that like regular shocks and struts seem to do.
Bad guess -- electrical systems last vastly longer than purely mechanical systems like a shock absorber. SERS could be an induced system, without physical contact, and thus without wear.
And how about just having an extended vehicle range? If you live 5.5 miles from work, your present day Prius will still have to fire up its gas engine. Add SERS and you don't need the gas. If you presently change the oil every 6 months, now you change it every 6.6 months. And unlike engines, and batteries, the SERS can be designed to not wear out at all -- so you extend the total life of your car, bringing further savings.
I think I'd like to let the marketplace decide, rather than choosing to not offer this product because it might just break even in some initial/present day cases. If SERS causes excitement and optimism, people will want to move toward electric and electric/hybrid systems even more -- and that would bring lower prices and more savings.
The future is in plastics, and SERS-like systems. I find your post well reasoned...for a 1900s buggy whip manufacturer.
Thanks everyone for your kindness. The total idiocy in my "correction" was only apparent to me after I came back from the Dog Obedience class I had rushed off to.
I'm not sure what "Iridium-33" is. Iridium's atomic number is 77. Lightest "most stable" isotope is 188. Maybe you meant Ir-193?
The Wiki page on Iridium.
How does it work with Comcast's Torrent Disruption System?
Anyone running Miro from a Comcast connection? Can the torrenting aspect be disabled?
"Buick invented the assembly line" false fact. Ask anyone (as I did to /. some time back) and they will rush to "prove it" with a wikianswer.
I've used YG for too long and am growing tired of their latest tactics: [1] putting arbitrary spaces in any long char string (including URLs), [2] arbitrarily not delivering email.
/.ers recommend/use? (I would prefer to not host a listserv...)
What other free alternatives do
I think you make some good points, but this math didn't check out:
Our system keeps kids in school for less than 8% of their time each year.
By my calculations:
Total hours in a year: 24*365=8760
8% of that would be: 0.08*8760=700.8
Our local "K thru 5" keeps them from 8am to 2pm, minus lunch and recess breaks of about an hour.
The average number of school days in a year is 180 [Source: http://ask.yahoo.com/20050509.html%5D
So, total hours "kept": 180*5=900
"Kept" percentage is more like ~10.3%
And middle and high school days are even longer so their percentages are higher.
FWIW, despite the calculation inaccuracy, I think this percentage is pretty much useless as a metric of how much we are investing in our kids.
For one thing, it counts time they would be asleep, etc. A more realistic maximum availability is 8 hours per day, or less. Also, adults don't work on weekends, so why should kids be expected to? And younger children are barely getting over temper tantrums, etc. and can not realistically be expected to log 8 hours per day.
I think you could increase the number of days at school by about a month each year without harming the kids, but that only adds 20 or so days, for a net bump from 10% to 11.4%.
A smarter area to focus on is what the *#(!*% they are actually studying. It has become truly depressing to watch kids go into middle school not knowing how to do long division, multiply 2-digit by 2-digit numbers, spell simple words, or have an interest in reading. But boy are they good with making a pumpkin or snowflake out of paper! Modern school textbooks have a few sentences and gigantic pictures on every page. Class sizes are now over 30 and so kids don't have to read -- they can just pause at a word and the teacher will quickly fill in the missing syllables for them.
Money has carefully and steadily been removed from the school system for decades. It is a deliberate dumbing down of the golden M generation and it is not about to be corrected by upgrading their Apple II to a virus-laden PC and keeping them in front of it for a longer period of time.
You have to use the command line format.exe to format a removable drive as NTFS, because frickin' Windows doesn't let you do it from the GUI.
How do you figure? Run diskmgmt.msc, right click on drive in question, "Format..." etc. Defaults to NTFS for me.
I'd settle for learning how he got it past the lameness filter.
name two other software packages where that's happened
(1) DOS 5 vs. DOS 4 (due to command.com being able to Load High)
(2) Win 3.11 vs. Win 3.1 (due to VFAT)
As if this forum were a place where any medical practice should actually be trashed.
When any of these treatments shows up on PubMed, I'll consider that evidence
that the establishment has nothing to lose by publishing it.
Fixed those for you.
On the topic of chiropractic, here is an alternative treatment (the person who invented it, and those who administer it today are chiros, btw): SAM
I've taken this treatment and have proved it to myself. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of others have also. Still, I predict a thorough thrashing in this forum. By people who have not taken it. Who mainly will not even critique the treatment itself but rather myself, or some generalized person "like" me.
In fairness, we don't know how their site "degrades" for 800x600 users. He just said he will drop support for it. It may still be perfectly usable. Maybe only the ads become invisible for those with .LE. 800 horizontal points of light...
I've given up on expecting most sites to be fluid, res. wise, but I still expect most to make reasonable choices. Unfortunately all too many sites are now assuming people have 1024 pixels of width -- forgetting that those running a 1920x1200 desktop might like a "two up" arrangement where their browser takes up half of that -- i.e. 960 pixels. So, for those with no imagination who like to rigidly code their site's width, please consider raising/lowering the bar to 960, not 1024. </rant>.
Minor nitpick but Wiki says the death zone is 7,000 to 8,000 meters (23,000 to 26,200 ft). The reason I checked is I had thought it was above 18,000 feet (the height of Everest base camp).
Re-read your six words and you will see your wrong.
Comcast recently announced HD bundles that will go for $115 to $180 per month. When you add in what they charge for high speed Internet, you hit $230/month already.
The flaw in parent's math, btw, is that the $44B is mainly one-time investments. The visually stunning, if you like graphs, promote-our-site page is nearly content-free but at least the PDF link (first footnote) reveals that only about $2.2B (over ~3 years) would go to subsidize the on-going costs of end-users (scroll down the PDF to the "Lifeline/linkup..." and "Every child online..." sections. Oh, watch out it is a PDF by the way.
So, Comcast is already hiking their rates, by $60 to $120/month, and in 3 years that works out to $31.75 to $63.5B of variable, not one-time, income. True, the increase is on the TV side of things, but considering their new Internet bandwidth cap it is easy to see them offering an HD/all-you-can-eat Internet upgrade that would be in the same ballpark as their HDTV upgrade.
Comcast rate increases alone (without the need for infrastructure improvements, mind you) make the $44B government plan-so-it will-never-happen look like chump change.
It's really interesting to hear the changing styles as the years and decades go by. But would I have paid to get the rap crap that started to show up big time since about 1998 or so? No freaking way - the RIAA cannot claim lost sales there, or for any country songs that are included - because I hate both.
My musical tastes go back to the days of High Fidelity mono as well. My take on rap is that it is not a musical genre but an attitude. And prior to the summer of 2008 I would have agreed with you about country music being a conflict in terms.
Then I had to work with a crew that listened to country and, surprise, surprise, there were/are some tunes there that I actually like. Examples: The Lost Trailers - Holler Back, Rascal Flatts - Bob That Head, Alan Jackson - Good Time, Kid Rock - All Summer Long and several from Brad Paisley.
I'm not giving country an all-access pass, but in 2008 the most well-produced, and lyrically audible, new music I heard was on country stations. It doesn't mean I'm tuning out Mark and Brian, but it shows that we need to keep an open mind. I hope you aren't missing out, Gorschkov.
This problem started 95 years ago on Jekyll Island.
/summary
Summarizing: If you siphon all the value out of a system, the system will go straight downhill without slowing.
By the time I got to college the 3.5" disks were starting to come out and this trick didn't work on them.
Maybe not with a hole punch, but it did work. 720 disks lacked the notch that 1440's had. One end of a pair of scissors and a few minutes pressure brought you almost three-quarters of a megabyte more diskspace! Could life get better?
I wonder how much collective time was spent gaining paltry amounts of unreliable storage. How about just the time cost to format the media before it started coming out pre-formatted?