When we all drive electric or homebrew biodiesel cars, there will be no gas tax to pay for roads.
And as fuel economy increases from better engine design and lighter/smaller cars, existing gasoline tax revenue drops. The gasoline tax model is simply not sustainable. Most states already require cars to come in for emissions checkups every other year. Why not require electric cars to come in for a mileage check and tax accordingly? Isn't this the model for public utilities? Some municipalities have automated utility meters that send real-time usage data back to HQ. If folks are OK with that, why not mileage tracking on cars? (BTW your cellphone company, and probably the goverment already knows where you go if you leave your cellphone on all the time. Who needs GPS lol!)
Another option is to make a default use tax for each vehicle and offer rebates the less you drive. You purchase the right to drive up to 15,000 miles via monthly fees, but get a big rebate at the end of the year when you only drive 10,000 miles. Insurance companies are already doing this, so why not the government? You can even have special provisions for low-income households who have to drive a long way to work and are underserviced by public transit.
But these are just ideas. Ideas are bullshit. Execution is what matters, and thats fucking hard to do.
S/PDIF ceased working after installing Windows 7. It sees the device but no sound comes out. This is a bummer. I hope there is a fix for this.
Can you please post the hardware PNPID of your audio devices? With this information Microsoft can investigate and post an appropriate fix via Windows Update. You better beleive MS employees are scouring all the interweb forums including slashdot to address real customer issues!
Best bet is to post a dxdiag log file as that will contain all the driver information and perhaps help to address your other issues as well:
start - dxdiag.exe - save all info
In the mean time, try force-installing the Vista driver via your vendor's website.
Most nerds seem to turn it off assuming it is "flasy useless eye candy". Little do they know they basically turned off hardware accelleration. You do know that Vista, with Aero enabled, will delegate most of the window drawing to the video card. In fact, the more ram on your video card, the better, Vista stores all the window data on that instead of your system RAM.
In Vista there are actually multiple copies of the "window data" in BOTH system and Video ram. That's one reason why dwm.exe commit size is so large in Vista.
If you have a WDDM 1.1 compatible video card in Windows 7, however, the memory savings is huge. Especially if you frequently have a lot of windows open simultaneously. All this was presented at WinHEC/PDC. All of this means that you can actually run Win7 with 1GB quite well without any disk thrashing. You can certainly run WinXP with 1GB or less, but you don't get all the cool stuff that all kids love.
So how do you know if your current Video card is WDDM 1.1 compatible? From looking at the INF files distributed with the BETA, you can deduce that any DirectX 10 capable card is also WDDM 1.1. Presumably the graphics guidelines for Windows 7 system builders will be published soon to verify this. Until then, get your latest WDDM 1.1 drivers from Windows Update Catalog
Re:"Nerd" is a cop-out
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 1
I think you may be over-simplifying. For some people, it is extremely difficult to learn social skills. Take folks with aspergers syndrome for example.
Conversely, some folks just don't get logical problem solving or don't have the aptitude to learn how to program in C or grok abstract concepts like pointers or OOP.
I think for some folks, nerd may be a cop out, but certainly not all. Some folks will always be nerds no matter how hard they try not to be, and there is nothing wrong with that.
BTW very nice online autocross book. Certainly evidence of a fellow car nerd:)
Presumably HP invested resources in more recent chipsets like Intel i945 to support Vista. HP then worried that their sales and/or unit profits would decrease because cheaper Intel i915-based systems would also qualify for "Vista Capable".
Suppose Dell offers a i915-based system for $500, but HP offers a i945-based system for $550. Both have a Vista-capable logo - which one is the unenlightened customer gonna buy?
According to Intel, the i915 chipset does not have a native hardware scheduler and hence cannot fully support the WDDM design. I believe there were alpha versions of WDDM drivers for i915 but they only supported a subset of WDDM features and were scrapped early in the project.
I reckon it is actually possible to have full WDDM on i915, but the performance would be absolutely horrible because the scheduling would have to be done in the driver - and we all know how zippy Intel drivers are:)
Bah forget all that. Smart meters are the way to go. Problem solved.
Of course only the true nerds look for the programming solution when there are much easier options around... but this is slashdot so I feel proud, not ashamed:)
You know what, I hope somebody mods my parent comment down. I didn't specifically say how to solve the problem.
I really don't know the best way to do this, it would certainly help if the needles were a different colour than the rest of the image. Then you could just compute the angles and relative postition of the needles. Given that data, its a piece of cake.
Going the OCR route is actually quite a bit more complicated. You'd basically have to train the OCR to recognize the dial pattern and what a "5" might look like. a "5" might have the needle just before the 5, on top of the 5, or just past the 5.
You could also figure out which pie slice of the circle has the most black space. So split the circle into 10 36-degree segments and add up all the black pixels. The one with the most black is likely the one with the needle. Or course you have to take into account corner cases, so some testing is necessary. And of course comparing to the preceding place value and past data points to make sure it all makes sense.
There are many open source OCR tools available. Write a script to capture a JPG or PNG image every day from your camera and run it through one of the command-line OCR tools..
As long as your web cam doesn't get moved, you can set static cropping on the image so only the numbers are in the jpg file without a huge complicated border than might confuse the OCR engine.
There are plenty of people that are too busy/socially inept/ugly/etc to get sex the usual way. So the result is to effectively outlaw their only means of sexual outlet with other people?
Beer has enabled ugly people to get sex for centuries.
MP3 is supported on more handheld players and integrated chipsets that's why. It may not be the best compression scheme as there have been some great developments in psychoacoustics in the last 15 years, but MP3 just works.
Also, don't worry about Fraunhofer/Thomson. The patents are gonna expire in a couple years and none of the big companies have sued anyone for using LAME yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
Why such a narrow patent? Why not patent an algorithm recognizing the patterns in English names in general to be applied in any User-interface rather just in an IM client?
Also what is this bit about a "database storing anthroponomastic information to perform the anthroponomastic analysis of the username of the first user to determine the probable gender" Is that a table of known names vs gender stats based on public records? Or is it name fragments and endings matched to probability of gender? For example if a name ends in "A" its probably female, but if it ends in "T" its probably male. If they are using an algorithm which decomposes the name, that's kinda cool, but if they are just looking it up in a table of public records, thats pretty lame IMO.
Hash is ~$30/gram depending on quality. Seems like those folks in PA have been smoking something else if they thought they needed to calculate an emmm-dee-five.
"Kernell, the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell, D-Memphis, turned himself in to federal authorities today."
Is this paragraph from the article misleading? I assume what they are getting at is that he didn't try to run away. I don't think he voluntarily went to the police and told them what he did. He was investigated and got caught, or at least the evidence points in his direction. Now he will take the heat like a man.
Either way, when he gets out of jail, he is going to get some major liberal/hacker tang!
Please accept my apologies. I think I'm trying too hard to keep up with the level of sarcasm and backlash against linux fanboys on this forum. I'm really not that immature I swear!
"Plus... we're announcing the very special gift that all PDC attendees will receive: a 160GB external USB2 hard drive with all of the bits! Could 'The Goods' get any cooler? They just did!"
please rephrase with cars. No one here understands this "jogging" or "football" you speak of.
You jest, but this actually applies to cars quite well.
I am more likely to stop and help a fellow Volkswagen motorist on the side of road when I drive my VW than if they are driving some shitty American car.
Why?
Because I associate Volkswagens with community. Subconsciously, I assume that if somebody bought a VW, we'll have an instant rapport if even on a superficial level. With all the quirks of these cars, you have to be a little crazy to love em;) I also get the chance to show off how much I know about these cars - so its more likely that I'll be able to help than with some unfamiliar car.
Slashdot Mirror
What tax is this proposed tax replacing?
When we all drive electric or homebrew biodiesel cars, there will be no gas tax to pay for roads.
And as fuel economy increases from better engine design and lighter/smaller cars, existing gasoline tax revenue drops. The gasoline tax model is simply not sustainable. Most states already require cars to come in for emissions checkups every other year. Why not require electric cars to come in for a mileage check and tax accordingly? Isn't this the model for public utilities? Some municipalities have automated utility meters that send real-time usage data back to HQ. If folks are OK with that, why not mileage tracking on cars? (BTW your cellphone company, and probably the goverment already knows where you go if you leave your cellphone on all the time. Who needs GPS lol!)
Another option is to make a default use tax for each vehicle and offer rebates the less you drive. You purchase the right to drive up to 15,000 miles via monthly fees, but get a big rebate at the end of the year when you only drive 10,000 miles. Insurance companies are already doing this, so why not the government? You can even have special provisions for low-income households who have to drive a long way to work and are underserviced by public transit.
But these are just ideas. Ideas are bullshit. Execution is what matters, and thats fucking hard to do.
S/PDIF ceased working after installing Windows 7. It sees the device but no sound comes out. This is a bummer. I hope there is a fix for this.
Can you please post the hardware PNPID of your audio devices? With this information Microsoft can investigate and post an appropriate fix via Windows Update. You better beleive MS employees are scouring all the interweb forums including slashdot to address real customer issues!
Best bet is to post a dxdiag log file as that will contain all the driver information and perhaps help to address your other issues as well:
In the mean time, try force-installing the Vista driver via your vendor's website.
1KW ~= 1.34 HP
200KW ~= 268HP
400HP equivalent?
They need to explain that a bit better in the article and on the product website
Most nerds seem to turn it off assuming it is "flasy useless eye candy". Little do they know they basically turned off hardware accelleration. You do know that Vista, with Aero enabled, will delegate most of the window drawing to the video card. In fact, the more ram on your video card, the better, Vista stores all the window data on that instead of your system RAM.
In Vista there are actually multiple copies of the "window data" in BOTH system and Video ram. That's one reason why dwm.exe commit size is so large in Vista.
If you have a WDDM 1.1 compatible video card in Windows 7, however, the memory savings is huge. Especially if you frequently have a lot of windows open simultaneously. All this was presented at WinHEC/PDC. All of this means that you can actually run Win7 with 1GB quite well without any disk thrashing. You can certainly run WinXP with 1GB or less, but you don't get all the cool stuff that all kids love.
So how do you know if your current Video card is WDDM 1.1 compatible? From looking at the INF files distributed with the BETA, you can deduce that any DirectX 10 capable card is also WDDM 1.1. Presumably the graphics guidelines for Windows 7 system builders will be published soon to verify this. Until then, get your latest WDDM 1.1 drivers from Windows Update Catalog
I think you may be over-simplifying. For some people, it is extremely difficult to learn social skills. Take folks with aspergers syndrome for example.
:)
Conversely, some folks just don't get logical problem solving or don't have the aptitude to learn how to program in C or grok abstract concepts like pointers or OOP.
I think for some folks, nerd may be a cop out, but certainly not all. Some folks will always be nerds no matter how hard they try not to be, and there is nothing wrong with that.
BTW very nice online autocross book. Certainly evidence of a fellow car nerd
Oh yeah, you're right, I had it reversed. It had an alpha XPDM driver which could run Aero; not a alpha WDDM driver.
But yeah either way, performance sucked.
Presumably HP invested resources in more recent chipsets like Intel i945 to support Vista. HP then worried that their sales and/or unit profits would decrease because cheaper Intel i915-based systems would also qualify for "Vista Capable".
Suppose Dell offers a i915-based system for $500, but HP offers a i945-based system for $550. Both have a Vista-capable logo - which one is the unenlightened customer gonna buy?
According to Intel, the i915 chipset does not have a native hardware scheduler and hence cannot fully support the WDDM design. I believe there were alpha versions of WDDM drivers for i915 but they only supported a subset of WDDM features and were scrapped early in the project.
:)
I reckon it is actually possible to have full WDDM on i915, but the performance would be absolutely horrible because the scheduling would have to be done in the driver - and we all know how zippy Intel drivers are
Bah forget all that. Smart meters are the way to go. Problem solved.
:)
Of course only the true nerds look for the programming solution when there are much easier options around... but this is slashdot so I feel proud, not ashamed
You know what, I hope somebody mods my parent comment down. I didn't specifically say how to solve the problem. I really don't know the best way to do this, it would certainly help if the needles were a different colour than the rest of the image. Then you could just compute the angles and relative postition of the needles. Given that data, its a piece of cake.
Going the OCR route is actually quite a bit more complicated. You'd basically have to train the OCR to recognize the dial pattern and what a "5" might look like. a "5" might have the needle just before the 5, on top of the 5, or just past the 5.
You could also figure out which pie slice of the circle has the most black space. So split the circle into 10 36-degree segments and add up all the black pixels. The one with the most black is likely the one with the needle. Or course you have to take into account corner cases, so some testing is necessary. And of course comparing to the preceding place value and past data points to make sure it all makes sense.
There are many open source OCR tools available. Write a script to capture a JPG or PNG image every day from your camera and run it through one of the command-line OCR tools..
As long as your web cam doesn't get moved, you can set static cropping on the image so only the numbers are in the jpg file without a huge complicated border than might confuse the OCR engine.
There are plenty of people that are too busy/socially inept/ugly/etc to get sex the usual way. So the result is to effectively outlaw their only means of sexual outlet with other people?
Beer has enabled ugly people to get sex for centuries.
MP3 is supported on more handheld players and integrated chipsets that's why. It may not be the best compression scheme as there have been some great developments in psychoacoustics in the last 15 years, but MP3 just works.
Also, don't worry about Fraunhofer/Thomson. The patents are gonna expire in a couple years and none of the big companies have sued anyone for using LAME yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
Nice mix of SQL and C pseudo code there :)
Expect to hear from IBM's lawyers about licensing their patent shortly :)
Why such a narrow patent? Why not patent an algorithm recognizing the patterns in English names in general to be applied in any User-interface rather just in an IM client?
Also what is this bit about a "database storing anthroponomastic information to perform the anthroponomastic analysis of the username of the first user to determine the probable gender" Is that a table of known names vs gender stats based on public records? Or is it name fragments and endings matched to probability of gender? For example if a name ends in "A" its probably female, but if it ends in "T" its probably male. If they are using an algorithm which decomposes the name, that's kinda cool, but if they are just looking it up in a table of public records, thats pretty lame IMO.
Hash is ~$30/gram depending on quality. Seems like those folks in PA have been smoking something else if they thought they needed to calculate an emmm-dee-five.
Indeed. DST has absolutely nothing to do with farmers which makes the above Homer Simpson quote even more amusing.
Except for all those 'daylight savings' days... lousy farmers!
Of course there is absolutely no chance that this particular piece of research is also wrong...
"Kernell, the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell, D-Memphis, turned himself in to federal authorities today."
Is this paragraph from the article misleading? I assume what they are getting at is that he didn't try to run away. I don't think he voluntarily went to the police and told them what he did. He was investigated and got caught, or at least the evidence points in his direction. Now he will take the heat like a man.
Either way, when he gets out of jail, he is going to get some major liberal/hacker tang!
Will Leeroy [Blizzcon07] be there again?
Please accept my apologies. I think I'm trying too hard to keep up with the level of sarcasm and backlash against linux fanboys on this forum. I'm really not that immature I swear!
"Plus... we're announcing the very special gift that all PDC attendees will receive: a 160GB external USB2 hard drive with all of the bits! Could 'The Goods' get any cooler? They just did!"
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/Countdown-to-PDC-2008-This-is-the-Software--Services-PDC-Plus-a-Hard-Drive-Chock-Full-oBits-is-a-PDC/
If you honestly think the the drive is completely filled with Windows OS+tools, you're quite naive.
please rephrase with cars. No one here understands this "jogging" or "football" you speak of.
You jest, but this actually applies to cars quite well.
;) I also get the chance to show off how much I know about these cars - so its more likely that I'll be able to help than with some unfamiliar car.
I am more likely to stop and help a fellow Volkswagen motorist on the side of road when I drive my VW than if they are driving some shitty American car.
Why?
Because I associate Volkswagens with community. Subconsciously, I assume that if somebody bought a VW, we'll have an instant rapport if even on a superficial level. With all the quirks of these cars, you have to be a little crazy to love em
And it is cheaper still to have a drinking bird do your remote work.
If there was a previous Simpsons reference earlier in the thread, a more appropriate moderation would be "redundant".
Now where is my Tab