Re: Range issue

More than you think, and for the hard of thinking : the recharge time is too long. 200 miles in one go is much rarer than a few 70 mile trips.

Re: 75 miles? hahahahahahahaha

We're clearly not going to agree, but I will concede that most journeys are under 75 miles - most of the ones I'm thinking of are.

The problem is the recharge time. If I take a typical Saturday's activities :

Route 1 - 13 miles each way. Travel time half an hour (car), 1:11 (bus).+25 minutes extra wasted waiting time

Route 2 - 23 miles each way. Travel time half an hour (car), 1:30 (average - train, walk, bus). Have to leave half an hour earlier than in car.

Total=72 miles. Total time wasted if public transport used : 3 hours, 45 minutes + leaving half an hour early.

Heaven forfend I actually fancy nipping to the shops as well! Alternatively, how about going to my parents (65 miles). You can get there, but not back...

No, I don't have time to waste half an hour recharging at a charging station, and the places I'm travelling to definitely don't have recharge facilities. I am not willing to concede that my expectations are in any way unrealistic - they can be easily met by the most basic non electric car available.

Five fat blokes in a VW Up with a sofa is not a common occurrence for most people. Four fat blokes without the sofa might be - if the VW Up couldn't fit four moderately sized people (perhaps with a degree of discomfort in the back) I'd criticise that too..

There are plenty of small city cars that are a little underpowered for the motorway - but they can manage it if necessary.

A 200 mile range would be reasonable - all the local journeys would be covered, plus occasional day trips into the countryside. Holidays would be viable with overnight charging, too.

Re: 75 miles? hahahahahahahaha

Unfortunately not. Most of my commuting or travel is by public transport. The car (diesel, 50+ mpg) is used when public transport would take 2-3 times as long and usually also when I'm carrying plenty of equipment. Public transport is usually only decent in a hub and spoke arrangement and woe betide you when wishing to travel between spokes.

If I did two regular weekend trips via public transport it'd waste over four hours of one day. That's why cars are great, and also why this is a toy, not a car.

The Tesla is not an option until someone on the average salary can buy one.

Re: Must not throw old computer kit away...

I do have one here - Chinon FZ-506 Rev A.. Will have to see if it still works. Realistically I'll never use it again - I have lots of 3.5" disks but practically no 5.25". I also have one of these lovely pieces of kit : http://www.lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=42 - never have a floppy fail again..

I suppose I should think of junking the 486DX2-66 with 20MB RAM too. It made a decent uTorrent box with NT4 and large IDE drivers, but the check time when transfers went wrong were excruciatingly long..

Re: Not surprised

I rather suspect there's more than a few people here who know what V.32bis is and at one point thought 14Kbps was fast..

Depends on the webpage. *some* pages are still usable at that speed, but with all the javascript, graphics and huge stylesheets it's very difficult to efficiently browse the modern web with anything under 256Kbp/s and about 800Mhz of processor.

I'd note that until very recently (I'm looking at places like you, National Rail) sites still used WAP, or WAP levels of bandwidth. It wasn't necessary to use any more bandwidth for looking up timetables, but oh no, they had to stick in graphics and suchlike and ruin the experience for old, slow phones. I bet traintimes.org.uk is still usable at 14Kbps.

Re: bigger problems

I rather suspect what cap'n actually means is not that facebook will disappear (it won't), but that it isn't sustainable at its current level.

Myspace was incredibly popular. It still exists and has apparently grown a little again post sale and re-branding, but it had to fall a very long way before that happened..

Ditto friendsreunited. Still alive, but look at the losses.

Re: all well and good

Uh-huh.. and A&A will charge through the nose for it, too.

It's 'only' about 20 quid more expensive than my already expensive top of the line Be Internet connection to get less service. Even if you compare another pricey business only broadband provider such as Zen for high data volumes, they're vastly cheaper than A&A.

10GB/month during business hours by default? Don't make me laugh - throw a few databases around or a couple of operating system images and I can get through 3x that in a day for work purposes. Not every day, granted, but enough to make 10GB laughable. Home usage is a lot more reasonable, I don't torrent and all my traffic is legal - but nevertheless I don't fancy limiting myself if I fancy a heavy month of large Unix distributions, lots of Steam and Lovefilm and suchlike.

Things are moving slowly in the UK, but the only reason A&A have improved recently has been due to cheap(er) routers. They've had an IPV6 network for years.

Re: Corruption ?

You've got it the wrong way round - the issue would be with crap firmware in the GPU, not with the VM. The hardware access in this case will almost certainly be managed by Directed I/O (VT-d/IOMMU - managed hardware access by the memory controller) and SR-IOV (splitting a device into multiple virtual functions).

I don't know quite how much of a free for all a modern GPUs have on main system memory, though. The memory controller hub should keep the VMs safe from one another, but if the device firmware is broken and the GPU has a mapping to more memory than it should, then I suppose there could be a hole..

Re: Being pedantic here .....

You are blinded by your own philosophy and equating slavery to software licensing carries more than a whiff of Godwin, but I'll spell it out :

Yes, if software is issued under a completely free license it's entirely probable at some point it will be taken, monetized and enhanced without returning anything to the original authors. The GPL/LGPL is one way of enforcing an evolving software ecosystem, but not the only way.

A third party taking code and not releasing enhancements is not depriving the original author of 'freedom' - it is merely refusing to sign up to the same viewpoint on how software should be distributed.

Neither is a third party taking code, putting a fancy skin on it and selling it in closed source form to users depriving them of as much freedom as the GPL would assert. After all, the original free source is still there. The users are equally able to search that out. If the enhancements the third party make are trivial then it should be equally trivial for the authors of the majority of the source code base to create an open source alternative, whilst if the enhancements are major then frankly I don't think there's a real case to answer.

Enforcing how code has to be used is pushing a particular viewpoint on others. This is not freedom.

Now, it's entirely possible that by using other licences such as BSD, Apache etc, the growth of a software ecosystem is not as fast as GPL/LGPL proponents would prefer, but history proves that growth still does occur.

History also proves that the GPL/LGPL is an effective philosophy for creating a large base of software, but don't dress it up as freedom when it's merely pushing a particular viewpoint.