Posts by Erik Aamot

@ Industrial Pluggery

back side of car makes design sense for a few reasons:

... it might be closer to the charging convertor and batteries , it's not the electric motor that's being charged. ( besides your assumption that the motor(s) would be in front, rather than within the drive wheels)

... putting items in the front of a vehicle, like a door / flap has a greater potencial for aerodynamic drag than on the back side

... this rather critical part , that if mangled might create a short, is less likely to be damaged on the rear side in the most common accidents

... from a design / ergonomics viewpoint , it's probably best to put the *fuel* input in a familiar location at a comfortable height

wondering too

" ...why some fucking snippet of CSS won't fucking render in fucking Internet Explorer fucking 6."

as in theregister.co.uk comment header lines overlaying other text that should appear below it ?

"Ted" should display Ted Nugent .. 'nuff said ...

like fast food chains

if google makes it all more convenient through apps > hi-speed wireless / mobile than dealing with Windows and MS apps, google will be serving billions and billions, nay, trillions and trillions of easy to digest, tasty data packets to the hungry masses

if you own the data, or even possess enough, you own the internet ..

he who has the most servers and networks rule .. doesn't matter if it's YouTube data, Facebook data, vpn corp tunnel, phone data .. if a company can put it's brands on your display moreso than anyone else, that company wins the data and software monetization *game* .. see ?

microsoft hasn't ever been in the optimisation game .. doing more with less .. it will be it's downfall

google is all about optimization and efficiency of resourses, comparatively, and tying together the pieces of what the future of computing for the masses might look like .. cell phones and netbooks running webbased apps, services, and of course, *secure* backup services and storage space for all .. for your convenience and for your best user experience, you must be connected ..

will all be very interesting when the blackhats and spies get in .. eh ?

@Sigh

"Welcome to the new Global American Empire. You are all Citizens."

eh .. these fellows would have not been convicted of a criminal charge in America .. the copyright holders can't even bring a successful civil case against torrent tracking sites here

it's particularly Swedish law, and by extension, EU law that has allowed this

it's up to Swedish citizens to clean up their corrupt courts, their corrupt politicos.. up to citizens of each of your European countries to stand up and not allow abuse of court systems there by American Corp copyright holders

as an American citizen I encourage you to do so, and as an American citizen I'll continue to work against bad law, corrupt courts and corrupt government here .. ok ?

worse figures used in US

for many years now .. the inflation rate published here excludes fuel and food costs, and has been only a measure of *durable* manufactured item prices

they've only pulled out CPI recently when fuel costs went down

inflation is expansion of money supply beyond gain in per capita productivity

so .. real property inflated in price due to expansion of money supply, in the form of easy credit, directed at that particular product .. and when that credit bubble burst, so did the inflated prices

one way to show this .. is to follow the mild rise in US housing prices from about 1982 to 1994 or so, that basicly followed rise in income/productivity .. extend that line to the present .. and that's about where housing prices are now .. what was a *peak* price of $300,000 .. is now about $175,000 ...

same with stock market .. follow the line from early 80's to early 90's .. extend it out .. and you're at about 7000 DJIA .. massive leveraging *created* excess money supply for stock products, inflating their price

when the big players took the money out of banking / housing and put it into oil and other commodities, there was excess money chasing too few product, and oil went to $147 and bushels of corn to $6

this does not happen in a free market with regulation to prevent artificial manipulation of product or money supply

unfortunately , it was the US Congress that artificially manipulated the housing market in an attempt to make housing affordable to those that could not afford it, and forcing banks to make risky loans in the process .. very quickly prices inflated .. making housing unaffordable

and worse now .. the Central banks and governments are artificially expanding money supply to prevent assets from finding their real market value ..

the only result can be higher inflation

this is primitive

come on .. this is footage from 1999 or there abouts .. a joke .. right ?

@ Told Ya So.....

Working on the bot and "Twitter Millionare" automated money making system right now

domain purchaced .. account made on webserver ..

looking for pics of some cool looking guy sitting on the hood of a ZR1 Vette

Giant Sucking Sound ...

of media webserving right out of New York State, and any plans to build new data centers as well ..

in the long run they lose tax reciepts, not gain from this .. big time .. idiots ..

how about the subscription fee for online Wall Street Journal ? .. WSJ smart enough to move online operations out of state .. what a hoot as physical newpapers fade in readership and revenue to tax ...

pfffffffffffffffffft ..

@AC @jake

that would be "metaphor" and possibly "humour" in this venue

on topic .. AMD releases 45nm with no significant advantage .. yawn ..

Intel ahead of schedule with good "product health" on 32nm process .. meaning they are getting good yields .. big investment in quality US plants .. all good ..

The new process means less power drawn, less heat generated, higher clock speed and lower manufacturing costs

some people live by "cheap is cheap", so I quess AMD will survive a while yet .. z z z z z z z z ...

if ...

if the prisons weren't run by corrupt officials, the prisoners wouldn't have mobile phones

if the businesses, including cell phone retailers and distributors weren't corrupt and in many cases backed with criminal funds .. well .. I can't imagine criminals having any problem getting cell phones 'illegally'

if anything, such a law would be used by criminal organisations and the police they pay off to jail those that oppose them

while there are often trolls in comments ..

it's rare to see an article that's a troll ..

as said .. it's a design patent ..

FYI .. you need a .tiff viewer plug in for your browser to view images at USPTO

Quicktime didn't work and it just update but Alterna at alternatiff.com works perfect

geeze louise

how many kilowatts per day per electric car ? .. probably more an energy efficient home(?) .. electricity is NOT emisions free .. 50% is from coal burning in US ..

a million ? .. about 0.5 % of number of vehicles in US .. replacing mostly small autos that already get much better milage than the average vehicle .. reduction in oil use maybe 0.3 %

How about this ? ... government pays $7000 for every vehicle that gets less than 30 mpg that is more than 10 years old, $5000 of which must be used as down payment to purchace of new or less-than-5 year old vehicle that gets better than 30 mpg ..

increase the mpg requirement of the purchaced autos 1 mpg per year

scrap them all and require the steel to be reprocessed in the US for the new vehicles and energy efficient appliances .. all manufactured in North America

I'll bet you'd turn over 10 million less efficient cars for more efficient cars per year, add 2-3 million in new car sales per year and imagine all the jobs ...

10 million per year .. about 5% of vehicles going from 20 mpg to 30 mpg+ .. or .. about 1.5% reduction in petroleum use per year for road vehicles .. in 20 years you could concievably have 80% of US autos getting 50 mpg+, and reduce petroleum use for autos by 30% or more

all for a paltry $70 billion per year, with just about all the money going into jobs and personal pockets .. all taxed economic activity making the net cost to the taxpayers much less.

$70 Billion per year wouldn't even cover the improvements in the electric grid and expansion of generating capacity you'd need to do, to turn over 10 million gas to electric vehicles per year, which wouldn't be possible at all for at least 10 years.

should be mid-sized, more fuel effecient

757 or 767 please ! .. limit the staff and reporter numbers .. lead by example by downsizing a wee bit before asking the public to do so .. hell, let the news agencies pay their own way or use local reporters for stops outside the D.C. area ..

ummmm ...

"A second by-product of increased bit density is reduced write endurance. This is being countered by adding parallel channels to controllers and avoiding unnecessary erase-delete cycles when writing data by over-provisioning the NAND and by clever file systems such as SanDisk's ExtremeFFS. This is a uniquely flash phenomenon; it doesn't apply to tape or to hard drives."

sorry, but until these problems are overcome, not just to some degree 'countered', I think it would be foolish for those concerned about the integrity of thier data to use flash memory in a computer system as primary storage / use

it's like expecting bad sectors in HDDs and just not using those sectors over time .. you replace an HDD when bad sectors start showing, you don't just 'counter' a problem with your storage medium degrading like this

I still boot up an old 200MMX machine with a 2.8GB drive that I keep some old files on I occasionally need .. and just for the fun of seeing my first PC still running .. ran SpinRite on it in 2007 .. no problems at all

until they solve the write speed and re-write durability problems, I think HDDs will be around for many years

and as far as capacity , most users today will never fill even 80GB in a consumer PC .. I'd take a stable proven 120GB HDD over a 250GB > 500GB in a new machine .. not having a FAIL is much more important than HDD size bragging rights

@ Potential energy

rather than weights and pulleys ..

when the grid does not need the elecricity , you use the turbine to pump water uphill to a reservoir .. when the turbines are idle or more electricity is needed for the grid during peak usage .. you run the water back downhill with gravity thru efficient hydroelectric generation

in combination with water holding tanks at wind turbine level, it can be a closed system where fresh water use might not present a problem except in quite arid areas

this is what T. Pickens had planned in Texas and north along the east side of the Rockies, where wind is relatively consistant .. other than dropping oil prices have delayed development and there are significant water use issues in Texas

given significant enough scope, such reservoirs of stored energy could last for days and at least give buffer if conventional generation needed to be put back online in extended calm periods

frankly though, the windfarm idea all falls apart as a commercial / profitable venture if you were to rely on much more than about 10% of peak need .. this might translate to 20% more average need, however you'd still need 90% conventional peak capacity, used less efficiently ( and therefore less profitably ) to handle usage peaks, or ramp back industry use during peak periods, again introducing economic inefficiencies

true figure might be less efficiency and reliabilty in Europe vs US eastern Rockies ..

we've had windfarms in California for decades, about 13,000 units producing 30% of the world's total of electricity from wind .. and guess what ? ..

a whopping 1.5% of California's electrical power is wind power.. and inconsistant at that

waste biomass manages 2.6% .. geothermal does 4.5 % .. hydroelectric 14.5% .. nuclear nearly 13% of electrical generation .. all relatively consistant and managable with changing demand

it's easy to see that waste biomass generation and nuclear have much greater potencial than wind power to replace any significant percentage of gas / oil / coal use

so then ..

.. by WinMaths .. NT 6.1 = 6+1 = Windows 7 .. correct ?

wanna bet ?

Windows 7 is Vista/server2008 kernal and will be (NT) 6.x , not 7.0 (legitimately) ?

not from my ISP

since this past spring/summer .. less than 10% of my e-mail from 2 long standing addresses is spam .. some days zero on one account or the other

att.yahoo.com mailservers .. meaning AT&T / Yahoo! DSL is doing something right on thier end

i download directly with OE 6 , no filtering by me on Yahoo! webside nor in my email client

ISP's are the only ones that can control this .. and the ones that really suffer on bandwidth costs and therefore competitiveness if they don't learn to identify and blackhole spam

have only had trouble recieving email from one person on a flaky ISP in Germany and no problem with legit commercial email I have opted into from legit businesses

no problem replying 'to all' with 40+ addresses either ..

distribution partners ...

included Circuit City .. how did they miss getting Woolworth onboard ?

I still prefer it

I've used AVG free for quite a few years, and it's online and email protection is excellent in recent years

There's no *protective* suite I'd recommend, and I went to AVG because Norton AV standalone nearly 7 years ago had horrible support, regular false positives, broken updates or virus breaking Norton itself

however .. how hard is it to include in a AV signature, and it's client side programming, critial system file names or attributes ( like directory path or file attributes ) that trip a warning ?

.. or allow a Windows warning that you are about to delete / modify / move a critical system file ?

I can understand a false positive on Zone Alarm .. I haven't heard of an AV program without similar false positives, but not testing a signature by running several machines with the most popular software installed by updating them through normal online update and running a scan is a FAIL in the QA process

that being said, AVG still good for me, but I'm a *careful* user and enough of a geek to read the file path and know when a file name could be a system file, and investigate before deleting ..

and really, it's the same people that take little caution or are computer ignorant that get caught by trojan pop-ups saying: 'critical system files infected .. click here to fix'

basicly, until Windows users get educated about Windows and Windows apps, there will always be a problem, it can't be made *secure* in the sence that it can be made idiot proof

this is clearly just a business method ...

.. which is not patentable .. FAIL

not to mention, under US law, the original inventor, even if kept as a trade secret, is still the inventor, not the first to file a claim

pretty sure this method has been used by corporate patent lawyers for at least 60 years, if not thought of shortly after establishment of USPTO .. so it's not original .. FAIL

again, just a business method attempting to legitamize back engineering of another's invention / trade secret to steal the original inventor's work, which is exactly why some trade secrets are not patented, so the secret details are not divulged .. not unusual in the chemicals industry

US People will expect too much

easy credit being dumped into monetary system to cover other easy credit mistakes, greater debt when the problem was too much phoney debt paper (?!)

there may be some temporary rebound from printing up yet more paper, but it really exasperates the underlying problem of having too much debt and it's enormace current and ludicrous future costs .. basicly, there must be a credit contraction to correct this

Obama and a Democrat Congress are not going to solve that, leading to a worse crash in year 2 or 3 of his Presidency

nor will they promote policies that will keep energy costs low, nor go full on with nuclear tech for electricity .. we will be more dependent on foreign oil ( luckily most from Canada ) with more motivation to *protect* middle eastern, mexican and south american supplies .. electrical costs will sky rocket ( Obama's terms) with his CO2 Cap and Trade plan

as a world recession / depression unfolds, there is much more likelyhood of regional unrest with quite a few places that could explode into a wider conflict / war .... can guarantee you won't be a ground war in the USA ...

it's an awful time for a young man with high expectations and social justice ideology to be taking office .. I hope he's strong enough to overpower the witch Pelosi and the mortician Ried and their minions Todd and Frank respectively .... nothing will get done of consequence in the first 100 days with that power struggle going on .. Obama has both Hillary and McCain who will subtlely make his life hard .. Slick Willi will always be implying his Presidency was better

It will be influence bought ... no real change guys .. sorry ..

Americans as a whole have short attention spans, *we* will be very irritated after a bitter long winter when things don't turn up dramaticly in the spring, just as the 5 and 7 year ARMs all start resetting at about the same level in dollar volume as they did earlier this year

won't be out of Iraq .. maybe there will be a couple of bad months there, maybe worse in Afganistan .. not wishing for it, but it's likely

lot's of bad shit still to happen .. Obama couldn't have picked worse time since 1932 to be President, almost makes me feel sorry for him

@Shame

The shame is that Robert Plant won't do it, and seems his mindset is to never do a Zep reunion ... he said so a week ago ... and has no plans for any touring for a couple of years

Saw Zep 7 times starting in Aug. 1969, counting the marvelous Page/Plant No Quarter tour

Only interesting idea I've heard on replacements for Plant is to have Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart sing ... gag me if it's someone like Paul Rogers

what everyone keeps missing

is that AT&T-Yahoo.com have excellent aDSL, excellent ISP servers and excellent att.yahoo.com email servers that have done an excellent job stopping SPAM into my email accounts with them ...

... last damn thing the millions of AT&T internet customers want is for Yahoo to replaced by MSN and hopefully, *if* Microsoft buys Yahoo, AT&T can break whatever agreement with Yahoo regarding ISP *portal* and whatever use Yahoo makes of AT&T data centers and network capacity

I suspect without AT&T agreements, Yahoo! wouldn't be worth the bits it's written on anyway

are they sure ..

this increased brain activity isn't in areas stimulated by pr0n ?

experienced users after all ...

Isn't analog TV gone in Febuary '09 ?

I thought local analog TV was going down along with it's spectra early next year ..

does not this make *white spaces* between current broadcast TV spectra a moot issue ?

I thought those frequencies have already been autioned off(?)

ok .. edumacate me please ..

@AC definition of strata

it's the plural of stratum , a (distinct) geological layer, like a layer of clay over a layer of coal

so I think they picked the right name, despite *believing*, like you, that it's atmospherically related .. and I used the *cloud* via Google / Wikipedia to double check too !

MS, of course, would check Encarta for definitions :)

I don't know how many Americans here .. however ..

*The People* in America have just been swindled by our politicians to the tune of 1.5 trillion$ and it's too bad our vote doesn't include "none of the above" .. because a new poll shows 83% of us would like to throw 95% of our Congress out on it's ass and start over

only saving grace is you dumbass Europeans buying so much of the phony money in the form of mortgage based securities, and the dumbass Chinese and oil rich Arabs buying so much of our government's phoney debt ..

I don't think Paris nor Sarah are that stupid collectively

'credit contraction' sounds like a good deal in the long run, how stupid is it to run business on credit and allow 'securities' to be owned on slim margins

bottom line .. the Democrats *bought* votes by forcing the banks to make lousy loans to people that couldn't afford them .. the lossened money and credit requirements naturally caused a speculative bubble in home prices ( so much for affordable after about 2003 ) ..

.. and now the Democrats are covering thier asses and thier friends asses with this bailout

Obama is a product of a corrupt Chicago political machine, auguably the most corrupt in the nation .. he's been hand picked to run by the Dems, and has not one original thought of value to his credit ..

McCain's almost as bad in different respects, but not likely to do much damage

With any luck, unfortunate but real racism on the order of 15% of the US population will stop Obama, McCain will be unable to serve out his term and Palin will become President

I'm serious ... the Central Banks have been pushing us all down this road for since the 1920's, maybe longer, siphoning the fruits of all our labor off for multinational corporate and banking interests .. and despite the myths, the Democrats / liberals are just as, if not more culpable in letting this happen ... set in stone since FDR's *new deal*

did you know 'money' bills are to be originated in the House, not the Senate ? .. this *bailout* is completely illegal Constitutionally .. the House rejected it and our Senate should have not been allowed to write a money bill or any bill involving tax changes or futher tax burden .. the Senators are much worse hacks than Congressional Representives in general .. which is why only 2 Senators have ever been elected President .. one being John F. Kennedy .. he was going to dump the Fed Bank, and look what happenned to him

Palin would make just as good a President, if not better than Obama, Biden or McCain .. she might not be *up* on everything yet, but she's a bright lady and not the high grade repetitive liar that just about everyone one in Washington DC is (other than Ron Paul)

I think she'll gather the facts and act in the American People's interest intelligently, I have no hope at all that Obama will .. he's a liberal / socialist tool , and McCain's a tool of the neocons not much better than Bush

2 sides of the same NewWorldOrder/Euro coin , with all the world's real estate, resources and the people's labor being swiftly taken over by the same banking overlords that created the problem

more than that

the guy misses the slow down signal, runs through the red light and the switch that would have taken the metrolink train to a side rail .. which he should have felt and heard (rail switch designed to break if hit at high speed so the train doesn't derail)

oh .. btw .. the MTA, to save costs, also contracted out the train driver / engineers to some European company ( French as I recall ) ... though that wasn't a major factor, this enginner was experienced and run the route many times before

it was a head-on in a curve, 3 car passenger vs long frieght train, both going about 40mph, at the point the engineers of either train had seen each other, it was too late to slow / stop.

yes, should be automated systems that would have slowed the train, made the metrolink switch and stopped it, after all ...

.. such systems, designed between multiple government agencies over lines controlled by different private interests, would certainly be infallible and allow the engineer(s) some much needed sleep !

yawn.

local judges make stupid and clearly unconstitutional rulings on a regular basis, here and elsewhere .. that why we have appeals with higher courts ...

I'm sure this will be reversed quickly, and it wouldn't surpise me if this idiot judge is removed from the bench .. the system here is rather unforgiving to judges that exceed thier authority, or don't go by precident .. Judges as a whole here, are quite concerned with the (apparent) integrity of the system and the degree of respect the Courts hold

please guys, those with a clue in the US are alot more concerned about this than EU citizens, who have allowed thier freedoms to be eroded to a much greater degree than here

for instance, we allow our NeoNazi's freedom of speech, IMHO, better to let dangerous people to express themselves and be known, then to drive them into secrecy

the only real threat to the NewWorldOrder being established are the US Citizens continuing thier fight against it, including fighting our own government and bought out politicians

UK will hopefully rise up too, as the Swedes are doing to a good degree, but middle Europe is pretty much lost, and the EU ( outside of economic co-operation for mutual benefit, where that exists) is just a model to bring the world under one government, which I assure you, will be much more corrupt and self serving that you can even imagine the USA being on it's own

what an awful name ..

"G1" .. what's that ? .. a third of a G3 phone ?

with the color shown .. and with a sense of humor .. perhaps "Goo1" or prefice with letter code

...'aGoog'... or for colors 'GreyGoo' and 'GreenGoo' (?)

or an IT angle ... 'Gooi' phone

USA concerned won't be traveling either

EFF *reveals*? .. this story was known in Febuary ... but worth an update for sure

As an American, I stopped flying because it's unreasonable search to have to remove my stinky shoes .. much less keep my ID details and travel records for 40yrs+ .. take a laptop or camera "? .. read private or business information without probable cause .. screw that !

If you don't have a warrant or my face up on a wanted poster ( or computer screen now ) just leave me the f**k alone

Anyway, seeing as US citizens will be subject to all this crap coming back in from even Canada and Mexico .. I'm just not going to bother leaving this really beautiful county ..

I could never see all the places I'd like to here .. I lived on the East Coast until 18, and have been West Coast since, and driven across the land several times .. been in about 45 states

The gReeD heADs have sure made a mess of things now, but all in all, never traveling out of the US isn't much of a loss, and I'll protest and do what I can to fight this crap

as far as I'm concerned, all the international airlines can go bankrupt, maybe then they'll figure out they've made it too much of a hassle

it's sad indeed that probable cause is being lost on all levels here .. I can't say on the internet what most 55yr. old+ American men would like to do with our Congress for the passage of laws like this.

excuse me folks ..

I haven't seen in any story on this, that any of the e-mail sent or recieved by Palin from this yahoo account included official Alaska government business

now it *may* have, or I didn't read a story claiming so

however most posters here seem to be ASSuming she is/was using this private account for official government business ...

PLEASE point me to the proof .. so I won't be thinking about 1/2 of you are just *complete* anti-American eurosnob rumor mongering socialist jerks

nice to see El Reg co.uk ..

... can handle the traffic from a top of the page, in red headline at drudgereport !

nice original story my friends !

BTW .. El Reg is my home page .. go to Drudge after reading here .. lol ..

it's not 800px !

you freakin whiners .. it's set to work for 1024px width and so the main content can fit in 800px

so .. have any of you actually tried to design a site to *fit* from 1024px (still the most common) to a ridiculous 2560px ? .. *and* make the design look good too ?

small font ? .. no it's fine .. your resolution is too high for the purpose ..

basics folks .. fonts work based on 72px per inch .. you make 72px only half an inch on your high res screen and OF COURSE the font's will look too small .. you should be able to bump up the font size however to fix that

it's *the* trade off of webdesign .. and why so many sites look the same ..

with fixed width .. you can control the layout and look 100% ..

with percentage widths and ALOT more work and testing .. you can usually keep the site looking decent from 1024px > 1280px .. but it will likely suffer at 1600px, if for no other reason than the graphics become too small in relation to other elements, particularly on high res wide screen displays on laptops .. you might have bragging rights to your 1600px width on a 15.4" laptop screen .. ( better than HD res !! .. woohoo !!) , however if you expect 10pt or 12pt font to be readable on it, you're going to be disappointed

large widescreen high resolution screens are made for gaming and movie watching .. not for reading your e-mail or websurfing , unless you have a very large screen and know how to set your window size !

oh .. just get RID of the stupid icons .. they are definitely a 1998 Web 1.2 idea that's *ok* for personalised *avatar* pics on forums .. however *comments* have value (or not) due to thier content .. stupid generic icons add nothing of real value, and help the trolls draw attention to themselves

oh good !

I've been noticing alot of net advertising by NS for domain names for the amazingly high price of $19.95 per year

at least a few n00bs have been saved, and hopefully went somewhere else to register

@D'ya Anom

ICAAN is California, USA not-for-profit public-benefit corporation, under the auspices of our Department of Commerce

It can basicly expand it's staff, payrates and office space, have more meetings, travel all over the world ... basicly creating a self-substaining

bureaucracy similar to how our not-for-profit<sic> governments work us. Perhaps the $0.22 fee they get per domain

Besides, the applicant / registrar has to have the equipment.$$$ and the knowhow.$$$ to run a TLD and dnsroot.$$$

.biz was a good idea, still has potencial, but I doubt any new TLDs with the *possible* exception of .XXX will be worth the .$$$ invested ....info looked good, but it's worthless.$$$

what would be much more useful, make "&" a legal character in domain names .. all blogs could be on .&&&

arm in hein rich ! .. ummm ..

doubt that's a real name, however, I'd suppose the fellow or gal makes a damn good living selling simple, useless, low cost bobbles to people with money to burn ..

truly inspiring !

i'm sure some saud prince, while on a nice $250,000 trout fishing trip would just love a set of ruby, emerald, saphire and diamond encrusted gold spinning lures to catch rich fat fish with ! :)