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Comment: Driving inefficiently another issue... (Score 2) 891

by Oshawapilot (#38621558) Attached to: Why Fuel Efficiency Advances Haven't Translated To Better Gas Mileage

Simple observation quickly shows many people are clueless to the effect of their driving styles on their fuel economy as well. Full throttle rush towards the next red light, slam on brakes, stop....repeat. Highway driving? Absolutely positive HAVE to achieve that 10 foot gain on the guy beside you, even if it means changing lanes and mashing on the accelerator only to inevitably end up following another car and having to slow down. Again, repeat....over and over and over again.

Simple driving style changes can yield the average driver a HUGE increase in fuel mileage, but until the "I'm more important than everybody else, I need to be in front of you and get there as fast as humanly possible, screw you all" attitude of many of todays drivers change, all the technology advances in the world won't help if the idiots behind the wheel just continue to operate the vehicles in a basically inefficient fashion.

Comment: Driving is not a right. (Score 0) 643

by Oshawapilot (#38611704) Attached to: What a Black Box Data Dump Looks Like

Some people have forgotten that driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right.

Accordingly, if you do something stupid, you damn well deserve to be held accountable for it. The "OMG ONOZ THE INSURANCE COMPANIES SEE MY PRIVATE BLACK BOX DATA!!" freakouts shouldn't fly with anyone who has a basic sense of respect for the privilege.

Comment: Re:Carefully placed.... (Score 1) 296

by Oshawapilot (#38109938) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Inexpensive Anti-Theft Vehicle Tracking System?

That would have been my suggestion as well. A carefully placed old iPhone 3G hardwired into the electrical system (to ensure it stays charged) with Find My iPhone enabled would do the trick, and be quite slick at that - you could track it on anything from a desktop computer, another iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, or heck, basically anything with a web browser.

Yes, there's a recurring monthly fee associated with that for the underlying cellular service, but I don't think that there's many options for this sort of system that won't carry a fee of one sort or another.

Comment: Re:Hmmm.... (Score 1) 444

by Oshawapilot (#36522910) Attached to: Canada Rolls Out Plastic Money

Polymer note lifespan is widely accepted to be about 5 years.

Given I just found a coin in my jeans from 1957 which is still in regular circulation, I think your suggestion that the two even remote compare in overall longevity remains flawed. Plenty of original 1987 $1.00 "Loonies" are still in circulation - at at 23+ years old. To replace the $1.00 and $2.00 coins with polymer would still mean that they would have been replaced at least 4 times over that same span of time, and every 5 years after that you add another replacement cycle.

To equate it to my 1957 coin in my jeans, a polymer equivalent would have had to have been replaced more than 20 times already.

Coins can easily last decades under regular circulation, and centuries with light circulation. Polymer will never match that no matter how hard you try.

Comment: Re:Maybe currentcost (Score 1) 172

by Oshawapilot (#33693886) Attached to: Real-Time Power Monitoring Options?

I own a CurrentCost ENVI. The current cost units do have basic device-level drivers for OSX but the interface software required to upload the data to Google Powermeter is (sadly) Windows only. It's one of the biggest gripes in the CurrentCost message forums but the developers appear complacent on the subject.

As such I've been forced to run Windows 24/7 via Parallels with the sole task of running the Google Powermeter application in Windows instead of OSX. Frustrating.

Frustration aside, I do like the unit, but I discovered shortly after my purchase that it only partially supports tiered pricing - it does support two tiers (day and night) with selectable rates and times, but our local utility uses three tiers with each coming into effect at various times of day - off peak, mid peak, and full peak. The ENVI has no ability to be programmed to support this - what I did was program it for the "average" price between mid=peak and on-peak so that it is at least relatively close on the price display.

I'm hoping eventually GPM will also add more options - it supports only *one* tarrif rate, making it even less useful for calculating pricing. It does graph the information nicely though.

Comment: Penalizing legal uses? (Score 1, Interesting) 352

by Oshawapilot (#30238100) Attached to: Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents

Here in Canada we pay a huge levy on blank CD media, MP3 players, and virtually any other media capable of holding music. This "goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying. ", as per the Cnet article here http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html

Therefore, this shutdown is infringing on my legal right to download music.

Meh, there's always ISOhunt, or like everyone else has already said, plenty of other choices.

Comment: Re:Why not store the data on phone permanent memor (Score 2, Informative) 304

by Oshawapilot (#29711221) Attached to: Server Failure Destroys Sidekick Users' Backup Data





Comment: How about updating USB camcorder support then? (Score 4, Informative) 820

by Oshawapilot (#25413005) Attached to: Users Rage Over Missing FireWire On New MacBooks





+ - SOA could change the way you buy electricity->

Submitted by
Link to Original Source

+ - Boot Camp Pulled for OS X 10.4 Users->

Submitted by RulerOf



Link to Original Source
It's funny.  Laugh.

+ - Bill Gates Denied Visa to Nigeria-> 1

Submitted by
Xight writes "Gizmodo recently wrote an article about Nigeria recently denying Bill Gates a visa to travel there on his recent trip to Africa proving that money can't get you everything. Whats even more amusing is that he was at "initially denied the Microsoft kingpin's application on the premise that they required proof he would not reside in Nigeria indefinitely, causing a strain on social services and a general nuisance for immigration.". I guess those Nigerian 419 scams really do pay off for them."
Link to Original Source

+ - Non Windows for Dummies?

Submitted by
Oshawapilot writes "Despite my best efforts to avoid it (Firefox, adequate spyware, virus and registry protection, etc) a relatives Windows XP machine has once again come to the point where it's unusable. This time around it decided to eat the TCP/IP stack, a problem that despite a great deal of effort to fix, has persisted to the point of being a lost cause.

Frankly I'm tired of reinstalling (or bandaging) Windows only to eventually reach this seemingly inevitable conclusion once again in the future.

That said, I'm looking for Linux alternatives. The catch is that the end user in question is by no means an OS savvy individual, so it needs to simply work — all the time, every time.

My (albeit limited) experiences with some of the Linux distro's in the past is that they work OK out of the box, but you still need to be somewhat Linux savvy in order to accomplish such seemingly simple tasks like installing new peripherals, for example.

I need a system that she could plug a new digital camera or printer she might buy into, and not have it turn into command-line hell in order to configure it and actually get it to work.

My first thought was to tell her to simply go and buy a Mac, but that's not financially in the options list at this time.

Tell me, Slashdot readers — is there a realistic option?"
