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.

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.

1KW ~= 1.34 HP
200KW ~= 268HP
400HP equivalent?
They need to explain that a bit better in the article and on the product website

Oh statistics can be used to prove anything, Dotan, forfy-nine percent of all people know that.

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 :)

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.

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.

I think you actually kinda answered your own question.

To meet safety requirements you ought to go by the rated power of each device. Even if the average load drawn by a device is 1-amp, if the peak draw is 2-amps, you rate it at 2 amps. Add up all the peak loads of the connected devices and leave it at that.

Trying to extract the last amp out of a circuit using the average load as a baseline is NOT a good idea at all. Always use the peak.Better to run a new circuit from the fusebox for safety. Your bosses don't want the fire Marshall to shut down the building as a fire hazard do they? Perhaps a consultation with a certified electrician is in order? I head contractors are itching to get new jobs, so this might be a good time to invest in an electrical upgrade.