Part of the school was distroyed by an arsonist sometime around 1994 so when they rebuilt they also covered all the slanted roofs in this awful bright red metal roofing

Images taken from http://www.dekalbk12.org and http://flickr.com/photos/timandrenda/2147172617/

What an idiot! Dell expressly warns users that order Ubuntu on their systems that it is for advanced users. The story at her local news station (of which I’ve noticed changing throughout the day) reads that the OS was defaulted to Ubuntu, this cannot be true because Windows is the default OS with every Dell unless you enter the site looking for Ubuntu (eg. Google-ing “Dell Ubuntu”). No Ubuntu doesn’t come with MS Office, it comes with OpenOffice, which is compatible with documents written in MS Office and can save its documents in such a manner that MS Office can do the reverse. And no that Verizon disk will not run on Ubuntu. It has software that reports user statistics for troubleshooting purposes anyway. You should NEVER use those disk because Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux (of which Ubuntu is a distribution) already comes with everything you need to get online. Find a Verizon user who gets online with their Mac, even they can figure it out. I will not explain the procedures here because if you can see this, do you really need help getting online?

There is absolutely NOTHING that Windows can do that Ubuntu can’t, because if there were, within two weeks some coder would have a Linux equivalent that one could make run on Ubuntu.

This young woman needs to start her classes with the most beginner computer class MATC offers…in a classroom, not online. Lets keep the Internet free of people who are obviously a danger to themselves because they don’t know what their doing. Lets start with an Internet equivalent to a drivers license.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, but it’s expensive to isolate for use en mass. Fuel cells are fragile and currently require the use of rare materials to produce. And unless you live in Southern California, you wont find a hydrogen filling station commonly available in the United States. See this Wikipedia article for further details. The point, hydrogen powered vehicles are still years from the masses.

Solar

Currently, photovoltaic cells, cannot produce the energy necessary to sustain power to an electric motor. They can however be used charge batteries, and batteries can sustain an electric motor for a short period of time. The higher the electrical capacity (more batteries), the more your vehicle weighs, thereby requiring more energy to move the vehicle. In addition to that, a lack of photons (a.k.a. night), has a tremendous effect on the power output of the photovoltaic cells. The point, not enough juice.

Gasoline-electric hybrid car

A gasoline engine is used to charge batteries as needed and is responsible for propelling the vehicle part of the time. An electric motor/generator draws power from the batteries charged by the gasoline engine to propel the vehicle. When you let off the accelerator pedal, the generator part of the motor takes advantage of the kinetic energy of the rotating wheels to generate power for the batteries and to decelerate the vehicle. The point, although you can go further before you’re looking to fill the tank, you are still a slave to the gasoline pump.

What I have yet to see

Before you read on, I need to address use of this idea. I believe this is important enough to the world that I do not want to be compensated financially for it. However, I will fight anyone patenting the idea for the purpose of keeping their competitors from producing it, or completely moth-balling it to keep it off the market. This is my intellectual property, it falls under the guidelines of the GNU General Public License Version 3. Meaning that you or anyone else as the right to use, modify, and redistribute the property as long as the core intellectual property remains clearly identified as mine. Products, physical of otherwise, derived from the idea are yours to do with what you please. And although my wife disagrees with me on not taking compensation from profits made producing/selling vehicles using this idea, I have to agree with her that it would be nice if those who did profit from it gave the idea’s originator a vehicle using the technology every five or so years. Nice but not required, talk to your PR personnel.

Here goes.
The vehicle is moving against the air, if you didn’t realize this your dog with it’s head out the window and whoever designed your car’s radiator sure did. Light-weight caterpillar style turbines attached to alternators on the roof could be used to take advantage of the forward movement thought the air and generate electric energy. Whenever the vehicle was moving the batteries would be charging. The higher the speed the more watts each turbine would produce. I’m setting an efficiency goal of having four to five turbines traveling forward at 45 miles per hour being able to produce enough energy to keep the batteries at least 90% charge for at least four hours while powering the electrical motor propelling the vehicle, before a unit goes into mass production.
Meet the goal and you have a vehicle that does not need fossil fuel at all. The only pollution generated would be that produce by all vehicles at the end of life, the space they take up in a junkyard. Can you say recycling? The batteries count just like break pads, you’d need to replace them every few years because they would hold less and less charge over time. unless they finally develop a rechargeable battery that doesn’t eventually die.

But what happens when you teenager runs down the batteries watching DVDs or using some other battery draining device while the vehicle is not moving? Well to protect the turbines and alternators from the elements they need to be enclosed in some housing that allows airflow from the front and out the back. Use that housing to hold photovoltaic cells, they would produce enough energy (in daylight) to get the vehicle moving again in about half an hour, spend the half hour lecturing to your teenager at whatever volume fits the situation. If all else fails, plug it into an electrical outlet for ten minuets to get a partial charge, the get moving and let the turbines do the rest.

I didn’t like the disorganization, so I wrote a html file that contained links to all the things I needed and added javascript to provide things we didn’t have. Because I didn’t have to sort though my company email to get to the links email I did not need so many windows open at once. If I needed a tool that I didn’t have open I’d click in one of my links and a new window would appear with that tool. I also automated the “local dial-up access number lookup” tool by adding a form field that I could enter a 10 digit number into and javascript would divide it into the three strings that were submitted into the official interface.

Before long I started passing my html document via email to other employees, several of which ashed me to turn it into a program instead of a web page. I, at the time, did not have the resources to do so until someone showed me a HTA. An HTA codes just like an html file. If you added framesets you could get it to display the contents of a page on a server, that way it wasn’t necessary to redistribute the HTA every time you made a change to the code. I developed a version for another client of the call center after my position was exported and I was moved to that client. HTA made my job easier, it just had one flaw that kept me from going into the business of developing consolidated interfaces for call centers… It only works on Windows, and it only opened new window links using IE. Now I’ve discovered Mozilla Prism.

Prism differs from HTA mainly by asking for a URL when you create a Prism file. When that file is opened it, Prism displays the contents of the URL just like a browser without any menus or toolbars. The page itself takes up 100% of the windows real estate, and new window links open in a new Prism window (choosing between Prism and the default web browser appears to be in the works for a future release). But the best part is that Prism is available on more than one OS. Thats makes Prism a tool I plan to use in place of HTA from now on. To bad I no longer work in a call center, although I’m sure I find somewhere where this would be useful.

It appears I’m behind the times on this one because Google seems to have been using this or something similar to it to create Google Apps, which are a group of programs that take several of Google’s web based endeavors (Gmail, Google Talk, Google Reader) from the browser to your task-bar.

“If the customer uses a product key for Windows XP Pro that they’ve previously activated, that machine will likely fail activation. If the downgraded machine fails activation the customer will be prompted to call the product activation call center to request a key that will enable them to pass activation. The customer should mention that they’re exercising their downgrade rights to the customer service representative in the activation call center,”–David Overton, Microsoft small business specialist.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Buy-Windows-Vista-Business-or-Ultimate-and-Get-Windows-XP-Professional-56647.shtml