I live in China (I'm a white American expat). I can't remember the context, but the other day a couple of lower-middle-class Chinese guys were talking about how war makes the warmonger poor. It didn't for America in the case of World War One or Two, but apparently it's their perception that it would make China poor.
have the "desktops" turn OFF their monitors and even computers when no one was using it
They already do that.
look at that printer in the office, it's on 24/7 but after office hours, who is printing to it
The printer-bashing scene in office space is hilarious because it's true. Printers are notoriously bitchy. You should absolutely not do anything to make them even bitchier, and powercycling would surely do that. A printer that's off isn't consuming much energy anyway. It's powering an LCD screen (like a digital watch) and it's listening on a USB or LPT (right?) cable. Most office printers that I've used require a "warm-up" time if they haven't been used in a while.
We don't need the technological advance of what you call light-bulb computers (which is probably a lot more difficult to achieve than you think), rather we need better taxation of pollution, which will increase energy costs to the consumer, making it more profitable to use sleep features on the computer, and less likely that landlords will offer flat-rate utilities.
Actually, the energy or frequency of the photons is not important when you're making fiber-optic cables. In fact, fiber-optic cables require no insulation except to protect them from exterior harm (sharp things falling on them, etc). The reason is that when light (or, I think, any other wave) is incident on the boundary between a high-index material and a lower-index material (we're talking index of refraction, here) from the high-index side, if it approaches at a slight enough angle, it will be completely reflected back into the high-index material. This is called "total internal reflection." None will be transmitted into the low-index medium. This is the reason that if you sit in the deep end of a pool, you can see the sky above you, but at the other end of the pool, the surface of the water looks like a mirror.
The result is that if you're trying to communicate by firing photons down a curving tube of glass, you just have to make sure that it never bends too sharply, and all the photons that go in will come out the other end, and none will be lost in transit (assuming the surface of the glass is very smooth)....hm, smooth...
It would have to be smooth relative to the wavelength of the photons being transmitted, which is a serious problem for gamma rays. I calculated that the wavelength of these photons should be 3 x 10^-13 m (based on E=mc^2 and E=f*hbar and c=f*wavelength), which is one three hundredth the radius of a silicon atom. So glass would not be smooth, and fiber-optic communication would be impossible with ordinary materials.
I'm pretty sure that the reason this hasn't been done is that G is not known precisely enough. It's an ironic state of affairs: of all the universal constants, G was the first to be identified (by which I mean that its significance was understood) and measured, and remains the least precisely known.
The do work at the poles. They actually work best at the poles. I mean, just think about it...at the pole the world is like a turntable, for purposes of this device.
The movement against spanking strikes me as incorrect. For one thing, you have to remember that it's safe: you can't get injured from a proper spanking. A spanking is emphatically not child abuse. Maybe spanking a kid every day or week would be out of line, but I think it's clear that child abusers take an entirely different approach.
Part of the reason that spankings should be regarded differently from other kinds of corporal punishment is that embarrassment and shame are the primary (yes, the primary) reasons that it is undesirable.
The linux crowd has been number 4,6,7,9 and 10 for most software(each distro needing a slot)
First thing, don't forget about hardware. I'd say hardware support is more important that software support. And for hardware drivers, all distros will share the same level of support (as long as they can keep with a current kernel).
As for software, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I thought software was pretty portable across linux distributions. If you can compile an application manually, it should work fine regardless of distro.
He was attacking the mac group, which you represent. I'd have modded you down too, if I had points and there were a "misses the point" mod. You've always been able to dual-boot Windows and Linux. The fact that Mac has finally made it to the party doesn't mean "the war is over", it's just a (minor or major, depending how much you cared about mac) development. The reason your comment is irritating and got modded down is that you're blithely evangelizing your hardware of choice, forgetting that some of us might not have any reason to pay a premium for access to Mac OS X.
the Linux base model laptop will have dedicated video
Do you mean that it will have dedicated video and that integrated video will be unavailable? That would seem to be false. I haven't been following the dellbuntu story very closely, but this configuration page has the laptop coming with a GMA 950 (integrated) video card, with the option for an upgrade to a dedicated nvidia card for $79.
3. Going through Dell's front door www.dell.com gets you absolutely zero indication they have Linux, much less ubuntu as an option.
They seem to have a couple different front page images. You must not have seen the one with the Ubuntu logo. Hit refresh a few times and you'll probably get it.
As Intel is very friendly to FLOSS, the drivers for Intel's integrated hardware are as good on Linux as they are on Windows (better, in some cases), and a linux box demands less because the OS architecture is better.
Maybe the grandparent tried to use Beryl on a machine with integrated graphics, and noticed that it didn't work too well. Or maybe he couldn't get something configured. Please, do not be misled by the grandparent. Ubuntu and linux work great with integrated graphics.
Often, it would jump around the room 'locking on' to things.
I played through Red Steel (I was bored) and I never noticed this. I think you're remembering a different phenomenon: the pointer software would frequently take a little break, place my pointer at the exact middle of the screen, and then come back online half a second later. You could diminish this behavior by turning off the speaker on the wii remote (in fact, by turning the volume to zero, not by turning it "off"). I agree with some other comment in this tree that the problems are probably in the software, and not in the hardware.
(Also, by the way, in Madden 2007 for wii, the pointer "locks on" to players, and it's not really a bad idea for that game.)
a 'bright' room causes havoc with pointer detection.
The sensor bar is in fact just a pair of infrared sources (two warm elements generating heat radiation). Depending on how the remote operates, you may be able to overcome this problem by replacing your sensor bar with stronger sources. Tea candles should work nicely.
Yes, it's a real problem. Evaluating teachers' performance is not easy. You need a really good administrator with any eye for the long term, a real even-keel kind of person who can give teachers the right amount of freedom. A good administrator can tell who's doing a good job and who's not, and without a good administrator I can't think of any way of measuring that would be at all useful. (Test-scores would be an utter joke.)
One thing to consider is that progressive raises are not *just* about improvements in abilities. People are happy when their standard of living is on the rise, and many organizations find that happy employees are useful. If they can convince employees to start with a lower salary, they can progressively raise it to boost morale.
The only way for this to help the prosecutor, in terms of electability, is by padding the conviction count. If I were her political strategist, I would be much more worried about negative press over this nonsense. Depending on whether the poor guy has to pay court costs, this is either 1) a cruel and financially devastating overreaction to an honest and benign misunderstanding, or 2) an enormous waste of county resources. (Or both. In either case, it's the other to a lesser extent.)
A prosecutor wins respect by putting away dangerous criminals, routing out corporate corruption, et cetera. This conviction isn't the kind of thing that helps you in a race for mayor.
No, they didn't. You could change the elevation of the camera for a different vantage, but it always preserved the same distance from the ground at the center of the screen. The result is that you got a sort of shoulder-level zoom, that wasn't at all useful when playing, but could be kind of fun when watching replays.
One of the advantages of rendering the game in 3d is that different resolutions and battlefield scales are easy to implement. Allowing people to zoom in and out like in Total Annihilation would be a big thing. It's not a decision to be made lightly. I'm sure Blizzard will consider (or has considered) it.
In earlier versions of this document, I listed RTF (Rich Text Format) as a more standards based way of exchanging word-processor documents. I have been corrected on that point innumerable times. RTF is little better than MS-Word format itself. It is a little better, but it shares all of the problems as MS-Word. Although RTF was advertised as a document exchange format, it never lived up to that. It appears to have varying features, and the various version of RTF that Microsoft products create have elements which only Microsoft Products can read. Note that this is not because MS-Word is a better product, but because Microsoft keeps elements of what it considers to be RTF secret.
Consumers may not care what format their stuff is in, but when they get a replay saying "sorry, I can't seem to open that.doc, could you save it as.odt?" they'll care whether their word-processor can do it.
Slashdot Mirror
it could just be sloppy writing...
I live in China (I'm a white American expat). I can't remember the context, but the other day a couple of lower-middle-class Chinese guys were talking about how war makes the warmonger poor. It didn't for America in the case of World War One or Two, but apparently it's their perception that it would make China poor.
Seriously? You mean all I need is a Faraday cage to defeat them? Son of a bitch....
Aren't flourescent lights a plasma? They're pretty cool.
tag the above "playingwithfire"
For purposes of that claim, people without Apple hardware aren't really people. It's part of the old-school Apple mindset.
have the "desktops" turn OFF their monitors and even computers when no one was using it
They already do that.
look at that printer in the office, it's on 24/7 but after office hours, who is printing to it
The printer-bashing scene in office space is hilarious because it's true. Printers are notoriously bitchy. You should absolutely not do anything to make them even bitchier, and powercycling would surely do that. A printer that's off isn't consuming much energy anyway. It's powering an LCD screen (like a digital watch) and it's listening on a USB or LPT (right?) cable. Most office printers that I've used require a "warm-up" time if they haven't been used in a while.
We don't need the technological advance of what you call light-bulb computers (which is probably a lot more difficult to achieve than you think), rather we need better taxation of pollution, which will increase energy costs to the consumer, making it more profitable to use sleep features on the computer, and less likely that landlords will offer flat-rate utilities.
Actually, the energy or frequency of the photons is not important when you're making fiber-optic cables. In fact, fiber-optic cables require no insulation except to protect them from exterior harm (sharp things falling on them, etc). The reason is that when light (or, I think, any other wave) is incident on the boundary between a high-index material and a lower-index material (we're talking index of refraction, here) from the high-index side, if it approaches at a slight enough angle, it will be completely reflected back into the high-index material. This is called "total internal reflection." None will be transmitted into the low-index medium. This is the reason that if you sit in the deep end of a pool, you can see the sky above you, but at the other end of the pool, the surface of the water looks like a mirror.
...hm, smooth...
You can read about it here: http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/GBSSCI/PHYS/Class/refrn/u14l3c.html.
The result is that if you're trying to communicate by firing photons down a curving tube of glass, you just have to make sure that it never bends too sharply, and all the photons that go in will come out the other end, and none will be lost in transit (assuming the surface of the glass is very smooth).
It would have to be smooth relative to the wavelength of the photons being transmitted, which is a serious problem for gamma rays. I calculated that the wavelength of these photons should be 3 x 10^-13 m (based on E=mc^2 and E=f*hbar and c=f*wavelength), which is one three hundredth the radius of a silicon atom. So glass would not be smooth, and fiber-optic communication would be impossible with ordinary materials.
I'm pretty sure that the reason this hasn't been done is that G is not known precisely enough. It's an ironic state of affairs: of all the universal constants, G was the first to be identified (by which I mean that its significance was understood) and measured, and remains the least precisely known.
The do work at the poles. They actually work best at the poles. I mean, just think about it...at the pole the world is like a turntable, for purposes of this device.
The movement against spanking strikes me as incorrect. For one thing, you have to remember that it's safe: you can't get injured from a proper spanking. A spanking is emphatically not child abuse. Maybe spanking a kid every day or week would be out of line, but I think it's clear that child abusers take an entirely different approach.
Part of the reason that spankings should be regarded differently from other kinds of corporal punishment is that embarrassment and shame are the primary (yes, the primary) reasons that it is undesirable.
A wiz is someone who's good at something. It's short for "wizard." You're thinking of "whiz."
The linux crowd has been number 4,6,7,9 and 10 for most software(each distro needing a slot)
First thing, don't forget about hardware. I'd say hardware support is more important that software support. And for hardware drivers, all distros will share the same level of support (as long as they can keep with a current kernel).
As for software, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I thought software was pretty portable across linux distributions. If you can compile an application manually, it should work fine regardless of distro.
He was attacking the mac group, which you represent. I'd have modded you down too, if I had points and there were a "misses the point" mod. You've always been able to dual-boot Windows and Linux. The fact that Mac has finally made it to the party doesn't mean "the war is over", it's just a (minor or major, depending how much you cared about mac) development. The reason your comment is irritating and got modded down is that you're blithely evangelizing your hardware of choice, forgetting that some of us might not have any reason to pay a premium for access to Mac OS X.
ln(1000) ~= 6.9.
I multiplied the skin depth by this number to get the distance for 99.9% attenuation.
the Linux base model laptop will have dedicated video
Do you mean that it will have dedicated video and that integrated video will be unavailable? That would seem to be false. I haven't been following the dellbuntu story very closely, but this configuration page has the laptop coming with a GMA 950 (integrated) video card, with the option for an upgrade to a dedicated nvidia card for $79.
3. Going through Dell's front door www.dell.com gets you absolutely zero indication they have Linux, much less ubuntu as an option.
They seem to have a couple different front page images. You must not have seen the one with the Ubuntu logo. Hit refresh a few times and you'll probably get it.
As Intel is very friendly to FLOSS, the drivers for Intel's integrated hardware are as good on Linux as they are on Windows (better, in some cases), and a linux box demands less because the OS architecture is better.
Maybe the grandparent tried to use Beryl on a machine with integrated graphics, and noticed that it didn't work too well. Or maybe he couldn't get something configured. Please, do not be misled by the grandparent. Ubuntu and linux work great with integrated graphics.
Often, it would jump around the room 'locking on' to things.
I played through Red Steel (I was bored) and I never noticed this. I think you're remembering a different phenomenon: the pointer software would frequently take a little break, place my pointer at the exact middle of the screen, and then come back online half a second later. You could diminish this behavior by turning off the speaker on the wii remote (in fact, by turning the volume to zero, not by turning it "off"). I agree with some other comment in this tree that the problems are probably in the software, and not in the hardware.
(Also, by the way, in Madden 2007 for wii, the pointer "locks on" to players, and it's not really a bad idea for that game.)
a 'bright' room causes havoc with pointer detection.
The sensor bar is in fact just a pair of infrared sources (two warm elements generating heat radiation). Depending on how the remote operates, you may be able to overcome this problem by replacing your sensor bar with stronger sources. Tea candles should work nicely.
Yes, it's a real problem. Evaluating teachers' performance is not easy. You need a really good administrator with any eye for the long term, a real even-keel kind of person who can give teachers the right amount of freedom. A good administrator can tell who's doing a good job and who's not, and without a good administrator I can't think of any way of measuring that would be at all useful. (Test-scores would be an utter joke.)
One thing to consider is that progressive raises are not *just* about improvements in abilities. People are happy when their standard of living is on the rise, and many organizations find that happy employees are useful. If they can convince employees to start with a lower salary, they can progressively raise it to boost morale.
The only way for this to help the prosecutor, in terms of electability, is by padding the conviction count. If I were her political strategist, I would be much more worried about negative press over this nonsense. Depending on whether the poor guy has to pay court costs, this is either 1) a cruel and financially devastating overreaction to an honest and benign misunderstanding, or 2) an enormous waste of county resources. (Or both. In either case, it's the other to a lesser extent.)
A prosecutor wins respect by putting away dangerous criminals, routing out corporate corruption, et cetera. This conviction isn't the kind of thing that helps you in a race for mayor.
No, they didn't. You could change the elevation of the camera for a different vantage, but it always preserved the same distance from the ground at the center of the screen. The result is that you got a sort of shoulder-level zoom, that wasn't at all useful when playing, but could be kind of fun when watching replays.
One of the advantages of rendering the game in 3d is that different resolutions and battlefield scales are easy to implement. Allowing people to zoom in and out like in Total Annihilation would be a big thing. It's not a decision to be made lightly. I'm sure Blizzard will consider (or has considered) it.
Other things that are frequently bothersome:
Suspend/hibernate
extra media buttons (volume mute)
Do you have those working? Was it easy?
http://www.blizzard.com/misc/e3/2004/ghost/index.s html
It may really be dead, but Blizzard hasn't made that pronounced it dead as far as I can tell.