To say that Brainiacs is similar to Mythbusters is an insult to Mythbusters. Brainiacs is a load of puerile nonsense, that insults the viewers intelligence.
Mythbusters have busted the cellphone + fumes = explosion myth twice already anway.
Apple are nearly right. IE 5.0 was the first version of IE to ship with MSXML and the XmlHttpRequest object.
However MSXML 2.0, which was where XmlHttpRequest first appeared was available for download before that. We were using MSXML 2.0 with IE 4.0 to do AJAX style apps before IE 5.0 was released.
Sounds like you are confusing HTTP with XmlHttp. Microsoft did add XmlHttp do their XML parser (and therefore accessible from IE) long before it was added to the other browsers.
I have been using XmlHttp and Javascript/VBScript to create AJAX style apps on Intranets for at least 5 years. Before that we were using Microsoft's Remote Scripting to do the same stuff.
I'm trying to remember when Remote Scripting first appeared, I think it was in 1999. We put together our first AJAX style functionality the same day it appeared.
The guy at Microsoft who created the Java applet that Remote Scripting used didn't really know his way around HTTP, he used GET to send the request to the server, thus severely limiting the amount of data you could send to the server. Thankfully Microsoft released the Java source for the applet, so I modded our version to use POST instead.
Not it isn't. I can no longer pay Red Hat to provide me with security patches for my existing installations of their software.
Yes I can probably get patches from Fedora or elsewhere, but this key service of official patches for older versions of Red Hat is no longer available to me. This is a major change.
I also can't install a new version of Red Hat and pay an affordable subscription for Red Hat supported patches for my home server. If I want that I have to pay for RHEL ES, at $349 a year (as far as I can see) rather than the $60 a year I pay at the moment.
I also _have_ to migrate my server to a new version for Red Hat if I want to partake of the supported patch subscription. And that migration is a "backup data, nuke RH7.1, install RHEL, piece data back together" type...
It might not be big changes for some people, they are going to be fairly time consuming for me I'm afraid.
P.S. I would have been happy to pay far more than $60 a year for the service, probably more like $250, if I could stay with RH7.1 until I am done with it
Unfortunately they are going to force me to migrate my Redhat 7.1 mail server to something else (be it Fedora, Enterprise or another). That is going to involve days of investigation, installation, porting of maintenance scripts, testing etc
The only reason I am going to have to do this is because the are stopping errata updates. There is nothing else that would make me want to "upgrade" my 7.1 box, it works fine as it is.
To be safe I also have to source some new hardware so that I can safely migrate from one setup to another.
It's not as if I'm being paid to maintain the server in question, it is handles domains and email for me and some friends. It has to be reliable and secure though.
According to the stuff I have read today Fedora releases will only be supported for 9 months.
My main point is that they have forced to migrate all my boxes in the next few months if I want to be able keep upto date on security fixes. Once they force me to do that I may as well look at alternatives to Redhat, given that I am going to go through hassle to migrate to Fedora or Enterprise.
From where I'm standing this looks like a very silly step on Redhat's behalf.
I have two Redhat boxes at the moment, one running 7.1 which handles mail and DNS for me a half a dozen friends/family, the other running 9.0 which is purely a remote backup server (rsync copies data to it daily).
I use Redhat because despite the fact that I installed 7.1 a couple of years ago I pay my $60 a year so that I can run "up2date" once a day to keep my security patches up to date. I pay my $60 for both systems.
I also buy a copy of Redhat every 18 months or so.
Now that they have decided to stop updating 7, 8 and 9 they are forcing me to migrate both boxes. I don't have time to scan the web looking for security updates for hundreds of packages, so I need an update service. Hell, I only installed the 9.0 box 4 months ago and come next April updates stop !
So it looks like they are forcing me to either move to Redhat Enterprise to get security updates from them. It looks like I would have to stump up two lots of $379 just to get a two copies of Enterprise and 12 months of update for my two boxes.
I obviously don't want to pay that much...
So I guess I'm going to have to migrate to Debian or something instead ?
The end result for Redhat, no more income from me.
Many, many people have sucessfully cleaned their Canon sensors.
Also many, many people have had the experience of sending their cameras back to Canon for cleaning only to find they come back with more dust on the sensor than when they sent it in.
Plenty of people have also followed Canon's only cleaning sugestion of using a blower bulb, only to result in blowing tiny bits of rubber onto the sensor...
I would recommend you read up on this and learn to clean your sensor yourself. It really isn't as scary as it sounds.
There is a good description of how to do it here:
http://www.pbase.com/copperhill/ccd_cleaning
I have followed this instructions with my 10D and had very good results. I have yet to hear of anyone who has permanently damaged their sensor following those instructions
P.S. don't forget it is not actually the sensor you are cleaning, it is the piece of glass in front of the filters that are in front of the sensor
Re:Possibly consider one of the 'pro-sumers' inste
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 1
I was about to post saying you were wrong and that the Panasonic wasn't likely to be F2.8 thoughout it's entire zoom range.
But doing some digging around I find that you are correct. It does indeed do F2.8 throughout it's complete range. Wonder how they have managed that ?
I have to ask though, do you actually need F2.8 anyway. The two reasons for wanting an aperture that wide are for getting a very shallow depth of field and for taking shots in low light.
If you want that shallow a depth of field then you probably want it for portraits or the like. In which case going the Canon route you could pick up a cheap EF 50 F/1.8 for $150 or so, which would give you an even tighter depth of field.
If you want it for low light use then you need to remember that the Canons have very usable 800 and 1600 ASA modes (they have less noise than most of the pro-sumers at 100 ASA). This means that you easily gain an extra 3 stops, so an F/4.5 on the Canons will equal the Panasonic's F/2.8
You could therefore get very close to the range you want with the EF 24-85 F/3.5-4.5 plus EF 75-300 IS F/4-5.6. This would get you close to the wide end (38mm Canon vs. 35mm Panasonic) and give you 480mm (at 35mm equiv) image stablized at the long end. You could get both of these good lenses for under $850.
If you really need the extra 3mm on the wide end then you could go with the 18-55mm kit lense and the EF 75-300 IS. That would leave you with a gap between 55mm and 75mm, but that is hardly the end of the world and you could fill it later.
I have both the 24-85 and the 75-300 IS and they are good lenses. The 75-300 is a bit plastic, but you have to consider that it is under $500 the other 300mm IS lense from Canon EF 300 F/4.0 L IS is $1500 or so, which makes the 75-300 a bit of a bargin.
Re:Possibly consider one of the 'pro-sumers' inste
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately the physics dictates that the noise of the Sony F828 is not going to come close to that of the Canon Digital Rebel or 10D. The sensor is just too small to get similar noise levels or low light performance.
The pixels of the sensor on the F828 are smaller that those on the Canon DSLRs, so they can't collect as much light and noise is going to be higher.
Well, VT are clearly getting a very good deal on their hardware. $5m for 1100 nodes works out at $4,500 a node.
Speccing up a dual G5 at the Apple store comes out at over $5,000. They also need to pay for the power and cooling hardware to run the thing.
Looks like they are getting a very good price from all their suppliers/contractors...
The retail price for the processing hardware for the UT cluster is very similar, a dual PowerEdge 2650 with 4Gb of RAM is also about $5,000. If they had taken the workstation route favoured by VT (by using Dell PWS 450 boxes) it wouldn't have saved them much as they come in at $4,600 at a similar spec.
The article says "The cost of the five-year project is about $38 million" and "The university plans to add at least 200 servers to the cluster within a year", so it isn't costing them $38m for the 300 node cluster they currently have.
Damn, just found the original press release showing that the Dells are 3.06 GHz boxes. That pushes the price per node up to over $6,300.
I'm pretty sure that the in the European market the car manufacturers are trying something similar already. Last I heard they wanted laws to outlaw anyone other than their dealerships selling parts. They claimed it was to cut down on poor quality counterfeit parts, but we all know the real reason...
I haven't heard anything about this for a while though, so hopefully they failed in their attempt.
If you read the acticles on the ESA shuttle you would know that it doesn't leave the atmosphere itself, so the problems of re-entry don't apply. Oh, and it is unmanned and autonomous.
It is clear from reading the article why Active Spam Killer and systems like it were left out.
The tests involved running multiple different systems against the same body of email that the author had already received. Given that Active Spam Killer requires an interaction between the unknown sender of the email and the system it can't be tested this way.
As far as I am concerned 640x480 is too small a res to surf the web, even on a decent monitor. People design webpages (quite sensibly) with the idea that 99% of people are going to use 640x480 or better.
Switching down to 640x480 for a few minutes gives me a headache (and this is on a nice clear monitor, not a fuzzy TV screen). Expecting people to use a TV screen as there main display for a GUI based system is just crazy. Back when people were happy to use TVs to display their computer output was when most computer displays were around 80x25 monospaced characters !
Unfortunately there are loads of users out there who don't know they have a copy of SQL server installed. They take their laptops home, plug into their DSL lines, get hit by the worm because the have no firewall at home.
Next day they bring the laptops into the office, plug into the corporate LAN and bingo, the worm is inside the firwall...
That's fine, but the Rio Receiver hardware was designed at least two years ago, at which point wireless functionality would have cost a greate deal more to add than $40.
If they were redesigning the hardware again now (which they no doubt are) then I'm sure they would add wireless.
Agreed, but I was responding to his comment where he said "The unit is totally portable, so I can plug it into my stereo at home, in my car, or at a party at my friends place", the empeg would meet all these requirements (unless his friends place is in California I guess)
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To say that Brainiacs is similar to Mythbusters is an insult to Mythbusters. Brainiacs is a load of puerile nonsense, that insults the viewers intelligence.
Mythbusters have busted the cellphone + fumes = explosion myth twice already anway.
Apple are nearly right. IE 5.0 was the first version of IE to ship with MSXML and the XmlHttpRequest object.
However MSXML 2.0, which was where XmlHttpRequest first appeared was available for download before that. We were using MSXML 2.0 with IE 4.0 to do AJAX style apps before IE 5.0 was released.
Sounds like you are confusing HTTP with XmlHttp. Microsoft did add XmlHttp do their XML parser (and therefore accessible from IE) long before it was added to the other browsers.
I have been using XmlHttp and Javascript/VBScript to create AJAX style apps on Intranets for at least 5 years. Before that we were using Microsoft's Remote Scripting to do the same stuff.
I'm trying to remember when Remote Scripting first appeared, I think it was in 1999. We put together our first AJAX style functionality the same day it appeared.
The guy at Microsoft who created the Java applet that Remote Scripting used didn't really know his way around HTTP, he used GET to send the request to the server, thus severely limiting the amount of data you could send to the server. Thankfully Microsoft released the Java source for the applet, so I modded our version to use POST instead.
Not it isn't. I can no longer pay Red Hat to provide me with security patches for my existing installations of their software.
Yes I can probably get patches from Fedora or elsewhere, but this key service of official patches for older versions of Red Hat is no longer available to me. This is a major change.
I also can't install a new version of Red Hat and pay an affordable subscription for Red Hat supported patches for my home server. If I want that I have to pay for RHEL ES, at $349 a year (as far as I can see) rather than the $60 a year I pay at the moment.
I also _have_ to migrate my server to a new version for Red Hat if I want to partake of the supported patch subscription. And that migration is a "backup data, nuke RH7.1, install RHEL, piece data back together" type...
It might not be big changes for some people, they are going to be fairly time consuming for me I'm afraid.
P.S. I would have been happy to pay far more than $60 a year for the service, probably more like $250, if I could stay with RH7.1 until I am done with it
WS is no use to me, my two boxes are servers and WS doesn't include several network services that I need.
Looking at:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/purchase/
The version that I need (Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES) is $349, sorry I incorrectly stated $379 earlier...
I was paying $60 * 2 = $120/year (two subscriptions at $60/year)
So that is $638 difference.
To be honest, the fact that I am going to be forced to migrate my 7.1 server to get on-going security fixes is more painful than the cash.
Unfortunately they are going to force me to migrate my Redhat 7.1 mail server to something else (be it Fedora, Enterprise or another). That is going to involve days of investigation, installation, porting of maintenance scripts, testing etc
The only reason I am going to have to do this is because the are stopping errata updates. There is nothing else that would make me want to "upgrade" my 7.1 box, it works fine as it is.
To be safe I also have to source some new hardware so that I can safely migrate from one setup to another.
It's not as if I'm being paid to maintain the server in question, it is handles domains and email for me and some friends. It has to be reliable and secure though.
I'm not a happy bunny.
According to the stuff I have read today Fedora releases will only be supported for 9 months.
My main point is that they have forced to migrate all my boxes in the next few months if I want to be able keep upto date on security fixes. Once they force me to do that I may as well look at alternatives to Redhat, given that I am going to go through hassle to migrate to Fedora or Enterprise.
From where I'm standing this looks like a very silly step on Redhat's behalf.
I have two Redhat boxes at the moment, one running 7.1 which handles mail and DNS for me a half a dozen friends/family, the other running 9.0 which is purely a remote backup server (rsync copies data to it daily).
I use Redhat because despite the fact that I installed 7.1 a couple of years ago I pay my $60 a year so that I can run "up2date" once a day to keep my security patches up to date. I pay my $60 for both systems.
I also buy a copy of Redhat every 18 months or so.
Now that they have decided to stop updating 7, 8 and 9 they are forcing me to migrate both boxes. I don't have time to scan the web looking for security updates for hundreds of packages, so I need an update service. Hell, I only installed the 9.0 box 4 months ago and come next April updates stop !
So it looks like they are forcing me to either move to Redhat Enterprise to get security updates from them. It looks like I would have to stump up two lots of $379 just to get a two copies of Enterprise and 12 months of update for my two boxes.
I obviously don't want to pay that much...
So I guess I'm going to have to migrate to Debian or something instead ?
The end result for Redhat, no more income from me.
Many, many people have sucessfully cleaned their Canon sensors.
Also many, many people have had the experience of sending their cameras back to Canon for cleaning only to find they come back with more dust on the sensor than when they sent it in.
Plenty of people have also followed Canon's only cleaning sugestion of using a blower bulb, only to result in blowing tiny bits of rubber onto the sensor...
I would recommend you read up on this and learn to clean your sensor yourself. It really isn't as scary as it sounds.
There is a good description of how to do it here:
http://www.pbase.com/copperhill/ccd_cleaning
I have followed this instructions with my 10D and had very good results. I have yet to hear of anyone who has permanently damaged their sensor following those instructions
P.S. don't forget it is not actually the sensor you are cleaning, it is the piece of glass in front of the filters that are in front of the sensor
http://www.dcviews.com/press/Panasonic-DMC-FZ10.ht m
But doing some digging around I find that you are correct. It does indeed do F2.8 throughout it's complete range. Wonder how they have managed that ?
I have to ask though, do you actually need F2.8 anyway. The two reasons for wanting an aperture that wide are for getting a very shallow depth of field and for taking shots in low light.
If you want that shallow a depth of field then you probably want it for portraits or the like. In which case going the Canon route you could pick up a cheap EF 50 F/1.8 for $150 or so, which would give you an even tighter depth of field.
If you want it for low light use then you need to remember that the Canons have very usable 800 and 1600 ASA modes (they have less noise than most of the pro-sumers at 100 ASA). This means that you easily gain an extra 3 stops, so an F/4.5 on the Canons will equal the Panasonic's F/2.8
You could therefore get very close to the range you want with the EF 24-85 F/3.5-4.5 plus EF 75-300 IS F/4-5.6. This would get you close to the wide end (38mm Canon vs. 35mm Panasonic) and give you 480mm (at 35mm equiv) image stablized at the long end. You could get both of these good lenses for under $850.
If you really need the extra 3mm on the wide end then you could go with the 18-55mm kit lense and the EF 75-300 IS. That would leave you with a gap between 55mm and 75mm, but that is hardly the end of the world and you could fill it later.
I have both the 24-85 and the 75-300 IS and they are good lenses. The 75-300 is a bit plastic, but you have to consider that it is under $500 the other 300mm IS lense from Canon EF 300 F/4.0 L IS is $1500 or so, which makes the 75-300 a bit of a bargin.
Unfortunately the physics dictates that the noise of the Sony F828 is not going to come close to that of the Canon Digital Rebel or 10D. The sensor is just too small to get similar noise levels or low light performance.
The pixels of the sensor on the F828 are smaller that those on the Canon DSLRs, so they can't collect as much light and noise is going to be higher.
Well, VT are clearly getting a very good deal on their hardware. $5m for 1100 nodes works out at $4,500 a node.
Speccing up a dual G5 at the Apple store comes out at over $5,000. They also need to pay for the power and cooling hardware to run the thing.
Looks like they are getting a very good price from all their suppliers/contractors...
The retail price for the processing hardware for the UT cluster is very similar, a dual PowerEdge 2650 with 4Gb of RAM is also about $5,000. If they had taken the workstation route favoured by VT (by using Dell PWS 450 boxes) it wouldn't have saved them much as they come in at $4,600 at a similar spec.
The article says "The cost of the five-year project is about $38 million" and "The university plans to add at least 200 servers to the cluster within a year", so it isn't costing them $38m for the 300 node cluster they currently have.
Damn, just found the original press release showing that the Dells are 3.06 GHz boxes. That pushes the price per node up to over $6,300.
I'm pretty sure that the in the European market the car manufacturers are trying something similar already. Last I heard they wanted laws to outlaw anyone other than their dealerships selling parts. They claimed it was to cut down on poor quality counterfeit parts, but we all know the real reason...
I haven't heard anything about this for a while though, so hopefully they failed in their attempt.
If you read the acticles on the ESA shuttle you would know that it doesn't leave the atmosphere itself, so the problems of re-entry don't apply. Oh, and it is unmanned and autonomous.
It is clear from reading the article why Active Spam Killer and systems like it were left out.
The tests involved running multiple different systems against the same body of email that the author had already received. Given that Active Spam Killer requires an interaction between the unknown sender of the email and the system it can't be tested this way.
Or course, I should have said "people are going to use 800x600 or better"
As far as I am concerned 640x480 is too small a res to surf the web, even on a decent monitor. People design webpages (quite sensibly) with the idea that 99% of people are going to use 640x480 or better.
Switching down to 640x480 for a few minutes gives me a headache (and this is on a nice clear monitor, not a fuzzy TV screen). Expecting people to use a TV screen as there main display for a GUI based system is just crazy. Back when people were happy to use TVs to display their computer output was when most computer displays were around 80x25 monospaced characters !
I take it you have never surfed the web or read your email on an average TV then ? The image quality and resolution just isn't up to it.
Unfortunately there are loads of users out there who don't know they have a copy of SQL server installed. They take their laptops home, plug into their DSL lines, get hit by the worm because the have no firewall at home.
Next day they bring the laptops into the office, plug into the corporate LAN and bingo, the worm is inside the firwall...
That's fine, but the Rio Receiver hardware was designed at least two years ago, at which point wireless functionality would have cost a greate deal more to add than $40.
If they were redesigning the hardware again now (which they no doubt are) then I'm sure they would add wireless.
Agreed, but I was responding to his comment where he said "The unit is totally portable, so I can plug it into my stereo at home, in my car, or at a party at my friends place", the empeg would meet all these requirements (unless his friends place is in California I guess)
You are wrong I'm afraid. The major parts of the software, the player software and the Windows client are both actually closed source.
You obviously don't know much about the empeg then, as that too is totally portable...
(mine sits on my desk at work every day providing tunes for the office)