In March, 1998, Auckland - New Zealand's major city (though not the capital, that's Wellington, in case you need to know) - had a FIVE week blackout. This was after the system was privatised. They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up. Five weeks with no power. In a major(-ish - hey, I live in Sydney) city. Incredible.
I think this would be a slight overstatement. I'd never heard of this until you mentioned it, but decided to do a little research:
The
BBC said: "At its height, the blackout affected more than 8,500 businesses employing almost 74,000 people, and some 6,230 apartment dwellers."
So while the center of Auckland lost power, it certainly wasn't like two million people were living without power for a month.
It was, however, the equivalent of losing power to a few square blocks of Manhattan or downtown Chicago.
my power bill is $180-200. I keep my house at 72-75F, even when it's 105F outside. IF the power company gets 35% more expensive here then it will be cost effective to generate my own using propane and a generator.
Instead of generating electricity from propane, you could try solar or, likely a better idea, finance some replacement windows for your house/apartment. The energy savings will easily offset the cost over five years, and your first combined electricity bill + window payment will be lower than your former electricity bill.
My power bills in Boston never ran more than $75/month in the summer, and after CA the NorthEast is the most expensive energy market.
"No portable computer will ever replace the desktop you have at home."
Maybe you haven't seen the new Acer Desknote. Given the amount of people out there still using 15-17" CRTs, this would easily replace the desktop at home. I saw one yesterday at a shop in NZ and almost fell over. The display area is as large as a 19" CRT, and the keyboard vast.
I certainly wouldn't use it as a laptop (it'd probably set the bed on fire) but as a portable computer it will easily replace the desktop at home.
"It's a concept the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon knew. The Greeks and Romans new it. The Saxons and Normans knew it. Even the founders of the US knew it. But somehow that concept has been lost in the modern US. It's truly sad."
Please don't tell me that robbery is a recent invention, or that it hasn't been practiced by every generation of humans since the advent of personal property. It's not something new, evil, or at all confined to the United States.
Yeah, I said that robbery isn't evil. It's just a fact of life. Individuals and corporations rob the people of the world all the time. Mining and timber rights, defence department contracts, indefinite copyright - it's all robbery.
Get off your high and mighty horse. The culture of the US is not doomed. Hell, it was built by Carnige and the likes that history remembers as the "Robber Barrons". GWB is known throughout the world as a tool of modern-day robber barrons - just look at how much money private corporations (such as Halliburton) have made from the war in Iraq!
Take your complaints about the "whining mediocrity" back to Mom's basement and go lose yourself in some nice, pulpy Ayn Rand.
Having taught in difficult situations in the past, I'm all for cameras in the classroom. While a Peace Corps volunteer in 1999-2000 teaching in an agricultural school in Poland (Zespol Szkol Rolniczne w Czernichowie) I was frequently yelled at by the principal for kicking particular students out of class. If only they could have seen the difference the removal of one disruptive student can make in a classroom...
Some may argue that a teacher should be able to handle all students, but with 160 students to keep track of, one can't be both teacher and psychologist to all of them.
I think the presence of cameras will restrain those likely to cause disturbances in class, and will be a tremendous aid in dealing with those who don't belong in a traditional classroom setting. Of course this is from personal experience only. I have no idea what the academic literature says about the idea.
* Not to say that the three kids (from different classes) I frequently kicked out weren't bright - they just made it impossible to get through a lesson with the rest of the students. In some situations pragmatism needs to trump "no child left behind" - if it's a choice between one student not learning a lesson or 20+ not learning...
"I'll be impressed when a mouse allows me to scroll into/out of the monitor"
One of the only things about the game Black & White that impressed me was the ability to zoom in and out of the 3d environment using the scroll wheel on your mouse. Granted I'm not a gamer.
I remember thinking during the brief two weeks when I was playing B&W that the paradigm would be great for information navagation... a la Apple's project x of 1995...
Slashdotting the FCC?
on
FCC Goes WiFi
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Michael is turning us all into terrorists, suggesting we participate in a distributed denial of service attack on a us government agency. Thank God I'm not in the US...
While we're at it, can we manufacture the shirts so that deoderant is somehow embedded in the fabric so that they'll take effect when being worn (by smelly, non-showering nerds)?
Adapt the Ig Noble award winning "under-tec" filters to a tight-fitting Slashdot T-Shirt and you're well on your way.
(I personally prefer Tom's of Maine unscented roll-on, but you didn't need to know that.)
Why are they looking for Michael Jackson songs then?... "I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music," he said in a statement.... It seems your statement is false.
Not necessarily so. No one is going to jail for downloading music - they're just going to go broke when a civil judgement is handed down against them.
As an easy way of avoiding said probability I suggest spending twenty-five dollars to incorporate in some state or country and then selling your computer to your new company. In case of lawsuit, take your company into bankrupcy and avoid the possibility of personal financial loss.
but having a nice long(and heavily shielded) cable running to the trunk would be more effective because the space constraints aren't as big of a deal.
With processors so cheap, just have a separate machine up front running VNC or similar, and put something real in the back to do the work. In fact, aren't there such displays commercially available? As in flat-panels with a processor, video card, and etherent jack?
Really the cost of installing a high-quality shielded cable to move user input back and video to the front is likely much greater than the cost of having two PCs...
So, even though Panasonic still makes the cell used by my Powerbook Lombard, and even though you cannot buy new Lombard/Pismo batteries(they're no longer made, period), I can't fix my lombard's battery.
I too atempted to order Panasonic cells to repair my Thinkpad 770 battery. No luck - they're sold for "approved applications" only. I have to say it's absolute bullshit. LI-ion batteries last me about 14 months.
How would one go about removing the gaps between the monitors? Use projectors instead. Or just pretend the gaps are structural pillars between the windows.
Re:A Mighty Mighty Wind Machine...
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
Lyons [James Lyons, GE chief engineer] says machines will grow to 5-MW size "We know we can do that, and other companies are going to as well. There's no reason to stop there. The big offshore machines will get to 7 to 10 MW".
I think wind in general is a good idea, but if the machines keep getting bigger I wonder what affect this will have.
Stick them out in the middle of nowhere and who cares how big they are! The only consideration is that transmission costs and losses go up with the distance from shore. (anyone have an equation?)
The only time I ever call technical support is when checking the manual and web doesn't get me the answer. If the person on the other end of the line has no more information available to them, what's the point?
I'm not going to say you're unique or special, because you're not. You're just one of a small, insignificant percentage of consumers who tries to solve problems on their own before running to tech support.
Try working a phone as tech support sometime. I did ages ago in college. You'll learn very quickly that the script to follow will solve over 80% of the problems you'll get. It's not like the people who wrote the script were idiots.
From the Design Principles: "...provides a single, uniform interface for manipulation of e-mail, instant messages, addresses, web pages, documents, news, bibliographies, annotations, music, images, etc."
"...attempts to match a user's own focus on objects in view and what can be done with them. An operation (such as spellchecking, sending an e-mail message, or rotating an image) can be invoked at any time on any object for which the operation "makes sense" (i.e. a blob of text, a person, or an image respectively)."
Back in the heady days of the PPC 601 and the Newton, one of Apple's software groups was working on this problem exactly. While I don't think OpenDoc could organize your information, it was certainly a uniform interface for manipulating stuff, with the focus on the stuff, and not the application in use. At that point, about seven years ago, I naively believed that one day OpenDoc would provide an environment in which I could edit a web page and all elements (including raster and vector images) without having six applications loaded. Ha!
At 160,000 feet using high altitude balloon tech to build a suspended launch platform you could fire a rail gun to launch cylinders into space with needed materials.
Not sure any baloon could support thirty miles of electrical cable necessary to power said rail gun. Also think one should consider Newton's Second when speaking of floating rail guns.
a big thing in digital audio is to keep a fully digital path all the way to the very last, then have a top D to A converter right in the amp and straight to the speakers
This is an exceptionally good idea if you use your computer as a music box. I had no idea how much degradation was going on until I bought a cheap Maya 5.1 sound card ($40USD) with optical S/PDIF out and used fiber to connect my PC and receiver. The difference between my SB card with analog out and the Maya card w/ optical out is night and day in terms of sound quality, and I attribute much of that to the lack of noise, and the rest to the superior D/A converters in my receiver.
While the whole waste does indeed fit into a two-story building, you need a building (container) that can survive about a million years.
Do you really think we won't be able to safely reprocess this waste in your lifetime? The specs for Yucca Mountain are just absurd. They seem to assume that science stopped in 1987. Almost any high-level radioactive waste can be reused as energy. The practical thing to do is build 200 year containment and let science catch up before trying to find some insane 10,000 year solution.
.If you produce large quantities of hydrogen in this fashion, producing all that CO2, it really defeats the purpose of not just burning natural gas or gasoline.
Natural Gas, maybe, but gasoline? Burning gasoline emits a hell of a lot more than CO2.
Then I think you need to watch it alone. You can not call your self a geek if you havn't watch it yet. OUTRAGE I say what a OUTRAGE!!!! Shame on you!!!!!!
I have to wait another two weeks until the SO is back from the other side of the planet before I can go watch "Reloaded" in the theater without her being upset. I've downloaded a few telesync versions but have not watched more than two minutes in to them, cause telesync sucks! If I can get a divx screener I'll watch it from home before going to theater, but I've looked everywhere and have had no luck.
Indeed one can still be a geek without having yet watched "Reloaded"
Please stop publishing on using inkjets to counterfit currency. Between this and the threads in reply to the Euro/RFID plan it's really too much publicity. If too many people catch on, the LEAs will be all over it and I won't be able to pay my bills anymore.
Thanks,
JB
Re:Completely illegal in MA, and hence, at MIT
on
Shocking Clothing
·
· Score: 1
Completely illegal in MA, and hence, at MIT
Yeah, and exactly which cop within 50 miles of the city of Boston is going to bust someone for having a taser or shock jacket? I've seen cyborgs on Segways in Kendall Square and fucking aliens outside of Manray in Central Square and every cop I've ever seen has either been chatting with a construction worker on the road or chowing down in his car.
When was the last time you tried running a version of Windows on an 800MHz Celeron with only 128MB RAM? I wouldn't worry about pirates using these for XP.:-)
XP Home on Celeron 467, 256MB RAM (one stick). Fast and stable, and beats the pants off my G4 (1.5 GB RAM, OSX 10.2)
Slashdot Mirror
I think this would be a slight overstatement. I'd never heard of this until you mentioned it, but decided to do a little research:
So while the center of Auckland lost power, it certainly wasn't like two million people were living without power for a month.
It was, however, the equivalent of losing power to a few square blocks of Manhattan or downtown Chicago.
my power bill is $180-200. I keep my house at 72-75F, even when it's 105F outside. IF the power company gets 35% more expensive here then it will be cost effective to generate my own using propane and a generator.
Instead of generating electricity from propane, you could try solar or, likely a better idea, finance some replacement windows for your house/apartment. The energy savings will easily offset the cost over five years, and your first combined electricity bill + window payment will be lower than your former electricity bill.
My power bills in Boston never ran more than $75/month in the summer, and after CA the NorthEast is the most expensive energy market.
"No portable computer will ever replace the desktop you have at home."
Maybe you haven't seen the new Acer Desknote. Given the amount of people out there still using 15-17" CRTs, this would easily replace the desktop at home. I saw one yesterday at a shop in NZ and almost fell over. The display area is as large as a 19" CRT, and the keyboard vast.
I certainly wouldn't use it as a laptop (it'd probably set the bed on fire) but as a portable computer it will easily replace the desktop at home.
I reluctantly quote the parent troll:
"It's a concept the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon knew. The Greeks and Romans new it. The Saxons and Normans knew it. Even the founders of the US knew it. But somehow that concept has been lost in the modern US. It's truly sad."
Please don't tell me that robbery is a recent invention, or that it hasn't been practiced by every generation of humans since the advent of personal property. It's not something new, evil, or at all confined to the United States.
Yeah, I said that robbery isn't evil. It's just a fact of life. Individuals and corporations rob the people of the world all the time. Mining and timber rights, defence department contracts, indefinite copyright - it's all robbery.
Get off your high and mighty horse. The culture of the US is not doomed. Hell, it was built by Carnige and the likes that history remembers as the "Robber Barrons". GWB is known throughout the world as a tool of modern-day robber barrons - just look at how much money private corporations (such as Halliburton) have made from the war in Iraq!
Take your complaints about the "whining mediocrity" back to Mom's basement and go lose yourself in some nice, pulpy Ayn Rand.
Having taught in difficult situations in the past, I'm all for cameras in the classroom. While a Peace Corps volunteer in 1999-2000 teaching in an agricultural school in Poland (Zespol Szkol Rolniczne w Czernichowie) I was frequently yelled at by the principal for kicking particular students out of class. If only they could have seen the difference the removal of one disruptive student can make in a classroom...
Some may argue that a teacher should be able to handle all students, but with 160 students to keep track of, one can't be both teacher and psychologist to all of them.
I think the presence of cameras will restrain those likely to cause disturbances in class, and will be a tremendous aid in dealing with those who don't belong in a traditional classroom setting. Of course this is from personal experience only. I have no idea what the academic literature says about the idea.
* Not to say that the three kids (from different classes) I frequently kicked out weren't bright - they just made it impossible to get through a lesson with the rest of the students. In some situations pragmatism needs to trump "no child left behind" - if it's a choice between one student not learning a lesson or 20+ not learning...
"I'll be impressed when a mouse allows me to scroll into/out of the monitor"
One of the only things about the game Black & White that impressed me was the ability to zoom in and out of the 3d environment using the scroll wheel on your mouse. Granted I'm not a gamer.
I remember thinking during the brief two weeks when I was playing B&W that the paradigm would be great for information navagation... a la Apple's project x of 1995...
Michael is turning us all into terrorists, suggesting we participate in a distributed denial of service attack on a us government agency. Thank God I'm not in the US...
While we're at it, can we manufacture the shirts so that deoderant is somehow embedded in the fabric so that they'll take effect when being worn (by smelly, non-showering nerds)?
Adapt the Ig Noble award winning "under-tec" filters to a tight-fitting Slashdot T-Shirt and you're well on your way.
(I personally prefer Tom's of Maine unscented roll-on, but you didn't need to know that.)
Why are they looking for Michael Jackson songs then? ... "I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music," he said in a statement. ... It seems your statement is false.
Not necessarily so. No one is going to jail for downloading music - they're just going to go broke when a civil judgement is handed down against them.
As an easy way of avoiding said probability I suggest spending twenty-five dollars to incorporate in some state or country and then selling your computer to your new company. In case of lawsuit, take your company into bankrupcy and avoid the possibility of personal financial loss.
but having a nice long(and heavily shielded) cable running to the trunk would be more effective because the space constraints aren't as big of a deal.
With processors so cheap, just have a separate machine up front running VNC or similar, and put something real in the back to do the work. In fact, aren't there such displays commercially available? As in flat-panels with a processor, video card, and etherent jack?
Really the cost of installing a high-quality shielded cable to move user input back and video to the front is likely much greater than the cost of having two PCs...
So, even though Panasonic still makes the cell used by my Powerbook Lombard, and even though you cannot buy new Lombard/Pismo batteries(they're no longer made, period), I can't fix my lombard's battery.
I too atempted to order Panasonic cells to repair my Thinkpad 770 battery. No luck - they're sold for "approved applications" only. I have to say it's absolute bullshit. LI-ion batteries last me about 14 months.
How would one go about removing the gaps between the monitors?
Use projectors instead. Or just pretend the gaps are structural pillars between the windows.
Lyons [James Lyons, GE chief engineer] says machines will grow to 5-MW size "We know we can do that, and other companies are going to as well. There's no reason to stop there. The big offshore machines will get to 7 to 10 MW".
I think wind in general is a good idea, but if the machines keep getting bigger I wonder what affect this will have.
Stick them out in the middle of nowhere and who cares how big they are! The only consideration is that transmission costs and losses go up with the distance from shore. (anyone have an equation?)
The only time I ever call technical support is when checking the manual and web doesn't get me the answer. If the person on the other end of the line has no more information available to them, what's the point?
I'm not going to say you're unique or special, because you're not. You're just one of a small, insignificant percentage of consumers who tries to solve problems on their own before running to tech support.
Try working a phone as tech support sometime. I did ages ago in college. You'll learn very quickly that the script to follow will solve over 80% of the problems you'll get. It's not like the people who wrote the script were idiots.
From the Design Principles:
"...provides a single, uniform interface for manipulation of e-mail, instant messages, addresses, web pages, documents, news, bibliographies, annotations, music, images, etc."
"...attempts to match a user's own focus on objects in view and what can be done with them. An operation (such as spellchecking, sending an e-mail message, or rotating an image) can be invoked at any time on any object for which the operation "makes sense" (i.e. a blob of text, a person, or an image respectively)."
Back in the heady days of the PPC 601 and the Newton, one of Apple's software groups was working on this problem exactly. While I don't think OpenDoc could organize your information, it was certainly a uniform interface for manipulating stuff, with the focus on the stuff, and not the application in use. At that point, about seven years ago, I naively believed that one day OpenDoc would provide an environment in which I could edit a web page and all elements (including raster and vector images) without having six applications loaded. Ha!
At 160,000 feet using high altitude balloon tech to build a suspended launch platform you could fire a rail gun to launch cylinders into space with needed materials.
Not sure any baloon could support thirty miles of electrical cable necessary to power said rail gun. Also think one should consider Newton's Second when speaking of floating rail guns.
a big thing in digital audio is to keep a fully digital path all the way to the very last, then have a top D to A converter right in the amp and straight to the speakers
This is an exceptionally good idea if you use your computer as a music box. I had no idea how much degradation was going on until I bought a cheap Maya 5.1 sound card ($40USD) with optical S/PDIF out and used fiber to connect my PC and receiver. The difference between my SB card with analog out and the Maya card w/ optical out is night and day in terms of sound quality, and I attribute much of that to the lack of noise, and the rest to the superior D/A converters in my receiver.
"Fyodor is ... a depraved, insidious hacker hell-bent on criminal intrusions into systems owned by minors!"
I'm sorry sir, but I do have to ask:
Is user 95460 the real Fyodor Vaskovich?
(ducks)
JB
While the whole waste does indeed fit into a two-story building, you need a building (container) that can survive about a million years.
Do you really think we won't be able to safely reprocess this waste in your lifetime? The specs for Yucca Mountain are just absurd. They seem to assume that science stopped in 1987. Almost any high-level radioactive waste can be reused as energy. The practical thing to do is build 200 year containment and let science catch up before trying to find some insane 10,000 year solution.
.If you produce large quantities of hydrogen in this fashion, producing all that CO2, it really defeats the purpose of not just burning natural gas or gasoline.
Natural Gas, maybe, but gasoline? Burning gasoline emits a hell of a lot more than CO2.
Then I think you need to watch it alone. You can not call your self a geek if you havn't watch it yet. OUTRAGE I say what a OUTRAGE!!!! Shame on you!!!!!!
I have to wait another two weeks until the SO is back from the other side of the planet before I can go watch "Reloaded" in the theater without her being upset. I've downloaded a few telesync versions but have not watched more than two minutes in to them, cause telesync sucks! If I can get a divx screener I'll watch it from home before going to theater, but I've looked everywhere and have had no luck.
Indeed one can still be a geek without having yet watched "Reloaded"
Um... I posted to the wrong story. Mea Culpa. What's with the flames?
Dear Editors,
Please stop publishing on using inkjets to counterfit currency. Between this and the threads in reply to the Euro/RFID plan it's really too much publicity. If too many people catch on, the LEAs will be all over it and I won't be able to pay my bills anymore.
Thanks,
JB
Completely illegal in MA, and hence, at MIT
Yeah, and exactly which cop within 50 miles of the city of Boston is going to bust someone for having a taser or shock jacket? I've seen cyborgs on Segways in Kendall Square and fucking aliens outside of Manray in Central Square and every cop I've ever seen has either been chatting with a construction worker on the road or chowing down in his car.
When was the last time you tried running a version of Windows on an 800MHz Celeron with only 128MB RAM? I wouldn't worry about pirates using these for XP. :-)
XP Home on Celeron 467, 256MB RAM (one stick). Fast and stable, and beats the pants off my G4 (1.5 GB RAM, OSX 10.2)