Re:Emphasis on the light, please.
on
Vertical Farming
·
· Score: 1
Middle of winter, even with the best insulation, you tend to get very cold at night, even while you're having so much heat during the day that it's hard *not* to vent. Getting a good heat storage/transfer system is one of the biggest challenges for small/midscale greenhouses to operate efficiently as far north as I am.
You probably need more thermal mass. If your greenhouse has tables, fill the space under them with stacks of bricks. Replace wooden walls with stone. Either will help cool the interior during the day and keep it warm at night.
Re:Wow, I didn't know that Ruby could do that!
on
Practical Ruby Gems
·
· Score: 0, Troll
So I used Perl because I know it can. Like it or not, as many nice features as Python does have, there's a whole lot of stuff that it _doesn't_ have. It's primitive and hardly feature-complete. Perl's been around for a while, has a great built-in library of functions, easy_install functions similar to gem. It's being used for practically everything you can imagine...websites, game scripting engines, scientific and analytical work, and there's a myriad of addon libraries , many of which can easily be installed under Windows, Linux and essentially any other platform that Perl can run on (e.g. cell phones). Can you say that for Python? Maybe in a few years, by which time Perl will likely have surpassed it yet again. Hell, Python was a language born and designed in the Netherlands, and it _still_ has trouble with internationalization support.
I'm sure the "cultist" Python fans will moderate this into oblivion, and personally, that's exactly what I'm hoping for. What better way to demonstrate the rabid, uncontrolled fanboyism toward a half-assed language?
I was only 9 when "Watch Mr. Wizard" went off the air, but I still remember it well. Yes, I'm an old fart. No, I didn't remember the correct name, everyone always just called it, "Mr Wizard".
An explosion is the result of a solid (or sometimes liquid) material being converted into a gas in a confinded volume. In most cases, the conversion has to happen faster than the gas can leak out of an enclosure. Most explosives are comnustable material that's been mixed with an oxidizer so it burn really, really fast. Without the oxidizer, oxygen can't get to the combustion fast enough and the gas escapes, turning the BOOM into a POP. Since there's an oxidizer present, these types of explosives work quite well in total vacumns, and yes, gunpowder falls into that group.
In other words, your gun will fucking work without oxygen, you moron.
I agree that Net Neutrality hasn't had as much coverage as it deserves, but has anyone read the rest of the list?
If you are reading the mainstream newspapers or listening to National Public Radio, you are contributing to your own mental illness, no matter how astute you believe yourself to be at "balancing" or "deciphering" the code.
Keith Harmon Snow, you lost me with this paragraph. I don't think many people will catargorize misinformation as mental illness. And what's up with the qoutes around "balancing" and "deciphering"? Just because someone is (in your opinion) unable to do something doesn't turn their efforts into some sort of deceitful act.
But breaking international and domestic law has not been a concern of an administration led by a "president" who has claimed "authority" to disobey over 750 laws passed by Congress.
Dahr Jamail, you've got quote problems as well. Like it or not, Shrub *is* the president, and saying the word "authority" in a funny, quavery, voice with a flashlight held under your chin isn't going to impress anyone.
Sorry, Project Censored, I'm sure you're trying to make positive changes in the world, but I've given up on reading the rest of the article. You causes may be valid, but please don't act like fruitcakes when you try to make your points.
Unfortunately, Star Wars didn't use any computer generated effects. The original version was done the old fashioned way, with models and latex. A few years later, Lucas decided that CGI was the way of the future, so he took a hunk of his profits and started a little company to design and manufacture CGI hardware. They did a lot of the effects for Wrath of Khan, among other things, but they never did as well as Lucas had hoped so he sold them to a recently fired billionaire looking for a new business to run. You may have heard of them; their name is Pixar.
I agree. The problem is, Desktop Linux needs to be more like Embedded Linux. Every once in a while, some magazine columist will claim that there are too many distros and that users are confused about while to use. They are missing the point.
There are a lot of manufacturers of embedded devices that run Linux, but their customers aren't confused about which distro to use. The maker picks a distro and makes it work on their platform, and that version gets shipped with the hardware. Sure, you can flash other distros, but it comes out of the box with something that "just works" and 99.999% of the users will never want to change it.
Microsoft, through various licensing agreements, guaranteed that anyone making desktop systems would have no reason to ship any other OS; BeOS found this out the hard way. Fortunately, most if not all of those agreements have been invalidated, but even so it's taking a while for the manufacturers to pick a distro. Linspire got Walmart to include their disto on some low end PCs, but Walmart hasn't wanted to commit the resources needed to make things take off; they need an 800 number for people to call when they have problems. Dell has announced that Unbuntu is their choice for their PCs, and have guaranteed that every system that they ship will have drivers for every piece of hardware that's installed. Some people are waiting to see what other distros will be supported, but I don't think that multiple choices are a good idea.
Psychological studies have proven that people want choice, but they don't want too much choice. The US got by for years with just three television networks, and I think that for in the near future the same should be true of operating systems. In the near term, all of the major manufacturers should support just Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu. In the long term, everyone will follow Oracle's lead (where they introduced their own brand of Linux) and Unbuntu will fork into Dell, HPQ and IBM versions.
My college roommate and I drove for two hours to get to the Creve Coeur Cinema (since torn down) to see this movie. The lobby was packed prior to the show; the word-of-mouth had been very, very good. I'd read the book already (first edition, IIRC there was no hint that it would be a movie), but everything on the screen blew me away. Since then, I've been married twice and had more kids than I can count, but I can still give myself goosebumps by merely recalling the Millennium Falcon's first jump to hyperdrive. The lastest trilogy may have sucked, but the original will live forever.
Saving pages isn't automated. Instead, set up a personal proxy server that never purges its cache, and use it to surf the web. Google desktop (or something similar) can be used to index the proxy's cache in case you can't remeber where you saw something. Finally, rdist the cache to a central location so you aren't tied to a single computer, and to protect against disk crashes.
Neither the article nor the replies tell me anything useful..tar.gz files are small, meaning they are fast to move through a network, but do they diff well? Good compression algorithms turn data into statistically random streams of bits, so I suspect that different generations of uncompressed.tar files would have smaller deltas than the compressed versions. Similar questions abound for GIF and JPEG files.
According to Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, recording one person's life as DVD video generates about 7 TB per year, so this is the same as generating life records for 2,000 people.
BTW, according to one trend line I've seen, the cost of a PB of raw storage will drop below $1,000 around 2020. This means that while it may cost ~$5,000,000 to store the first year's data, by 2020 you could store 13 years worth of the data (i.e. all of the data produced up to that date) for around $250,000. Double that if you want it mirrored.
As far as I'm concerned, when Palm dropped Moto's Dragonball processor for the ARM, it was all over. About that same time they got rid of the original Graffiti for something that didn't use one stroke per letter. (Admittedly, this was due to a lawsuit, but the patent was eventually overturned; Palm did not return to Graffiti, however.) There's still a thriving market on eBay for the old Palm devices. I still use my m150, and have a couple of spares that are still shrink-wrapped. The battery life is still incredible. I can take it with me on week-long hikes without any worries.
Actually, there's a Palm III emulator that's been ported all over the place, including handheld versions of Windows. There's no reason why it couldn't run on a Linux-based PDA. Maybe I should change my subject: "PalmOS will never die!"
If someone could CONCLUSIVLY prove that humans are the sole cause of global warming, and that global warming is not natural, and that it is bad, I would listen.
Actually, only that last clause needs to be proven. By your reasoning, an asteroid hitting the earth is nothing to be worried about because humans wouldn't be the cause and it is a natural process. If global warming is bad, then we should work to reverse it regardless of its cause. Some proposed solutions assume that CO2 increases are the cause and work to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but other solutions involve reducing the about of solar radiation absorbed by the earth (via microsats or changes to planetary albedo).
I had custody of the kids (2, 5 and 7 at the time) every other weekend. Saturday night, I get a call from work, and it's something that can't be fixed from home. I can't find my ex, I can't find a sitter, so I bring the kids in. One of the operators volunteers to show them around the computer room while I work on things. Five minutes later, the IBM mainframe mysteriously halts. Yes, one of the kids had wondered why there was a big red button on the console. My problem was suddenly minor, so I took the kids out for ice cream.
Cash in your investments and buy "40 acres and a mule" in the Ozarks. The downside is that you'll never have a vacation for the rest of your life. The upside is that you'll be safe and sound when peak oil hits and the food riots start.
Hypernovas, like supernovas, seem to radiate a lot of their energy equally in all directions. The manner in which that energy is generated doesn't really matter, just the distribution, so a hypernova more than 260 light-years away won't be a big threat. A gamma ray burst, OTOH, radiates most of its energy in two diametrically opposed narrow cones aligned along the star's rotational axis. If such a beam happened to be aimed towards earth, then yes it could be quite deadly at great distances, but the odds of such good aim are rather slim. Eta Carinae has recently been identified as a binary system. The other star has been observed eclipsing the primary, meaning that we are near the rotational plane; i.e. neither of the poles are pointing at us, so we don't need to fear GRBs from it. I don't know of any hypernova threats nearer than Eta Carinae, so I think that we're pretty safe.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you look at the GP?
So I used Perl because I know it can. Like it or not, as many nice features as Python does have, there's a whole lot of stuff that it _doesn't_ have. It's primitive and hardly feature-complete. Perl's been around for a while, has a great built-in library of functions, easy_install functions similar to gem. It's being used for practically everything you can imagine...websites, game scripting engines, scientific and analytical work, and there's a myriad of addon libraries , many of which can easily be installed under Windows, Linux and essentially any other platform that Perl can run on (e.g. cell phones). Can you say that for Python? Maybe in a few years, by which time Perl will likely have surpassed it yet again. Hell, Python was a language born and designed in the Netherlands, and it _still_ has trouble with internationalization support.
I'm sure the "cultist" Python fans will moderate this into oblivion, and personally, that's exactly what I'm hoping for. What better way to demonstrate the rabid, uncontrolled fanboyism toward a half-assed language?
I was only 9 when "Watch Mr. Wizard" went off the air, but I still remember it well. Yes, I'm an old fart. No, I didn't remember the correct name, everyone always just called it, "Mr Wizard".
An explosion is the result of a solid (or sometimes liquid) material being converted into a gas in a confinded volume. In most cases, the conversion has to happen faster than the gas can leak out of an enclosure. Most explosives are comnustable material that's been mixed with an oxidizer so it burn really, really fast. Without the oxidizer, oxygen can't get to the combustion fast enough and the gas escapes, turning the BOOM into a POP. Since there's an oxidizer present, these types of explosives work quite well in total vacumns, and yes, gunpowder falls into that group.
In other words, your gun will fucking work without oxygen, you moron.
Sorry, Project Censored, I'm sure you're trying to make positive changes in the world, but I've given up on reading the rest of the article. You causes may be valid, but please don't act like fruitcakes when you try to make your points.
Unfortunately, Star Wars didn't use any computer generated effects. The original version was done the old fashioned way, with models and latex. A few years later, Lucas decided that CGI was the way of the future, so he took a hunk of his profits and started a little company to design and manufacture CGI hardware. They did a lot of the effects for Wrath of Khan, among other things, but they never did as well as Lucas had hoped so he sold them to a recently fired billionaire looking for a new business to run. You may have heard of them; their name is Pixar.
I agree. The problem is, Desktop Linux needs to be more like Embedded Linux. Every once in a while, some magazine columist will claim that there are too many distros and that users are confused about while to use. They are missing the point.
There are a lot of manufacturers of embedded devices that run Linux, but their customers aren't confused about which distro to use. The maker picks a distro and makes it work on their platform, and that version gets shipped with the hardware. Sure, you can flash other distros, but it comes out of the box with something that "just works" and 99.999% of the users will never want to change it.
Microsoft, through various licensing agreements, guaranteed that anyone making desktop systems would have no reason to ship any other OS; BeOS found this out the hard way. Fortunately, most if not all of those agreements have been invalidated, but even so it's taking a while for the manufacturers to pick a distro. Linspire got Walmart to include their disto on some low end PCs, but Walmart hasn't wanted to commit the resources needed to make things take off; they need an 800 number for people to call when they have problems. Dell has announced that Unbuntu is their choice for their PCs, and have guaranteed that every system that they ship will have drivers for every piece of hardware that's installed. Some people are waiting to see what other distros will be supported, but I don't think that multiple choices are a good idea.
Psychological studies have proven that people want choice, but they don't want too much choice. The US got by for years with just three television networks, and I think that for in the near future the same should be true of operating systems. In the near term, all of the major manufacturers should support just Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu. In the long term, everyone will follow Oracle's lead (where they introduced their own brand of Linux) and Unbuntu will fork into Dell, HPQ and IBM versions.
And then Linux will take over the desktop!
My college roommate and I drove for two hours to get to the Creve Coeur Cinema (since torn down) to see this movie. The lobby was packed prior to the show; the word-of-mouth had been very, very good. I'd read the book already (first edition, IIRC there was no hint that it would be a movie), but everything on the screen blew me away. Since then, I've been married twice and had more kids than I can count, but I can still give myself goosebumps by merely recalling the Millennium Falcon's first jump to hyperdrive. The lastest trilogy may have sucked, but the original will live forever.
Saving pages isn't automated. Instead, set up a personal proxy server that never purges its cache, and use it to surf the web. Google desktop (or something similar) can be used to index the proxy's cache in case you can't remeber where you saw something. Finally, rdist the cache to a central location so you aren't tied to a single computer, and to protect against disk crashes.
Neither the article nor the replies tell me anything useful. .tar.gz files are small, meaning they are fast to move through a network, but do they diff well? Good compression algorithms turn data into statistically random streams of bits, so I suspect that different generations of uncompressed .tar files would have smaller deltas than the compressed versions. Similar questions abound for GIF and JPEG files.
15 petabytes per year.
According to Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, recording one person's life as DVD video generates about 7 TB per year, so this is the same as generating life records for 2,000 people.
BTW, according to one trend line I've seen, the cost of a PB of raw storage will drop below $1,000 around 2020. This means that while it may cost ~$5,000,000 to store the first year's data, by 2020 you could store 13 years worth of the data (i.e. all of the data produced up to that date) for around $250,000. Double that if you want it mirrored.
As far as I'm concerned, when Palm dropped Moto's Dragonball processor for the ARM, it was all over. About that same time they got rid of the original Graffiti for something that didn't use one stroke per letter. (Admittedly, this was due to a lawsuit, but the patent was eventually overturned; Palm did not return to Graffiti, however.) There's still a thriving market on eBay for the old Palm devices. I still use my m150, and have a couple of spares that are still shrink-wrapped. The battery life is still incredible. I can take it with me on week-long hikes without any worries.
Actually, there's a Palm III emulator that's been ported all over the place, including handheld versions of Windows. There's no reason why it couldn't run on a Linux-based PDA. Maybe I should change my subject: "PalmOS will never die!"
... are doomed to live it. See Larry Niven's story "Cloak of Anarchy".
If someone could CONCLUSIVLY prove that humans are the sole cause of global warming, and that global warming is not natural, and that it is bad, I would listen.
Actually, only that last clause needs to be proven. By your reasoning, an asteroid hitting the earth is nothing to be worried about because humans wouldn't be the cause and it is a natural process. If global warming is bad, then we should work to reverse it regardless of its cause. Some proposed solutions assume that CO2 increases are the cause and work to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but other solutions involve reducing the about of solar radiation absorbed by the earth (via microsats or changes to planetary albedo).
Did you try Googling for any patents? http://www.google.com/patents?id=jI1-AAAAEBAJ&dq=7 156088
VMware? (Hey, you didn't say "free", although VMware Player and VMware Server are free-as-in-beer.)
Then it's too bad Atari didn't have a band of time traveling ninjas to kidnap this team and have them do E.T.
It'd work great on e-paper, though; waste doesn't matter on something that's instantly recyclable.
I had custody of the kids (2, 5 and 7 at the time) every other weekend. Saturday night, I get a call from work, and it's something that can't be fixed from home. I can't find my ex, I can't find a sitter, so I bring the kids in. One of the operators volunteers to show them around the computer room while I work on things. Five minutes later, the IBM mainframe mysteriously halts. Yes, one of the kids had wondered why there was a big red button on the console. My problem was suddenly minor, so I took the kids out for ice cream.
Cash in your investments and buy "40 acres and a mule" in the Ozarks. The downside is that you'll never have a vacation for the rest of your life. The upside is that you'll be safe and sound when peak oil hits and the food riots start.
Was i the only person momentarily confused by the title? Or does everyone think that California has .ca as its own TLD?
Hypernovas, like supernovas, seem to radiate a lot of their energy equally in all directions. The manner in which that energy is generated doesn't really matter, just the distribution, so a hypernova more than 260 light-years away won't be a big threat. A gamma ray burst, OTOH, radiates most of its energy in two diametrically opposed narrow cones aligned along the star's rotational axis. If such a beam happened to be aimed towards earth, then yes it could be quite deadly at great distances, but the odds of such good aim are rather slim. Eta Carinae has recently been identified as a binary system. The other star has been observed eclipsing the primary, meaning that we are near the rotational plane; i.e. neither of the poles are pointing at us, so we don't need to fear GRBs from it. I don't know of any hypernova threats nearer than Eta Carinae, so I think that we're pretty safe.
First, Eta Carinae is not visible to anyone north of 27 N, so in the US only people in or south of Miami will see it. In Africa, you basically have to be in a country that doesn't touch the Mediterranean Sea; while in Asia every country touching the Indian Ocean will see it, but not China or Japan. Among English-speaking countries, only Austrailia will have a great view, but the ozone layer will protect them (and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere) from direct radiation. "Scientists at NASA and Kansas University have determined that the supernova would need to be within 26 light years from Earth to significantly damage the ozone layer and allow cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation to saturate the Earth's surface. An encounter with a supernova that close only happens at a rate of about once in 670 million years(...) The new calculations are based largely on advances in atmospheric modeling, analysis of gamma rays produced by a supernova in 1987 called SN1987a, and a better understanding of galactic supernova locations and rates. A supernova is an explosion of a star at least twice as massive as our Sun." Since Eta Carinae is 300 times that distance, its blast wound need to be 90,000 times as energetic to be dangerous. A hypernova is about 100 times more powerful than a supernova, so there's plenty of margin of safety there.
That's a spurious complaint. All you have to do to fix it is only allow HTML forms to post to .bank URLs.