Let's look at what the real implications of cheap solar power are:
demand for tech to turn electrical power plus (whatever) ingredients into natural gas (cars powered by methane emit only CO2, not other nasty stuff, plus infrastructure there - existing cars can run on natural gas for $300 conversion kit)
Even though burning a perfect mixture of pure methane and pure oxygen do produce only CO2, a car running on pure methane would also produce nitrogen dioxide (NO2), simply because we would use air instead of pure oxygen for costs and safety. And if, or when, the oxygen/methane mix isn't perfect, the car ends up putting out some carbon monoxide (CO). In addition, emitting just CO2 isn't without problems either - it's really far from pollution free. We'd really want to burn pure oxygen and hydrogen, which would emit only water, but that still isn't practical.
The immediate down side I can think of is that the sender knows (by observing their web server logs) that you received and read that message [...] This is possibly a good thing (debatable) if it's legit email, but is a bad thing if it's spam (the spammer now knows that joe@joe.com is a valid address which is read by a human).
Eh? Just because somebody or something goes to fetch the "sent mail" doesn't mean that the mail is read by human. I don't care if the message is send directly to me or via some hosted server, I still won't be reading all the mail by myself -- some kind of filter that reads through the content is going to do some sorting if not anything else. A filtering program already reads all mail sent to me before I read it, and if it's a clear spam, the sender will be informed that "the user account doesn't exist" and the mail will be stored to/dev/null.
Firefox is meant to be a web browser - and no extras. So why would it need to use [WinFS]?
I'm not really familiar with the WinFS but I guess an application must be made WinFS aware to be able to use WinFS features in File/Save As... and File/Open... Just changing default save location to \\...\defaultstore would be a nice start on Longhorn machines if I've understood WinFS behavior correctly. I haven't seen a live Longhorn machine - common dialogs probably have WinFS support automatically?
A 12ms means that you should be able to handle a 83.3ish refresh without any ghosting (1000 / 12).
If I have understood correctly, the 12ms time is for the best case scenario (going to total black to total white or the other way around, which ever is faster). The true display speed is much harder to determine. I once read that this is because for black and white you just cut the power or put full power for the pixel to turn black or white. For something in between, you have to use limited current and just wait until the correct color turns out....or something like that -- I cannot remember for sure. One thing is sure though, my "16ms" TFT screen is much slower than a normal CRT with a 60Hz refresh rate (which should result to ~16ms). The TFT might be that fast to blink between black and white but it's far from 16ms when going from light grey to dark yellow, for example.
It might be that this display really has maximum time of 12ms but I wouldn't count on it. As usual, check the display with your own eyes. I know that my eyes are very sensitive to the ghosting effects.
"It costs us $500 to $1,000 a line to review our source code. It would cost billions of dollars to review Linux."
It actually costs this? why? where can I sign up?
I was thinking just the same thing. However, I still consider this as total FUD. Nobody is forcing them to use all of Linux. Most of the Linux source code is device drivers. It would be really stupid to review every device driver included in the kernel -- they won't use all those devices and most devices have hardware bugs so it doesn't matter if the source code were perfect because those devices still wouldn't work perfectly.
The real question is, if just the review of source code costs them $500 to $1000 a line, then how much does it cost to design, write the code, debug and then review the source? Surely they would gain hugely from looking at the Linux source code for things that need to be done for their application and just review those bits.
I guess that the real issue behind this FUD is that they are upset that their competitors can start on top of the Linux and they, with longer history, already have source code under different (non-compatible with GPL) license and they've decided that they cannot use Linux source code (because it would force them to license under GPL). So they just go on throwing FUD and hoping that somebody buys their more expensive and arguably higher quality product.
Writing high quality software is always costly. If you outsource it to foreign countries, the costly things just morph to other things -- like writing the source code is now cheaper but the review just got much more expensive because the review "must" be done by "us" and you have to consider every line compromised until proven otherwise. With Linux you get the source for Free, it's up to you do decide how much reviewing it still needs.
... but a bit uneffective. It's missing a lot of really important parts like a gimbal, for example. Nobody has steady enough arms to hold that stick and not to do any unwanted panning or tilting. Or if you do have such an arm, why are you reading this discussion at all - you don't need a steadicam.
Don't forget that most of the calendar using world formats its dates as dd/mm/yyyy, not our American system of mm/dd/yyyy. So if you plan on writing software for use outside of the U.S., this would be a really useful piece of code to keep laying around.
Why is power storage always brought up when renewables are mentioned? It's not as if it's a different type of electricity.
Probably, because it's a real issue with renewable power sources. You say we have "fairly efficient" grids. I don't agree. The current grids are pretty good for transferring power up to 1000 miles. If you're targetting to replace fossil and fission power sources with renewables you need to transfer power from the distances of at least 10000 miles without too much loss. If your energy source is sun, you'll need to transfer the energy for roughly 20000 miles, because nowadays we need energy in the night time too.
We simply don't have the technology to store all the energy from renewable sources. If we could store/transfer all the energy we can gather and use that later/elsewhere effectively, when we need that enery, I'd support renewable energy sources. Right now, I think the fission power has the least problems. I'm looking forward for fusion power but I wouldn't expect too much in the next decade or so.
Organizations get sloppy when they are not held accountable. To think that so many billions of taxes go toward what is supposedly one of our most high-tech endeavors, and they can't even install the parts correctly?
If the above assumption was automatically correct, just think for a second where it would put US Army and the Air Force... or the CIA... or the NSA... or any other TLA...
It took 2-3 months for Pioneer to resolve all the errors & issue a firmware patch, & in a few more months, the 8X drive was out, cheaper than 6x, but with problems of its own:)
This all sounds way too familiar to me. I made a mistake of buying a Pioneer (read only) DVD drive in the past when even the read only drives were still expensive and I'm fighting with its firmware even today. I complained to Pioneer and they suggested that I should upgrade to their latest offering which had similar specs but better firmware. For gods sake, my drive does have flashable firmware! Why not release a firmware update instead? Yeah, sure, I'll buy another product from you instead... I made a promise to myself to never buy another Pioneer optical drive and to this day I haven't regret my decision. It sounds like Pioneer still provides really buggy firmware for its drives. (I really don't have anything positive to say about any other Pioneer product either; some have done what the manufacturer promised but none has surprised me positively.)
I'd suggest something done by Lite-On (I've seen *many* really good products from that company in a few last years) or LG instead. Some say that Samsung should be a good optical drive manufacturer, too. And Plextor is always a safe bet but never cheap.
The point of Karate - or any martial art - would be in part *to* give him coordination.
[...]
Speaking as a former "gifted" kid, and someone who started taking martial arts young, there's nothing like knocking the shit out of the school bully to give a kid some confidence.
Yep, knocking or kicking the living shit out of the school bully is something a gifted or not-so-gifted kid should do to get some confidence. Sure... Stop right there. Just how surprised would you be, if I were to tell you, that a skilled expression can modify your thoughts, a lot more than you have ever imagined? And it'll be subtle. As in, you'll not even realize. As you're reading the words I've written, and you're still wondering what I'm actually speaking about, it may be, that you already feel deep inside you, that words really can make a difference.
Now, stop, just for a second, and think about the claim I made in the end of the previous paragraph. Would you've agreed with that unless I'd written the previous sentences? Notice that my English isn't perfect, English isn't even one of the official languages where I live, but still I can change your mind with just a couple of simple sentences of that language. Did you notice how this paragraph already changed your thoughts? If English is your native language, notice, for example, that you cannot fluently read over any sentence that contains the word stop. Just try not to stop while reading this sentence with words like stop and wait thrown in between other words like halt and pause. Did you notice that? You mind made a little pause during every one of those 'magic' words.
If the kid were really gifted, I'd give him a psychology book or two. Or make it sociology or psychotherapy. And then I'd tell him to try the skills he learns from those books with people he doesn't already know. Let me tell you, it's sometimes frightening how closely some people follow the models listed in countless books. And in the same time, you value the people that go against the known models so much more. As he's trying the new skills in action, he'll, as a side effect, learn to deal with previously unknown people (also known as social skills). Soon enough, he'll find that the typical shit written in a typical psychology book, other than the basics, is just theories after theories and it doesn't apply to reality. But by that time, it's already too late; he's already learned some social skills! And it might be that he likes those new skills. I've one question to ask: how surprised would you be, if you had picked up some psychology books by the end of the next week just because you read this message? That's something to think about.
Do you really think that having a good coordination has anything to do with good social skills? If not, why should a kid without social skills take martial arts course? To help with the lack of social skills? Why not something that helps, instead?
Also, the argument to use old equipment rather than new betrays the lie. New equipment is more energy efficient. Since the bulk of the fossil fuel burning they are talking about can be attributed to electrical generation, running an old piece of shit that sucks up ten times as much juice will produce far more pollution than stuffing it in the closet and buying an LCD.
Consider for a second that the stated energy required to manufacture a CRT display is around 240 kg of fossil fuel. In addition, lets assume that the industry can convert that to around 600kWh in electricity.
Now, lets take that old, energy sucking CRT takes around 150W of power (my old 19" CRT display takes max of 120W). Now, take that 600kWh of energy and realize that you can run that old energy sucking monitor for 4000 hours with that. Compare that to a 19" TFT display that takes about 50W (typ) of power. You'd need to run the TFT for around 8000 hours just to make even after including the energy costs of manufacturing the TFT (I'm guessing it takes about the similar amount of energy compared to a CRT to manufacture) and the energy spent during those hours for that TFT display. I'm not sure for how long an average TFT lasts currently, but I'm a bit skeptical that you're saving energy by replacing a CRT with a TFT. (The situation changes, if your CRT displays are the major source of heat for the AC to handle...)
In addition, a TFT cannot replace CRTs in many graphical work where one works with colors. (If you don't believe me, just put up a gamma test pattern on your TFT display and move your head up or down an inch. You'll notice that the gamma of a TFT display is very dependant of the vertical position of eyes. Put up some color checking pattern and move your eyes horizontally and notice how the colors shift a bit. Also, I can definately see blurring with "high speed" or "fast" 16ms TFT displays while moving any objects on the screen.)
If you think that TFT is better for the work you're using your display, then use it for that reason. Buying a TFT display to save energy is a dimishing saving compared to using a DPMS screen saver correctly.
As JesseL already explained, the problem isn't the actual "boiling" itself, but what happens after that (you loose fluid from the brake lines which gets replaced with steam). Note that even water doesn't boil under high enough pressure so the real boiling happens after you release the brakes.
And as to what comes to driving over mountains, one should use a manual transmission car and use the engine to do the braking while going downhill (select a small gear and set throttle to zero) so that your real brakes are saved for the time you really need them (like, when some animal/idiot jumps in front of you). As an added bonus, if your car has computer controlled fuel injection, you'll be able to drive down the hill with "engine running" with zero fuel usage.
I mean, female drivers are usually said not to be able to drive. On the other hand, most fatal traffic accidents are caused by males. The thing is, female drivers make a little bumps on the parking lot and stuff like that. They tend to survive to tell the story... If I were to design a car for women, I'd make sure that all the corner parts of the exterior would be easily replaceable and cheap (and therefore small so you can change only broken part). Latest VW Golf is already a step in this direction but a major change is still waiting to happen.
If the bonnet and both sides of the front of the car is a single piece, just think how much it's going to cost if you must change the whole thing after a minor bump?
SVG is lousy at [making animated menus and animated vector-based graphic animations, for which Flash is usually used]. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).
Really? Are you sure you read about SVG and not about something else? Read the Animation chapter again. Especially, note that you can use SMIL animation mechanisms. Or you can use DOM:
Using the SVG DOM. [...] Every attribute and style sheet setting is accessible to scripting, and SVG offers a set of additional DOM interfaces to support efficient animation via scripting. As a result, virtually any kind of animation can be achieved. The timer facilities in scripting languages such as ECMAScript can be used to start up and control the animations. [...]
SVG cannot replace Flash today -- mainly, because Flash has widely installed software support and SVG doesn't. However, I believe SVG has huge promises for the future including the uses you listed. IMO, the most important feature of SVG is able to apply the same stylesheet to SVG image/animation that has been applied to a (X)HTML document.
Obviously, Flash has more mature development tools as it has been on the market for longer. Unfortunately for Flash, you practically have to use Macromedia's proprietary tools to create your work. I can see absolutely no reason for SVG not being able to display every content Flash is able to display. I expect to see a converter from Flash to SVG in the future.
As for the performance, I've a bit hard time to believe that you cannot make SVG animations fly when you take a look what latest PC games do. Sure, SVG will require some level of support from hardware but if you try to run your X server without any acceleration, you'll realize that not having any hardware acceleration is too slow for even drawing simple rectangles with high performance, let alone blitting some images.
[I wrote:
A normal user logging into a linux system is logically the same thing as windows user powering up the system and logging as administrator.]
Err, where do you get this idea? A normal user logging on to a Linux system is just that - a normal user.
Yes, I'm familiar with the difference and I'm running SuperiorSU on my Windows 2000 installation to overcome some difficulties of not running as Administrator all the time. However, Notice that I said logically. In linux, if the only user of the system is you (as in Windows and single Administrator account) then all that really matters to you can be destroyed with your user account. All your important files? Gone, because if you had write access to those, so did the worm that run on your account. The only major difference is that the worm doesn't spread to the whole system (and even that's true ONLY IF no local exploits do exist in your system) but in case of single user home desktop, what's the difference, after all?
Then, since windows is all about being integrated and since most user run as "root" in Windows, it's allowed to get set up as a daemon and install itself to be loaded whenever a machine boots.
And this is different from *x systems, that allow the worm to append their "service" to.bashrc or.Xclients, exactly how? [Remember, that windows users usually run as Administrator because they are the only user of the system. A normal user logging into a linux system is logically the same thing as windows user powering up the system and logging as administrator.]
If you want to take effective measurements against stupid users, simply install all software to/usr and setup users' home directories to/home. Then apply the magic and mount/usr as exec and read only, and mount the/home as write and noexec. Yep, the user is still able to run shell scripts but he has to execute the virus with style "sh virus.sh". On the other hand, he might also run "rm -rf ~" if virus mail asked to do so... There're fool proof systems, but I guess idiot proof systems do not exist.
I currently use a Kodak DC-210+ zoom digital camera. It's getting pretty long in the tooth, and starting to wear out. What should I replace it with?
Are you really asking this question here? I'd suggest that you visit dpreview.com for more information. As for the camera, I'd suggest Canon A80 (or A70 depending on the price). It's image quality is quite nice for such a cheap camera.
In Finland the basic rule is that if the mail is sent to john.smith@company.com, then only John Smith is allowed to read it and it's considered strictly personal unless a previously written contract says otherwise. However, if the mail address is support@company.com or something else that doesn't specify a single person but a function instead, then the employer is allowed to read the mail by default. If you, as a sender, are trying to contact customer support and send mail to somebody's personal address and that person has left the company, then it's your fault. I know that some companies even provide mail forwarding for ex-employees so that their personal addresses stay functional by the time they leave the company.
Of course, such a vague rule cannot be the written law, but that seems to be the logic behind court rulings.
There is no perfect solution for dealing with matching primaries, because in the end three numbers aren't enough information to reconstruct the full spectrum of light. As soon as we get greater than 8 bits of depth, we'll have to start asking for more than 3 color components:)
As human eye only has sensors for three wave lengths, three numbers should be enough to represent full spectrum of light, as much as we can perceive it. We just have two problems: 1) the currently used RGB model doesn't model the correct wave lengths - it's close but not perfect. 2) Every human eye has a little bit different construction. No human eye is perfect - so selecting three perfect wave lengths is impossible.
After saying that, I feel that RGB is still better color model than HSV, Lab, CMYK or all the other models available because RGB is closest match to human eye behavior. All we need is much more precision than 8 bit per color. 8 bit is barely enough to store final image, but if any computations are required (like alpha blending with another image) then more precision is needed.
Perhaps one motivation for "embedded" color profiles is avoiding the need to transform 8-bit pixel values and thus introduce quantization artifacts.
My thoughts exactly. Color profiles are only a cheap hack while we're waiting for 16 bit (or more) color channels. Once we have enough precision it doesn't matter if we have to transform between color spaces instead of tagging what different numbers are supposed to mean. And no, using 16 bit per channel doesn't take significantly more than 8 bit per channel when done right because we can use the magic of compression.
I think you have inadvertently identified why JPEG2000 hasn't seen wider adoption. It has nice features like progressive refinement, which are important for very large images. For images that are 800x600 and down, the user gets the full resolution on one screen and has little use for the new capability.
I'd would love to design web sites where I could use large JPEG2000 images for pretty much all pixel based graphics. Need and image that works as an image? Put an 1024x1024 pixel image there and let the browser fetch the part it needs. Use CSS to request the display size you want and if the user wants to take a closer look to the icon, he can do that without the icon looking bad. If the browser is correctly done, the image quality doesn't suffer a little bit compared to PNG, the browser doesn't need to load anything extra (downloading only the start of the file is enough) and I can finally size things relative to viewport or user's font size, not relative to pixels.
If you think that SVG is great because it allows you to display scalable vector graphics, think what you can do with JPEG2000 which does the same thing for photos...
In some places, such as Northern Ireland, newly qualified drivers are required to wear special plates on their cars to alert other drivers of their rookie status, further ensuring road safety.
I believe it's getting pretty standard in the EU, though maybe not completely.
There used to be a special maximum speed limit and special label for newly qualified drivers in the Finland, too. A driver with a license less than one year old was required to keep the label clearly visible in the vehicle. However, other drivers behaved aggressively againts the new drivers that drove under the road's speed limit (but up to the speed limit they were allowed to drive), so the special speed limit and the label were removed. I think it's better this way as, every time I see somebody still practicing driving (practice cars have a small white triangle here) almost all "qualified" drivers seem to think they're under an obligation to overtake the student - no matter if the student is already running maximum speed allowed or the road were too narrow for overtaking.
The exam itself is quite good but an average driver in Finland doesn't care anyone but himself. And yes, you must have an ability to paraller park around here.
As a sidenote, Finland has different tests and licenses for motorcycles and cars.
Let's assume that you've got ~1,000,000 lines of code. Have you reviewed each one of them? The recent attempt to install a Linux backdoor was only spotted by 3 guys examining the code - and they were just concentrating on a few lines.
Hmmm... are you really running much software that has over one million lines of code and require uid=0? I think most of the suid software is pretty simple just to be on the safe side. Some old monolithic server software require suid and we have seen all the vulnerabilities with them.
I wouldn't trust any software, with over one million lines of code, a suid bit unless it came from some place I can trust.
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Even though burning a perfect mixture of pure methane and pure oxygen do produce only CO2, a car running on pure methane would also produce nitrogen dioxide (NO2), simply because we would use air instead of pure oxygen for costs and safety. And if, or when, the oxygen/methane mix isn't perfect, the car ends up putting out some carbon monoxide (CO). In addition, emitting just CO2 isn't without problems either - it's really far from pollution free. We'd really want to burn pure oxygen and hydrogen, which would emit only water, but that still isn't practical.
Eh? Just because somebody or something goes to fetch the "sent mail" doesn't mean that the mail is read by human. I don't care if the message is send directly to me or via some hosted server, I still won't be reading all the mail by myself -- some kind of filter that reads through the content is going to do some sorting if not anything else. A filtering program already reads all mail sent to me before I read it, and if it's a clear spam, the sender will be informed that "the user account doesn't exist" and the mail will be stored to /dev/null.
I'm not really familiar with the WinFS but I guess an application must be made WinFS aware to be able to use WinFS features in File/Save As... and File/Open... Just changing default save location to \\...\defaultstore would be a nice start on Longhorn machines if I've understood WinFS behavior correctly. I haven't seen a live Longhorn machine - common dialogs probably have WinFS support automatically?
If I have understood correctly, the 12ms time is for the best case scenario (going to total black to total white or the other way around, which ever is faster). The true display speed is much harder to determine. I once read that this is because for black and white you just cut the power or put full power for the pixel to turn black or white. For something in between, you have to use limited current and just wait until the correct color turns out. ...or something like that -- I cannot remember for sure. One thing is sure though, my "16ms" TFT screen is much slower than a normal CRT with a 60Hz refresh rate (which should result to ~16ms). The TFT might be that fast to blink between black and white but it's far from 16ms when going from light grey to dark yellow, for example.
It might be that this display really has maximum time of 12ms but I wouldn't count on it. As usual, check the display with your own eyes. I know that my eyes are very sensitive to the ghosting effects.
I was thinking just the same thing. However, I still consider this as total FUD. Nobody is forcing them to use all of Linux. Most of the Linux source code is device drivers. It would be really stupid to review every device driver included in the kernel -- they won't use all those devices and most devices have hardware bugs so it doesn't matter if the source code were perfect because those devices still wouldn't work perfectly.
The real question is, if just the review of source code costs them $500 to $1000 a line, then how much does it cost to design, write the code, debug and then review the source? Surely they would gain hugely from looking at the Linux source code for things that need to be done for their application and just review those bits.
I guess that the real issue behind this FUD is that they are upset that their competitors can start on top of the Linux and they, with longer history, already have source code under different (non-compatible with GPL) license and they've decided that they cannot use Linux source code (because it would force them to license under GPL). So they just go on throwing FUD and hoping that somebody buys their more expensive and arguably higher quality product.
Writing high quality software is always costly. If you outsource it to foreign countries, the costly things just morph to other things -- like writing the source code is now cheaper but the review just got much more expensive because the review "must" be done by "us" and you have to consider every line compromised until proven otherwise. With Linux you get the source for Free, it's up to you do decide how much reviewing it still needs.
If you don't care the hours the building takes, then I'd suggest building something like this guy did: a full steadicam-like setup with a vest, two suspension arms, a fully working gimbal and all the stuff this $14 poor man's "steadicam" has. The costs? About $30, plus 20 hours of work. Sure, it looks ugly but you can't beat the price for the functionality. You'll need stabilizer arms for a stable picture while running or glimbing stairs.
(As a sidenote, "SteadiCam" is a trademarked term. Wikipedia has more information about steadicams in general.)
Actually, most of the world is following ISO 8601 standard, which says that you should use YYYY-MM-DD instead. The ISO 8601 time format is also recommended by W3C.
Probably, because it's a real issue with renewable power sources. You say we have "fairly efficient" grids. I don't agree. The current grids are pretty good for transferring power up to 1000 miles. If you're targetting to replace fossil and fission power sources with renewables you need to transfer power from the distances of at least 10000 miles without too much loss. If your energy source is sun, you'll need to transfer the energy for roughly 20000 miles, because nowadays we need energy in the night time too.
We simply don't have the technology to store all the energy from renewable sources. If we could store/transfer all the energy we can gather and use that later/elsewhere effectively, when we need that enery, I'd support renewable energy sources. Right now, I think the fission power has the least problems. I'm looking forward for fusion power but I wouldn't expect too much in the next decade or so.
If the above assumption was automatically correct, just think for a second where it would put US Army and the Air Force... or the CIA... or the NSA... or any other TLA...
Well, at least I can hope you're incorrect.
This all sounds way too familiar to me. I made a mistake of buying a Pioneer (read only) DVD drive in the past when even the read only drives were still expensive and I'm fighting with its firmware even today. I complained to Pioneer and they suggested that I should upgrade to their latest offering which had similar specs but better firmware. For gods sake, my drive does have flashable firmware! Why not release a firmware update instead? Yeah, sure, I'll buy another product from you instead... I made a promise to myself to never buy another Pioneer optical drive and to this day I haven't regret my decision. It sounds like Pioneer still provides really buggy firmware for its drives. (I really don't have anything positive to say about any other Pioneer product either; some have done what the manufacturer promised but none has surprised me positively.)
I'd suggest something done by Lite-On (I've seen *many* really good products from that company in a few last years) or LG instead. Some say that Samsung should be a good optical drive manufacturer, too. And Plextor is always a safe bet but never cheap.
Yep, knocking or kicking the living shit out of the school bully is something a gifted or not-so-gifted kid should do to get some confidence. Sure... Stop right there. Just how surprised would you be, if I were to tell you, that a skilled expression can modify your thoughts, a lot more than you have ever imagined? And it'll be subtle. As in, you'll not even realize. As you're reading the words I've written, and you're still wondering what I'm actually speaking about, it may be, that you already feel deep inside you, that words really can make a difference.
Now, stop, just for a second, and think about the claim I made in the end of the previous paragraph. Would you've agreed with that unless I'd written the previous sentences? Notice that my English isn't perfect, English isn't even one of the official languages where I live, but still I can change your mind with just a couple of simple sentences of that language. Did you notice how this paragraph already changed your thoughts? If English is your native language, notice, for example, that you cannot fluently read over any sentence that contains the word stop. Just try not to stop while reading this sentence with words like stop and wait thrown in between other words like halt and pause. Did you notice that? You mind made a little pause during every one of those 'magic' words.
If the kid were really gifted, I'd give him a psychology book or two. Or make it sociology or psychotherapy. And then I'd tell him to try the skills he learns from those books with people he doesn't already know. Let me tell you, it's sometimes frightening how closely some people follow the models listed in countless books. And in the same time, you value the people that go against the known models so much more. As he's trying the new skills in action, he'll, as a side effect, learn to deal with previously unknown people (also known as social skills). Soon enough, he'll find that the typical shit written in a typical psychology book, other than the basics, is just theories after theories and it doesn't apply to reality. But by that time, it's already too late; he's already learned some social skills! And it might be that he likes those new skills. I've one question to ask: how surprised would you be, if you had picked up some psychology books by the end of the next week just because you read this message? That's something to think about.
Do you really think that having a good coordination has anything to do with good social skills? If not, why should a kid without social skills take martial arts course? To help with the lack of social skills? Why not something that helps, instead?
Consider for a second that the stated energy required to manufacture a CRT display is around 240 kg of fossil fuel. In addition, lets assume that the industry can convert that to around 600kWh in electricity.
Now, lets take that old, energy sucking CRT takes around 150W of power (my old 19" CRT display takes max of 120W). Now, take that 600kWh of energy and realize that you can run that old energy sucking monitor for 4000 hours with that. Compare that to a 19" TFT display that takes about 50W (typ) of power. You'd need to run the TFT for around 8000 hours just to make even after including the energy costs of manufacturing the TFT (I'm guessing it takes about the similar amount of energy compared to a CRT to manufacture) and the energy spent during those hours for that TFT display. I'm not sure for how long an average TFT lasts currently, but I'm a bit skeptical that you're saving energy by replacing a CRT with a TFT. (The situation changes, if your CRT displays are the major source of heat for the AC to handle...)
In addition, a TFT cannot replace CRTs in many graphical work where one works with colors. (If you don't believe me, just put up a gamma test pattern on your TFT display and move your head up or down an inch. You'll notice that the gamma of a TFT display is very dependant of the vertical position of eyes. Put up some color checking pattern and move your eyes horizontally and notice how the colors shift a bit. Also, I can definately see blurring with "high speed" or "fast" 16ms TFT displays while moving any objects on the screen.)
If you think that TFT is better for the work you're using your display, then use it for that reason. Buying a TFT display to save energy is a dimishing saving compared to using a DPMS screen saver correctly.
And as to what comes to driving over mountains, one should use a manual transmission car and use the engine to do the braking while going downhill (select a small gear and set throttle to zero) so that your real brakes are saved for the time you really need them (like, when some animal/idiot jumps in front of you). As an added bonus, if your car has computer controlled fuel injection, you'll be able to drive down the hill with "engine running" with zero fuel usage.
If the bonnet and both sides of the front of the car is a single piece, just think how much it's going to cost if you must change the whole thing after a minor bump?
Really? Are you sure you read about SVG and not about something else? Read the Animation chapter again. Especially, note that you can use SMIL animation mechanisms. Or you can use DOM:
SVG cannot replace Flash today -- mainly, because Flash has widely installed software support and SVG doesn't. However, I believe SVG has huge promises for the future including the uses you listed. IMO, the most important feature of SVG is able to apply the same stylesheet to SVG image/animation that has been applied to a (X)HTML document.
Obviously, Flash has more mature development tools as it has been on the market for longer. Unfortunately for Flash, you practically have to use Macromedia's proprietary tools to create your work. I can see absolutely no reason for SVG not being able to display every content Flash is able to display. I expect to see a converter from Flash to SVG in the future.
As for the performance, I've a bit hard time to believe that you cannot make SVG animations fly when you take a look what latest PC games do. Sure, SVG will require some level of support from hardware but if you try to run your X server without any acceleration, you'll realize that not having any hardware acceleration is too slow for even drawing simple rectangles with high performance, let alone blitting some images.
Error #42: assert(life != social_life) failed.
Yes, I'm familiar with the difference and I'm running SuperiorSU on my Windows 2000 installation to overcome some difficulties of not running as Administrator all the time. However, Notice that I said logically. In linux, if the only user of the system is you (as in Windows and single Administrator account) then all that really matters to you can be destroyed with your user account. All your important files? Gone, because if you had write access to those, so did the worm that run on your account. The only major difference is that the worm doesn't spread to the whole system (and even that's true ONLY IF no local exploits do exist in your system) but in case of single user home desktop, what's the difference, after all?
And this is different from *x systems, that allow the worm to append their "service" to .bashrc or .Xclients, exactly how? [Remember, that windows users usually run as Administrator because they are the only user of the system. A normal user logging into a linux system is logically the same thing as windows user powering up the system and logging as administrator.]
If you want to take effective measurements against stupid users, simply install all software to /usr and setup users' home directories to /home. Then apply the magic and mount /usr as exec and read only, and mount the /home as write and noexec. Yep, the user is still able to run shell scripts but he has to execute the virus with style "sh virus.sh". On the other hand, he might also run "rm -rf ~" if virus mail asked to do so... There're fool proof systems, but I guess idiot proof systems do not exist.
Are you really asking this question here? I'd suggest that you visit dpreview.com for more information. As for the camera, I'd suggest Canon A80 (or A70 depending on the price). It's image quality is quite nice for such a cheap camera.
Of course, such a vague rule cannot be the written law, but that seems to be the logic behind court rulings.
As human eye only has sensors for three wave lengths, three numbers should be enough to represent full spectrum of light, as much as we can perceive it. We just have two problems: 1) the currently used RGB model doesn't model the correct wave lengths - it's close but not perfect. 2) Every human eye has a little bit different construction. No human eye is perfect - so selecting three perfect wave lengths is impossible.
After saying that, I feel that RGB is still better color model than HSV, Lab, CMYK or all the other models available because RGB is closest match to human eye behavior. All we need is much more precision than 8 bit per color. 8 bit is barely enough to store final image, but if any computations are required (like alpha blending with another image) then more precision is needed.
My thoughts exactly. Color profiles are only a cheap hack while we're waiting for 16 bit (or more) color channels. Once we have enough precision it doesn't matter if we have to transform between color spaces instead of tagging what different numbers are supposed to mean. And no, using 16 bit per channel doesn't take significantly more than 8 bit per channel when done right because we can use the magic of compression.
I'd would love to design web sites where I could use large JPEG2000 images for pretty much all pixel based graphics. Need and image that works as an image? Put an 1024x1024 pixel image there and let the browser fetch the part it needs. Use CSS to request the display size you want and if the user wants to take a closer look to the icon, he can do that without the icon looking bad. If the browser is correctly done, the image quality doesn't suffer a little bit compared to PNG, the browser doesn't need to load anything extra (downloading only the start of the file is enough) and I can finally size things relative to viewport or user's font size, not relative to pixels.
If you think that SVG is great because it allows you to display scalable vector graphics, think what you can do with JPEG2000 which does the same thing for photos...
There used to be a special maximum speed limit and special label for newly qualified drivers in the Finland, too. A driver with a license less than one year old was required to keep the label clearly visible in the vehicle. However, other drivers behaved aggressively againts the new drivers that drove under the road's speed limit (but up to the speed limit they were allowed to drive), so the special speed limit and the label were removed. I think it's better this way as, every time I see somebody still practicing driving (practice cars have a small white triangle here) almost all "qualified" drivers seem to think they're under an obligation to overtake the student - no matter if the student is already running maximum speed allowed or the road were too narrow for overtaking.
The exam itself is quite good but an average driver in Finland doesn't care anyone but himself. And yes, you must have an ability to paraller park around here.
As a sidenote, Finland has different tests and licenses for motorcycles and cars.
Hmmm... are you really running much software that has over one million lines of code and require uid=0? I think most of the suid software is pretty simple just to be on the safe side. Some old monolithic server software require suid and we have seen all the vulnerabilities with them.
I wouldn't trust any software, with over one million lines of code, a suid bit unless it came from some place I can trust.