Well, yeah, I acknowledge a slight bias in assuming the person I was responding to was in America (I'm in America).:-) I admit that being in a given locality of a major story will tend to make you be more interested in it.
You could already do this I suppose using the already-extant satellite internet access systems. But why would you want to if you live in range of the MAN? Yes, the bandwidth is about the same, but your latency will be MUCH less than to a satellite transceiver (the difference it take an EM wave to travel from car to city 10 miles distant and back (way shorter than you'd notice) compared to from your car to orbital bird and back (quarter second and up depending on altitude)). Wouldn't matter for email and web surfing probably but net games and remote shelling would really be feeling the difference.
As long as your train is mostly above-ground it'd be easy to mount a transceiver on the train, and then have a LAN on the train (data port on every seat or something, or in special "commuters who like to work" cars that cost a few bucks extra to defer the cost of the modification). Short tunnels could be fixed with rebroadcasters, longer ones with beefier ones. If the tunnel is through something like a mountain you'd probably need a rebroadcaster on the opposite-from-MAN side anyway.
It would be especially nice if they included a three-pronger AC outlet with each ethernet port. Gotta figure, a few dozen laptops would be a negligible power drain compared to an electric turbine powerful enough to move n tons of train + people + cargo... If you're using a gas/diesel turbine you probably have power to spare to run a small generator anyway (and probably are already doing so for the electrical subsystem on the train).
Well, the majority of work data pulled from the intra/inter-net via the web probably has a pretty plain interface to begin with. I mean, how fat does a web2ldap address book need to be? (this is not to say some idiot hasn't done it with a big Flash movie calling data URLs, but hopefully that doesn't happen often). Similarly, news clippings (like for the journalist), stock quotes / business documents, scientific data (interfaces to a LIMS), etc. are all pretty simple, mostly textual data. Even if you tart it up a bit with a few pictures that doesn't change the inherently textual and thus fundamentally low bandwidth nature of the data.
And of course if you're using the wireless bandwidth for a terminal interface (shell access to data, company mail or news, company internal IRC network, etc.), it's probably 28.8 kbps at a max. (of course if you're a looooooong way from the transceiver the lag would be a bitch;-) (rsh'ing from the moon would suck...))
Do you by any chance live in Austin, TX?:-) (can't count the number of times I've seen some lady driving the youth soccer league around in her suburan attack/utility vehicle while using both hands to talk to two people on two cell phones (at least by the way she goes from lane 0 to lane n at high speed and random intervals))
Well, hopefully the terminal would be on the passenger side and be engineered such that (s)he couldn't reach the keyboard or easily see the screen. Yes, the only damn thing you should be doing if you're in the driver's seat is driving.:-)
Now if you have a passenger, I can see this as being a good thing. The web term would keep them from bugging you while you keep yout eyes on the road (hey, ideal world), and if you forgot a map, they can still play navigator for you using a map website. And if you have a kid up there they can be kept from asking the Dread Question (namely: "while(1) { printf("Are we there yet?!\n");}") by giving them some URLS to pr0n...;-)
Come on, which (made-up) news story would you read/watch/listen to first (i.e. pay the most attention and therefor generate the most potential sales to advertisers):
Arab-Isreali Conflict Intensifies
Indian Factions Settle Differences
Journalism is nothing more than the material in between the ads. It's sole reason for existence is to attract viewers to said ads[1]. Therefore, whatever the news media perceives as being attractive to the largest number of audience members they prioritize coverage of. This is why car wrecks come before cattle prices in the evening news, and cattle prices are all there is in the 5am farm report (<-- central texas).
The media will always focus on what is bad and/or exceptional before it focuses on what is good or normal becuase that attracts more attention ("1 Dead in Schoolbus Collision" vs. "37 Survive Schoolbus Collision" or "17000 cars didn't collide on day of schoolbus collision").
[1] My fiancee recently received her Bachelors in Journalism and derived particular black humor from a quote to this effect from somebody like Cronkite or Murrow. Apparently said to a junior reporter, paraphrased it was something like "Never forget that all you are is filler in between advertisements."
I swear I just (like three days ago) came across this place that basically did everything you're asking for. They would take a master from the musician, along with digitized cover/insert material, and when an order came in, they would burn a Redbook CD copy of the master, stick it in a case with the printed cover and insert, and handle the shipping/billing. At the end of the month, musician gets a check for that month's sales minus their fees (it was linked to from/. I _think_ and the person linking to it was a musician using the service, saying inpassing that the fees were very reasonable). The problem is that I've been racking my brain for about 5 minutes now and I can't recall their URL.:-( Oh well, at least take solace that someone is out there on the net offering what you want (try google for "redbook fullfilment" or something I guess). Sorry to be so vague...
Pick up any book on graphic design (by that I mean stuff like page layout). Any college of journalism will have at least one course on this (and by extension the college bookstore(s) will have the texts). My fiancee recently got her journalism degree (concentration in magazine design), so I've absorbed some of this stuff over her shoulder.
One book I got that does a pretty good job of explaining this stuff to amateurs is The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (1994, Peachpit Press; $10.50 at www.bookpool.com).
See specifically chapters 7 through 9 (the "Designing with type" section).
I usually code in 14 to 16 point font. I find that at this level most of the "standard" fonts are usable (i.e. something in the courer-TNR-arial-whatever family). I usually end up using a TrueType version of courier if it's available.
I also go out of my way to get a) syntax highlighting (becuase no matter how good I get at C I always forget that fscking terminating */;-) ) and b) a dark back ground color scheme (this way the lighter colors in a syntax schema show up better).
Are you sure it uses motif? I don't recall it needing it when I installed rp8 on a machine with no motif... But then I have OpenMotif installed (yeah, it's big, but it's free;-) ) so I may not have noticed a problem if they changed it to using motif recently (the non-motif-having machine install was a while ago whereas my most recent install of rp on this machine was about a week ago).
Yeah, that is a nasty bug. Thanks for posting the fix! (I installed OpenMotif so the libXm thing isn't a problem, and libXt on my system is.6, so that's why I didn't notice anything amiss...)
It is real hard to hear substantive aural differences once your encoding bitrate is 128 kbps or higher. That is unless your hearing is extremely sharp. The "crappy sound" of most mp3's if they're encoded at 128 or above is more due to crummy sound reproduction in the computer (noisy sound card, cheeepass2000-model speakers, etc.).
I tried Mozilla 0.8 a few days ago (the last milestone I tried was 0.6 IIRC), and was pleasantly suprised by how much it has improved. Didn't crash once in several hours of use, even when I fed it Java. It even liked my 4.x series plugins[1] (namely Flash, I haven't tested realplayer or acrobat yet), which is a very cool point 'cuz that means there are whole masses of plugins that people use/rely on that won't have to be recoded all in a hurry for the new version.
So all in all: yay Mozilla! Thanks, coder dudes!:-)
[1] easy to do: cp/path/to/4.x/plugins/*/path/to/mozilla/plugins/ worked for me (one other filesystem level oddity was that to get java to work I had to symlink the libjavaplugin_oji.so from ~4 levels deep under (/path/to/mozilla)/plugins/ back to plugins; seems odd that the installer wouldn't do this).
Proof positive I need to drink at least one cup of coffee before reading/. after waking up. The thought of M$ being invovled in some sort of webcam-of-giant-booger, and what nefarous reasons they would have, dude, that's just wrong.:-)
The broadband 'explosion' is crawling to a halt, and many providers are wondering why. It's quite simple, really -
everyone has as much pornography as they want.
Pornography has always been the driving force behind Internet innovation, after all. It was for pornography that ever
faster connections were demanded, and it was for pornography that the basics of online financial transactions were
fleshed out.
However, there's simply a limit to the demand for pornography. To put it bluntly, everyone who uses the stuff is
beating themselves sore, and can't possibly consume any more. Thus, the adoption of home broadband connections has
dropped off severely.
I predict, though, that our wily friends the pornographers will find a way to stimulate demand. Perhaps they will lobby
congress to allow advertisements for pornography on television. Perhaps they will hire a celebrity spokesperson, such
as Bob Doll or Heidi Wall. Regardless, once the pornographers get back on their feet, broadband demand will ignite
once more.
Well, as one person (whose name I can't recall) said: "The entire body of computer science can be viewed as nothing more than the development of efficient methods for the storage, transportation, encoding, and rendering of pornography.".
It's easy to see how pr0n providers could cater to and increase demand for the broadband market: higher resolution and encoding for stills and motion picture files, high quality sound in motion picture files, Flash site navigation, etc. etc. etc. Figure, what, the average file size of a pr0n JPEG is 40-80KB? You could easily 10x that if you went for higher quality encoding and/or greater resolutions.
btw, Bob Dole is already a spokesperson for the sex industry. "Take viagra! It gave me a stiffy!"
AFAIK the 2d acceleration is pretty generalized (the XAA in XFree 4.x, I think in later 3.3.x too). So any driver that implements this will have "good 'nuff" 2d accel, which is most of them (again AFAIK; I did use one card that didn't (a shitty embedded SiS chipset video thing), and that sucked[1])). I know that, for example, things besides the rage128 in the ATi line are accelerated (e.g. Xpert 98, my fav' ubercheap agp card). I've also seen Matrox cards perform impressively in this regard (G200 & G400).
WRT Nautilus, I know basically zero about it but another poster is saying that they haven't addressed optimization yet (good for them, as Knuth said: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil.").
[1] I'd move a window, and it would screw up the blitting, so the window would leave glitches on the desktop and surfaces "below" it, as well as picking up glitches itself. Oh, and of course since everything was integrated and sharing the same limited bandwidth on the MB, moving the window caused so much traffic or something that the audio from a playing CD would stutter.:-( This was on the POS[tm] brand developer workstations I had at my last startup job (but to be charitable, they were very cheap and did basically let us get the job done).
Re:problem for lan parties isn't the case...
on
Cool Case
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I got the 19 becuase my 17 went all bbbZZZt-pop on me.;-) Oh well, it gave me 5 and a half years of faithful service so I can't complain too loud. (The 19 was only ~$50 more than a nice 17 what with this random super-duper rebate thing, which to my suprise the company actually honored.)
One problem is that subscription costs (for library usage, which is what you need to get for >1 scientist at $LOCATION to make use of the information) are really, really high, and have been rising far faster than inflation. I seem to recall that in my field, something like 90% of the journals are controlled by <3 firms. Hello, price fixing? ("my field" == chemistry). One journal I read had to be dropped last year by my school becuase a year's subscription had crossed the $40,000 USD mark.
The problem is that the most expensive journals tend to also be the most "prestigous" (sp? my internal speeler isn't working well today) journals, e.g. Nature or Science. So people are in this wierd position of wanting to publish in some journals for their resume, and others to reach the widest audience (c.f. Angewantde Chemie, international edition).
In an ideal world there would be some way of having free access to scientific articles, like through the web in some centralized fashion, but I understand that peer review and staff costs are not zero. Not a trivial problem to solve...
The other reply by Mr. Currie is very correct. Small additional note: really cold metals still have really low resistance, even if it ain't exactly zero.:-) So unless by T > Tcrit you mean T = 500 K or something, it probably won't die horribly. I'd guess you'd see increasing glitchiness as T rose, leading to total system failure. So you'd have functional warnings besides temp alarms (much like a computer that's overclocked too much now).
problem for lan parties isn't the case...
on
Cool Case
·
· Score: 2
... it's the fsckin' moniter. My case is pretty light compared to my behemoth of a moniter (19" flatscreen, weighs about 60 pounds and is really unwieldly to carry). If somebody made a "moniter carrier" (like straps and handles or something), I'd buy it.
Well, to be honest I doubt that we'll reach room-temp or higher superconductors any time soon (== next hundred years or so). How ever, I suspect that in the next 20-50 years we'll discover a superconductor whose critical temperature is reachable with common industrial refridgerants (like say -40 C instead of -113). This is an easier goal to reach energetically and would open the field to industrial applications like the cool plasma deposition things the other poster was speaking of.
I did a little research into this field a few years back in a special topics class (as a chemist). My impression was that superconducting compounds (I was studying the Yttrium-Barium-Copper-Oxide family) were superconducting by virtue of "channels" forming through the crystalline structure that had surrounding electron densities just right such that free electrons could flow "down" them with 0 resistance, and that since the surrounding atoms "wiggled around" too much at T > Tcrit, the "channels" were disrupted. Or something. I was a chemist, and a freshman, so I wasn't exposed to a lot of the real underlying theory.
heh, in which case the frustration of doing any thing shell-related in graphitti and over a 1KB/day link is far more punishment than any private citizen could legally inflict on them...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah, I acknowledge a slight bias in assuming the person I was responding to was in America (I'm in America). :-) I admit that being in a given locality of a major story will tend to make you be more interested in it.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
You could already do this I suppose using the already-extant satellite internet access systems. But why would you want to if you live in range of the MAN? Yes, the bandwidth is about the same, but your latency will be MUCH less than to a satellite transceiver (the difference it take an EM wave to travel from car to city 10 miles distant and back (way shorter than you'd notice) compared to from your car to orbital bird and back (quarter second and up depending on altitude)). Wouldn't matter for email and web surfing probably but net games and remote shelling would really be feeling the difference.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
As long as your train is mostly above-ground it'd be easy to mount a transceiver on the train, and then have a LAN on the train (data port on every seat or something, or in special "commuters who like to work" cars that cost a few bucks extra to defer the cost of the modification). Short tunnels could be fixed with rebroadcasters, longer ones with beefier ones. If the tunnel is through something like a mountain you'd probably need a rebroadcaster on the opposite-from-MAN side anyway.
It would be especially nice if they included a three-pronger AC outlet with each ethernet port. Gotta figure, a few dozen laptops would be a negligible power drain compared to an electric turbine powerful enough to move n tons of train + people + cargo... If you're using a gas/diesel turbine you probably have power to spare to run a small generator anyway (and probably are already doing so for the electrical subsystem on the train).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Well, the majority of work data pulled from the intra/inter-net via the web probably has a pretty plain interface to begin with. I mean, how fat does a web2ldap address book need to be? (this is not to say some idiot hasn't done it with a big Flash movie calling data URLs, but hopefully that doesn't happen often). Similarly, news clippings (like for the journalist), stock quotes / business documents, scientific data (interfaces to a LIMS), etc. are all pretty simple, mostly textual data. Even if you tart it up a bit with a few pictures that doesn't change the inherently textual and thus fundamentally low bandwidth nature of the data.
And of course if you're using the wireless bandwidth for a terminal interface (shell access to data, company mail or news, company internal IRC network, etc.), it's probably 28.8 kbps at a max. (of course if you're a looooooong way from the transceiver the lag would be a bitch ;-) (rsh'ing from the moon would suck...))
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Do you by any chance live in Austin, TX? :-) (can't count the number of times I've seen some lady driving the youth soccer league around in her suburan attack/utility vehicle while using both hands to talk to two people on two cell phones (at least by the way she goes from lane 0 to lane n at high speed and random intervals))
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Well, hopefully the terminal would be on the passenger side and be engineered such that (s)he couldn't reach the keyboard or easily see the screen. Yes, the only damn thing you should be doing if you're in the driver's seat is driving. :-)
Now if you have a passenger, I can see this as being a good thing. The web term would keep them from bugging you while you keep yout eyes on the road (hey, ideal world), and if you forgot a map, they can still play navigator for you using a map website. And if you have a kid up there they can be kept from asking the Dread Question (namely: "while(1) { printf("Are we there yet?!\n");}") by giving them some URLS to pr0n... ;-)
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Come on, which (made-up) news story would you read/watch/listen to first (i.e. pay the most attention and therefor generate the most potential sales to advertisers):
- Arab-Isreali Conflict Intensifies
- Indian Factions Settle Differences
Journalism is nothing more than the material in between the ads. It's sole reason for existence is to attract viewers to said ads[1]. Therefore, whatever the news media perceives as being attractive to the largest number of audience members they prioritize coverage of. This is why car wrecks come before cattle prices in the evening news, and cattle prices are all there is in the 5am farm report (<-- central texas).The media will always focus on what is bad and/or exceptional before it focuses on what is good or normal becuase that attracts more attention ("1 Dead in Schoolbus Collision" vs. "37 Survive Schoolbus Collision" or "17000 cars didn't collide on day of schoolbus collision").
[1] My fiancee recently received her Bachelors in Journalism and derived particular black humor from a quote to this effect from somebody like Cronkite or Murrow. Apparently said to a junior reporter, paraphrased it was something like "Never forget that all you are is filler in between advertisements."
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
I swear I just (like three days ago) came across this place that basically did everything you're asking for. They would take a master from the musician, along with digitized cover/insert material, and when an order came in, they would burn a Redbook CD copy of the master, stick it in a case with the printed cover and insert, and handle the shipping/billing. At the end of the month, musician gets a check for that month's sales minus their fees (it was linked to from /. I _think_ and the person linking to it was a musician using the service, saying inpassing that the fees were very reasonable). The problem is that I've been racking my brain for about 5 minutes now and I can't recall their URL. :-( Oh well, at least take solace that someone is out there on the net offering what you want (try google for "redbook fullfilment" or something I guess). Sorry to be so vague...
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Pick up any book on graphic design (by that I mean stuff like page layout). Any college of journalism will have at least one course on this (and by extension the college bookstore(s) will have the texts). My fiancee recently got her journalism degree (concentration in magazine design), so I've absorbed some of this stuff over her shoulder.
One book I got that does a pretty good job of explaining this stuff to amateurs is The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (1994, Peachpit Press; $10.50 at www.bookpool.com). See specifically chapters 7 through 9 (the "Designing with type" section).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
I usually code in 14 to 16 point font. I find that at this level most of the "standard" fonts are usable (i.e. something in the courer-TNR-arial-whatever family). I usually end up using a TrueType version of courier if it's available.
I also go out of my way to get a) syntax highlighting (becuase no matter how good I get at C I always forget that fscking terminating */ ;-) ) and b) a dark back ground color scheme (this way the lighter colors in a syntax schema show up better).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Are you sure it uses motif? I don't recall it needing it when I installed rp8 on a machine with no motif... But then I have OpenMotif installed (yeah, it's big, but it's free ;-) ) so I may not have noticed a problem if they changed it to using motif recently (the non-motif-having machine install was a while ago whereas my most recent install of rp on this machine was about a week ago).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Yeah, that is a nasty bug. Thanks for posting the fix! (I installed OpenMotif so the libXm thing isn't a problem, and libXt on my system is .6, so that's why I didn't notice anything amiss...)
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
It is real hard to hear substantive aural differences once your encoding bitrate is 128 kbps or higher. That is unless your hearing is extremely sharp. The "crappy sound" of most mp3's if they're encoded at 128 or above is more due to crummy sound reproduction in the computer (noisy sound card, cheeepass2000-model speakers, etc.).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
I tried Mozilla 0.8 a few days ago (the last milestone I tried was 0.6 IIRC), and was pleasantly suprised by how much it has improved. Didn't crash once in several hours of use, even when I fed it Java. It even liked my 4.x series plugins[1] (namely Flash, I haven't tested realplayer or acrobat yet), which is a very cool point 'cuz that means there are whole masses of plugins that people use/rely on that won't have to be recoded all in a hurry for the new version.
So all in all: yay Mozilla! Thanks, coder dudes! :-)
[1] easy to do: cp /path/to/4.x/plugins/* /path/to/mozilla/plugins/ worked for me (one other filesystem level oddity was that to get java to work I had to symlink the libjavaplugin_oji.so from ~4 levels deep under (/path/to/mozilla)/plugins/ back to plugins; seems odd that the installer wouldn't do this).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Proof positive I need to drink at least one cup of coffee before reading /. after waking up. The thought of M$ being invovled in some sort of webcam-of-giant-booger, and what nefarous reasons they would have, dude, that's just wrong. :-)
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Um, actually I can think of two ways to do this:
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Well, as one person (whose name I can't recall) said: "The entire body of computer science can be viewed as nothing more than the development of efficient methods for the storage, transportation, encoding, and rendering of pornography.".
It's easy to see how pr0n providers could cater to and increase demand for the broadband market: higher resolution and encoding for stills and motion picture files, high quality sound in motion picture files, Flash site navigation, etc. etc. etc. Figure, what, the average file size of a pr0n JPEG is 40-80KB? You could easily 10x that if you went for higher quality encoding and/or greater resolutions.
btw, Bob Dole is already a spokesperson for the sex industry. "Take viagra! It gave me a stiffy!"
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
AFAIK the 2d acceleration is pretty generalized (the XAA in XFree 4.x, I think in later 3.3.x too). So any driver that implements this will have "good 'nuff" 2d accel, which is most of them (again AFAIK; I did use one card that didn't (a shitty embedded SiS chipset video thing), and that sucked[1])). I know that, for example, things besides the rage128 in the ATi line are accelerated (e.g. Xpert 98, my fav' ubercheap agp card). I've also seen Matrox cards perform impressively in this regard (G200 & G400).
WRT Nautilus, I know basically zero about it but another poster is saying that they haven't addressed optimization yet (good for them, as Knuth said: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil.").
[1] I'd move a window, and it would screw up the blitting, so the window would leave glitches on the desktop and surfaces "below" it, as well as picking up glitches itself. Oh, and of course since everything was integrated and sharing the same limited bandwidth on the MB, moving the window caused so much traffic or something that the audio from a playing CD would stutter. :-( This was on the POS[tm] brand developer workstations I had at my last startup job (but to be charitable, they were very cheap and did basically let us get the job done).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Yeah, I got the 19 becuase my 17 went all bbbZZZt-pop on me. ;-) Oh well, it gave me 5 and a half years of faithful service so I can't complain too loud. (The 19 was only ~$50 more than a nice 17 what with this random super-duper rebate thing, which to my suprise the company actually honored.)
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
... the same ever again. Or patch cable for that matter. That's just wrong! Wrong, I say!
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
One problem is that subscription costs (for library usage, which is what you need to get for >1 scientist at $LOCATION to make use of the information) are really, really high, and have been rising far faster than inflation. I seem to recall that in my field, something like 90% of the journals are controlled by <3 firms. Hello, price fixing? ("my field" == chemistry). One journal I read had to be dropped last year by my school becuase a year's subscription had crossed the $40,000 USD mark.
The problem is that the most expensive journals tend to also be the most "prestigous" (sp? my internal speeler isn't working well today) journals, e.g. Nature or Science. So people are in this wierd position of wanting to publish in some journals for their resume, and others to reach the widest audience (c.f. Angewantde Chemie, international edition).
In an ideal world there would be some way of having free access to scientific articles, like through the web in some centralized fashion, but I understand that peer review and staff costs are not zero. Not a trivial problem to solve...
--
"Overrated" is "overfuckingused".
The other reply by Mr. Currie is very correct. Small additional note: really cold metals still have really low resistance, even if it ain't exactly zero. :-) So unless by T > Tcrit you mean T = 500 K or something, it probably won't die horribly. I'd guess you'd see increasing glitchiness as T rose, leading to total system failure. So you'd have functional warnings besides temp alarms (much like a computer that's overclocked too much now).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
... it's the fsckin' moniter. My case is pretty light compared to my behemoth of a moniter (19" flatscreen, weighs about 60 pounds and is really unwieldly to carry). If somebody made a "moniter carrier" (like straps and handles or something), I'd buy it.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Well, to be honest I doubt that we'll reach room-temp or higher superconductors any time soon (== next hundred years or so). How ever, I suspect that in the next 20-50 years we'll discover a superconductor whose critical temperature is reachable with common industrial refridgerants (like say -40 C instead of -113). This is an easier goal to reach energetically and would open the field to industrial applications like the cool plasma deposition things the other poster was speaking of.
I did a little research into this field a few years back in a special topics class (as a chemist). My impression was that superconducting compounds (I was studying the Yttrium-Barium-Copper-Oxide family) were superconducting by virtue of "channels" forming through the crystalline structure that had surrounding electron densities just right such that free electrons could flow "down" them with 0 resistance, and that since the surrounding atoms "wiggled around" too much at T > Tcrit, the "channels" were disrupted. Or something. I was a chemist, and a freshman, so I wasn't exposed to a lot of the real underlying theory.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
heh, in which case the frustration of doing any thing shell-related in graphitti and over a 1KB/day link is far more punishment than any private citizen could legally inflict on them...
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org