Negative death rate (Re:So...)
on
Newsy Numbers
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· Score: 1
But perhaps, statistically speaking, a negative number of people *could* die. How? Statistically speaking, a birth would be the inverse of a death, eh?
What if one or more people get sick with a particular pathogen and end up having to go to the hospital. In the end, the doctors save the day, and all the ill folks leave feeling much better, thank you. Now, suppose a few of the formerly hospitalized fellows (or females) fell in love and made little ones with special someones (to be sterotypical, nurses) they met while incapacitated...
TADA! A statistcally negative number of deaths attributable to the pathogen. (Admittedly, this counts indirect results of the infections, but hey, the statistics often do.)
The dielectric constant for air at 1 atm is listed as 1.00059. (A vacuum has a dielectric constant of 1.) Water has a dielectric constant listed around 80.4, and I have a bad feeling that may have significant adverse effects on modern computer components.
I know that when you submerge electronics, you generally use nonconductive fluids with low dielectric constants, but I'm not sure how badly the traces would couple, etc, given water's high dielectric constant. Either way, I'd suggest safety glasses.
If processor technology does indeed plateau, perhaps there would be hope for what the parent suggests. However, if we were to treat the English language and the brain as an example of code and fairly static processor power, we could use the post as an example of a simple application (more like a shell script than emacs, but an example nonetheless).
Consider the following paraphrase:
It _might_ be good if the rampant speed advance slowed significantly.
Consider:
Some may return to witing efficient code instead of writing anyhow and adding hardware until it runs acceptably. (Microsoft: I'm looking at you!)
Desktop machines might _not_ become obsolete in under two years and might continue to be useful as more than just a router.
Processor designers might spend more time creating innovative new ideas instead of raising clock speeds.
Cooling and quieting technology might even have a chance to catch up with heat output.
(Finally, my wild dream: Game writers might remember gameplay, not just better coloured lighting.)
That's a character savings of approximately 25%. Obviously, there is good reason for the lack of optimization in the original parent post. It would not be worth the time and effort to optimise such a trivial bit of English code. If it were a manuscript for a techical manual (more like emacs than like a shell script), more optimizations would like be done.
Programming parallels language usage. There will always be some who optimise to the Nth degree. In programming, these people sometimes make demos and kernels and clean, nice libraries; in language, they tend to be poets and lawyers and grammar nazis. There will be others who write large quantities of clean, but not hyper-optimized code. These are the application programmers and general writers. Then there will be the great, unwashed masses. Outside of programming, they either don't write more than an occasional postcard, or they write terrible fanfic. In programming, the postcards are quick-and-dirty shell scripts and utilities, and the terrible fanfic includes most of Microsoft (ever notice how they're always the main character in their software?).
Anyway, the analogy is strained and breaks down easily, but it fun to just sit back and take a thought at it once in a while. It may be that we will get more efficient coders out of a slower processing environment, but then again, it could just mean that we end up with a lot more fanfic-quality applications that make the well-written code stand out as an enjoyable and welcome group.
Don't drive to Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay), Alaska. You won't be happy on the Alaska Highway, and by the time you get to the *start* of the 415-mile Dalton Highway, you'll want an Osprey to fly you home.
Seriously, though, I wouldn't want an auto-driver. The act of driving is very enjoyable, once I'm in "the zone". It's a lot like programming, I think. If you don't get in the zone, you can sling a page or two and be completely exhausted, but once you're in the zone, you could code half of emacs without sleep or food or noticing the lack of either. (Okay, half of vi?)
It would be interesting, perhaps, to have a car drive itself, but I think I might get a little bored just riding for hours on end. It took me only about 12 days of solo driving to get from Baton Rouge, LA, to the Arctic Ocean by Prudhoe Bay (yes, I swam) and back (11,333 miles). My longest day started at the first rest stop west of San Antonio on I-10 and ended an hour north of Los Angeles on I-5. If I had to just sit there, I'd have been really, really bored.
I have a friend whose company was bidding on a contract. Part of the forms they had to fill out was their company's mission statement. Well, since they didn't have a mission statement, and since it was a *required* field on the form, he went to Dilbert.com and fetched one of these lovely (*cough*) mission statements.
They got the contract, in part because the client thought they had a good mission statement. (Needless to say, they never told the client where they came up with it.)
The copyright holder for a given work (piece of code, whatever) can license it according to whatever terms they'd like. If they release a copy of the work under the GPL, then that copy can be used according to the terms of that license. Meanwhile, if they wake up with a humorous streak and license it BSD-style with the added requirement that to use the code you must paint your nose purple, that's fine, too.
Think of releasing a work under a license as analogous to attaching a tarball to an email message. The recipient (licensee) has a copy of the work and whatever permissions you granted. You still have the tarball and can send it to another recipient and grant that recipient different permissions. (Of course, once you start getting into exclusive licenses, et al, you're out of the scope of this post.)
Would it be enough to get me thrown out of the patent reviewer pool if I were to point out that this sounds almost exactly like a 1-button Mac mouse? A click, double-click, and click-and-hold have been around since what version of MacOS?
To quote the part that says what the article is actually about:
The key to BIC's speed is that it uses a binary search approach - a fairly common way to search databases - that allows for rapid detection of maximum network capacities with minimal loss of information. "What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second," Rhee said.
The spam issue is such a large scale issue that the rules governing statistics should hold quite nicely (when you've got a sample size in the millions...).
The probability of a statistically significant number of spammers just happening to have said, "Let's use all our *US* zombies!" this particular day and then deciding the day after the study, "You know what, let's all go back to our Salmnonian zombies!" is so preposterous as to be humorous. It would be like having a majority of US voters wake up and decide for two days to vote for the Green Party candidate, then all of them switch back right after the primary. (If it were a small sample size, this could happen, but for a large sample size, it is *far* less likely.)
If you taper it down, you just prolong the agony. The headaches and stuff from stopping brick-wall style might be more painful, but having terrible headaches for a few days was better than having generally unpleasant headaches for a few weeks.
I would dring several liters of caffeinated beverages a day, so when I dropped it, it *really* hurt. Still, since then, headaches are very rare (only when I've been up all night, say, New Year's Eve), and driving cross country is a lot more pleasant now. (I drove 7364 miles in 6.5 days, and I felt fine when I got home.)
"The SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX) helps millions of customers..." but "Hundreds of customers like and use SCO's Unix products." Why the discrepancy?
If you take the set H (helped by the SCO Group), the set U (use SCO's Unix products), and the set L (like SCO's Unix products), you will likely find that there is a fairly strong correlation between sets H and U. This is not to imply that H is either a superset of U or a subset of U, merely that there is a presumably significant intersection. On the other hand, the set L is by all accounts much smaller than either set H or set U.
Although a case could be made that there are members of set L who are there for the very reason that they are not themselves members of set U, it is logical and seemingly quite likely that all or virtually all members of set L are also members of set U. If we assume that set L is, in fact, a subset of set U then the statement that the intersection of sets L and U contains hundreds of members can be simplified and restated as "The set L contains hundreds of members."
In other words, although *millions* of customers are helped by the SCO Group, only hundreds of customers like them. Yep. Makes perfect sense now, eh?
"Wouldn't the GPL being proven invalid just replace it with standard copyright law, and if so doesn't that mean that they have NO rights to the code what-so-ever?"
As I understand it, SCO isn't just trying to get the GPL declared invalid. They're trying to get the GPL declared invalid and all GPLed software declared public domain. Basically, their argument (however invalid it may be) is that anyone who gives you as much freedom as the GPL gives must obviously not care to do anything with their copyright, and therefore "GPL" == "public domain".
I personally find this "They gave us a piece, so they owe us the whole pizza!" argument reprehensible, but it seems as if it is perfectly acceptable to some people (read: SCO lawyers).
Something like "He who steals a Bible likely needs it more anyway"?
(I've got some Gideons as friends... maybe I should see if they'll send a carton to the RIAA for their leisure reading... perhaps with a little note in the front cover explaining that "God" is not an anagram of "RIAA", even in Hebrew, Greek, or what-have-you.)
I've now been geocaching for over two years. In that time, I've learned more about the environment and *done* more about the environment than I had done in the previous 24 years of my life. Geocaching is directly responsible for that.
Thanks to what I've learned geocaching, when I go on hikes with friends, I'm the person imploring them to stay on the trails (*especially* if the trail is wet and muddy, since walking around the puddle will only make it wider). I've taught several people that bringing a canvas sack and trash bag along on a hike makes picking up litter a breeze.
One example: I was out in the Henderson Swamp area of the Atchafalaya basin area of Louisiana last weekend. While out there, I picked up approximately 13 pieces of floating litter (depends on what you count... I counted the two plastic wrappers individually). Why did I spend my valuable personal watercraft time and gas on cleaning up a couple miles of litter along I-10 over the swamp? Because I learned to do it from CITO (Cache In, Trash Out) and geocaching. Geocaching has made me a more nature-conscious person... it'd be a shame to ban it more. (Note: In places like, say, Yellowstone near Old Faithful, I would be the first person to vote for a geocaching ban, but in, say, Baton Rouge parks... that'd be counter-productive.)
Incidentally, I learned nature from geocaching, and I learned software rights from Linux. I've spent most of my free time for the last half-year developing an application for geocaching... alas, there are not enough Linux-loving application programmers who are also geocachers, and so a native Linux port isn't forthcoming, unfortunately... maybe one day...
Well, the fact that NFL Sunday Ticket is only available on DirecTV *would* sound like a really bad thing until you do the research.
My family comes from Wisconsin and lives in Louisiana, so NFL Sunday Ticket looked like it would be an excellent birthday gift for my dad last year. Unfortunately, it's only available on DirecTV, and you can't go out and buy a receiver at your local store without buying a year of service or paying the $150 extra (the "penalty" for no service). Neither of those options were acceptable, so I started e-mailing, and when that went nowhere, I got on the phone.
Well, it turns out that you *can* get NFL Sunday Ticket a la carte. It is the only a la carte service DirecTV will sell you, but they *will* sell it to you (probably for the express reason of avoiding "abuse of a monopoly" lawsuits). You just go to your friendly neighborhood used stuff site (I chose eBay, as much as it pained me to finally register, hehe), and you buy a *used* receiver (or even a whole used package).
DirecTV will charge you a few bucks for a new access card (since you don't know where the old one's been, I'd definitely do that), and then when you call, you simply tell them that you want to activate a used system with *only* NFL Sunday Ticket. ("Yes, just NFL Sunday Ticket.... No, I don't want that; I just want NFL Sunday Ticket.... No, I hate TV, but I want NFL Sunday Ticket....") A few hairs later, you've got your nice system all up and running, with no additional committments.
So, if you're comfortable enough with a compass, wrench, and RG-6 tools, you can have NFL Sunday Ticket for the price of the season, a used receiver, and a new access card. Not a bad deal, at least compared to flying to Green Bay and buying, er, "resold" tickets every game.;)
> The cost of polarized system is too high > and is certainly not justified.
Actually, all LCD monitors *already* have the capability built in. The way they work is by using the polarization of light. All you have to do to make one of these "secure" panels that can only be viewed through polarized glasses is *remove* the polarizing film from the monitor.
Put simply, it should not be much more expensive to *leave out* part of the panel, eh?
I read about this a long, long time ago (I can't remember when, but it is on the order of years). It was a mod that a company was selling for business people's laptops. They'd strip off the polarizing film from the laptop's LCD panel, and then you could only see what was on the screen through polarizing glasses.
I'm not sure whether the glasses required were vertically polarized of horizontally polarized. If they were vertically polarized, anyone with a pair of sunglasses could quite easily read the screen (but wouldn't you look odd wearing sunglasses on a plane while staring at a business person's apparently blank laptop screen).
On the other hand, if the required glasses were horizontally polarized, you'd have to rotate the sunglass lenses 90 degrees (which, since most sunglass lenses do not posess rotational symmetry, would mean you either would have a serious mod coming, or else you'd just have to tip your head 90 degrees... Actually, this might just work, but only if you were pretending to sleep and laying your head on the business person's shoulder, and that's likely to just make them upset.;)
Of course, if anyone's wondering, GPS receivers determine position by solving a set of equations for the four variables of position (3 dimensions) and time (1 dimension).
There is a really nice (but Shockwave, unfortunately) overview of GPS at Trimble's site.
We've been discussing the RINOs (and all sorts of other GPS and GPS-related devices) for some time over on the geocaching neck of the woods. (At times, the Magellan/Garmin/Lowrance/etc. debate looks like a distro-fest.)
The RINOs have a quadrifilar (quad-helix) antenna, which means they should have reception up there with the Magellan 300-series and Meridian receivers (and the Garmin GPS V). The poor reception of the Garmin eTrex line will not affect them. (And the Garminites all cry "Yipee!" and no longer have to cower before those of us who have been using Magellans the whole time.)
Anyway, for group caching, the RINOs look really fun. I do most of my geocaching alone, so I'd probably pass on them, though.;)
RINO usefulness for the existing GPS sports: - Geocaching: Excellent if in groups. - Geodashing: Maybe, but not likely. - Degree Confluences: Same as geodashing. - Geodrawing: Multi-pen art? Cool. - MinuteWar: Possibly... occasionally.
With a read-only filesystem, trying to create.ini files cannot succeed. Writing to the registry will. (You can, with a bit of tweaking and a ram disk, actually boot Win9x from a CD.)
You really should read the article before you post obviously stupid comments, but I'll forgive you of that, since I've done that myself (haven't we all). Anyway, to sum up the whole thing in one little line, CrossOver is a Wine-using thingy that lets you install the Windows version of the said plugins and use them as if they were Linux native Netscape plugins. (In other words, since you're using the Windows install of the Windows plugin, of course it works with Sorenson, and next time, click the link... it wasn't even slashdotted.)
Condolences if this is true...
on
Dynamix Closed Down?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Having been one of the fans whose hopes for the Babylon 5: Into The Fire space combat simulator were screwed by Sierra, I can only say that this is yet another bucket of water in the ocean of disgust for anything related to Sierra.
The B5:ItF fans and developers fought for about two years to keep the project alive somehow, and at several turns, Sierra (and whatever parent company, of course) all but threw monkey wrenches into the process. Now the project is officially dead, and I will probably retain my bitterness toward anything Sierra (other than mountains, which are not associated with the company using the name) for a very, very long time.
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But perhaps, statistically speaking, a negative number of people *could* die. How? Statistically speaking, a birth would be the inverse of a death, eh?
What if one or more people get sick with a particular pathogen and end up having to go to the hospital. In the end, the doctors save the day, and all the ill folks leave feeling much better, thank you. Now, suppose a few of the formerly hospitalized fellows (or females) fell in love and made little ones with special someones (to be sterotypical, nurses) they met while incapacitated...
TADA! A statistcally negative number of deaths attributable to the pathogen. (Admittedly, this counts indirect results of the infections, but hey, the statistics often do.)
The dielectric constant for air at 1 atm is listed as 1.00059. (A vacuum has a dielectric constant of 1.) Water has a dielectric constant listed around 80.4, and I have a bad feeling that may have significant adverse effects on modern computer components.
I know that when you submerge electronics, you generally use nonconductive fluids with low dielectric constants, but I'm not sure how badly the traces would couple, etc, given water's high dielectric constant. Either way, I'd suggest safety glasses.
If processor technology does indeed plateau, perhaps there would be hope for what the parent suggests. However, if we were to treat the English language and the brain as an example of code and fairly static processor power, we could use the post as an example of a simple application (more like a shell script than emacs, but an example nonetheless).
Consider the following paraphrase:
That's a character savings of approximately 25%. Obviously, there is good reason for the lack of optimization in the original parent post. It would not be worth the time and effort to optimise such a trivial bit of English code. If it were a manuscript for a techical manual (more like emacs than like a shell script), more optimizations would like be done.
Programming parallels language usage. There will always be some who optimise to the Nth degree. In programming, these people sometimes make demos and kernels and clean, nice libraries; in language, they tend to be poets and lawyers and grammar nazis. There will be others who write large quantities of clean, but not hyper-optimized code. These are the application programmers and general writers. Then there will be the great, unwashed masses. Outside of programming, they either don't write more than an occasional postcard, or they write terrible fanfic. In programming, the postcards are quick-and-dirty shell scripts and utilities, and the terrible fanfic includes most of Microsoft (ever notice how they're always the main character in their software?).
Anyway, the analogy is strained and breaks down easily, but it fun to just sit back and take a thought at it once in a while. It may be that we will get more efficient coders out of a slower processing environment, but then again, it could just mean that we end up with a lot more fanfic-quality applications that make the well-written code stand out as an enjoyable and welcome group.
Don't drive to Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay), Alaska. You won't be happy on the Alaska Highway, and by the time you get to the *start* of the 415-mile Dalton Highway, you'll want an Osprey to fly you home.
Seriously, though, I wouldn't want an auto-driver. The act of driving is very enjoyable, once I'm in "the zone". It's a lot like programming, I think. If you don't get in the zone, you can sling a page or two and be completely exhausted, but once you're in the zone, you could code half of emacs without sleep or food or noticing the lack of either. (Okay, half of vi?)
It would be interesting, perhaps, to have a car drive itself, but I think I might get a little bored just riding for hours on end. It took me only about 12 days of solo driving to get from Baton Rouge, LA, to the Arctic Ocean by Prudhoe Bay (yes, I swam) and back (11,333 miles). My longest day started at the first rest stop west of San Antonio on I-10 and ended an hour north of Los Angeles on I-5. If I had to just sit there, I'd have been really, really bored.
Or maybe not.
Yeah, Sil, marketing makes the world go round, but just for a while, I wouldn't mind too much if the room stopped spinning.
(As someone who doesn't care about Halo 2 or what-have-you, I may have enjoyed the "advertainment"... alas.)
I have a friend whose company was bidding on a contract. Part of the forms they had to fill out was their company's mission statement. Well, since they didn't have a mission statement, and since it was a *required* field on the form, he went to Dilbert.com and fetched one of these lovely (*cough*) mission statements.
They got the contract, in part because the client thought they had a good mission statement. (Needless to say, they never told the client where they came up with it.)
The copyright holder for a given work (piece of code, whatever) can license it according to whatever terms they'd like. If they release a copy of the work under the GPL, then that copy can be used according to the terms of that license. Meanwhile, if they wake up with a humorous streak and license it BSD-style with the added requirement that to use the code you must paint your nose purple, that's fine, too.
Think of releasing a work under a license as analogous to attaching a tarball to an email message. The recipient (licensee) has a copy of the work and whatever permissions you granted. You still have the tarball and can send it to another recipient and grant that recipient different permissions. (Of course, once you start getting into exclusive licenses, et al, you're out of the scope of this post.)
"However, the open source strategy is a triple-edge sword." --Ken Brown, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
"Understanding is a three-edged sword." --Kosh Naranek, "Deathwalker" (113), Babylon 5 (Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5)
Would it be enough to get me thrown out of the patent reviewer pool if I were to point out that this sounds almost exactly like a 1-button Mac mouse? A click, double-click, and click-and-hold have been around since what version of MacOS?
To quote the part that says what the article is actually about:
The spam issue is such a large scale issue that the rules governing statistics should hold quite nicely (when you've got a sample size in the millions...).
The probability of a statistically significant number of spammers just happening to have said, "Let's use all our *US* zombies!" this particular day and then deciding the day after the study, "You know what, let's all go back to our Salmnonian zombies!" is so preposterous as to be humorous. It would be like having a majority of US voters wake up and decide for two days to vote for the Green Party candidate, then all of them switch back right after the primary. (If it were a small sample size, this could happen, but for a large sample size, it is *far* less likely.)
If you taper it down, you just prolong the agony. The headaches and stuff from stopping brick-wall style might be more painful, but having terrible headaches for a few days was better than having generally unpleasant headaches for a few weeks.
I would dring several liters of caffeinated beverages a day, so when I dropped it, it *really* hurt. Still, since then, headaches are very rare (only when I've been up all night, say, New Year's Eve), and driving cross country is a lot more pleasant now. (I drove 7364 miles in 6.5 days, and I felt fine when I got home.)
"The SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX) helps millions of customers..." but "Hundreds of customers like and use SCO's Unix products." Why the discrepancy?
If you take the set H (helped by the SCO Group), the set U (use SCO's Unix products), and the set L (like SCO's Unix products), you will likely find that there is a fairly strong correlation between sets H and U. This is not to imply that H is either a superset of U or a subset of U, merely that there is a presumably significant intersection. On the other hand, the set L is by all accounts much smaller than either set H or set U.
Although a case could be made that there are members of set L who are there for the very reason that they are not themselves members of set U, it is logical and seemingly quite likely that all or virtually all members of set L are also members of set U. If we assume that set L is, in fact, a subset of set U then the statement that the intersection of sets L and U contains hundreds of members can be simplified and restated as "The set L contains hundreds of members."
In other words, although *millions* of customers are helped by the SCO Group, only hundreds of customers like them. Yep. Makes perfect sense now, eh?
"Wouldn't the GPL being proven invalid just replace it with standard copyright law, and if so doesn't that mean that they have NO rights to the code what-so-ever?"
As I understand it, SCO isn't just trying to get the GPL declared invalid. They're trying to get the GPL declared invalid and all GPLed software declared public domain. Basically, their argument (however invalid it may be) is that anyone who gives you as much freedom as the GPL gives must obviously not care to do anything with their copyright, and therefore "GPL" == "public domain".
I personally find this "They gave us a piece, so they owe us the whole pizza!" argument reprehensible, but it seems as if it is perfectly acceptable to some people (read: SCO lawyers).
Something like "He who steals a Bible likely needs it more anyway"?
(I've got some Gideons as friends... maybe I should see if they'll send a carton to the RIAA for their leisure reading... perhaps with a little note in the front cover explaining that "God" is not an anagram of "RIAA", even in Hebrew, Greek, or what-have-you.)
I've now been geocaching for over two years. In that time, I've learned more about the environment and *done* more about the environment than I had done in the previous 24 years of my life. Geocaching is directly responsible for that.
Thanks to what I've learned geocaching, when I go on hikes with friends, I'm the person imploring them to stay on the trails (*especially* if the trail is wet and muddy, since walking around the puddle will only make it wider). I've taught several people that bringing a canvas sack and trash bag along on a hike makes picking up litter a breeze.
One example: I was out in the Henderson Swamp area of the Atchafalaya basin area of Louisiana last weekend. While out there, I picked up approximately 13 pieces of floating litter (depends on what you count... I counted the two plastic wrappers individually). Why did I spend my valuable personal watercraft time and gas on cleaning up a couple miles of litter along I-10 over the swamp? Because I learned to do it from CITO (Cache In, Trash Out) and geocaching. Geocaching has made me a more nature-conscious person... it'd be a shame to ban it more. (Note: In places like, say, Yellowstone near Old Faithful, I would be the first person to vote for a geocaching ban, but in, say, Baton Rouge parks... that'd be counter-productive.)
Incidentally, I learned nature from geocaching, and I learned software rights from Linux. I've spent most of my free time for the last half-year developing an application for geocaching... alas, there are not enough Linux-loving application programmers who are also geocachers, and so a native Linux port isn't forthcoming, unfortunately... maybe one day...
Well, the fact that NFL Sunday Ticket is only available on DirecTV *would* sound like a really bad thing until you do the research.
;)
My family comes from Wisconsin and lives in Louisiana, so NFL Sunday Ticket looked like it would be an excellent birthday gift for my dad last year. Unfortunately, it's only available on DirecTV, and you can't go out and buy a receiver at your local store without buying a year of service or paying the $150 extra (the "penalty" for no service). Neither of those options were acceptable, so I started e-mailing, and when that went nowhere, I got on the phone.
Well, it turns out that you *can* get NFL Sunday Ticket a la carte. It is the only a la carte service DirecTV will sell you, but they *will* sell it to you (probably for the express reason of avoiding "abuse of a monopoly" lawsuits). You just go to your friendly neighborhood used stuff site (I chose eBay, as much as it pained me to finally register, hehe), and you buy a *used* receiver (or even a whole used package).
DirecTV will charge you a few bucks for a new access card (since you don't know where the old one's been, I'd definitely do that), and then when you call, you simply tell them that you want to activate a used system with *only* NFL Sunday Ticket. ("Yes, just NFL Sunday Ticket.... No, I don't want that; I just want NFL Sunday Ticket.... No, I hate TV, but I want NFL Sunday Ticket....") A few hairs later, you've got your nice system all up and running, with no additional committments.
So, if you're comfortable enough with a compass, wrench, and RG-6 tools, you can have NFL Sunday Ticket for the price of the season, a used receiver, and a new access card. Not a bad deal, at least compared to flying to Green Bay and buying, er, "resold" tickets every game.
(Oh, and as long as I'm here... "GO! PACK! GO!")
> The cost of polarized system is too high
> and is certainly not justified.
Actually, all LCD monitors *already* have the capability built in. The way they work is by using the polarization of light. All you have to do to make one of these "secure" panels that can only be viewed through polarized glasses is *remove* the polarizing film from the monitor.
Put simply, it should not be much more expensive to *leave out* part of the panel, eh?
I read about this a long, long time ago (I can't remember when, but it is on the order of years). It was a mod that a company was selling for business people's laptops. They'd strip off the polarizing film from the laptop's LCD panel, and then you could only see what was on the screen through polarizing glasses.
;)
I'm not sure whether the glasses required were vertically polarized of horizontally polarized. If they were vertically polarized, anyone with a pair of sunglasses could quite easily read the screen (but wouldn't you look odd wearing sunglasses on a plane while staring at a business person's apparently blank laptop screen).
On the other hand, if the required glasses were horizontally polarized, you'd have to rotate the sunglass lenses 90 degrees (which, since most sunglass lenses do not posess rotational symmetry, would mean you either would have a serious mod coming, or else you'd just have to tip your head 90 degrees... Actually, this might just work, but only if you were pretending to sleep and laying your head on the business person's shoulder, and that's likely to just make them upset.
LOL! I haven't read anything that funny in hours!
Of course, if anyone's wondering, GPS receivers determine position by solving a set of equations for the four variables of position (3 dimensions) and time (1 dimension).
There is a really nice (but Shockwave, unfortunately) overview of GPS at Trimble's site.
We've been discussing the RINOs (and all sorts of other GPS and GPS-related devices) for some time over on the geocaching neck of the woods. (At times, the Magellan/Garmin/Lowrance/etc. debate looks like a distro-fest.)
;)
The RINOs have a quadrifilar (quad-helix) antenna, which means they should have reception up there with the Magellan 300-series and Meridian receivers (and the Garmin GPS V). The poor reception of the Garmin eTrex line will not affect them. (And the Garminites all cry "Yipee!" and no longer have to cower before those of us who have been using Magellans the whole time.)
Anyway, for group caching, the RINOs look really fun. I do most of my geocaching alone, so I'd probably pass on them, though.
RINO usefulness for the existing GPS sports:
- Geocaching: Excellent if in groups.
- Geodashing: Maybe, but not likely.
- Degree Confluences: Same as geodashing.
- Geodrawing: Multi-pen art? Cool.
- MinuteWar: Possibly... occasionally.
Read-only filesystem.
.ini files cannot succeed. Writing to the registry will. (You can, with a bit of tweaking and a ram disk, actually boot Win9x from a CD.)
With a read-only filesystem, trying to create
In congratulations, redundancy can be a good thing, eh?
You really should read the article before you post obviously stupid comments, but I'll forgive you of that, since I've done that myself (haven't we all). Anyway, to sum up the whole thing in one little line, CrossOver is a Wine-using thingy that lets you install the Windows version of the said plugins and use them as if they were Linux native Netscape plugins. (In other words, since you're using the Windows install of the Windows plugin, of course it works with Sorenson, and next time, click the link... it wasn't even slashdotted.)
Having been one of the fans whose hopes for the Babylon 5: Into The Fire space combat simulator were screwed by Sierra, I can only say that this is yet another bucket of water in the ocean of disgust for anything related to Sierra.
:/
The B5:ItF fans and developers fought for about two years to keep the project alive somehow, and at several turns, Sierra (and whatever parent company, of course) all but threw monkey wrenches into the process. Now the project is officially dead, and I will probably retain my bitterness toward anything Sierra (other than mountains, which are not associated with the company using the name) for a very, very long time.
And don't ask me about TNT.