Gotcha, I don't design generators for living, only DC-DC/AC-DC/DC-AC converters. Generators and motors are somehow.. working class technology.
High power DC engines need brushes. Physical wear & tear.. Permanent magnets don't yield to that great kilowattage. And since it's a bitch to generate truly high DC voltages, you are resorting to ridiculous currents when you want to push around a medium-sized ship or something. Semiconductors for any kind of AC/DC conversion just come with so much breakdown voltage capacity.
Not a big deal to step up to 25kV for nice 5000 watt railroad engine, at stately 200mA with AC!
The problem is that most power generated comes in AC flavor. And even the best AC/DC converters waste about 10% of the power. That's lots and lots of energy turned to heat at point-of-origin of at your environment friendly nuclear power plant.
Ditto for DC/DC power supplies, which is where the level shifting comes in at.
Only DC power sources I can think of are batteries and solar panels, neither of which are very relevant on power-grid level.
like you wouldn't be able to abuse a tube amp.. tube amps are 'cool' though, cool in the watercooling sense of cool. fun, but not so useful like most of the hobbyists would like to believe.
Unlike tubes, water cooling has one tangible, measurable improvement over traditional fan + heatsink fare. Noise level. It is possible to build quite a silent PC with watercooling. Of course overclocking nutcases want to be able to pipe out the extra 200 watts of power their 2x spec frequency CPU puts out, but for the rest of us you get rid of *rather loud* fan noise.
Turn off your PC sometime. And wonder what's missing.
Better yet. Make default action to open it in Acrobat reader and you're not annoyed with dialog boxes unnecessarily. You can still right-click to save the files if necessary.
At third - ANY not hearing impaired person can hear difference between ANY lossy compression and original. Go to local 'audiofilic' store, get a listening room with audiosystem like over 10000-15000 (cd, amp & speakers) and compare original CD and compressed sound at comfortable sound level.
Oh bullpuckies.
OK, that does leave definition of "hearing impaired" rather open. Should we agree that a person who hears as well as 66% of population is not hearing impaired? 50? 10? 2?
Regardless, there's lossy and there's lossy. And then there's bitrates. And there's codecs. And bugs in codecs. And so forth.
Shit, even CD audio is lossy! Studio's got a low-pass filter at about 20kHz!! (or whatever)
So your median guy sits in a couch while a nice lady offers him drinks while they play back latest inane chart-beat from bit-rate variable lame encoder mp3 and straight from CD?
Wanna bet how much the guesses of our test sampling of joe sixpacks will deviate from 50/50 as to which was original recording?
[Some things never change. The usual left-looney game is to treat the United States, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il, etc. as being completely morally equivalent. They are all equally as bad. If you truly believe this, then you need to take a step back and ask yourself, "When did I lose my marbles?".]
You could very well argue that some stuff that has been going on recently has been on a very very slippery slope indeed. Fortunately, thought, the most blatant sore against "democratic" values is being lanced as we dither. Guantamo bay is being emptied and the inmates will apparently receive a trial.
So in a democratic society you may have forays into totalitarian methods, but the "system" will eventually correct them by itself.
And for anyone who equates Q-B with wholesale prosecution of dissidents in China or wholesale murder of people with a "wrong" ethnic background in Sudan should wake up and make some nice strong coffee.
Your reaction makes perfect sense - use what OS you need to to run the apps you want - but your post also contains the incorrect implication that there's something that Linux could do to make those apps run on it. There isn't. It's entirely in the hands of the application writers, and market forces. That's not something linux itself can change. It's a social problem, not a technical one. The apps don't exist on linux because the companies that make them don't think the effort to port would bring them enough new customers. This has nothing do to with any deficiencies in the OS itself. None.
Ooh. Let's have another "It's all the fault of the evil application developers"-rant. When we get down to it, Linux is great for uses other than general workstation stuff. Apple has shown there's nothing on unix-type system that stops it from being integrated into a slick and user-friendly whole. But that just flies on the face of "obscurity keeps the masses away"-school. And it'd be just so wrong to have an entirely commercial package from a big vendor such as IBM with commercial and tailored sofware packages available that actually work coherently and are a snap to install & start cracking on. UI development is just so boring and rather demanding too. Most people wouldn't do something like that for free.
To get back vaguely on topic, what SP2 will do to prevent spam is to (a) install a better firewall and turn it on by default and (b) turn on automatic updating. This should protect the most clueless users, but I suspect most of them were using legit copies anyway.
You're saying that most clueless users are using legit copies? Is there something especially clueful in having someone copy an XP CD with serial number written on leaflet?
Now if they did something radical like admit that hiding file extensions was the most stupid idea, ever..
Or, ooh, stop outlook from executing attachments directly. At least if you have to save it somewhere and run it from there, that would exclude the most clueless users. I mean, really, you'd be surprised how many people don't get the whole directory-thing.
99% of our users need email, simple office and a browser. If Win2K does the job (and it pretty much does)...then what is the incentive to drop $20 million on new PCs and a new OS roll-out? And yes, some form of Linux desktop in about 2007 looks pretty attractive to me...
Trust Microsoft to withold some crucial driver for W2k. I thought it was going to happen with USB2, but apparently they chickened out on that one. It already worked on NT4..
The buildup of ketones is very similar to what happens to diabetics who don't regulate themselves strictly enough. It's one of the leading causes of many of the health problems diabetics suffer from.
No, it is not, despite the close spelling. In one case, you have breakdown of body's ability to process carbohydrates by a process called insulin resistance. Kidneys need to produce more and more insulin for the cells to process the carbs into fat. Eventually you get into a point where the kidneys cannot supply enough insulin and the blood sugar shoots thru the roof.. And you have got type II diabetes.
And the acidosis is what happens when you intake too many carbs (!) when you have diabetes. In other case, you're consuming very small quantities of carbs by choice, so your body switches over to processing fat instead of carbs for energy. The ketones replace glucose. So in fact the two conditions are caused by exact opposite behavior.
I'm not going to root thru pubmed looking for terribly many references, but here's one
They recommend low carb diet as a safe and efficient way of controlling seizures in children with parkinson's.
By implication, it would hardly be a recommended treatment if ketosis was in some way a harmful or dangerous state for the body to be in.
Staying on Atkins for any length of time longer than months is a Very Bad Idea. IANA nutritional scientist, but I know that when you get most of your energy form metabolizing protien, ketones build up in your bloodstream. These are very bad chemicals that do damage to organs.
That's so scientific. Actually you get most of your energy from metabolizing fat when you're on Atkins, but never mind that.
Would you mind providing a reference for the "Ketoines cause organ damage"-claim, or would that spoil the fun?
I ask you.. Do you really want to spend time in what amounts to enlarged doghouse for about a year.. With several other guys one or more of which is a woman? Can you say PMS? And no-going-out-for-a-bit-no-matter-what?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Having said that, Asimov's really just interpersonal relationship hack in outer space. You could take the SF elements out and the story would change only tiny little bit.
I'm an power electronics engineer and use my old HP48 a lot. Mainly it's very nice for solving simple equations while you're picking component values. Sometimes I wish it had a bit more flexible equation editor or that solving for two unknowns was not a huge kludge to do. Excel does that sort of stuff pretty easily, thought.
Yeah, "if". But what if it can't be done? There is no chance to make an Antarctic colony, where the conditions still are much more friendly than on Moon. I doubt if there is any chance to make anything colony-like on Moon - there is no serious plan how to make water and oxygen on the lunar desert (not to mention food or anything useful). All we hear are Star Trek-like hypothetical scenarios, that maybe there could be some frozen water. Well, what if there isn't?
Good grief. So go and find out! If everyone stopped at "what if it does not work", nothing would ever get done. Including bashing your neighbour's head in with a stick instead of a rock.
There's evidence of ice out there, so logically next step would be to send probes/whatnot to look for more.
If you want a better chance for the policy to change, you'll get more chance of success if you don't go apoplectic. Instead, take about 100 deep breaths, sleep 2 two nights, count to 10000 and think about a much larger problem such as nuclear annihilation and how small your problem really is.
What are you doing on/. brother?
This is a rare glimmer of good sense and reason which is usually in such a short supply with the groupthink! In fact that's such a good advice I might try it myself someday..
To quote a well known author, anytime you guys got phone number of god, wake me up..
Seriously, I'd be very, very suprised everything rounded out neatly into existing textbook formulas. Witness the new D-vitamin interaction they recently discovered that upset the neat tables in textbooks like that.
I don't really care about the DRM argument and such. Only thing that makes me wonder is why do none of the online music services compete on prices. And why should I pay same price for something I D/L as I would for a physical CD.. And it gets better yet. The reason there are no online music services in europe is that the record labels insist that the cost-per-song must match local CD prices. So we'd be looking at.99 pounds or 1.4 euros/song! *gah*
Yes, I know the reason is that the labels are running a cartel.
I'm using Mozilla Firefox and it never stalls. Back when I used Mozilla 1.2 or whatever it was, it never stalled for me. Is it a new bug?
Been around since 0.9 versions which were the first ones I tested. It used to be really very bad (2 minutes checked from a watch to bring up mozilla) but firefox et al are a bit better about it. Funnily enough, "quick start" feature really made this problem come out.
Find out why the thing stalls all the time and fix it.
Amen brother. This one is years and years old now. Only reason nothing has been done about it is that it's a problem with win32 only. So all those OS linux developers pretend it's not their problem at all. There have been some interesting suggestions such as mozilla checks all the bloody fonts available x times every time it's brought up and so on. But the best developers come up is with 2% speed up in library x (which was plenty fast enough to start with.)
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It's a long-standing bug. God it took long time to be acknowledged because it's WIN32-specific bug.
Oh and FF 0.9 broke the fix.. For some reason devs have been dragging their feet about checking it into the branch builds.
With that fix FF/TB/Mozilla become so snappy you won't believe it.
Gotcha, I don't design generators for living, only DC-DC/AC-DC/DC-AC converters. Generators and motors are somehow.. working class technology.
High power DC engines need brushes. Physical wear & tear.. Permanent magnets don't yield to that great kilowattage. And since it's a bitch to generate truly high DC voltages, you are resorting to ridiculous currents when you want to push around a medium-sized ship or something. Semiconductors for any kind of AC/DC conversion just come with so much breakdown voltage capacity.
Not a big deal to step up to 25kV for nice 5000 watt railroad engine, at stately 200mA with AC!
The problem is that most power generated comes in AC flavor. And even the best AC/DC converters waste about 10% of the power. That's lots and lots of energy turned to heat at point-of-origin of at your environment friendly nuclear power plant.
Ditto for DC/DC power supplies, which is where the level shifting comes in at.
Only DC power sources I can think of are batteries and solar panels, neither of which are very relevant on power-grid level.
like you wouldn't be able to abuse a tube amp.. tube amps are 'cool' though, cool in the watercooling sense of cool. fun, but not so useful like most of the hobbyists would like to believe.
Unlike tubes, water cooling has one tangible, measurable improvement over traditional fan + heatsink fare. Noise level. It is possible to build quite a silent PC with watercooling. Of course overclocking nutcases want to be able to pipe out the extra 200 watts of power their 2x spec frequency CPU puts out, but for the rest of us you get rid of *rather loud* fan noise.
Turn off your PC sometime. And wonder what's missing.
Better yet. Make default action to open it in Acrobat reader and you're not annoyed with dialog boxes unnecessarily. You can still right-click to save the files if necessary.
At third - ANY not hearing impaired person can hear difference between ANY lossy compression and original. Go to local 'audiofilic' store, get a listening room with audiosystem like over 10000-15000 (cd, amp & speakers) and compare original CD and compressed sound at comfortable sound level.
Oh bullpuckies.
OK, that does leave definition of "hearing impaired" rather open. Should we agree that a person who hears as well as 66% of population is not hearing impaired? 50? 10? 2?
Regardless, there's lossy and there's lossy. And then there's bitrates. And there's codecs. And bugs in codecs. And so forth.
Shit, even CD audio is lossy! Studio's got a low-pass filter at about 20kHz!! (or whatever)
So your median guy sits in a couch while a nice lady offers him drinks while they play back latest inane chart-beat from bit-rate variable lame encoder mp3 and straight from CD?
Wanna bet how much the guesses of our test sampling of joe sixpacks will deviate from 50/50 as to which was original recording?
[Some things never change. The usual left-looney game is to treat the United States, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il, etc. as being completely morally equivalent. They are all equally as bad. If you truly believe this, then you need to take a step back and ask yourself, "When did I lose my marbles?".]
You could very well argue that some stuff that has been going on recently has been on a very very slippery slope indeed. Fortunately, thought, the most blatant sore against "democratic" values is being lanced as we dither. Guantamo bay is being emptied and the inmates will apparently receive a trial.
So in a democratic society you may have forays into totalitarian methods, but the "system" will eventually correct them by itself.
And for anyone who equates Q-B with wholesale prosecution of dissidents in China or wholesale murder of people with a "wrong" ethnic background in Sudan should wake up and make some nice strong coffee.
Your reaction makes perfect sense - use what OS you need to to run the apps you want - but your post also contains the incorrect implication that there's something that Linux could do to make those apps run on it. There isn't. It's entirely in the hands of the application writers, and market forces. That's not something linux itself can change. It's a social problem, not a technical one. The apps don't exist on linux because the companies that make them don't think the effort to port would bring them enough new customers. This has nothing do to with any deficiencies in the OS itself. None.
Ooh. Let's have another "It's all the fault of the evil application developers"-rant. When we get down to it, Linux is great for uses other than general workstation stuff. Apple has shown there's nothing on unix-type system that stops it from being integrated into a slick and user-friendly whole. But that just flies on the face of "obscurity keeps the masses away"-school. And it'd be just so wrong to have an entirely commercial package from a big vendor such as IBM with commercial and tailored sofware packages available that actually work coherently and are a snap to install & start cracking on. UI development is just so boring and rather demanding too. Most people wouldn't do something like that for free.
Somebody should tell the (female) exec who runs that channel that penis enlargement pills don't work.
Of course they do work! They generate healthy revenue for the snake-oil salesmen! Goes to the same pile as useless investment books and so forth.
To get back vaguely on topic, what SP2 will do to prevent spam is to (a) install a better firewall and turn it on by default and (b) turn on automatic updating. This should protect the most clueless users, but I suspect most of them were using legit copies anyway.
You're saying that most clueless users are using legit copies? Is there something especially clueful in having someone copy an XP CD with serial number written on leaflet?
Now if they did something radical like admit that hiding file extensions was the most stupid idea, ever..
Or, ooh, stop outlook from executing attachments directly. At least if you have to save it somewhere and run it from there, that would exclude the most clueless users. I mean, really, you'd be surprised how many people don't get the whole directory-thing.
99% of our users need email, simple office and a browser. If Win2K does the job (and it pretty much does)...then what is the incentive to drop $20 million on new PCs and a new OS roll-out? And yes, some form of Linux desktop in about 2007 looks pretty attractive to me...
Trust Microsoft to withold some crucial driver for W2k. I thought it was going to happen with USB2, but apparently they chickened out on that one. It already worked on NT4..
The buildup of ketones is very similar to what happens to diabetics who don't regulate themselves strictly enough. It's one of the leading causes of many of the health problems diabetics suffer from.
No, it is not, despite the close spelling. In one case, you have breakdown of body's ability to process carbohydrates by a process called insulin resistance. Kidneys need to produce more and more insulin for the cells to process the carbs into fat. Eventually you get into a point where the kidneys cannot supply enough insulin and the blood sugar shoots thru the roof.. And you have got type II diabetes.
And the acidosis is what happens when you intake too many carbs (!) when you have diabetes. In other case, you're consuming very small quantities of carbs by choice, so your body switches over to processing fat instead of carbs for energy. The ketones replace glucose. So in fact the two conditions are caused by exact opposite behavior.
I'm not going to root thru pubmed looking for terribly many references, but here's one
They recommend low carb diet as a safe and efficient way of controlling seizures in children with parkinson's.
By implication, it would hardly be a recommended treatment if ketosis was in some way a harmful or dangerous state for the body to be in.
Staying on Atkins for any length of time longer than months is a Very Bad Idea. IANA nutritional scientist, but I know that when you get most of your energy form metabolizing protien, ketones build up in your bloodstream. These are very bad chemicals that do damage to organs.
That's so scientific. Actually you get most of your energy from metabolizing fat when you're on Atkins, but never mind that.
Would you mind providing a reference for the "Ketoines cause organ damage"-claim, or would that spoil the fun?
I ask you.. Do you really want to spend time in what amounts to enlarged doghouse for about a year.. With several other guys one or more of which is a woman? Can you say PMS? And no-going-out-for-a-bit-no-matter-what?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Having said that, Asimov's really just interpersonal relationship hack in outer space. You could take the SF elements out and the story would change only tiny little bit.
I'm an power electronics engineer and use my old HP48 a lot. Mainly it's very nice for solving simple equations while you're picking component values. Sometimes I wish it had a bit more flexible equation editor or that solving for two unknowns was not a huge kludge to do. Excel does that sort of stuff pretty easily, thought.
Yeah, "if". But what if it can't be done? There is no chance to make an Antarctic colony, where the conditions still are much more friendly than on Moon. I doubt if there is any chance to make anything colony-like on Moon - there is no serious plan how to make water and oxygen on the lunar desert (not to mention food or anything useful). All we hear are Star Trek-like hypothetical scenarios, that maybe there could be some frozen water. Well, what if there isn't?
Good grief. So go and find out! If everyone stopped at "what if it does not work", nothing would ever get done. Including bashing your neighbour's head in with a stick instead of a rock.
There's evidence of ice out there, so logically next step would be to send probes/whatnot to look for more.
Do you use proxomitron? I do and it was causing that.
If you want a better chance for the policy to change, you'll get more chance of success if you don't go apoplectic. Instead, take about 100 deep breaths, sleep 2 two nights, count to 10000 and think about a much larger problem such as nuclear annihilation and how small your problem really is.
/. brother?
What are you doing on
This is a rare glimmer of good sense and reason which is usually in such a short supply with the groupthink! In fact that's such a good advice I might try it myself someday..
To quote a well known author, anytime you guys got phone number of god, wake me up..
Seriously, I'd be very, very suprised everything rounded out neatly into existing textbook formulas. Witness the new D-vitamin interaction they recently discovered that upset the neat tables in textbooks like that.
I don't really care about the DRM argument and such. Only thing that makes me wonder is why do none of the online music services compete on prices. And why should I pay same price for something I D/L as I would for a physical CD.. And it gets better yet. The reason there are no online music services in europe is that the record labels insist that the cost-per-song must match local CD prices. So we'd be looking at .99 pounds or 1.4 euros/song! *gah*
Yes, I know the reason is that the labels are running a cartel.
I'm using Mozilla Firefox and it never stalls. Back when I used Mozilla 1.2 or whatever it was, it never stalled for me. Is it a new bug?
Been around since 0.9 versions which were the first ones I tested. It used to be really very bad (2 minutes checked from a watch to bring up mozilla) but firefox et al are a bit better about it. Funnily enough, "quick start" feature really made this problem come out.
(Darn, bad html)
I'm using Mozilla Firefox and it never stalls. Back when I used Mozilla 1.2 or whatever it was, it never stalled for me. Is it a new bug?
which were the first ones I tested. It used to be really very bad (2 minutes checked from a watch to bring up mozilla) but firefox et al are a bit better about it.
Find out why the thing stalls all the time and fix it.
Amen brother. This one is years and years old now. Only reason nothing has been done about it is that it's a problem with win32 only. So all those OS linux developers pretend it's not their problem at all. There have been some interesting suggestions such as mozilla checks all the bloody fonts available x times every time it's brought up and so on. But the best developers come up is with 2% speed up in library x (which was plenty fast enough to start with.)
*sigh*
If they cannot know that they cannot distribute the money fairly and if they can . . . Well, then there are serious privacy implications.
Two words: Anonymous statistics.