There are ways around this. My way is to put the OS and all my applications (except games) on a 10GB partition (less than half full) and when everything is installed and working well, save a compressed binary image of that partition with Acronis TrueImage. When things start running down, or when I suspect I touched a virus, I overwrite the partition with a backup, update the things that need updating since I saved the backup, and make a new backup. This way, it takes me about five minutes to restore my system to the way it felt two days after install, with everything optimally tuned and configured. An extra benefit is that a restore from an Acronis TrueImage is 100% defragmented. This procedure is such a godsend that I wonder why it's not universally recommended by all nerds to people who run Windows.
Since most of the important modifications for Air Force One have to do with armor, EMP shielding, extra fuel storage, etc., why not start with a military plane that's already got some of these features by design, and just retrofit it with couches and stuff?
One added benefit would be that it could transport the presidential limo/tank in case there is fear of sniper fire at the airport. The president could just be driven from the cargo bay of the plane.
If you're you're right, I hope someone shares the script here. I have a feeling it might be tougher than you think, because Adblock understands regular expressions, wildcards, etc.
If this is intended to control a media center, why does it force the user to get up and to the screen give the media center input?
Wouldn't it be better if the media center itself were a plain, small and silent box (like the Apple TV) to which this neat keyboard could be connected wirelessly? The screen on it would be ideal for browsing through a music collection on the network, when you're in no mood to fire up the big screen in the living room. Communication between the keyboard and the box with the processor could happen by bluetooth or wifi.
An added benefit would be that the keyboard would have much longer battery life.
This is really interesting! I'm not sure I completely get the principle, but it almost sounds like the flywheel is a glorified transmission - that the engine runs at a constant, optimal rpm to spin up the flywheel, and energy is removed from the flywheel as needed for the propulsion of the car. This means that more torque is available for straightaways than what the engine itself can provide, increasing both performance and efficiency.
I can also imagine that the flywheel itself could be tilted with hydraulics to take advantage of the gyroscopic effect for enabling tighter turns. I doubt F1 would allow this, but it would be a pretty amazing ride! I can imagine future F1 drivers wearing a g-suit.
I did some of the AI for the new enemies in the Ascention mod, and it was a very interesting experience. David Gaider, senior engineer at Bioware, basically showed up on a Yahoo group one day where we were working on teaching ourselves the scripting system, with the hope of "smartening up" our the standard BG2 enemies.
We made considerable progress, and Gaider was impressed. Then he unloaded on us something that he had been working on - the "proper" ending for Throne of Baahl that Bioware just didn't have time to include. We coded up some pretty good AI for the enemies, to the point where, in a fight of equals, the AI almost always beat identically-endowed players, and without cheating.
I still think that the final sequence in Ascention is the gold standard for party-based RPG fighting. It's definitely not easy, but by the time you get that far into the game, you should be skilled enough to construct a successful strategy.
I remember years ago when porn customers were happy enough to see a video of good looking people having sex. Now I have the impression that entire companies are surviving off the money of "long tail" customers who want to see shemales fuck midgets inside of a walk-in freezer.
And as we all know, where porn goes everyone else follows.
Hmm, this really doesn't make much sense. If you're going to spend that much money, the thing should have four graphics cards and its own nuclear powerplant. The one they reviewed, priced at 5099 dollars, only has one graphics card, so it gets whooped by a $1500 computer at Crysis.
Any ethernet plug made in the last 10 years probably supports WOL. Sometimes when ethernet is bundled with the motherboard, WOL is turned off by default in the BIOS. That's one setting that matters. Less intuitively, there is also a setting in the ethernet driver which needs to be set for WOL. This confused me, because I was thinking: The driver isn't even loaded when the computer is off, so how could a driver setting affect whether a computer is wakeable? Apparently it does, and once you know this, the setup isn't difficult. There are many online tutorials.
As far as sending the necessary magic packet, I use my DD-WRT router's default interface. It's as easy as logging in to the router from a remote location and pushing a button.
There might be a better way, but the following is easy enough: I have a router with DD-WRT, and I can log in to the the web interface for that router from anywhere in the world and use DD-WRT's native WOL feature. It works like a charm - basically involves the pushing of one button next to the name of the computer you want to wake up.
Shutting down is less straightforward. For this I use either VNC or Remote Desktop - or, when I'm lazy, I just let my computers go into S5 suspend (no power use) on their own.
FEHA permits unlimited compensatory and punitive damages
Woohoo! I'm getting a job there, and if the infringe on my Orthodox Satanist beliefs, I'll be asking for some of those "unlimited compensatory and punitive damages!"
"Once you have a nuclear energy facility, it's straightforward to start refining uranium in that facility, which is what Iran is doing and Venezuela is planning to do," Jacobson said. "The potential for terrorists to obtain a nuclear weapon or for states to develop nuclear weapons that could be used in limited regional wars will certainly increase with an increase in the number of nuclear energy facilities worldwide." Jacobson calculated that if one small nuclear bomb exploded, the carbon emissions from the burning of a large city would be modest, but the death rate for one such event would be twice as large as the current vehicle air pollution death rate summed over 30 years.
So basically, to make Nuclear just fall off his chart, he assumes that building more powerplants will lead to nuclear war, and calculates how much stuff that will burn. Is that not completely absurd?
Basically, the gist of what he's saying about Nuclear is this: "We have to pretend like it's a bad idea, because if we don't, other countries will want to do it, and then they might build bombs. So, say it with me: Nuclear is a baad idea."
Does somebody want to break it to the guy that Iran and other states will pursue weapons programs no matter what sort of powerplants we build in the US? And besides, what's more likely to cause war: Clean and cost-effective nuclear powerplants that the rest of the world will want to copy, or an energy shortage which sends us looking to secure fossil fuels? I think the latter.
Anyway, this calculating methodology is so incredibly bizarre that I suspect it's bought.
I would always leave my bedroom PC on in case I needed to FTP into it and get some data when I was away from home. Since then, though, I've learned that it's easy to power up my PC from anywhere in the world. Then I VNC into it, do stuff and shut it down.
It really feels like I'm living in the future! Actually, my computer is set to auto-hibernate when there's no activity for a while, and WOL can wake it from this as well. These days I also wake my computer from work before I go home, and set it to download the previous night's Colbert torrent, so that it's ready when I get home. Now I need some sort of a USB-switchable power strip so that I could control the power of my other appliances, like lights and audio system.
Right, the calling out is one of the things that Google would need to help with. You can get Skype Out for very cheap, like 20 Euro per year, for unlimited calling in North America. (I'm sure there will be a Skype app for Android.) Google could either team up with Skype or do something with Google Talk to mirror SkypeOut and SkypeIn's interface, which could be done through Grand Central.
What bugs me about Grand Central is the stupid "press one to accept this call" when you answer the phone. If it worked more transparently, I'd love it. But one thing it's good at is being agnostic about who provides your telephony services. Whatever it is, they route to it.
Currently, my setup is that when someone calls my GrandCentral number, my cell phone and SkypeIn both ring. Even better though would be this: I assign an Android handset to be on, say, the GoogleTalk network, and when I'm connected (i.e. in a hotspot), GrandCentral either automatically takes the call through VoIP, or maybe even better, Android gives me two different options for answering the call: One button for accept as cellular call, and another for accept as VoIP. You might choose the first option if you are about to leave the hotspot but want to continue the conversation.
One really awesome thing for which we could use more help from Google would be this: You get one GrandCentral number and if your phone is connected to a Wifi spot, your calling is by default VoIP. You'd only use the cellular network if you somewhere out of reach of a hotspot.
There should be a way to configure Grand Central to be sensitive to the context of your handset and route the call in the optimal way, automatically.
Since I spend about 90% of my time in some sort of a hotspot (I work at a university), it would mean that I would probably cancel my monthly contract altogether and switch to a prepaid minutes/data plan. That savings would go a long way towards paying back my unsubsidized four hundred bucks for the handset.
Yeah, that was a good article. I know that a lot of people interpret Star Wars through the "hero's journey" lens developed by Joseph Campbell. It's boring now. Somehow, though, your article wasn't - so, nice work!
Basically, you're saying that with Android, a manufacturer wouldn't really even need the support of a big brand of cellphones - since the big brands use China for fabrication, but then pocket some of the money.
So Chinese fabs could just hire a couple of engineers to quickly make clones of devices designed by experts, and there would be a ready-made, free software for those devices. I like it! But it must be a scary thought for companies like Nokia, Motorola, RIM and Apple. Maybe it will drive some hesitation about the use of Android, because everyone will know that knockoffs will work pretty much identically to an Android phone.
Potentially, the big winners here could be the carriers, who could just brand the cheaper hardware.
Sucks to have to scroll down so far before this good advice appears. I'd only add one thing: My favorite way of watching YouTube now is with the KeepVideo bookmarklet. All you need is to create a bookmark with the following target:
When you get to a YouTube page, don't let the video load, but quickly hit the bookmarklet button. You'll go to a simple site where the.flv file of the video is available for download. That way, you can keep forever and view it on your own terms.
Better even than Gmail's website: Use something like Thunderbird or Outlook and get your Gmail by IMAP. That way you won't have to open your browser, and only get the text of your emails without a package of a million lines of javascript.
This thing sounds expensive. I wonder if this ended up costing more than the $3,000,000 that the Alder Planetarium payed for it's high-tech projection system.
When, in a recent debate, McCain was reaching for an example of ridiculous pork that he demonstrates spending that's run out of control, he mentioned this as a paradigmatic waste of money: "Three million dollars for a (heh heh) projector." See the story here.
Yup, I've thought about it and you're exactly right. Apple really do seem to be making the best laptops these days. (I'm writing this on my desktop while taking a break from diagnosing the incessant blue-screening of my Thinkpad. Maybe I'm ready to upgrade.)
I foresee a different future for AMD. I have a feeling that they're restructuring themselves to be a big ATi, which was a fabless "silicon design" company. There are plenty of competent and cheap foundries for silicon. The costs of duplicating the engineering work of others is weighing heavily on AMD, since their primary rival can outspend them by such a huge margin. It seems to me that they're betting on the survival of AMD intellectual property by having their competent engineers design stuff that's fabbed in Taiwan.
I might be wrong and maybe they have enough confidence in their process tech that they want to scale up their manufacture beyond the demand of their own processors and GPUs, but I don't think so. AMD GPUs are already fabbed in Taiwan. Despite the huge investment in process tech made by AMD, this is still worth their while. That makes me think that they're regretting their huge investment in process tech, and aren't feeling up to the challenge of spending the dough to stay competitive with the big boys.
Slashdot Mirror
Then we should call it something less militaristic than "Air Force One" - don't you think?
There are ways around this. My way is to put the OS and all my applications (except games) on a 10GB partition (less than half full) and when everything is installed and working well, save a compressed binary image of that partition with Acronis TrueImage. When things start running down, or when I suspect I touched a virus, I overwrite the partition with a backup, update the things that need updating since I saved the backup, and make a new backup. This way, it takes me about five minutes to restore my system to the way it felt two days after install, with everything optimally tuned and configured. An extra benefit is that a restore from an Acronis TrueImage is 100% defragmented. This procedure is such a godsend that I wonder why it's not universally recommended by all nerds to people who run Windows.
Since most of the important modifications for Air Force One have to do with armor, EMP shielding, extra fuel storage, etc., why not start with a military plane that's already got some of these features by design, and just retrofit it with couches and stuff?
One added benefit would be that it could transport the presidential limo/tank in case there is fear of sniper fire at the airport. The president could just be driven from the cargo bay of the plane.
If you're you're right, I hope someone shares the script here. I have a feeling it might be tougher than you think, because Adblock understands regular expressions, wildcards, etc.
If this is intended to control a media center, why does it force the user to get up and to the screen give the media center input?
Wouldn't it be better if the media center itself were a plain, small and silent box (like the Apple TV) to which this neat keyboard could be connected wirelessly? The screen on it would be ideal for browsing through a music collection on the network, when you're in no mood to fire up the big screen in the living room. Communication between the keyboard and the box with the processor could happen by bluetooth or wifi.
An added benefit would be that the keyboard would have much longer battery life.
This is really interesting! I'm not sure I completely get the principle, but it almost sounds like the flywheel is a glorified transmission - that the engine runs at a constant, optimal rpm to spin up the flywheel, and energy is removed from the flywheel as needed for the propulsion of the car. This means that more torque is available for straightaways than what the engine itself can provide, increasing both performance and efficiency.
I can also imagine that the flywheel itself could be tilted with hydraulics to take advantage of the gyroscopic effect for enabling tighter turns. I doubt F1 would allow this, but it would be a pretty amazing ride! I can imagine future F1 drivers wearing a g-suit.
I did some of the AI for the new enemies in the Ascention mod, and it was a very interesting experience. David Gaider, senior engineer at Bioware, basically showed up on a Yahoo group one day where we were working on teaching ourselves the scripting system, with the hope of "smartening up" our the standard BG2 enemies.
We made considerable progress, and Gaider was impressed. Then he unloaded on us something that he had been working on - the "proper" ending for Throne of Baahl that Bioware just didn't have time to include. We coded up some pretty good AI for the enemies, to the point where, in a fight of equals, the AI almost always beat identically-endowed players, and without cheating.
I still think that the final sequence in Ascention is the gold standard for party-based RPG fighting. It's definitely not easy, but by the time you get that far into the game, you should be skilled enough to construct a successful strategy.
I remember years ago when porn customers were happy enough to see a video of good looking people having sex. Now I have the impression that entire companies are surviving off the money of "long tail" customers who want to see shemales fuck midgets inside of a walk-in freezer.
And as we all know, where porn goes everyone else follows.
Hmm, this really doesn't make much sense. If you're going to spend that much money, the thing should have four graphics cards and its own nuclear powerplant. The one they reviewed, priced at 5099 dollars, only has one graphics card, so it gets whooped by a $1500 computer at Crysis.
Any ethernet plug made in the last 10 years probably supports WOL. Sometimes when ethernet is bundled with the motherboard, WOL is turned off by default in the BIOS. That's one setting that matters. Less intuitively, there is also a setting in the ethernet driver which needs to be set for WOL. This confused me, because I was thinking: The driver isn't even loaded when the computer is off, so how could a driver setting affect whether a computer is wakeable? Apparently it does, and once you know this, the setup isn't difficult. There are many online tutorials.
As far as sending the necessary magic packet, I use my DD-WRT router's default interface. It's as easy as logging in to the router from a remote location and pushing a button.
There might be a better way, but the following is easy enough: I have a router with DD-WRT, and I can log in to the the web interface for that router from anywhere in the world and use DD-WRT's native WOL feature. It works like a charm - basically involves the pushing of one button next to the name of the computer you want to wake up.
Shutting down is less straightforward. For this I use either VNC or Remote Desktop - or, when I'm lazy, I just let my computers go into S5 suspend (no power use) on their own.
FEHA permits unlimited compensatory and punitive damages
Woohoo! I'm getting a job there, and if the infringe on my Orthodox Satanist beliefs, I'll be asking for some of those "unlimited compensatory and punitive damages!"
So basically, to make Nuclear just fall off his chart, he assumes that building more powerplants will lead to nuclear war, and calculates how much stuff that will burn. Is that not completely absurd?
Basically, the gist of what he's saying about Nuclear is this: "We have to pretend like it's a bad idea, because if we don't, other countries will want to do it, and then they might build bombs. So, say it with me: Nuclear is a baad idea."
Does somebody want to break it to the guy that Iran and other states will pursue weapons programs no matter what sort of powerplants we build in the US? And besides, what's more likely to cause war: Clean and cost-effective nuclear powerplants that the rest of the world will want to copy, or an energy shortage which sends us looking to secure fossil fuels? I think the latter.
Anyway, this calculating methodology is so incredibly bizarre that I suspect it's bought.
I would always leave my bedroom PC on in case I needed to FTP into it and get some data when I was away from home. Since then, though, I've learned that it's easy to power up my PC from anywhere in the world. Then I VNC into it, do stuff and shut it down.
It really feels like I'm living in the future! Actually, my computer is set to auto-hibernate when there's no activity for a while, and WOL can wake it from this as well. These days I also wake my computer from work before I go home, and set it to download the previous night's Colbert torrent, so that it's ready when I get home. Now I need some sort of a USB-switchable power strip so that I could control the power of my other appliances, like lights and audio system.
I guess that the black hole formed a long time ago around some hot grits, way back when that was funny.
Right, the calling out is one of the things that Google would need to help with. You can get Skype Out for very cheap, like 20 Euro per year, for unlimited calling in North America. (I'm sure there will be a Skype app for Android.) Google could either team up with Skype or do something with Google Talk to mirror SkypeOut and SkypeIn's interface, which could be done through Grand Central.
What bugs me about Grand Central is the stupid "press one to accept this call" when you answer the phone. If it worked more transparently, I'd love it. But one thing it's good at is being agnostic about who provides your telephony services. Whatever it is, they route to it.
Currently, my setup is that when someone calls my GrandCentral number, my cell phone and SkypeIn both ring. Even better though would be this: I assign an Android handset to be on, say, the GoogleTalk network, and when I'm connected (i.e. in a hotspot), GrandCentral either automatically takes the call through VoIP, or maybe even better, Android gives me two different options for answering the call: One button for accept as cellular call, and another for accept as VoIP. You might choose the first option if you are about to leave the hotspot but want to continue the conversation.
One really awesome thing for which we could use more help from Google would be this: You get one GrandCentral number and if your phone is connected to a Wifi spot, your calling is by default VoIP. You'd only use the cellular network if you somewhere out of reach of a hotspot.
There should be a way to configure Grand Central to be sensitive to the context of your handset and route the call in the optimal way, automatically.
Since I spend about 90% of my time in some sort of a hotspot (I work at a university), it would mean that I would probably cancel my monthly contract altogether and switch to a prepaid minutes/data plan. That savings would go a long way towards paying back my unsubsidized four hundred bucks for the handset.
Though unemployment also increases the temptation towards game piracy.
Yeah, that was a good article. I know that a lot of people interpret Star Wars through the "hero's journey" lens developed by Joseph Campbell. It's boring now. Somehow, though, your article wasn't - so, nice work!
Basically, you're saying that with Android, a manufacturer wouldn't really even need the support of a big brand of cellphones - since the big brands use China for fabrication, but then pocket some of the money.
So Chinese fabs could just hire a couple of engineers to quickly make clones of devices designed by experts, and there would be a ready-made, free software for those devices. I like it! But it must be a scary thought for companies like Nokia, Motorola, RIM and Apple. Maybe it will drive some hesitation about the use of Android, because everyone will know that knockoffs will work pretty much identically to an Android phone.
Potentially, the big winners here could be the carriers, who could just brand the cheaper hardware.
Sucks to have to scroll down so far before this good advice appears. I'd only add one thing: My favorite way of watching YouTube now is with the KeepVideo bookmarklet. All you need is to create a bookmark with the following target:
javascript:document.location='http://keepvid.com/?url='+escape(window.location);When you get to a YouTube page, don't let the video load, but quickly hit the bookmarklet button. You'll go to a simple site where the .flv file of the video is available for download. That way, you can keep forever and view it on your own terms.
Better even than Gmail's website: Use something like Thunderbird or Outlook and get your Gmail by IMAP. That way you won't have to open your browser, and only get the text of your emails without a package of a million lines of javascript.
This thing sounds expensive. I wonder if this ended up costing more than the $3,000,000 that the Alder Planetarium payed for it's high-tech projection system.
When, in a recent debate, McCain was reaching for an example of ridiculous pork that he demonstrates spending that's run out of control, he mentioned this as a paradigmatic waste of money: "Three million dollars for a (heh heh) projector." See the story here.
Be glad he doesn't read Slashdot!
Yup, I've thought about it and you're exactly right. Apple really do seem to be making the best laptops these days. (I'm writing this on my desktop while taking a break from diagnosing the incessant blue-screening of my Thinkpad. Maybe I'm ready to upgrade.)
I foresee a different future for AMD. I have a feeling that they're restructuring themselves to be a big ATi, which was a fabless "silicon design" company. There are plenty of competent and cheap foundries for silicon. The costs of duplicating the engineering work of others is weighing heavily on AMD, since their primary rival can outspend them by such a huge margin. It seems to me that they're betting on the survival of AMD intellectual property by having their competent engineers design stuff that's fabbed in Taiwan.
I might be wrong and maybe they have enough confidence in their process tech that they want to scale up their manufacture beyond the demand of their own processors and GPUs, but I don't think so. AMD GPUs are already fabbed in Taiwan. Despite the huge investment in process tech made by AMD, this is still worth their while. That makes me think that they're regretting their huge investment in process tech, and aren't feeling up to the challenge of spending the dough to stay competitive with the big boys.