When I bought my dual core machine in jan 2008 it was already year old hardware, the cheapest name brand stuff you could buy. That was for a $500 computer including $120 video card at the time. A standard $350 consumer computer without fancy video card from three years ago is going to be just as fast running firefox as a brand new one - i.e. instant. I think it's respectable to expect poorer performance on a 5 year old computer running it's original install of windows (and whatever spyware it's been choking on since), compared to a 2006 or 2007 vintage computer.
How much faster can you get than "instant"? I'm still using 3.0 on a dual core windoze machine and everytime I hear someone say "its faster than the previous version" I think, "hunh?". Browser speed is not something that has come to mind since 2005 at least. Maybe they're talking about render speed on old 1ghz celerons burdened with norton antivirus and tons of spyware on 512mb of ram.
They probably should have changed the name of the company at the same time, such as Universal Vehicles or something, as a holding company, and legally spun off each major division to avoid BS lawsuits like this. Keeping the same name might be nice for traditionalists, but what came out of bankruptcy is essentially a new, private company.
That was the first thing that went through my head. Call me old and crotchity (at age 25) but I'm done with bleeding edge software (unless it's the only free version and I need it right NOW). I'm a little suprised Chrome doesn't have a FF extension compatibility layer built in from the get-go. I'll consider Chrome when they hit v1.5 or so and stop adding functionality and start working on stability (Firefox hit this stage around the 2.0 stage).
Texas driver's licenses have a barcode. They also have a magnetic strip (identical to what's on a credit card) that has all the information that's on the front. This information is used by "civilians"; a lot of bars have machines that will read this to detect fake IDs.
The document isn't being destroyed. It's the embedded chip that is. I guess it depends on whether or not the chip is considered by law already to be a document in itself.
I just use flashblock. Doesn't break the page (creates appropriately sized boxes where the flash ads would be), and has a big play button in the middle in case I need to see it (youtube, for example). And you're not hurting anyone's non-annoying ad revenue.
Apple has always been this way. There were always some major releases that at least some programs had backport support to. A lot of OS 9 apps would run on 8.6, but not 7.5, or it would run on 7.5 but not System 7.0 due to networking improvements along the way. A lot of basic OS 9 programs would run on System 6 but not earlier. Windows hasn't changed a terrible lot since Win 2000. The Kernel went from 5.0 to 5.1 with XP, Vista was kernel version 6.0 (really, 5.2 or 5.5) and Win 7 is kernel 6.1 (really, 5.3 or 5.6)... so it's sort of assumed that backwards compatibility should be high with this version of Windows. It should be noted that most software written for 10.1 still runs just fine on x86 in 10.5.
BTW System 6 is still the fastest OS I've ever used, even being based off a floppy drive. Written in assembly, it just screams for internet (well, "internet"), word processing, etc. Boot time is less than 10 seconds.
I just want to be able to plug my rock band drums into my linux box and use with as a 0 latency "synth drum" box. I just don't have the time space or money for a full set of drums but it's been reported that rock band drums support velocity and something like 6 pads total (double up the pads to get a full set of drums including cowbell). The main drawback is that there's still a noticable delay even to the untrained ear, filtered through crappy youtube videos. I've been looking, but I haven't seen a drop in latency patch yet for linux audio. Fingers crossed...
Yeah, but this is a great feature. You take a great photo at the bar, and instead of passing the camera around to all your drunk buddies with greasy fingers, you can just shine the photo on the wall. I was in the market for a new digital camera, and this plus the vibration reduction makes it the ultimate bar camera. A separate LED projector like this ALONE cost $299 just a couple of months ago. $400 for a camera you will probably have for 5 years and take thousands of photos isn't a bad deal, since you never have to pay for film or processing. $400 might seem a little steep to you, but I usually take 10,000 pictures with one camera before I wear some part out of it and/or it becomes obsolete (about 5 years for a pocket-sized camera in my case, and I'm pretty rough with them).
Hah, nickleback everytday at 1:32 at my local station in Dallas, and "Hey there delilah" at 2:00pm on the dot on thursdays. My coworker takes advantage of the "radio over speakerphone" function in our office and I get to listen to whatever she's listening to.
You can put together a competent "recording studio" in your home office for under $500. I certianly have, and as a hobby only. As it turns out, humans (well, a significant minority, at least, but it's larger than you think) are very well designed for making music on the fly. The costs of a home studio are so low that a lot of people do it as a hobby - I'm one of them, and still learning to play myself. With the exception of fronting cash for tours and professional studio time ($100-500/hr) and marketing expertise, there's very little that modern labels do for real musicians.
I need Word still, sadly. Notepad doesn't have an integrated spellcheck, and our IT department won't let me install Open Office. Sometimes in a pinch I'll spell check in gmail or google docs.
Hmm I looked at this some more. It looks like there is only a 2,900 joule requirement to leave earth's orbit from LEO for a 1kg object. So you're looking at 1450 joules to leave earth's orbit at full weight; a CO2 cartridge provides about 150 joules of energy. You should be able to fit at least three CO2 cartridges in that canister, so you're already 40% of the way to deep space exploration using off the shelf technology! Plus each cartridge uses 12g of CO2, so the probe becomes lighter as it uses it's fuel. 60g of liquid oxygen/hydrogen peroxide should be enough to slingshot the probe around the moon towards the planet of your choice.
The PDF says you can link up to 4 of these together; in theory you could have two pressurized canisters of fuel, one canister functioning as the nozzle and flight computer, with the fourth canister holding your scientific instrument payload.
You didn't RTFA. For $8,000 this comes with a turnkey satellite + satellite development software environment,
Casing, Endplates, and Mounting Hardware
A Transceiver
A Battery Pack
Solar Cells
A Power Management Control System (PMCS)
Microcomputer
Software
Antennas
Safety Switches
Complete Instructions
with equipment that's already gone through R&D, and warrantied against failure during the trip into space, with space for additional cargo of up to 0.2kg. I'm sure they'd sell you the empty casing plus space on the rocket for less than $8 large (maybe as low as 4K? judging from their pricing model, it looks like the 4K is for the actual propellant/overhead costs), but it's going to cost a business a whole lot more than 8K to develop space-worthy electronics + software to put in the canister.
It says you can link up to four together at a time. I guess the first unit would have the antennas, thrusters and deployment, with up to three separate payloads.
How many high pressure CO2 cartridges can you fit in one of those, and would they provide enough thrust to get your device out of earth's orbit? Maybe stick it in a figure 8 orbital pattern between the moon and earth, or shoot it off towards Mars. I would imagine you need substantially less thrust to break from earth's orbit for a lowly half-pound payload than say, a space shuttle, not to mention, the pressure differential is substantially greater.
That's an interesting point. From that point of view, you could argue that large, full scale war culls society to some extent. We don't really have any large wars killing large portions of the "underclass" these days in the first world. Sure 2,000-3,000 here and there in wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's well within the margin of error of any study on 300 million people. Natural disasters kill more people than wars do in the first world.... prior to 1940, easily 5% of a population (usually the poorest) might go to war and not come back. With a significant war of some type every 20-30 years that's at least once a generation.
You must work for NASA - this is metric money, not imperial. Got to be careful with those conversions, you never know when one might accidentally cause a probe to slam into Mars at high speed.
I've noticed boing boing has had increasingly bad and misleading posts/articles lately, down to "what caused these waves in the snow" and other random BS. Whatever draws an audience, and the clicking of advertising links, I suppose. You don't see crappy articles like these in the NYT.
Are you kidding? $200K for a week in an orbital hotel and an open bar? There's probably one in the works already, they're just trying to figure out how to hose vomit off the walls in zero-G.
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When I bought my dual core machine in jan 2008 it was already year old hardware, the cheapest name brand stuff you could buy. That was for a $500 computer including $120 video card at the time. A standard $350 consumer computer without fancy video card from three years ago is going to be just as fast running firefox as a brand new one - i.e. instant. I think it's respectable to expect poorer performance on a 5 year old computer running it's original install of windows (and whatever spyware it's been choking on since), compared to a 2006 or 2007 vintage computer.
How much faster can you get than "instant"? I'm still using 3.0 on a dual core windoze machine and everytime I hear someone say "its faster than the previous version" I think, "hunh?". Browser speed is not something that has come to mind since 2005 at least. Maybe they're talking about render speed on old 1ghz celerons burdened with norton antivirus and tons of spyware on 512mb of ram.
They probably should have changed the name of the company at the same time, such as Universal Vehicles or something, as a holding company, and legally spun off each major division to avoid BS lawsuits like this. Keeping the same name might be nice for traditionalists, but what came out of bankruptcy is essentially a new, private company.
What's chrome?
That was the first thing that went through my head. Call me old and crotchity (at age 25) but I'm done with bleeding edge software (unless it's the only free version and I need it right NOW). I'm a little suprised Chrome doesn't have a FF extension compatibility layer built in from the get-go. I'll consider Chrome when they hit v1.5 or so and stop adding functionality and start working on stability (Firefox hit this stage around the 2.0 stage).
Texas driver's licenses have a barcode. They also have a magnetic strip (identical to what's on a credit card) that has all the information that's on the front. This information is used by "civilians"; a lot of bars have machines that will read this to detect fake IDs.
The document isn't being destroyed. It's the embedded chip that is. I guess it depends on whether or not the chip is considered by law already to be a document in itself.
I just use flashblock. Doesn't break the page (creates appropriately sized boxes where the flash ads would be), and has a big play button in the middle in case I need to see it (youtube, for example). And you're not hurting anyone's non-annoying ad revenue.
Apple has always been this way. There were always some major releases that at least some programs had backport support to. A lot of OS 9 apps would run on 8.6, but not 7.5, or it would run on 7.5 but not System 7.0 due to networking improvements along the way. A lot of basic OS 9 programs would run on System 6 but not earlier. Windows hasn't changed a terrible lot since Win 2000. The Kernel went from 5.0 to 5.1 with XP, Vista was kernel version 6.0 (really, 5.2 or 5.5) and Win 7 is kernel 6.1 (really, 5.3 or 5.6)... so it's sort of assumed that backwards compatibility should be high with this version of Windows. It should be noted that most software written for 10.1 still runs just fine on x86 in 10.5.
BTW System 6 is still the fastest OS I've ever used, even being based off a floppy drive. Written in assembly, it just screams for internet (well, "internet"), word processing, etc. Boot time is less than 10 seconds.
I just want to be able to plug my rock band drums into my linux box and use with as a 0 latency "synth drum" box. I just don't have the time space or money for a full set of drums but it's been reported that rock band drums support velocity and something like 6 pads total (double up the pads to get a full set of drums including cowbell). The main drawback is that there's still a noticable delay even to the untrained ear, filtered through crappy youtube videos. I've been looking, but I haven't seen a drop in latency patch yet for linux audio. Fingers crossed...
Yeah, but this is a great feature. You take a great photo at the bar, and instead of passing the camera around to all your drunk buddies with greasy fingers, you can just shine the photo on the wall. I was in the market for a new digital camera, and this plus the vibration reduction makes it the ultimate bar camera. A separate LED projector like this ALONE cost $299 just a couple of months ago. $400 for a camera you will probably have for 5 years and take thousands of photos isn't a bad deal, since you never have to pay for film or processing. $400 might seem a little steep to you, but I usually take 10,000 pictures with one camera before I wear some part out of it and/or it becomes obsolete (about 5 years for a pocket-sized camera in my case, and I'm pretty rough with them).
Are you saying CERN is like FEMA, or more like congressional pork? Or did I just describe the Office of Homeland Security?
Says the man whose .sig links to his Fermilab profile page! We're onto you!
Anyone ever think that Fermilab is paying Cern employees to sabotage their collider? Each setback adds 6-8 months to the life of Fermilab...
Hah, nickleback everytday at 1:32 at my local station in Dallas, and "Hey there delilah" at 2:00pm on the dot on thursdays. My coworker takes advantage of the "radio over speakerphone" function in our office and I get to listen to whatever she's listening to.
You can put together a competent "recording studio" in your home office for under $500. I certianly have, and as a hobby only. As it turns out, humans (well, a significant minority, at least, but it's larger than you think) are very well designed for making music on the fly. The costs of a home studio are so low that a lot of people do it as a hobby - I'm one of them, and still learning to play myself. With the exception of fronting cash for tours and professional studio time ($100-500/hr) and marketing expertise, there's very little that modern labels do for real musicians.
I need Word still, sadly. Notepad doesn't have an integrated spellcheck, and our IT department won't let me install Open Office. Sometimes in a pinch I'll spell check in gmail or google docs.
I took the joules measurement from a CO2 cartridge based BB gun, so that should be real world energy thrust (TM), not theoretical.
Hmm I looked at this some more. It looks like there is only a 2,900 joule requirement to leave earth's orbit from LEO for a 1kg object. So you're looking at 1450 joules to leave earth's orbit at full weight; a CO2 cartridge provides about 150 joules of energy. You should be able to fit at least three CO2 cartridges in that canister, so you're already 40% of the way to deep space exploration using off the shelf technology! Plus each cartridge uses 12g of CO2, so the probe becomes lighter as it uses it's fuel. 60g of liquid oxygen/hydrogen peroxide should be enough to slingshot the probe around the moon towards the planet of your choice.
The PDF says you can link up to 4 of these together; in theory you could have two pressurized canisters of fuel, one canister functioning as the nozzle and flight computer, with the fourth canister holding your scientific instrument payload.
You didn't RTFA. For $8,000 this comes with a turnkey satellite + satellite development software environment,
with equipment that's already gone through R&D, and warrantied against failure during the trip into space, with space for additional cargo of up to 0.2kg. I'm sure they'd sell you the empty casing plus space on the rocket for less than $8 large (maybe as low as 4K? judging from their pricing model, it looks like the 4K is for the actual propellant/overhead costs), but it's going to cost a business a whole lot more than 8K to develop space-worthy electronics + software to put in the canister.
It says you can link up to four together at a time. I guess the first unit would have the antennas, thrusters and deployment, with up to three separate payloads.
How many high pressure CO2 cartridges can you fit in one of those, and would they provide enough thrust to get your device out of earth's orbit? Maybe stick it in a figure 8 orbital pattern between the moon and earth, or shoot it off towards Mars. I would imagine you need substantially less thrust to break from earth's orbit for a lowly half-pound payload than say, a space shuttle, not to mention, the pressure differential is substantially greater.
That's an interesting point. From that point of view, you could argue that large, full scale war culls society to some extent. We don't really have any large wars killing large portions of the "underclass" these days in the first world. Sure 2,000-3,000 here and there in wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's well within the margin of error of any study on 300 million people. Natural disasters kill more people than wars do in the first world.... prior to 1940, easily 5% of a population (usually the poorest) might go to war and not come back. With a significant war of some type every 20-30 years that's at least once a generation.
You must work for NASA - this is metric money, not imperial. Got to be careful with those conversions, you never know when one might accidentally cause a probe to slam into Mars at high speed.
I've noticed boing boing has had increasingly bad and misleading posts/articles lately, down to "what caused these waves in the snow" and other random BS. Whatever draws an audience, and the clicking of advertising links, I suppose. You don't see crappy articles like these in the NYT.
Are you kidding? $200K for a week in an orbital hotel and an open bar? There's probably one in the works already, they're just trying to figure out how to hose vomit off the walls in zero-G.