I love those wheels! I've thought about getting some for my Golf (the ones for Passats won't fit; different bolt pattern, but they're also available in the Golf's pattern).
If you would like to know how to connect your rear fog -- it is fiendishly simple -- I've done it and can give you some pointers, though I'll have to check to make sure that there's no drastic changes in the pinout on the taillight end. It's there but not connected in NA cars; you just need to run a wire from the switch to the socket and put a bulb in.
You'll need this Euro headlight switch to make it work. (The rear fog indicator in these doesn't light up; mine does but that's a custom hack I had someone do for me. Depending on when your car was made, you may have a working in-dash fog indicator, or may be able to wire it to work if not.)
Tell your cousin-in-law I love his Passat! The only thing that'd make it better would be if it were a wagon.:)
I've got no plans in the immediate future to chip my Golf 2.0, but I did put in GTI headlamps with fog lights (cost me all of $250 buying parts used; I now have much better lighting in bad weather.) When the car's ten years old and the powertrain warranty runs out, I'll swap in a VR6 engine and a Tiptronic tranny. It'll cost $5,000-$7,000 I'm sure, but that's a lot cheaper than a new car.
Yep, just about any VW engine will fit in any VW body. All the mount points are there.
Then there's big brake kits, those Bosch Xenon HID upgrades you mentioned (1,300 or so for a Golf/GTI), adding the MFA computer to a car that didn't come with it (now that's a very cool hack -- someone on the VW site I'm on has done it), etc. etc....
I have a congenital birth defect that rendered my left ear all but useless and my right ear severely impaired. This means that (1) I do not have stereo hearing; (2) I have a difficult time in situation where there is a lot of background noise; (3) computer software and/or games that depend on audible alerts to signal the user are nearly useless to me.
First off, let me say that I'm glad that there are some provisions for the deaf in Windows; I recently installed XP and used 98SE before that. (At this point, the applications I use basically require Windows, though I have several Linux boxes in the house for applications where free software exists; I also use MacOS X). I will concentrate on Windows because that's (unfortunately) what most people use.
The accessibility options for the deaf are relatively scant. Yes, it's true that those who are hard of hearing don't need a lot in the way of assistance because we can see just fine (aside from sometimes wearing glasses, like me). But there are two major issues with the built-in accessibility tools: (1) They aren't installed by default (I don't think they are; I had to check the box for them when custom installing XP and I believe I did for 98SE as well), so if you don't know that they exist, you won't get them. (2) They don't do a heck of a lot. I've checked the boxes for having applications flash a visual alert, but I've yet to see one do this outside built-in (for that app) options. (I use SecureCRT for telnet; it too has a "visual bell" setting.)
Now, I do a lot of chatting over the Net (you don't know how empowering it is to sit in a group of two dozen people and not miss a word and be part of the conversation until that is denied you in the real world) and I use MUSHClient and mIRC to do it. Both of those applications have built into them options to flash the taskbar button if new text arrives while the program is not the foremost window. All well and good. However, again there is the problem of obscurity: while the options are of course installed with the software, they are not turned on by default and are usually somewhat hard to notice. MUSHclient's is buried deep within the preferences for a specific connection and isn't program-wide, so I can't check "Flash visual alert on activity" in global preferences -- I have to do it one at a time. mIRC is much the same: I have to right-click on a channel's mIRC-Taskbar button and select "Flashing" (not too descriptive an option name; Flash on Activity would be better) and it seems to be rather sporadic at times regarding whether or not it does it in query windows.
Games. I'm a gamer. And a lot of games these days have options for subtitles (Wing Commander III-V stand out here, having options for French and German as well as English subtitles) and a lot don't (why is Starlancer, also made by Chris Roberts, missing them?!). I can't play Thief because it doesn't put up any visual cues. Return to Castle Wolfenstein has none in its cutscenes but since it's a first person shooter game, I can get by without the cutscenes... but it'd be nice to enjoy them. Diablo II has none, though the Collector's Edition DVD fortunately had subtitles on its versions of the cutscenes.
It is not that hard to add subtitles; fan petitions got some added to at least one of the Zork games. Movie theaters don't have them yet because people claim they're intrusive, but as long as they can be toggled (with a control in a plain, obvious place!), that's not an issue.
So what does Unix need, then?
It needs built-in alert options, which are part of the default install, as part of window managers. KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, whatever. A standard needs to exist for how applications will address it. Apps need to use it.
The controls to turn these on need to be in an obvious place and marked with clear symbology (the white-on-blue wheelchair symbol is a good start.)
Applications need to be marked as captioned for the hearing impaired on their web sites and on packaging. Develop a standardized symbol for this.
If I sound rather platform-independent, then that's a good thing. If I use all sorts of OSes, then other people out there like me do, too.
"Yes, one of them blew up recently. But that's one launch failure in over 30 launches."
Destroyed by the range safety officer deliberately. It's still counted as a failure because that last drastic step was necessary. The investigation as to what happened is still ongoing, though the list of possible causes is far shorter than it was when the panel was convened.
You've just wandered onto one of my best reference sites. Bravo!:)
The Pegasus doesn't touch the ground, though. The L-1011 stands tall enough on its wheels that there's a fair amount of clearance. Underslung pods of all sorts (rockets, missiles, fuel tanks, et cetera) are all designed with the ground clearances of their carrier aircraft in mind.
Is that what you were worried about? (I'm not quite sure of your intent)
That's Buran, the Soviet space shuttle. This photo is showing the Russian/Soviet equivalent of the U.S. Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. I do believe the An-225 might have been custom-developed for this purpose, an extremely expensive proposition. The United States, on the other hand, transports the shuttle orbiters on a widely-available commercial aircraft -- in fact, the early photographs of the SCA clearly reveal American Airlines markings faintly visible on the skin of the plane! (Both 747s have since been repainted white with a blue stripe.)
I don't get it. How do you cut the price in half just by getting the first 40,000 feet out of 200 miles free?
Most of the fuel use by a modern rocket occurs just getting off the launch pad. Current launch systems work by placing the rocket in a vertical position on the launch pad before liftoff, and the rocket lifts straight up before performing what's called a "roll maneuver" (this is unmistakable on the Space Shuttle, but "regular" cylindrical rockets do it as well) to get into the correct attitude for the rest of the flight. This is an incredibly energy-inefficient method, but the rockets are designed to work this way.
Consider also that most launches take place from sea level (the Sea Launch converted oil platform is a perfect example) where the earth's atmosphere is thickest, causing a lot of reistance that has to be overcome by the force of the rocket motors. At 40,000 feet, the atmosphere is far thinner (consider that humans have to wear breathing masks above 10,000) so there's less fuel used just burning through the lower atmosphere.
There is also a velocity bonus that comes from launching this way. A rocket lifting off from the earth's surface is only getting a "free" boost from the speed at which the ground moves at that latitude, explaining why the equator is the best latitude for launches and why Sea Launch tries to get as close to it as possible. An air-launched rocket like Pegasus gets the "free" velocity bonus from the launching aircraft in addition to that from the earth's rotation.
So... let the aircraft, which costs far far less to operate (we don't have rockets in every garage, but I know a few pilots) do most of the hard work and then let the rocket literally piggyback on that. (Yes, I know full well that Pegasus rides under the L-1011!)
It leads to tighter clearances, literally, on landing approach I imagine. However, the Pegasus doesn't use liquid-fuel rocket motors the way most other commercial launchers do (some do use solid propellant but generally in strap-on boosters; the main ore is liquid-propelled). This is less of a danger because the solid propellant won't ignite until a jet of flame shoots down the centreline of the motor from the ignitor (this is near the nose of the SRBs of the Space Shuttle). Care is still required but it's not as dangerous as, say, JP-1.
From the User's Guide:
"The three solid rocket motors were designed and optimized specifically for Pegasus and include features that emphasize reliability, manufacturability, and affordability. The design was developed using previously flight-proven and qualified materials and components. Common design features, materials, and production techniques are applied to all three motors to maximize cost efficiency and reliability. These motors are fully flight-qualified.
Pegasus is currently under investigation for a failure of its last flight (video here. The long smoke trail is a dead giveaway of a solid-propellant rocket motor.)
The founder effect, which is the sharp reduction in the genetic variety of a population when it arises from a very small group of individuals (Iceland is an excellent example), has a great potential to be a problem here. The cheetah, for example, went through a bottleneck at some point in the past (no one knows why). Individual cheetahs are so genetically similar that organs (such as skin) can be transplanted between individuals with little or no rejection.
Unless samples from multiple thylacines can be retrieved and successfully used to clone infants, these animals will always be sucsceptible to being wiped out by a plague (since they all have the same genotype.)
And that's to say nothing of the issues with captive-raised animals that have none of the instincts that their wild counterparts would. For example, falcons that have imprinted on humans (and think they're human as a result) cannot be released into the wild -- it would be disastrous. They would never fear humans and would be unable to hunt to feed themselves.
This is the major problem I have with the Final Fantasy film. All those floating keyboards are nice and nifty to see on the screen, but I never saw any hint of any sort of tactile feedback. Perhaps it's because the entire film was computer-animated with no human actors, but I just couldn't get comfortable with those keyboards.
Some other problems were revealed, too, such as...
What happens when the power goes out? How can you reactivate a barrier field in an emergency if you've knocked out the power to your generator, so your keyboard has just vanished? Imagine that you're an operator at, say, a Chernobyl-like plant and you can prevent disaster if only you can hit the big red "ABORT" button... that just vanished as you reached for it. It's true that you shouldn't even be using a computer in a case like that because the entire system is probably powerless, but it still makes me uneasy.
Something as simple as that brief 15-second scene should serve as a warning to anyone thinking of using one of these.
Birds can be acclimated to the presence of people. In falconry, this is called "manning" a bird (nothing to do with spacecraft carrying people). I visited the World Bird Sanctuary here in St. Louis a few weeks ago (pictures are in here) and few of the birds I looked at were afraid of people. There are even a few photos on the net -- I went with friends -- of some of us standing next to some large raptors that I could almost say posed for the camera!
It's similar to the way stray cats that are mistreated will often be afraid of the new owners who take them in but over time lose their fear (one of the cats we had when I was a child was named 'Fraidy Cat' for this reason, which later became 'Fred E. Cat')...
... if their creators believe that it is. Whether or not someone thinks my drawings are art, I think they are -- and that makes them art. They take skill to create, and I take joy in making them. That, I think, is art.
Seems to me a lot of people are dissatisfied with PayPal, but I haven't seen anyone yet say how to cancel an account. So how would one go about doing that?
Digichromatography is often used in applications where color photographs of objects are needed in high detail. This is because black and white film often has a finer grain than color does (I don't know the specifics, though. I invite comments from more avid photographers than I). It is also used, as in this case, at times when color cameras are not available -- for example, prior to World War I.
Many planetary probes don't carry color cameras but instead use high-resolution black and white cameras to shoot three images of the same scene, which are combined to produce those stunning photos that we see on sites like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory site.
I thought about your response for a bit and recalled reading that there is a way to use JavaScript to go through the available plug-ins one by one to see if any of them meets the ID string of the one you're looking for.
This one is for Netscape 3 or higher and detects a VRML plugin:
<!--
function DetectNetscape() {
var retVal = 0;
var version = parseFloat(navigator.appVersion);
if (version>=3) {
var plugin = navigator.mimeTypes["model/vrml"];
if (plugin != null) {
retVal = 1;
}
}
return retVal;
}
// -->
The snippet is from http://web3d.vapourtech.com/workshop/embed/ which has details on how to do it in IE along with a script that makes use of this function.
It might be fun (but I'll probably forget) to write a simple page that just spits out all the ID strings of all installed plugins on your system. Then one could remove the serial number from the QT control panel to make it think it's unregistered, load the page, put it back, and see if anything changed.
Or maybe if I get bored I'll just turn Javascript off and see what the trailer loader page does without it.
What is it that makes it fail if you don't have QT5Pro installed?
Also, since I work in a research lab where we use QuickTime all the time, we have it on all machines -- so I don't even know what it does if you don't and click the link anyway.
"This assummes you have curl or wget or something."
Well, I did have wget in 10.0 up to 10.0.4, but the 10.1 update "helpfully" deleted it from my system. After several annoyed looks and some time spent searching Google, I found a download site for a precompiled binary for wget that will run under OS X (downloads as an installer.pkg file; you'll need to be root or an admin to install it.) The file is, for those who want to get it directly, here (.tar.gz format... use gunzip and tar -xvf to unpack if StuffIt Expander doesn't/can't.)
If you really, really want to compile yourself (you need to have installed the developer tools, which come with boxed copies of OS X), the source is here.
Interestingly enough, the antenna used on Galileo was the same or similar as that used in Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS). Those satellites have never had any trouble with antenna deployment. The one fitted to Galileo failed because it was not lubricated at all over the years the probe sat in storage after Challenger exploded -- Galileo was designed to be launched by the Space Shuttle.
Interestingly enough, the main antenna for a Voyager probe fits perfectly within the Shuttle's payload bay, which may or may not be a coincidence. Remember that the Shuttle was designed in part to specs supplied by the Department of Defense, and chances are the specs were those of a KH-series spysat. Now consider that the KH satellites are launched by Titan IV rockets -- the same vehicle that launched Voyager 1 and 2.
... Magellan, also launched by the Shuttle/Inertial Upper Stage, used a spare Voyager antenna and performed flawlessly during its mission to map Venus.
... except that that signal is only the carrier signal off the low-gain antenna. The high-gain antenna, which will be used for transmitting actual data, won't be activated until the probe finishes unfolding itself from cruise mode configuration. That antenna transmits data many times faster (I wasn't able to find the exact transmission speed when I looked for it last night.)
This was done in order to prevent small errors that won't affect the spacecraft from shutting it down at a bad time. Fault control software on late-model NASA craft causes them to enter into a "safe mode" that shuts down nonessential functions and causes the craft to wait for instructions from Earth.
If this were to happen during the engine firing -- causing the probe to stop everything and just wait -- it'd sail right on past Mars, a fate which befell some of the earlier lunar probes.
If this were to happen, Mars Odyssey would be useless anyway... so better to risk the small problems rather than have them come back to bite you in a big way.
A Photoshop plugin called LunarCell does this a bit more literally -- it creates planets, not landscapes on planets, also by means of fractals. What's more, it can download actual cloud patterns from satellites to create even more realistic images by combining real bitmapped data with fractals.
(The most recent one uses another plugin, developed by the same people -- to add a nebula background. Yes, I know the planet should drown the stars and nebula out. It looks cool, and I created that pic to be my desktop background image!):-)
Slashdot Mirror
I love those wheels! I've thought about getting some for my Golf (the ones for Passats won't fit; different bolt pattern, but they're also available in the Golf's pattern).
:)
If you would like to know how to connect your rear fog -- it is fiendishly simple -- I've done it and can give you some pointers, though I'll have to check to make sure that there's no drastic changes in the pinout on the taillight end. It's there but not connected in NA cars; you just need to run a wire from the switch to the socket and put a bulb in.
You'll need this Euro headlight switch to make it work. (The rear fog indicator in these doesn't light up; mine does but that's a custom hack I had someone do for me. Depending on when your car was made, you may have a working in-dash fog indicator, or may be able to wire it to work if not.)
Tell your cousin-in-law I love his Passat! The only thing that'd make it better would be if it were a wagon.
I've got no plans in the immediate future to chip my Golf 2.0, but I did put in GTI headlamps with fog lights (cost me all of $250 buying parts used; I now have much better lighting in bad weather.) When the car's ten years old and the powertrain warranty runs out, I'll swap in a VR6 engine and a Tiptronic tranny. It'll cost $5,000-$7,000 I'm sure, but that's a lot cheaper than a new car.
...
:)
Yep, just about any VW engine will fit in any VW body. All the mount points are there.
Then there's big brake kits, those Bosch Xenon HID upgrades you mentioned (1,300 or so for a Golf/GTI), adding the MFA computer to a car that didn't come with it (now that's a very cool hack -- someone on the VW site I'm on has done it), etc. etc.
I've played with a VAG-COM on my car. Nifty.
Are you a Vortexer?
I have a congenital birth defect that rendered my left ear all but useless and my right ear severely impaired. This means that (1) I do not have stereo hearing; (2) I have a difficult time in situation where there is a lot of background noise; (3) computer software and/or games that depend on audible alerts to signal the user are nearly useless to me.
... but it'd be nice to enjoy them. Diablo II has none, though the Collector's Edition DVD fortunately had subtitles on its versions of the cutscenes.
First off, let me say that I'm glad that there are some provisions for the deaf in Windows; I recently installed XP and used 98SE before that. (At this point, the applications I use basically require Windows, though I have several Linux boxes in the house for applications where free software exists; I also use MacOS X). I will concentrate on Windows because that's (unfortunately) what most people use.
The accessibility options for the deaf are relatively scant. Yes, it's true that those who are hard of hearing don't need a lot in the way of assistance because we can see just fine (aside from sometimes wearing glasses, like me). But there are two major issues with the built-in accessibility tools: (1) They aren't installed by default (I don't think they are; I had to check the box for them when custom installing XP and I believe I did for 98SE as well), so if you don't know that they exist, you won't get them. (2) They don't do a heck of a lot. I've checked the boxes for having applications flash a visual alert, but I've yet to see one do this outside built-in (for that app) options. (I use SecureCRT for telnet; it too has a "visual bell" setting.)
Now, I do a lot of chatting over the Net (you don't know how empowering it is to sit in a group of two dozen people and not miss a word and be part of the conversation until that is denied you in the real world) and I use MUSHClient and mIRC to do it. Both of those applications have built into them options to flash the taskbar button if new text arrives while the program is not the foremost window. All well and good. However, again there is the problem of obscurity: while the options are of course installed with the software, they are not turned on by default and are usually somewhat hard to notice. MUSHclient's is buried deep within the preferences for a specific connection and isn't program-wide, so I can't check "Flash visual alert on activity" in global preferences -- I have to do it one at a time. mIRC is much the same: I have to right-click on a channel's mIRC-Taskbar button and select "Flashing" (not too descriptive an option name; Flash on Activity would be better) and it seems to be rather sporadic at times regarding whether or not it does it in query windows.
Games. I'm a gamer. And a lot of games these days have options for subtitles (Wing Commander III-V stand out here, having options for French and German as well as English subtitles) and a lot don't (why is Starlancer, also made by Chris Roberts, missing them?!). I can't play Thief because it doesn't put up any visual cues. Return to Castle Wolfenstein has none in its cutscenes but since it's a first person shooter game, I can get by without the cutscenes
It is not that hard to add subtitles; fan petitions got some added to at least one of the Zork games. Movie theaters don't have them yet because people claim they're intrusive, but as long as they can be toggled (with a control in a plain, obvious place!), that's not an issue.
So what does Unix need, then?
It needs built-in alert options, which are part of the default install, as part of window managers. KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, whatever. A standard needs to exist for how applications will address it. Apps need to use it.
The controls to turn these on need to be in an obvious place and marked with clear symbology (the white-on-blue wheelchair symbol is a good start.)
Applications need to be marked as captioned for the hearing impaired on their web sites and on packaging. Develop a standardized symbol for this.
If I sound rather platform-independent, then that's a good thing. If I use all sorts of OSes, then other people out there like me do, too.
You've just wandered onto one of my best reference sites. Bravo! :)
The Pegasus doesn't touch the ground, though. The L-1011 stands tall enough on its wheels that there's a fair amount of clearance. Underslung pods of all sorts (rockets, missiles, fuel tanks, et cetera) are all designed with the ground clearances of their carrier aircraft in mind.
Is that what you were worried about? (I'm not quite sure of your intent)
That's Buran, the Soviet space shuttle. This photo is showing the Russian/Soviet equivalent of the U.S. Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. I do believe the An-225 might have been custom-developed for this purpose, an extremely expensive proposition. The United States, on the other hand, transports the shuttle orbiters on a widely-available commercial aircraft -- in fact, the early photographs of the SCA clearly reveal American Airlines markings faintly visible on the skin of the plane! (Both 747s have since been repainted white with a blue stripe.)
They are not stock, though:
Modifications to tail to counter increased wake turbulence from Orbiter
SCA without orbiter, displaying attachment fittings like those on External Tank
SCA carrying orbiter Enterprise about to land
N905NA served with American until 1974. The other, N911NA, is from Japan Air Lines and was acquired by NASA in 1988.
I've got pictures of one of the Buran test articles if you're wondering how this Soviet version of the Space Shuttle looks from up close.
Most of the fuel use by a modern rocket occurs just getting off the launch pad. Current launch systems work by placing the rocket in a vertical position on the launch pad before liftoff, and the rocket lifts straight up before performing what's called a "roll maneuver" (this is unmistakable on the Space Shuttle, but "regular" cylindrical rockets do it as well) to get into the correct attitude for the rest of the flight. This is an incredibly energy-inefficient method, but the rockets are designed to work this way.
Consider also that most launches take place from sea level (the Sea Launch converted oil platform is a perfect example) where the earth's atmosphere is thickest, causing a lot of reistance that has to be overcome by the force of the rocket motors. At 40,000 feet, the atmosphere is far thinner (consider that humans have to wear breathing masks above 10,000) so there's less fuel used just burning through the lower atmosphere.
There is also a velocity bonus that comes from launching this way. A rocket lifting off from the earth's surface is only getting a "free" boost from the speed at which the ground moves at that latitude, explaining why the equator is the best latitude for launches and why Sea Launch tries to get as close to it as possible. An air-launched rocket like Pegasus gets the "free" velocity bonus from the launching aircraft in addition to that from the earth's rotation.
So... let the aircraft, which costs far far less to operate (we don't have rockets in every garage, but I know a few pilots) do most of the hard work and then let the rocket literally piggyback on that. (Yes, I know full well that Pegasus rides under the L-1011!)
From the User's Guide:
Pegasus is currently under investigation for a failure of its last flight (video here. The long smoke trail is a dead giveaway of a solid-propellant rocket motor.)The founder effect, which is the sharp reduction in the genetic variety of a population when it arises from a very small group of individuals (Iceland is an excellent example), has a great potential to be a problem here. The cheetah, for example, went through a bottleneck at some point in the past (no one knows why). Individual cheetahs are so genetically similar that organs (such as skin) can be transplanted between individuals with little or no rejection.
Unless samples from multiple thylacines can be retrieved and successfully used to clone infants, these animals will always be sucsceptible to being wiped out by a plague (since they all have the same genotype.)
And that's to say nothing of the issues with captive-raised animals that have none of the instincts that their wild counterparts would. For example, falcons that have imprinted on humans (and think they're human as a result) cannot be released into the wild -- it would be disastrous. They would never fear humans and would be unable to hunt to feed themselves.
This is the major problem I have with the Final Fantasy film. All those floating keyboards are nice and nifty to see on the screen, but I never saw any hint of any sort of tactile feedback. Perhaps it's because the entire film was computer-animated with no human actors, but I just couldn't get comfortable with those keyboards.
...
... that just vanished as you reached for it. It's true that you shouldn't even be using a computer in a case like that because the entire system is probably powerless, but it still makes me uneasy.
Some other problems were revealed, too, such as
What happens when the power goes out? How can you reactivate a barrier field in an emergency if you've knocked out the power to your generator, so your keyboard has just vanished? Imagine that you're an operator at, say, a Chernobyl-like plant and you can prevent disaster if only you can hit the big red "ABORT" button
Something as simple as that brief 15-second scene should serve as a warning to anyone thinking of using one of these.
Birds can be acclimated to the presence of people. In falconry, this is called "manning" a bird (nothing to do with spacecraft carrying people). I visited the World Bird Sanctuary here in St. Louis a few weeks ago (pictures are in here) and few of the birds I looked at were afraid of people. There are even a few photos on the net -- I went with friends -- of some of us standing next to some large raptors that I could almost say posed for the camera!
...
It's similar to the way stray cats that are mistreated will often be afraid of the new owners who take them in but over time lose their fear (one of the cats we had when I was a child was named 'Fraidy Cat' for this reason, which later became 'Fred E. Cat')
... if their creators believe that it is. Whether or not someone thinks my drawings are art, I think they are -- and that makes them art. They take skill to create, and I take joy in making them. That, I think, is art.
Seems to me a lot of people are dissatisfied with PayPal, but I haven't seen anyone yet say how to cancel an account. So how would one go about doing that?
Here's how the process works. I plan to try it myself in Photoshop.
Many planetary probes don't carry color cameras but instead use high-resolution black and white cameras to shoot three images of the same scene, which are combined to produce those stunning photos that we see on sites like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory site.
I thought about your response for a bit and recalled reading that there is a way to use JavaScript to go through the available plug-ins one by one to see if any of them meets the ID string of the one you're looking for.
This one is for Netscape 3 or higher and detects a VRML plugin:
<!--
function DetectNetscape() {
var retVal = 0;
var version = parseFloat(navigator.appVersion);
if (version>=3) {
var plugin = navigator.mimeTypes["model/vrml"];
if (plugin != null) {
retVal = 1;
}
}
return retVal;
}
// -->
The snippet is from http://web3d.vapourtech.com/workshop/embed/ which has details on how to do it in IE along with a script that makes use of this function.
It might be fun (but I'll probably forget) to write a simple page that just spits out all the ID strings of all installed plugins on your system. Then one could remove the serial number from the QT control panel to make it think it's unregistered, load the page, put it back, and see if anything changed.
Or maybe if I get bored I'll just turn Javascript off and see what the trailer loader page does without it.
So... I'm curious ...
What is it that makes it fail if you don't have QT5Pro installed?
Also, since I work in a research lab where we use QuickTime all the time, we have it on all machines -- so I don't even know what it does if you don't and click the link anyway.
... All your commercials are belong to us.
I'm downloading fink as I write this. Looks pretty interesting. Thanks for the tip!
Well, I did have wget in 10.0 up to 10.0.4, but the 10.1 update "helpfully" deleted it from my system. After several annoyed looks and some time spent searching Google, I found a download site for a precompiled binary for wget that will run under OS X (downloads as an installer .pkg file; you'll need to be root or an admin to install it.) The file is, for those who want to get it directly, here (.tar.gz format... use gunzip and tar -xvf to unpack if StuffIt Expander doesn't/can't.)
If you really, really want to compile yourself (you need to have installed the developer tools, which come with boxed copies of OS X), the source is here.
Beats me why Apple did this...
That's no moon. It's a space station.
Interestingly enough, the antenna used on Galileo was the same or similar as that used in Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS). Those satellites have never had any trouble with antenna deployment. The one fitted to Galileo failed because it was not lubricated at all over the years the probe sat in storage after Challenger exploded -- Galileo was designed to be launched by the Space Shuttle.
Interestingly enough, the main antenna for a Voyager probe fits perfectly within the Shuttle's payload bay, which may or may not be a coincidence. Remember that the Shuttle was designed in part to specs supplied by the Department of Defense, and chances are the specs were those of a KH-series spysat. Now consider that the KH satellites are launched by Titan IV rockets -- the same vehicle that launched Voyager 1 and 2.
... Magellan, also launched by the Shuttle/Inertial Upper Stage, used a spare Voyager antenna and performed flawlessly during its mission to map Venus.
A relay for future landers...
... and an experiment to learn about the radiation that future human Mars explorers will encounter (and possibly a buried Shadow vessel, too?)
... and a camera with far-greater resolution than the one on mars Global Surveyor (maybe it can hunt for the lost Polar Lander?)
... and a gamma-ray specrtrometer.
... except that that signal is only the carrier signal off the low-gain antenna. The high-gain antenna, which will be used for transmitting actual data, won't be activated until the probe finishes unfolding itself from cruise mode configuration. That antenna transmits data many times faster (I wasn't able to find the exact transmission speed when I looked for it last night.)
This was done in order to prevent small errors that won't affect the spacecraft from shutting it down at a bad time. Fault control software on late-model NASA craft causes them to enter into a "safe mode" that shuts down nonessential functions and causes the craft to wait for instructions from Earth.
If this were to happen during the engine firing -- causing the probe to stop everything and just wait -- it'd sail right on past Mars, a fate which befell some of the earlier lunar probes.
If this were to happen, Mars Odyssey would be useless anyway... so better to risk the small problems rather than have them come back to bite you in a big way.
My Fractal Planet Gallery might interest some people...
(The most recent one uses another plugin, developed by the same people -- to add a nebula background. Yes, I know the planet should drown the stars and nebula out. It looks cool, and I created that pic to be my desktop background image!) :-)