And the over-zealous moderators. I can't edit from work anymore because some moderator decided I was on an open proxy (I'm not) and refuses to do anything about it. Oh well, no more editing in my lunch hour.
Anybody got any leads on a decent alternative to the Raspberry Pi? Since it seems impossible to actually get hold of one and I'd like to get a really compact embedded computer for a project.
I'm in about the same place. I ordered from Allied since I'm in the states. Their website now states:
*Please note that due to extreme demand and short supply, the estimated delivery time is uncertain and will likely take several months. We do regret the delay and inconvenience this may cause.
I e-mailed them last week and they never got back to me. Fucking useless.
My gasoline is drilled and refined many more miles away than my local power station. So what's your point? How much is energy is lost shipping my gas to my local gas station? Including what I waste driving to the gas station in the first place?
And yes, I clearly expressed that pollution is a global problem. But if we're going to have smokestacks, I'd rather have big smokestacks well away from where people live rather than everybody driving around with their own little smokestack pumping out crap right on my street. Yes, I'd rather have no smokestacks, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.
No, you're right. It's clearly better for all if everybody's streets are choked with tailpipe emissions. Just because a solution isn't ideal for everybody doesn't mean it isn't better than the current situation. And for the record, I'd have no problems with a wind farm nearby.
I don't know what this "hydrogeb" is, but electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen is done today, although steam reforming of hydrocarbons is generally more common because electrolysis doesn't scale well.
While the amount of pollution produced by an electric car depends on how the electricity is produced, a couple of advantages of an electric car, even with coal-fired power stations, are worth mentioning. First is, I don't live next door to a coal-fired power station. So the pollution generated by an electric car is happening somewhere else, not in my neighborhood. While global warming is a global problem, not choking on exhaust fumes ever time I walk down my street is, I think, a bonus. Second, even with coal-fired plants, it'll be easier to upgrade and eventually replace a handful of coal-fired power stations than to replace potentially millions of cars. If the government mandated all new cars had to be electric (and I'm not suggesting they do), it would still take decades for all the old cars to be retired.
"The Associated Press is reporting that years before F-22 stealth fighter pilots began getting dizzy in the cockpit, before one struggled to breathe as he tried to pull out of a fatal crash"
Emphasis on the "fatal" part; i.e. he didn't eject.
One think I've noticed so far, it seems that pretty much all the courses on offer are introductory. And when you think about the drop out rate, this kinda makes sense. If only 10% of people starting your course finishes it, what's the point of putting up a follow-up course? Already the market for that course is tiny in comparison to the introductory course. You can probably expect a lower drop-out rate on the follow-up course, but it'll be less than 100%. And not even all the students finishing your first course will take the second. So maybe 10% finish the first course, 75% of them take the second class, and maybe 50% of them finish it. Now what's the point of the third class in the series? You pretty rapidly go from MOOC to TOOC (tiny open online class) with a handful of students.
So my fear is, while this is a great way to get a broad introduction to a lot of different topics, you'll never see it really get into depth. For that, you will absolutely still need a traditional university.
BTW, I took the original AI class, the Udacity web engineering class, and I'm currently taking the gamification course of Coursera. I've also done the traditional university thing in the past for far too many years to get a Ph.D.
So why are politicians wasting valuable time on such trivial nonsense as the economy, jobs, healthcare and the Middle East, when there is a genuine, honest-to-goodness global crisis going on?
This should be one of those rare moments that bring politicians of all ilk together to solve this. We need a bacon Apollo project, or a bacon Manhattan project.
I honestly don't know if that will help. After all by SP2 they had worked most of the bugs out of Vista but you still can't get most people to even think of taking Vista on a bet, once the public has made up its mind that is usually it.
Agreed. I didn't use Vista until I got a freebie DVD (with SP2) from a Microsoft event (and even then it was months before I tried it while I was building a new computer). I ran it for a couple of years with really no problems at all. A lot of the launch problems where a) resistance to change, b) a new driver model which meant a lot of rushed crappy drivers (especially from a certain video card maker), c) UAC (which comes back to resistance to change - because it's a good change), d) a lot of older software that ignored Microsoft recommendations and stored their data in the programs folder instead of the users documents folder. If Vista hadn't been launched at all, then all those same problems would have hit Windows 7 instead and that would have been deemed a failure too. As many have already said, Windows 7 is more like Vista SP3.
Having said all that, it was shocking how much bad publicity killed Vista so fast, and Windows 8 is already getting as much, if not more bad publicity even before launch. It looking like it might be an even more spectacular failure that Vista.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because we are all descended from telephone sanitation engineers.
I have an account, and I'm logged in. I'm still blocked.
And the over-zealous moderators. I can't edit from work anymore because some moderator decided I was on an open proxy (I'm not) and refuses to do anything about it. Oh well, no more editing in my lunch hour.
That was my question too.
When installers ask me if I want a short-cut to their wiz-bang application I cringe.
I cringe more when they don't ask and just do it anyway. Serious pet-peeve.
the MS tablets have some advantages over the iPad3.
One of which is a USB port!
Thanks. The pandaboard and the gumstix look very interesting.
Yeah, that does seem to be the observation a lot of people are making. I might well cancel my order with Allied and try ordering from the other guys.
I've used the Netduino before, and it's not quite the same thing.
Anybody got any leads on a decent alternative to the Raspberry Pi? Since it seems impossible to actually get hold of one and I'd like to get a really compact embedded computer for a project.
I'm in about the same place. I ordered from Allied since I'm in the states. Their website now states:
I e-mailed them last week and they never got back to me. Fucking useless.
The desktop PC will die the year after the "year of the linux desktop".
i.e. It'll never happen.
Absolutely agree on public transport. It's terrible in most of the US.
My gasoline is drilled and refined many more miles away than my local power station. So what's your point? How much is energy is lost shipping my gas to my local gas station? Including what I waste driving to the gas station in the first place?
And yes, I clearly expressed that pollution is a global problem. But if we're going to have smokestacks, I'd rather have big smokestacks well away from where people live rather than everybody driving around with their own little smokestack pumping out crap right on my street. Yes, I'd rather have no smokestacks, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.
No, you're right. It's clearly better for all if everybody's streets are choked with tailpipe emissions. Just because a solution isn't ideal for everybody doesn't mean it isn't better than the current situation. And for the record, I'd have no problems with a wind farm nearby.
I don't know what this "hydrogeb" is, but electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen is done today, although steam reforming of hydrocarbons is generally more common because electrolysis doesn't scale well.
While the amount of pollution produced by an electric car depends on how the electricity is produced, a couple of advantages of an electric car, even with coal-fired power stations, are worth mentioning. First is, I don't live next door to a coal-fired power station. So the pollution generated by an electric car is happening somewhere else, not in my neighborhood. While global warming is a global problem, not choking on exhaust fumes ever time I walk down my street is, I think, a bonus. Second, even with coal-fired plants, it'll be easier to upgrade and eventually replace a handful of coal-fired power stations than to replace potentially millions of cars. If the government mandated all new cars had to be electric (and I'm not suggesting they do), it would still take decades for all the old cars to be retired.
From the summary:
Emphasis on the "fatal" part; i.e. he didn't eject.
Compared to the cost of training new pilots to replace the ones that died?
One think I've noticed so far, it seems that pretty much all the courses on offer are introductory. And when you think about the drop out rate, this kinda makes sense. If only 10% of people starting your course finishes it, what's the point of putting up a follow-up course? Already the market for that course is tiny in comparison to the introductory course. You can probably expect a lower drop-out rate on the follow-up course, but it'll be less than 100%. And not even all the students finishing your first course will take the second. So maybe 10% finish the first course, 75% of them take the second class, and maybe 50% of them finish it. Now what's the point of the third class in the series? You pretty rapidly go from MOOC to TOOC (tiny open online class) with a handful of students.
So my fear is, while this is a great way to get a broad introduction to a lot of different topics, you'll never see it really get into depth. For that, you will absolutely still need a traditional university.
BTW, I took the original AI class, the Udacity web engineering class, and I'm currently taking the gamification course of Coursera. I've also done the traditional university thing in the past for far too many years to get a Ph.D.
So why are politicians wasting valuable time on such trivial nonsense as the economy, jobs, healthcare and the Middle East, when there is a genuine, honest-to-goodness global crisis going on?
This should be one of those rare moments that bring politicians of all ilk together to solve this. We need a bacon Apollo project, or a bacon Manhattan project.
I honestly don't know if that will help. After all by SP2 they had worked most of the bugs out of Vista but you still can't get most people to even think of taking Vista on a bet, once the public has made up its mind that is usually it.
Agreed. I didn't use Vista until I got a freebie DVD (with SP2) from a Microsoft event (and even then it was months before I tried it while I was building a new computer). I ran it for a couple of years with really no problems at all. A lot of the launch problems where a) resistance to change, b) a new driver model which meant a lot of rushed crappy drivers (especially from a certain video card maker), c) UAC (which comes back to resistance to change - because it's a good change), d) a lot of older software that ignored Microsoft recommendations and stored their data in the programs folder instead of the users documents folder. If Vista hadn't been launched at all, then all those same problems would have hit Windows 7 instead and that would have been deemed a failure too. As many have already said, Windows 7 is more like Vista SP3.
Having said all that, it was shocking how much bad publicity killed Vista so fast, and Windows 8 is already getting as much, if not more bad publicity even before launch. It looking like it might be an even more spectacular failure that Vista.
Sure. Just bend over and grab your ankles. I hear they are testing the magnum extra large ones today.
Do you live in a mental institution?
And a 2% yearly bump is really (barely) treating water. Inflation is usually more than that.