And AFAIK, that was by design. They knew it would expand, so they took advantage of that and optimized the plane for flight, rather than sitting on the ground, which makes sense to me. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71#Fuselage
To allow for thermal expansion at the high operational temperatures the fuselage panels were manufactured to fit only loosely on the ground. Proper alignment was only achieved when the airframe warmed up due to air resistance at high speeds, causing the airframe to expand several inches. Because of this, and the lack of a fuel sealing system that could handle the extreme temperatures, the aircraft would leak JP-7 jet fuel onto the runway before it took off. The aircraft would quickly make a short sprint, meant to warm up the airframe, and was then refueled in the air before departing on its mission... On landing after a mission the canopy temperature was over 300 C, too hot to approach.
I could read about the SR-71 all day long. That thing was a freaking marvel in every sense of the word and there are a million neat details about it, and it's amazing to consider that it was built in the early 60s. One little tidbit you'll often hear (so it must be true;-) ) -- "if a surface-to-air missile launch were detected, standard evasive action was simply to accelerate and climb." The freaking thing officiallyflew across the country in 68 minutes.
PETA kills 85 percent of the animals it takes in, and finds adoptive homes for just 14 percent. By contrast, the Norfolk SPCA, whose shelter is located less than 4 miles from PETA's headquarters, found adoptive homes for 73 percent of its animals in 2003.
Your natural tendency is to look left and right, not up and down.
True, and paradoxically, that's the problem. The western world reads left-to-right. So everything is arranged left to right. So all these things must be stacked, which is where the problem comes in. On my Mac right now, I've got a menu bar at the top of the screen, then Safari's title bar (holding the close/minimize/useless green buttons and the page's title), then my buttons (prev, next, refresh, etc) and the location bar in the next row, then my bookmarks bar, then my tabs, then finally this page's content, then Safaris' status bar (why it's off by default I'll never know), then my Dock. Yes, I could put it on the side, but I prefer it horizontal. That's a lot of chrome top to bottom. Looking left to right, the only chrome is the scroll bar. And that is (part of) why I prefer more vertical real estate.
And 4:3 screens don't just give you more vertical real estate, they give you more real estate, period. Everyone who's ever taken geometry knows that the closer you get to a square, the more area you have, other things (perimeter or diagonal length) being equal. Compare a typical 20" 4:3 monitor to a typical 20" 16:10. Yes, they can be manufactured however the builder wants, but you'll typically see 1600x1200 for the 4:3 and 1680x1050 for the widescreen. That's a whole 150 pixels hacked off the height and a mere 80 pixels added to the width in the change from 4:3 to widescreen. That's 1.92 million pixels versus 1.764 million pixels--the 4:3 gives you almost 10% more total screen area. Sure, we could have higher-res screens (Apple went from 1440x900 to 1680x1050 on their 17" widescreen laptops a year or two ago) but the same could be done with a 4:3 screen. It simply comes down to marketing--wide screens look "cooler" to most people and at the end of the day all that matters to any company is what sells the most.
A final problem with widescreen is dealing with the proliferation of aspect ratios. Apple's iSight camera shoots video at 4:3 so when you run iChat in full-screen mode on a widescreen display the picture gets stretched horizontally. HDTV is 16:9 but computer monitors are 16:10 so you still get letterboxing, and film is never shot at 16:9 anyway. Apple's iPhone is 3:2. (480x320.) At one time Apple made screen in four different ratios: 4:3 (12" iBook and PowerBook), 5:4 (17" Studio Display), 3:2 (original PowerBook G4) and 16:10 (20" and 23" Cinema Displays.)
In the end it's just a matter of personal preference. I do equal parts design and code and I prefer to have one large 4:3 monitor than a widescreen or multiscreen setup. Unfortunately, widescreens are the way of the future and it looks like we'll never get past 1600x1200 in 4:3 LCD. If I want to go larger it'll have to be 24" or 30" widescreen. Would I really want a 30" 4:3? It might truly be too tall to look at top-to-bottom. Guess I'll never find out.
...at least as far as compromised computers are concerned. Bill Gates claimed in 2004 that spam would be solved by 2006. He could go a long way towards making that happen by offering XP SP2 (upgrade) free to anyone who wants it, that would work on any computer running Win95 or newer, legal/legit or not. Sure, he's officially retired, but I bet people in Redmond still listen to him. Hell, he's got enough money, he could literally buy every single copy needed and M$ wouldn't even lose a penny. (Except for lost Vista sales.)
That happened to me on a database demo site that I did. The 'edit,' 'details,' and, yes, 'delete' buttons were just plain old text links. I posted the URL of the page to a mailing list, Google came in through that, and methodically 'clicked' on each link, including the 'delete' ones. (There was even a confirmation page with 'Are you sure you want to delete this? _Yes_ or _No_'--as links, of course.) I went to show someone it one day and all the data was gone. It was just sample data, so no great loss. I figured it was just some bored person who deleted everything but I looked at my access_log and there was Googlebot all over the place.
Sort of like the server version of BattleBots. Coming to Comedy Central this fall!
Agreed. For desktops, compare a 20" 4:3 monitor with a 20" widescreen. One is 1600x1200, one is 1920x1050. That's 1.92 million pixels versus 1.764 million pixels. 4:3 gives you 8.8% more pixels. That might not sound like much but you're getting a mere 80 pixels wider and a whole 150 pixels shorter. In inches (both displays are almost exactly 100 dpi) you gain 0.8 inches of width and lose 1.5 inches of height. At the moment, Dell sells both (the 2007FP and 2007WFP) for the same price.
Since almost all computer "chrome" (taskbar, Dock, menus, etc.) is horizontal, vertical real estate is more valuable. Right now in Safari I've got the title bar going the whole width of the window, the the button/location/search bar, then my bookmarks bar, my tabs, and the status bar at the bottom. On the side, all there is is the scroll bar. That's not even counting the menu bar at the top of the screen and the Dock at the bottom (where I prefer it.)
Google should then add a simple mechanism to the vans that allows the drivers to set a "last couple images are bad" marker.
Boy do I wish they had that feature. I temped at Google to process the video for Street View and I had to fast-forward through hours of footage from the van sitting in front of a porno theater.
From TFA: HP executives say the only major feature its Mini-Note lacks is an optical drive for ingesting DVDs and CD-ROMs, which can be bought separately. But they say many schools requested the drives be left out to prevent students from playing unauthorized games.
Um, what? Every time I go to the library, all the computers are occupied by kids playing a million different Flash games online. None of them are playing games that involve CDs. And plenty of small games can be run locally by saving the.SWF file, which one kid will figure out how to do in 5 minutes and the rest will know 2 seconds later.
The tiny device boasts speeds up to 1.6 gigahertz. They haven't yet decided on a name, but 'netbooks' is one possibility... Optical drives have been left out... Weighing less than 3 pounds...
How about 'NetBook Air'? Catchy, I think.
Re:Shouldn't it be just "Wicked PHP?"
on
Wicked Cool PHP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
PHP is inconsistent and limiting; why would anyone who knows how to write good code use it instead of a different language?
Because many of the inconsistencies are minor (who cares if it's noun_verb, nounverb, or verb_noun? str_split, stripclashes, strip_tags... BFD!) and who cares about limits if you don't bump your head against them? Not everyone needs to write computer-science-textbook-worthy apps or bulletproof-scalable-enterprise-ready apps day in and day out. A shared phone book or simple inventory system that can be cooked up in a few hours is often worth its weight in gold. I'd rather solve ten problems in a usable fashion than solve one problem the "right" way.
Ob. car analogy: Why would anyone who has access to a limo, a semi-trailer, and a Formula 1 car drive a beat-up old pickup? Because sometimes quick, cheap, and easy are the priorities!
Agreed. Dammit MS, just virtualize it already! In a sense, Mac OS X (plus Parallels or VMWare) is nearly 100% backward-compatible with Windows XP, 2K, 98, etc. XP on my dual-core MacBook is about as peppy as it is on my dad's two-year-old HP laptop for any average day-to-day task. Why can't Microsoft, with all its resources, just do the same damn thing? No sense mentioning that Apple did this with Classic mode in the first place when they went to OS X. What Apple did 7 years ago, MS should have done with Vista, and the same holds true today--MS should just wrap XP/Vista in a big honkin' VM for Windows 7. For the rest of the OS, they could start with a new code base, or BeOS, or QNX, or *BSD, or Plan 9... whatever the hell they want, just write a good VM on day 1 and then do whatever they want with the rest.
Agreed. Or, I'd love to see a book like this with things divided into big chunks, clearly separated--maybe with a different background color or something: "This is UNIX stuff that has been around for five/ten/thirty years and will work on any distro (or OS X or Solaris)" and "This is stuff that's particular to Ubuntu."
In any case, I love how permanent this stuff is. It's not quite a general UNIX book, but I still find myself turning to my decade-old horsey book from time to time.
I'm (almost) right there with you. I stuck with NS3 when NS4 came out and I stuck with it for years, right up until Phoenix (Firefox) 0.2 came out--it was fast, like NS3, but with TABS, and had a modern JS engine so I could look at pages which more and more demanded javascript. And then FF got chunky around 0.8 and I liked 1.0 even less and 1.5 even less and 2.0 even less. I played with other browsers, like K-Meleon, but they all were missing various features I'd grown used to. Plus the pages changed too, and as much as I liked NS3, it just isn't worth it to switch between it and another browser whenever I want to do something like look at google maps.
Now I spend most of my time with a slightly out-of-date browser on a slightly out-of-date machine and have a miserable web experience because I'm too busy to read web pages any more, I just click on links and minimize them to read later and never get around to them so I've always got a hojillion pages open and the whole thing runs like ass. Plus things are so damn JS-intensive now. I downloaded eBay's front page once, looked at the source, downloaded all the linked JS files, and the whole things was ONE-THIRD of a MEGABYTE of JS--all code that the machine has to actually execute, not just render. Oh well.:-)
Trying too hard? More like totally unfunny because they're staggeringly obvious. Linus going to quit maintaining Linux? Hoo hoo ha ha, stop, you're killing me.
But it's funny, I had the exact same thought--thanks to whoever tagged this 'aprilfools' for reminding me not to even bother coming here tomorrow. Okay, maybe once to see if they're going to make a new ZOMG Ponies!!! theme but otherwise I'll steer clear.
Song had a headrest system years ago that let you listen to music, see the plane's status, and (my favorite) play a cool trivia game against other passengers. On one flight they didn't boot up the systems until after the passengers were on and I saw it run through a standard Linux boot sequence, complete with Tux in the top left corner. My phone was already off and I figured they'd finish booting before I could dig it out, turn it on, and activate the camera, so I didn't even bother to try to get a pic. I flew with them in February and June of 2005 between Orlando and Vegas.
Are you kidding me? You, the kind of person interested enough in and knowledgeable enough about computers to be a Slashdot reader and poster, installed TWO anti-malware packages (btw, what does Symantec AV corporate cost per year?) on a computer and you somehow think that's TYPICAL?!? That's my whole point! I'd love to see the same girl with NO HELP and an OUT-OF-THE-BOX OEM Windows laptop, and compare her experience to that of her twin sister with a stock MacBook. We'll see which one calls more in the first two years. My whole point was the difference you see in STOCK systems piloted by TYPICAL users.
Slashdot Mirror
Your natural tendency is to look left and right, not up and down.
True, and paradoxically, that's the problem. The western world reads left-to-right. So everything is arranged left to right. So all these things must be stacked, which is where the problem comes in. On my Mac right now, I've got a menu bar at the top of the screen, then Safari's title bar (holding the close/minimize/useless green buttons and the page's title), then my buttons (prev, next, refresh, etc) and the location bar in the next row, then my bookmarks bar, then my tabs, then finally this page's content, then Safaris' status bar (why it's off by default I'll never know), then my Dock. Yes, I could put it on the side, but I prefer it horizontal. That's a lot of chrome top to bottom. Looking left to right, the only chrome is the scroll bar. And that is (part of) why I prefer more vertical real estate.
And 4:3 screens don't just give you more vertical real estate, they give you more real estate, period. Everyone who's ever taken geometry knows that the closer you get to a square, the more area you have, other things (perimeter or diagonal length) being equal. Compare a typical 20" 4:3 monitor to a typical 20" 16:10. Yes, they can be manufactured however the builder wants, but you'll typically see 1600x1200 for the 4:3 and 1680x1050 for the widescreen. That's a whole 150 pixels hacked off the height and a mere 80 pixels added to the width in the change from 4:3 to widescreen. That's 1.92 million pixels versus 1.764 million pixels--the 4:3 gives you almost 10% more total screen area. Sure, we could have higher-res screens (Apple went from 1440x900 to 1680x1050 on their 17" widescreen laptops a year or two ago) but the same could be done with a 4:3 screen. It simply comes down to marketing--wide screens look "cooler" to most people and at the end of the day all that matters to any company is what sells the most.
A final problem with widescreen is dealing with the proliferation of aspect ratios. Apple's iSight camera shoots video at 4:3 so when you run iChat in full-screen mode on a widescreen display the picture gets stretched horizontally. HDTV is 16:9 but computer monitors are 16:10 so you still get letterboxing, and film is never shot at 16:9 anyway. Apple's iPhone is 3:2. (480x320.) At one time Apple made screen in four different ratios: 4:3 (12" iBook and PowerBook), 5:4 (17" Studio Display), 3:2 (original PowerBook G4) and 16:10 (20" and 23" Cinema Displays.)
In the end it's just a matter of personal preference. I do equal parts design and code and I prefer to have one large 4:3 monitor than a widescreen or multiscreen setup. Unfortunately, widescreens are the way of the future and it looks like we'll never get past 1600x1200 in 4:3 LCD. If I want to go larger it'll have to be 24" or 30" widescreen. Would I really want a 30" 4:3? It might truly be too tall to look at top-to-bottom. Guess I'll never find out.
call me when they make one that's 1x4x9.
The toggles! They do nothing!
20,000 items and 90,000 images were posted today... The new site is the largest collection of Darwin's work in history...
Wow, quite a feat. Must have taken some really intelligent design to put all that together and make it work.
...at least as far as compromised computers are concerned. Bill Gates claimed in 2004 that spam would be solved by 2006. He could go a long way towards making that happen by offering XP SP2 (upgrade) free to anyone who wants it, that would work on any computer running Win95 or newer, legal/legit or not. Sure, he's officially retired, but I bet people in Redmond still listen to him. Hell, he's got enough money, he could literally buy every single copy needed and M$ wouldn't even lose a penny. (Except for lost Vista sales.)
That happened to me on a database demo site that I did. The 'edit,' 'details,' and, yes, 'delete' buttons were just plain old text links. I posted the URL of the page to a mailing list, Google came in through that, and methodically 'clicked' on each link, including the 'delete' ones. (There was even a confirmation page with 'Are you sure you want to delete this? _Yes_ or _No_'--as links, of course.) I went to show someone it one day and all the data was gone. It was just sample data, so no great loss. I figured it was just some bored person who deleted everything but I looked at my access_log and there was Googlebot all over the place.
Sort of like the server version of BattleBots. Coming to Comedy Central this fall!
Agreed. For desktops, compare a 20" 4:3 monitor with a 20" widescreen. One is 1600x1200, one is 1920x1050. That's 1.92 million pixels versus 1.764 million pixels. 4:3 gives you 8.8% more pixels. That might not sound like much but you're getting a mere 80 pixels wider and a whole 150 pixels shorter. In inches (both displays are almost exactly 100 dpi) you gain 0.8 inches of width and lose 1.5 inches of height. At the moment, Dell sells both (the 2007FP and 2007WFP) for the same price.
Since almost all computer "chrome" (taskbar, Dock, menus, etc.) is horizontal, vertical real estate is more valuable. Right now in Safari I've got the title bar going the whole width of the window, the the button/location/search bar, then my bookmarks bar, my tabs, and the status bar at the bottom. On the side, all there is is the scroll bar. That's not even counting the menu bar at the top of the screen and the Dock at the bottom (where I prefer it.)
Google should then add a simple mechanism to the vans that allows the drivers to set a "last couple images are bad" marker.
Boy do I wish they had that feature. I temped at Google to process the video for Street View and I had to fast-forward through hours of footage from the van sitting in front of a porno theater.
From TFA: HP executives say the only major feature its Mini-Note lacks is an optical drive for ingesting DVDs and CD-ROMs, which can be bought separately. But they say many schools requested the drives be left out to prevent students from playing unauthorized games.
.SWF file, which one kid will figure out how to do in 5 minutes and the rest will know 2 seconds later.
Um, what? Every time I go to the library, all the computers are occupied by kids playing a million different Flash games online. None of them are playing games that involve CDs. And plenty of small games can be run locally by saving the
The tiny device boasts speeds up to 1.6 gigahertz. They haven't yet decided on a name, but 'netbooks' is one possibility... Optical drives have been left out... Weighing less than 3 pounds...
How about 'NetBook Air'? Catchy, I think.
PHP is inconsistent and limiting; why would anyone who knows how to write good code use it instead of a different language?
Because many of the inconsistencies are minor (who cares if it's noun_verb, nounverb, or verb_noun? str_split, stripclashes, strip_tags... BFD!) and who cares about limits if you don't bump your head against them? Not everyone needs to write computer-science-textbook-worthy apps or bulletproof-scalable-enterprise-ready apps day in and day out. A shared phone book or simple inventory system that can be cooked up in a few hours is often worth its weight in gold. I'd rather solve ten problems in a usable fashion than solve one problem the "right" way.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html (Haters note: that piece wasn't written by JWZ.)
Ob. car analogy: Why would anyone who has access to a limo, a semi-trailer, and a Formula 1 car drive a beat-up old pickup? Because sometimes quick, cheap, and easy are the priorities!
But that would only leave OMG PHP LOL!!!11 as a possible title.
Hmm... actually, looks kinda cool.
... for the Special Edition lawsuit, where Andrew sues first.
... by Cory Doctorow.
Agreed. Dammit MS, just virtualize it already! In a sense, Mac OS X (plus Parallels or VMWare) is nearly 100% backward-compatible with Windows XP, 2K, 98, etc. XP on my dual-core MacBook is about as peppy as it is on my dad's two-year-old HP laptop for any average day-to-day task. Why can't Microsoft, with all its resources, just do the same damn thing? No sense mentioning that Apple did this with Classic mode in the first place when they went to OS X. What Apple did 7 years ago, MS should have done with Vista, and the same holds true today--MS should just wrap XP/Vista in a big honkin' VM for Windows 7. For the rest of the OS, they could start with a new code base, or BeOS, or QNX, or *BSD, or Plan 9... whatever the hell they want, just write a good VM on day 1 and then do whatever they want with the rest.
I'm hoping for The Complete Idiot's Missing Manual to Teach Yourself Practical Guides in 24 Hours Unleashed.
Agreed. Or, I'd love to see a book like this with things divided into big chunks, clearly separated--maybe with a different background color or something: "This is UNIX stuff that has been around for five/ten/thirty years and will work on any distro (or OS X or Solaris)" and "This is stuff that's particular to Ubuntu."
In any case, I love how permanent this stuff is. It's not quite a general UNIX book, but I still find myself turning to my decade-old horsey book from time to time.
I'm (almost) right there with you. I stuck with NS3 when NS4 came out and I stuck with it for years, right up until Phoenix (Firefox) 0.2 came out--it was fast, like NS3, but with TABS, and had a modern JS engine so I could look at pages which more and more demanded javascript. And then FF got chunky around 0.8 and I liked 1.0 even less and 1.5 even less and 2.0 even less. I played with other browsers, like K-Meleon, but they all were missing various features I'd grown used to. Plus the pages changed too, and as much as I liked NS3, it just isn't worth it to switch between it and another browser whenever I want to do something like look at google maps.
:-)
Now I spend most of my time with a slightly out-of-date browser on a slightly out-of-date machine and have a miserable web experience because I'm too busy to read web pages any more, I just click on links and minimize them to read later and never get around to them so I've always got a hojillion pages open and the whole thing runs like ass. Plus things are so damn JS-intensive now. I downloaded eBay's front page once, looked at the source, downloaded all the linked JS files, and the whole things was ONE-THIRD of a MEGABYTE of JS--all code that the machine has to actually execute, not just render. Oh well.
Trying too hard? More like totally unfunny because they're staggeringly obvious. Linus going to quit maintaining Linux? Hoo hoo ha ha, stop, you're killing me.
But it's funny, I had the exact same thought--thanks to whoever tagged this 'aprilfools' for reminding me not to even bother coming here tomorrow. Okay, maybe once to see if they're going to make a new ZOMG Ponies!!! theme but otherwise I'll steer clear.
When seeing only the last name 'Clinton' in non-election-related news, the first name that pops into my mind is
[x] Bill
[_] Hillary
[_] Neal
Song had a headrest system years ago that let you listen to music, see the plane's status, and (my favorite) play a cool trivia game against other passengers. On one flight they didn't boot up the systems until after the passengers were on and I saw it run through a standard Linux boot sequence, complete with Tux in the top left corner. My phone was already off and I figured they'd finish booting before I could dig it out, turn it on, and activate the camera, so I didn't even bother to try to get a pic. I flew with them in February and June of 2005 between Orlando and Vegas.
Are you kidding me? You, the kind of person interested enough in and knowledgeable enough about computers to be a Slashdot reader and poster, installed TWO anti-malware packages (btw, what does Symantec AV corporate cost per year?) on a computer and you somehow think that's TYPICAL?!? That's my whole point! I'd love to see the same girl with NO HELP and an OUT-OF-THE-BOX OEM Windows laptop, and compare her experience to that of her twin sister with a stock MacBook. We'll see which one calls more in the first two years. My whole point was the difference you see in STOCK systems piloted by TYPICAL users.
Consider this: if the Windows laptop were hacked into first, would we even be reading about this? IT IS NEWS BECAUSE IT IS RARE, which again, is my whole point. Nowhere in my posts did I say "Macs are perfect and invincible." Besides, people probably focused on the Mac because breaking it would gain more notoriety--this wasn't exactly a scientific experiment. Miller was the first contestant to attempt an attack on any of the systems (Why was he first?) on the second day. Had another attacker been given the opportunity, they might have chose Linux or Windows.
This is not science. This is not the end of the world. This is, in the purest sense of the word, an anomaly.