making the actual measure of a kilogram's worth of energy, tho, would be quite messy and would likely result in the destruction of the testing apparatus, as well as the planet upon which it sat.
well, yeah, but you'd run into the same problem of accuracy in the measuring device, in this example: friction.
though your second example (the vacuum) makes slightly more sense, it still relies on gravity, which is just slightly variable enough that it's going to be a different measurement every time.
"NIST, those not-so-standard standards people, want to give up the hunk of metal they've been calling a kilogram, even though it never weighs the same twice."
of course it weighs different every time, it's a standard kilogram, which is a measure of mass. the weight of the Kg will differ as gravity differs - which is a fun little trick having to do with the mass of the earth and the nearby celestial bodies.
the whole point of the new measuring device is (basically) to more accurately measure the force of gravity on the standard mass - by doing some magic with a magnet keeping the whole thing in balance. this is really just getting at a better measurement of gravity than anything else.
the crux of the situation is that the only standard for a kilogram is the actual lump of platinum itself. other things, like the standard second, are based on fun stuff like exactly how many times a cesium atom vibrates at a particular temperature. it might be fun to try and define a kilogram as Exactly This Many platinum atoms and be done with it, but that's kinda tricky for the moment.
it might be a better "standard" to accelerate the "standard" mass at a "standard" rate and measure the forces. say, by swinging the thing around in a calibrated centrifuge at whatever we're calling one Gee. then you can get to the bottom of the whole "weight" issue (in terms of newtons, i suppose).
besides, unless the standard mass is made of something that's decaying (radioactively - it's not like they'd make the thing out of, say, beef), it'll be pretty much the same mass for quite some time. it's just those nitpickety scientists at the NIST (on which i read a very interesting article recently, i believe in National Geographic Magazine) who want it to be defined in terms of something that will never change
and secondly, since when is the NIST "not-so-standard"? they are the national frickin' institution for the damned things, so they should be an authority on the subject...
considering it's still a few years away from puberty, there's still some time before linux's real Growth Spurt.
and if you consider in ten years it's gone from exactly one user to.. um? millions? (depends on who you ask) the next few years will be prety interesting.
also if you consider the original kernel source and the current(ish) kernel source are, respectively, 71 Kb and 26,830 Kb (gzipped), what will the future bring? 2 CD distros of just the kernel?
hell, the patches are 10x larger than the original source. that's one fast growing 10 year old...
sure it's the right blue (maybe - web colors suck for ID standards) and there are the stripes, but gradients and dropshadows? on a logo?
okay, so i don't play the part of design nazi very well, but i did have the logo usage standards drilled into my head when i worked at Big Blue, and it sucks to see them ogilvy-and-mathered. yarf.
from the article linked:
"Its PowerPC
chips run devices ranging from
television set-top boxes to mobile
phones."
which says nothing of the millions of Apple Macintosh computers the chips run as well (presuming this is the same PowerPC we're talking about.. it doesn't give model numbers).. does this mean all new Macs will have this "IBM Technology" logo on them, too? since they went to translucent plastic, the PowerPC logo has been absent
nor does it mention anything about the fact that the chip is derived from the Power family of RISC chip designs, intended for use in IBM servers... or that the platform was co-developed by motorola for the desktop and embedded markets.
i just thought i'd add my 2 cents (3 cents canadian) to the obviously lacking fluff on C|Net
how is it i can get modded up for replying to somebody else's redundant post with the above link, and get modded down here for being redundant - i suppose to myself...
oh well, that's slashdot democracy for you...
you mean something like this?
on
Quake 4 Announced
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
wow, someone badmouths a 900 mhz chip from sun being competition for the Itaniums (which, i read somewhere, were only running at 800 at this point...), and all of a sudden the "it's the pipeline, stupid" and "there's more than just megahertz" people come out of the woodwork.
i'll have to remember this when the next G4 vs Pentium4 debate comes up...
i know there are palmOS emulators out there (for all kinds of platforms) mainly for development and testing, but what about a WinCE emulator?
it just tempts me to try and run, say, linux on Palm inside the Palm emultor for WinCE, inside the WinCE emulator running under virtualPC inside MacOnLinux on yellow dog linux on my G4...
The revolution and evolution of the adventure genre owe much to Steve Meretzky. Fans of interactive fiction will recognize Meretzky as one of the Infocom Implementors. He is the father of such classics as Planetfall (1983), Sorcerer (1984), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (with Douglas Adams, 1985), A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985), Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986), Stationfall (1987), Zork Zero (1988), Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get all the Girls (1990), Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance (1991), Leather Goddesses of Phobos II (1991), and Spellcasting 301: Spring Break (1992). His last adventure game is The Space Bar in 1997.
"...it starts to make Linux look more and more attractive with its arguably more polished interfaces.
With Aqua down and not getting up for a while (until Apple can revive it),"...
these two sentences from the introduction make absolutely no sense to me. is he saying that linux has a more polished interface than OS X? what, X? KDE? Gnome? is he joking?
and what is this about aqua being "down"? from what i can tell, aqua is still alive and kicking, considering it's in the released and currently updated product. it's not as if aqua is, say, cyberdog or opendoc, after all...
unfortunately, this is as far as i got in this article, considering his premises are flawed, i can't see how the rest of the review can be any better
so, how are they going to prevent me from taping new "protected" shows on my old (very old) VCR? i can understand if they're targeting people with Tivos and whatnot, but if there's some way for them to prevent some shows from being recorded by joe average with a 3 year out-of-date VCR, then it'll work about as well as, say, macrovision on my DVD player, and do little more than tick off those of us that can't be home when DragonBall Z is on during the week, so we tape all the episodes and watch them saturday afternoon...
what was my point? damn. i keep forgetting to include one of those...
despite the fact that, on a number of points, the scifi "Dune" miniseries really and truly sucked ass, it was impressive that it was done as well as it was, and that it was produced at all.
hopefully the subsequent sequels will at least live up to the first production, and not go down hill as sequels tend to do
tho, even the subsequent books drifted off track a bit from the original...
excuse me, but we atlantans don't take kindly to idle talk of being bombed or enslaved... we've had some trouble with that in the past, and it's not nice to rile up those old feelings..
when i used to go skiing and swimming at a large local lake, i would often come upon large, seemingly solitary waves out in the middle of an otherwise calm channel
these "monster waves" were usually the result of an infrequent combination of boat wakes or one wake interfering with itself in an inlet. the odd triangular waves would perpetuate themselves, and travel across the lake until finally diminishing on the far shore, or by coming upon another boat's wake.
it was a fun pastime to track these guys down whilst on skis and jump them, but i thought nothing of the phenomenon until a few years later. that's when i read something (i think it was in popular science or discover magazine) about these large mysterious (and dangerous, as in iceberg dangerous) triangular waves in the north atlantic. study had proven that these were the result of converging currents and strong winds. until then, they were a mystery.
i thought, hey, if the same thing can happen in the north atlantic, and nobody knows until now how they form, maybe it's the same thing that's happening at my lake.. and maybe at other lakes - like loch ness - that have boat traffic on them.
anyhoo, i still want to see someone pull a live one out of the loch in a net, but until then i think a lot of the "humps" people see are just caused by wind, or temperature inversion, or seismic activity, or my monster waves...
Slashdot Mirror
i suppose, because after all, E=Mc^2
making the actual measure of a kilogram's worth of energy, tho, would be quite messy and would likely result in the destruction of the testing apparatus, as well as the planet upon which it sat.
well, yeah, but you'd run into the same problem of accuracy in the measuring device, in this example: friction.
though your second example (the vacuum) makes slightly more sense, it still relies on gravity, which is just slightly variable enough that it's going to be a different measurement every time.
so, back to where we started...
"NIST, those not-so-standard standards people, want to give up the hunk of metal they've been calling a kilogram, even though it never weighs the same twice."
of course it weighs different every time, it's a standard kilogram, which is a measure of mass. the weight of the Kg will differ as gravity differs - which is a fun little trick having to do with the mass of the earth and the nearby celestial bodies.
the whole point of the new measuring device is (basically) to more accurately measure the force of gravity on the standard mass - by doing some magic with a magnet keeping the whole thing in balance. this is really just getting at a better measurement of gravity than anything else.
the crux of the situation is that the only standard for a kilogram is the actual lump of platinum itself. other things, like the standard second, are based on fun stuff like exactly how many times a cesium atom vibrates at a particular temperature. it might be fun to try and define a kilogram as Exactly This Many platinum atoms and be done with it, but that's kinda tricky for the moment.
it might be a better "standard" to accelerate the "standard" mass at a "standard" rate and measure the forces. say, by swinging the thing around in a calibrated centrifuge at whatever we're calling one Gee. then you can get to the bottom of the whole "weight" issue (in terms of newtons, i suppose).
besides, unless the standard mass is made of something that's decaying (radioactively - it's not like they'd make the thing out of, say, beef), it'll be pretty much the same mass for quite some time. it's just those nitpickety scientists at the NIST (on which i read a very interesting article recently, i believe in National Geographic Magazine) who want it to be defined in terms of something that will never change
and secondly, since when is the NIST "not-so-standard"? they are the national frickin' institution for the damned things, so they should be an authority on the subject...
i'm sorry, but i don't want anything in my kitchen or in reach of my kids that simply shouts its bad intentions.
come on, the thing is called EVILla after all..
considering it's still a few years away from puberty, there's still some time before linux's real Growth Spurt.
and if you consider in ten years it's gone from exactly one user to.. um? millions? (depends on who you ask) the next few years will be prety interesting.
also if you consider the original kernel source and the current(ish) kernel source are, respectively, 71 Kb and 26,830 Kb (gzipped), what will the future bring? 2 CD distros of just the kernel?
hell, the patches are 10x larger than the original source. that's one fast growing 10 year old...
the logo they're plastering on these things is awful. Paul Rand would puke.
sure it's the right blue (maybe - web colors suck for ID standards) and there are the stripes, but gradients and dropshadows? on a logo?
okay, so i don't play the part of design nazi very well, but i did have the logo usage standards drilled into my head when i worked at Big Blue, and it sucks to see them ogilvy-and-mathered. yarf.
from the article linked:
"Its PowerPC
chips run devices ranging from
television set-top boxes to mobile
phones."
which says nothing of the millions of Apple Macintosh computers the chips run as well (presuming this is the same PowerPC we're talking about.. it doesn't give model numbers).. does this mean all new Macs will have this "IBM Technology" logo on them, too? since they went to translucent plastic, the PowerPC logo has been absent
nor does it mention anything about the fact that the chip is derived from the Power family of RISC chip designs, intended for use in IBM servers... or that the platform was co-developed by motorola for the desktop and embedded markets.
i just thought i'd add my 2 cents (3 cents canadian) to the obviously lacking fluff on C|Net
--hey! where's my sig?
how is it i can get modded up for replying to somebody else's redundant post with the above link, and get modded down here for being redundant - i suppose to myself...
oh well, that's slashdot democracy for you...
you mean something like this?
i dunno.. doesn't work for me
how about...
so, is this what we have to look forward to?
of course palms can damage motherboards.
so can the occasional fist or foot.
that's what happens when you get physical and "boot" your computer whenever it misbehaves. i don't think you have any right to sue...
so, what they're saying is the only company to actually make money on the dot economy last year was Herman Miller?
cool. we've got a slew of aerons here, as well as their Resolve system. it's so sweet... replace cubicles with honeycombs...
i'd just hate to see the company that made our office system go out of business, just when i had my eye on a bunch of cool accessories
wow, someone badmouths a 900 mhz chip from sun being competition for the Itaniums (which, i read somewhere, were only running at 800 at this point...), and all of a sudden the "it's the pipeline, stupid" and "there's more than just megahertz" people come out of the woodwork.
i'll have to remember this when the next G4 vs Pentium4 debate comes up...
there's alots of solutions for syncing your newt, you're just not looking (or else you think they all died when the newton did).
1 95&db=mac
o pics&forum=Newton+General+Discussion&number=1
:)
here's a couple of links to get you going:
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=10
-- new software to sync your newton with MS Entourage (if you use something else, there's an option out there somewhere, i swear)
http://talk.smaller.com/forumdisplay.cgi?action=t
-- excellent discussion forum, always active
http://www.info-newt.com/faq/index.html
-- the most comprehensive listing of FAQs, software vendors, etc. plus links to lots more
http://www.newtontraveler.com/
-- my newton site
i know there are palmOS emulators out there (for all kinds of platforms) mainly for development and testing, but what about a WinCE emulator?
it just tempts me to try and run, say, linux on Palm inside the Palm emultor for WinCE, inside the WinCE emulator running under virtualPC inside MacOnLinux on yellow dog linux on my G4...
whew..
http://www.adventurecollective.com/articles/inter
from the interview:
"...it starts to make Linux look more and more attractive with its arguably more polished interfaces.
With Aqua down and not getting up for a while (until Apple can revive it),"...
these two sentences from the introduction make absolutely no sense to me. is he saying that linux has a more polished interface than OS X? what, X? KDE? Gnome? is he joking?
and what is this about aqua being "down"? from what i can tell, aqua is still alive and kicking, considering it's in the released and currently updated product. it's not as if aqua is, say, cyberdog or opendoc, after all...
unfortunately, this is as far as i got in this article, considering his premises are flawed, i can't see how the rest of the review can be any better
so, how are they going to prevent me from taping new "protected" shows on my old (very old) VCR? i can understand if they're targeting people with Tivos and whatnot, but if there's some way for them to prevent some shows from being recorded by joe average with a 3 year out-of-date VCR, then it'll work about as well as, say, macrovision on my DVD player, and do little more than tick off those of us that can't be home when DragonBall Z is on during the week, so we tape all the episodes and watch them saturday afternoon...
what was my point? damn. i keep forgetting to include one of those...
the olympic park bombing is what i was referring to, specifically, but being burned to the ground is another thing i had in mind
despite the fact that, on a number of points, the scifi "Dune" miniseries really and truly sucked ass, it was impressive that it was done as well as it was, and that it was produced at all.
hopefully the subsequent sequels will at least live up to the first production, and not go down hill as sequels tend to do
tho, even the subsequent books drifted off track a bit from the original...
excuse me, but we atlantans don't take kindly to idle talk of being bombed or enslaved... we've had some trouble with that in the past, and it's not nice to rile up those old feelings..
However, a spokeswoman at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles told BBC News Online: "These rumours come round every couple of months. It's idle gossip."
looks like a slow news day for slashdot and the BBC, both.
next, you'll be posting an article about Apple being bought by Disney or some such...
when i used to go skiing and swimming at a large local lake, i would often come upon large, seemingly solitary waves out in the middle of an otherwise calm channel
these "monster waves" were usually the result of an infrequent combination of boat wakes or one wake interfering with itself in an inlet. the odd triangular waves would perpetuate themselves, and travel across the lake until finally diminishing on the far shore, or by coming upon another boat's wake.
it was a fun pastime to track these guys down whilst on skis and jump them, but i thought nothing of the phenomenon until a few years later. that's when i read something (i think it was in popular science or discover magazine) about these large mysterious (and dangerous, as in iceberg dangerous) triangular waves in the north atlantic. study had proven that these were the result of converging currents and strong winds. until then, they were a mystery.
i thought, hey, if the same thing can happen in the north atlantic, and nobody knows until now how they form, maybe it's the same thing that's happening at my lake.. and maybe at other lakes - like loch ness - that have boat traffic on them.
anyhoo, i still want to see someone pull a live one out of the loch in a net, but until then i think a lot of the "humps" people see are just caused by wind, or temperature inversion, or seismic activity, or my monster waves...
All those people spending late nights chasing down obscure bugs
and adding new features, for no reason except to further the OS and the community.
half right. the reason anybody spends long hours or late nights these days chasing down obscure bugs and adding in new features is this:
so i can get this @#$%ing sound card to play my @#$%ing MP3s...