I *think* the initials are "Ministry of Transport", but that's not directly relevant.
In the UK, if your car is over three years old, you must get a certificate of roadworthiness, issued by a certified test centre, once a year. The certificate is an "MOT Certificate" and the test is an "MOT Test".
Driving without an MOT or insurance is illegal, and you have to present both your MOT and your insurance certificate in order to get a tax disk, without which you're bound to get stopped and fined (or worse) eventually.
The article is suggesting that adding the necessary tech would be mandatory in order to pass the test.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people call something the New Whatever. It sounds like it is planned for obsolesce.
There's plenty of placenames that make the same mistake: Newtown, Newport, New Street, New Road etc. OK when it "just happened", but some of these places are planned towns from the 60s and 70s. Surely they would have known that one day their town wouldn't be "New".
Considering most of that dust is probably YOU, in little tiny bits of dead skin, it is unlikely to harm you
It's a home to dustmites, to which plenty of people are allergic. I'll grant you that opening up your own PC a couple of times a year won't harm you, but a PC engineer might expect to inhale a hell of a lot of other people's dust in the course of his job.
Currently WirelessUSB LS will be used in point-to-point connections that do not require standards-based protocols such as wireless mice, keyboards, gamepads, remote controls, garage door openers, etc. Does anyone care if their garage door opener uses an IEEE standard?:-)
s/IEEE/open/ and the answer becomes "yes". An open standard would be great for the consumer. It would mean, that any car manufacturer could build a wireless opener into the dash, which would work on any brand of door. Or maybe my mobile phone could have built-in WirelessUSB and, thanks to a standard, be able to open my garage door and change channels on my TV.
Don't really understand why you say wireless mice wouldn't need a standards based protocol. I remember the headaches setting up X when several mouse protocols were prevalent.
And I suppose we should switch to metric instead!?
Yes, but not because Europe has, but because it's intrinsically more sensible.
NB: Britain has not gone 100% metric. Food and drink (except beer/cider/etc. on tap) are sold by the millilitre and gram, furniture and building materials are generally measure by the meter -- but most people (not me) know their own weight in Stones and their height in feet, while road signs and atlases measure distances by the mile.
The only Imperial measure I'm keen to keep is the pint for poured beer. I can't justify it, I just feel that a litre is too much and half a litre isn't enough. Just to confuse matters, an American pint is less than a British pint (and an American pint is different for dry material than for liquid. Huh?)
1) Re-release it periodically. If it's worth buying they'll make money.
I bought a new copy of Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max on a single CD a few months ago (the mind plays tricks, but I'm sure it was no more than a year ago). So someone recognises that the property is still worth money.
But getting Sam & Max running in Windows 2000 with full speech and music was difficult, and I never managed at all with DOTT. Getting it doing with ScummVM, however, was a breeze. LucasArts should bundle ScummVM and the games; I reckon it would save them money on fielding tech support calls. It would be polite to throw the ScummVM developers a few quid, but not obligatory.
I can't fault either of those games, and I'd recommend anyone buy them today. Beneath a Steel Sky, however, breaks Lucasarts' first rule of adventure games - you should never be able to die or get into a situation where you can't win: in BASS you get shot in the first scene.
about the only thing I found that helps when I really need to concentrate is music
I'm quite the opposite. I used to have music on all the time when I was doing school homework, but since then I've learned that I can't concentrate on a task while also listening to music: I feel the need to listen to the music, rather than let it wash over me.
Different people's minds work in different ways though. My girlfriend likes to have Soaps on TV while she works, and she can really do this. I'm incapable of even simple tasks, like reading a novel, while *anything* is on TV.
Day of the Triffids was made into perhaps the worst 50s Sci-Fi movie of all time. In the film, the character of Josella was all but eliminatd, and it had a mandatory happy ending tacked on - the plants melt when exposed to salt water (I kid you not).
It was also made into a 6 part 1981 BBC TV series. It was very good, and from memory, very similar in tone to parts of 28 Days Later. The plants were a bit rubbery, but we can live with that, right?
The lack of microbial verisimilitude in "28 Days Later" may surprise viewers who recall the vividly accurate depiction of heroin withdrawal in Mr. Boyle's popular "Trainspotting" (1996).
I've never withdrawn from heroin myself, but I once read that it's something akin to a bad dose of the flu -- and last time I had flu, I didn't hallucinate dead babies crawling on the ceiling while trance music pumped away.
(NB I imagine it would be pretty tricky to endure a really bad flu when one knew it would all stop for a fiver's worth of heroin)
There was nothing original about this movie except the lengths the studio and reviewers went to decieve the public on it's quality and originality. It's just a mishmash of standard zombie flicks in a British setting with bad film stock and worse editing.
I loved it. It wears it's influences on its sleeve. I don't think it has any shame in admitting the strong influences of Day of the Triffids (the British TV version -- very similar indeed in tone), Dawn of the Dead, The Omega Man, Twelve Monkeys (the deserted city), even Apolcalypse Now (the bloodbath near the end).
I don't believe scariness was intended. Exhilaration, I got in spades.
The "bad film stock" is actually digital video. For all I know the image was processed for a grainier "video nasty" look... I was strongly reminded of "The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue" in places.
It may help to be familiar with Central London, to be properly awestruck by the deserted London scene near the start (c.f. Times Square in Vanilla Sky).
That Godspeed You Black Emperor track used throughout is terrific too:)
Where on earth is the video-in they plan to use this with?
Both MythTV and Freevo are moving toward a client/server architecture, so some boxes on the system record, some record and play, and some only play. I imagine if you've spent a few hundred dollars on a well specced server/recorder/encoder, and Xbox would make a handy playback only device to sit on the network.
I have a Toshiba Libretto with a P75 CPU, which I'm currently using as a home server: it's quiet, it's quite powerful enough to run Apache with SSL on Debian, and it does everything I need.
However, even the small noise it does make, is pretty annoying when trying to listen to a quiet passage of music, DVD, etc. (it's in my front room).
So if you're starting from scratch, I'd recommend getting an VIA Eden 600Mhz based mini-itx setup, so it's silent, and assuming you need a lot of storage, invest in a laptop hard drive, because they're quieter than full size ones.
What's not mentioned, so I assume it's not present, is a convenient skip to a convenient break point.
There's a specific application I have in mind for this product: I want to timeshift John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show, so I can listen to it on the way to work in the morning. The music is eclectic, and my journey is shorter than the show, so it would be nice, if the current song didn't appeal, to be able to skip to the next "talky" bit. I'm sure some spectrum analysis could manage to tag talk vs music to make this possible...
Also in reponse to people who say to go use MtyhTV, you need like a 1GHz processor to do MPEG encoding in realtime... and it eats up most all the cpu, so dont expect to be using the computer for much else while it is recording.
This is true, but the answer is not "don't use MythTV", but "don't use your CPU for MPEG encoding". There are dedicated chipsets for encoding/decoding MPEG2, and you can get them as PCI boards.
Better still, in areas with digital TV, us DTVB card to capture raw MPEG streams direct from the air to your HDD (and in some cases, use the same card to decode MPEG)
Re:Uphill water flow at Disneyworld since 1971..
on
Water Flows Uphill
·
· Score: 1
I'll add to the list of similar places: the House of Mystery in Hungry Horse, Montana. They give you marbles before you go in, and you can watch them roll uphill.
The effect is caused by an unexplained vortex on the site. Science is unable to explain it, and you get to stand pretty much as near to the centre of the vortex as is safe....:)
While the adaptation of colors and revising the layout of the dollar bill is a nice deterrent, there is one thing that would be nice to see: dollar bills that the blind could use.
Yes, it'd make sense, wouldn't it... or at least, the partially sighted.
I have perfect (corrected) vision, and even I have trouble distinguishing US notes at a glance -- all the same size, all the same colour, who's stupid idea was that?
FreeView is the UK's digital TV service, it also broadcasts several radio channels.
This is true, and TiVo does record radio shows from digital set top boxes in exactly the same way as it does TV shows (by EPG, as suggestions, all of that good stuff)
However, TiVo isn't optimal for this: when the set top box is receiving audio broadcasts, it displays a static image on the video output, and since TiVo doesn't know any better, it slavishly records this, wasting lots of storage.
I gather that Nokia is now producing an integrated PVR and terrestrial digital TV reciever. This saves the digital stream as broadcast, rather than re-encoding an analogue signal as TiVo does -- an approach with both advantages and disadvantages, but which means that radio shows are only stored as audio. The review I read indicated that since the machine was designed for video, it had enough storage for several hundred hours of digital audio.
This box also has digital audio out, so archiving to DAT, Minidisc, CDR or PC is possible.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is an 'MOT'?
I *think* the initials are "Ministry of Transport", but that's not directly relevant.
In the UK, if your car is over three years old, you must get a certificate of roadworthiness, issued by a certified test centre, once a year. The certificate is an "MOT Certificate" and the test is an "MOT Test".
Driving without an MOT or insurance is illegal, and you have to present both your MOT and your insurance certificate in order to get a tax disk, without which you're bound to get stopped and fined (or worse) eventually.
The article is suggesting that adding the necessary tech would be mandatory in order to pass the test.
GIMP is pretty much the only raster graphics package out there, Win32 has Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photo Paint, Fireworks, Painter, etc.
But I choose Gimp even on Windows, so it's moot
It's a pet peeve of mine when people call something the New Whatever. It sounds like it is planned for obsolesce.
There's plenty of placenames that make the same mistake: Newtown, Newport, New Street, New Road etc. OK when it "just happened", but some of these places are planned towns from the 60s and 70s. Surely they would have known that one day their town wouldn't be "New".
Considering most of that dust is probably YOU, in little tiny bits of dead skin, it is unlikely to harm you
It's a home to dustmites, to which plenty of people are allergic. I'll grant you that opening up your own PC a couple of times a year won't harm you, but a PC engineer might expect to inhale a hell of a lot of other people's dust in the course of his job.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if there's no air-cooling going on whatsoever, does that mean the case can be completely sealed against dust?
I'm sure inhaling the dust that collects in computer cases is a health hazard, if you do it often enough.
Currently WirelessUSB LS will be used in point-to-point connections that do not require standards-based protocols such as wireless mice, keyboards, gamepads, remote controls, garage door openers, etc. Does anyone care if their garage door opener uses an IEEE standard? :-)
s/IEEE/open/ and the answer becomes "yes". An open standard would be great for the consumer. It would mean, that any car manufacturer could build a wireless opener into the dash, which would work on any brand of door. Or maybe my mobile phone could have built-in WirelessUSB and, thanks to a standard, be able to open my garage door and change channels on my TV.
Don't really understand why you say wireless mice wouldn't need a standards based protocol. I remember the headaches setting up X when several mouse protocols were prevalent.
Is there an USian dry pint?
Maybe you're thinking of the ounce, which in the US has two meanings (ounce of weight vs. fluid ounce or "fl. oz." of liquid volume)
I'm going by this chart. The dry pint thing was new to me too.
And I suppose we should switch to metric instead!?
Yes, but not because Europe has, but because it's intrinsically more sensible.
NB: Britain has not gone 100% metric. Food and drink (except beer/cider/etc. on tap) are sold by the millilitre and gram, furniture and building materials are generally measure by the meter -- but most people (not me) know their own weight in Stones and their height in feet, while road signs and atlases measure distances by the mile.
The only Imperial measure I'm keen to keep is the pint for poured beer. I can't justify it, I just feel that a litre is too much and half a litre isn't enough. Just to confuse matters, an American pint is less than a British pint (and an American pint is different for dry material than for liquid. Huh?)
1) Re-release it periodically. If it's worth buying they'll make money.
I bought a new copy of Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max on a single CD a few months ago (the mind plays tricks, but I'm sure it was no more than a year ago). So someone recognises that the property is still worth money.
But getting Sam & Max running in Windows 2000 with full speech and music was difficult, and I never managed at all with DOTT. Getting it doing with ScummVM, however, was a breeze. LucasArts should bundle ScummVM and the games; I reckon it would save them money on fielding tech support calls. It would be polite to throw the ScummVM developers a few quid, but not obligatory.
I can't fault either of those games, and I'd recommend anyone buy them today. Beneath a Steel Sky, however, breaks Lucasarts' first rule of adventure games - you should never be able to die or get into a situation where you can't win: in BASS you get shot in the first scene.
about the only thing I found that helps when I really need to concentrate is music
I'm quite the opposite. I used to have music on all the time when I was doing school homework, but since then I've learned that I can't concentrate on a task while also listening to music: I feel the need to listen to the music, rather than let it wash over me.
Different people's minds work in different ways though. My girlfriend likes to have Soaps on TV while she works, and she can really do this. I'm incapable of even simple tasks, like reading a novel, while *anything* is on TV.
Day of the Triffids was made into perhaps the worst 50s Sci-Fi movie of all time. In the film, the character of Josella was all but eliminatd, and it had a mandatory happy ending tacked on - the plants melt when exposed to salt water (I kid you not).
It was also made into a 6 part 1981 BBC TV series. It was very good, and from memory, very similar in tone to parts of 28 Days Later. The plants were a bit rubbery, but we can live with that, right?
Google brought up this episode guide
Dog Soldiers is also a good one.
British Army unit on an exercise find themselves holed up in a cottage in a seige against werewolves.
Worth it for the cheesy Matrix gag.
The lack of microbial verisimilitude in "28 Days Later" may surprise viewers who recall the vividly accurate depiction of heroin withdrawal in Mr. Boyle's popular "Trainspotting" (1996).
I've never withdrawn from heroin myself, but I once read that it's something akin to a bad dose of the flu -- and last time I had flu, I didn't hallucinate dead babies crawling on the ceiling while trance music pumped away.
(NB I imagine it would be pretty tricky to endure a really bad flu when one knew it would all stop for a fiver's worth of heroin)
There was nothing original about this movie except the lengths the studio and reviewers went to decieve the public on it's quality and originality. It's just a mishmash of standard zombie flicks in a British setting with bad film stock and worse editing.
:)
I loved it. It wears it's influences on its sleeve. I don't think it has any shame in admitting the strong influences of Day of the Triffids (the British TV version -- very similar indeed in tone), Dawn of the Dead, The Omega Man, Twelve Monkeys (the deserted city), even Apolcalypse Now (the bloodbath near the end).
I don't believe scariness was intended. Exhilaration, I got in spades.
The "bad film stock" is actually digital video. For all I know the image was processed for a grainier "video nasty" look... I was strongly reminded of "The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue" in places.
It may help to be familiar with Central London, to be properly awestruck by the deserted London scene near the start (c.f. Times Square in Vanilla Sky).
That Godspeed You Black Emperor track used throughout is terrific too
Where on earth is the video-in they plan to use this with?
Both MythTV and Freevo are moving toward a client/server architecture, so some boxes on the system record, some record and play, and some only play. I imagine if you've spent a few hundred dollars on a well specced server/recorder/encoder, and Xbox would make a handy playback only device to sit on the network.
I'm sure f*ckf*ck is an excellent first programming language for a kid.
I have a Toshiba Libretto with a P75 CPU, which I'm currently using as a home server: it's quiet, it's quite powerful enough to run Apache with SSL on Debian, and it does everything I need.
However, even the small noise it does make, is pretty annoying when trying to listen to a quiet passage of music, DVD, etc. (it's in my front room).
So if you're starting from scratch, I'd recommend getting an VIA Eden 600Mhz based mini-itx setup, so it's silent, and assuming you need a lot of storage, invest in a laptop hard drive, because they're quieter than full size ones.
With so many houses in the US built from lightweight materials (wood etc.) I'd expect WiFi to go through them pretty easily.
I've been in a motel in North Dakota where my GPS worked indoors!
What's not mentioned, so I assume it's not present, is a convenient skip to a convenient break point.
There's a specific application I have in mind for this product: I want to timeshift John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show, so I can listen to it on the way to work in the morning. The music is eclectic, and my journey is shorter than the show, so it would be nice, if the current song didn't appeal, to be able to skip to the next "talky" bit. I'm sure some spectrum analysis could manage to tag talk vs music to make this possible...
Are you kidding me?
Finding stuff from Notes is like... well.. finding a needle in a haystack.
Also in reponse to people who say to go use MtyhTV, you need like a 1GHz processor to do MPEG encoding in realtime... and it eats up most all the cpu, so dont expect to be using the computer for much else while it is recording.
This is true, but the answer is not "don't use MythTV", but "don't use your CPU for MPEG encoding". There are dedicated chipsets for encoding/decoding MPEG2, and you can get them as PCI boards.
Better still, in areas with digital TV, us DTVB card to capture raw MPEG streams direct from the air to your HDD (and in some cases, use the same card to decode MPEG)
I'll add to the list of similar places: the House of Mystery in Hungry Horse, Montana. They give you marbles before you go in, and you can watch them roll uphill.
:)
The effect is caused by an unexplained vortex on the site. Science is unable to explain it, and you get to stand pretty much as near to the centre of the vortex as is safe....
picture1
picture2
While the adaptation of colors and revising the layout of the dollar bill is a nice deterrent, there is one thing that would be nice to see: dollar bills that the blind could use.
Yes, it'd make sense, wouldn't it... or at least, the partially sighted.
I have perfect (corrected) vision, and even I have trouble distinguishing US notes at a glance -- all the same size, all the same colour, who's stupid idea was that?
FreeView is the UK's digital TV service, it also broadcasts several radio channels.
This is true, and TiVo does record radio shows from digital set top boxes in exactly the same way as it does TV shows (by EPG, as suggestions, all of that good stuff)
However, TiVo isn't optimal for this: when the set top box is receiving audio broadcasts, it displays a static image on the video output, and since TiVo doesn't know any better, it slavishly records this, wasting lots of storage.
I gather that Nokia is now producing an integrated PVR and terrestrial digital TV reciever. This saves the digital stream as broadcast, rather than re-encoding an analogue signal as TiVo does -- an approach with both advantages and disadvantages, but which means that radio shows are only stored as audio. The review I read indicated that since the machine was designed for video, it had enough storage for several hundred hours of digital audio.
This box also has digital audio out, so archiving to DAT, Minidisc, CDR or PC is possible.
Just in case anyone reading is in this situation:
I bought a new build house, and the first time I saw it, they hadn't yet fixed the stud plasterboard to the interior walls.
I should have taken that opportunity to flood the place with Cat 5, but I didn't.
Next time, eh...