Don't sweat it, a debate is not necessarily a flame.
You are absolutely correct, this is easier said than done. However, I disagree that it's completely dependant on the job market. If you don't have any marketable skills, you're going to have a hard time finding a job or negotiating for *anything*. It is YOUR responsibility to develop marketable skills, regardless of your current employment situation. This goes hand-in-hand with the attitude that I outlined above.
If you have, as another poster suggested, a year of income saved up, and/or another job lined up, that's a position of strength. You can afford to negotiate with your current employer, with the knowledge that you can walk away from the table at any time.
If you're being hired in a high-turnover job that requires THEM to train you, you ain't got nothin' to work with. However, if you bring a certain set of skills to the table that the company needs (a common scenerio), that is also a position of strength.
However, in the original post, the point is that your salary and benefits are negotiable, but don't negotiate if you don't have the ability to walk away.
These don't use 'car counters' (sounds expensive), they simply use the RFID tags that the tollway system uses to automatically charge you when you cruise through at 70 mph. They just set the sensors up on the side of the road (cheap), and send the info in. That's why they can afford to have coverage over the entire city, not just downtown like that slow Denver map.
What would be great is a standardized system to push these maps to LCD screens in your car.
That'd be great, if NASA actually listened to its experts.
Unfortunately, the decisions of what it's going to do in the future are not made by its experts, it is made by the politicians, which (at least indirectly) are influenced by our democracy.
Why? It all comes down to funding, which comes from the government.
For example, why do you think the shuttle is the way it is (part reusable, part disposable)? Politics. The fully reusable one was too expensive. This article outlines the compromises that were made, and is an overall interesting read.
A quote from the article, "But you're in luck--the launch goes fine. Once you get into space, you check to see if any tiles are damaged. If enough are, you have a choice between Plan A and Plan B. Plan A is hope they can get a rescue shuttle up in time. Plan B is burn up coming back. "
What are the uses? Spoken like someone who has gotten used to the NON-integration of the world.
I am in a profession that requires a lot of pictures, and often drawing on the pictures and taking notes. Normally, I carry a digital camera and a notebook, and spend many tedious hours downloading pictures and adding comments from my notebook onto my laptop in the evenings. With a handheld like this, with a DECENT camera (forget the CMOS crap that comes with cell phones), it's easy to see how this type of device will make my life easier.
It is possible to take a picture, with written or voice notes and annotate them. With a bluetooth enabled GPS (they do exist), I can also integrate pictures with a GPS location without becoming a tangled mess of wires.
Perhaps its a niche market, but it does exist, and it makes a LOT more sense than having a crappy little camera on a cell phone. However, the point of both of them is to always have a camera with you.
Working as a bartender? A merchant marine? A volunteer? The Peace Corps? Bah. Forget it. Just go.
Bartender/ski lift operator/au pair/whatever: Go to a fabulous country, have no time to do anything, and get paid next to nothing doing crap work!
Merchant Marines: Little known fact - today's modern container ships only take a few hours to offload - this means that ships spend as little time as possible in port. If you like taking weeks to get somehwere, and spending literally a few hours there, this is they way to go!
Peace Corps: Heh.
Volunteering: Well, you're VOLUNTEERING!
Bottom line is that many of these things are over-romanticized.
IMHO, the best thing to do is to get a backpack, put a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, a tent, and a towel in it, buy a plane ticket to somewhere, and go.
I was in Turkey at a youth hostel once, and encountered a Dutch guy who was in the middle of a backpacking trip. He started of hitching in the netherlands, had gone through russia, mongolia, china, vietnam, thailand, india, pakistan, and iran, and had just gotten off of the train in eastern Turkey. He was washing washing his spare clothes - a change of underwear.
It doesn't take much money, and you can make a game of trying to find work to supplement your trip. A few thousand will keep you going for months if you're frugal, and you don't have anyone telling you what to do! If you don't like walking, and want to go fast, bring a bike.
Most of all, just have fun and enjoy the experience.
I drove the Volvo that the MIT Media Lab used to collect 'predictive' data for the lane-change detection etc. It was an interesting experience - driving in Boston wearing a small fiber optic video camera taped (!) to some cheap safety glasses, several video cameras pointing every which way, and sensors on the steering wheel, brake pedal, and gas pedal to collect the data.
The theory was that they would use the data to predict when you were *about* to change lanes - and set off an alarm if there were a car in your way. I'd be interested to know if they actually succeeded in doing this.
This wasn't a fully automated process - there was a co-driver who you had to tell when you were going to change lanes, turn, etc., then he would punch the appropriate action into a laptop.
Then again, I got paid $20 for the hour or so it took, so I'm not complaining:) Well worth all of the funny looks I got on I-95.
I am in the same boat as the author of this article - an experienced Perl programmer who needed to learn some XML stuff.
I found this book to be an outstanding resource that got me up to speed very quickly on both XML in general and that variety of ways that Perl deals with it.
Don't let the small size fool you, it is packed with useful information and well worth the price.
1) If you 'just check e-mail, web surf, and do office stuff', IT MAKES LITTLE DIFFERENCE which OS you use. This is the 'dumb' user that can't fix ANY problem, whether it's Linux or MS or VMS.
2) If you like pretty and infinitely customizable, Linux or OS X is for you.
3) If you use specialized software that only runs in Windows, Windows is for you.
4) If you ENJOY tinkering with your computer, Linux is for you. I freely admit that I got a peverse thrill when recompiling my kernel, but it finally gets to be once too often.
Bottom line - different users have different needs. Anyone who says that any current OS is the ultimate solution is a liar. For me, the choice of OS is a difficult, heartwrenching choice. I love/hate linux, I like the idea of MacOS X, but I run WinXP. Why? See #3. WinXP has shocked me with how well thought out and stable it is. I thought I would hate it, but I don't. But I still run Linux on other machines, and I still pine for OS X.
If you haven't used Linux or WinXP for more than a few minutes, you deserve to have your comment modded down to -1.
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 08, @07:08PM from the limbaugh-combos-are-not-in-the-sats dept.
Richard M writes "A Farkistanian researcher, Oika Irom, from the Farkistan University's College of Humanity, claims to have found a link between voting for Republicans and the balance of activity in the brain. It is also claimed that this effect can cause behavioural changes, such as lack of concentration, difficulty with social association, short temper, and enjoying Fox News. These effects are also thought to be, to some extent, nonreversible."
I was gonna say something witty and insightful here, but I can't think of anything. At least I can't figure out a butterfly ballot well enough to vote for Kathleen Harris instead of a dog.
NOUN 1. Philosophy a. An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence. b. A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. 2. Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief. 3. The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement. 4. also Nihilism A diffuse, revolutionary movement of mid 19th-century Russia that scorned authority and tradition and believed in reason, materialism, and radical change in society and government through terrorism and assassination. 5. Psychiatry A delusion, experienced in some mental disorders, that the world or one's mind, body, or self does not exist.
ETYMOLOGY Latin nihil, nothing. See ne. + -ism
OTHER FORMS ni'hilist - NOUN
ni''hilis'tic - ADJECTIVE
ni''hilis'tically - ADVERB
Try getting information like that anywhere on the net. No web pages to open, just send a text query. SmarterChild actually redefines fast information access, IMHO.
Funny how the fact that this is great source of homework queries for kids isn't anywhere in the article.
Ballard was scooped long ago by Pitman and Ryan. Read their book on a catastrophic flood that filled what is now the Black Sea. They've put a good scientific story together, not the bunk that keeps appearing in this thread.
Archaeology is doing so well because archeologists finally grew brains and started incorporating geology into their work.
For years, archaeologists have thought like this "these people liked to live by rivers, so lets dig around by rivers and see what we find!", when in fact, they should have been thinking like this "these people liked to live by rivers and hung around here about 10,000 yeras ago, lets figure out where the rivers were 10,000 years ago and dig there!".
Sea level has risen significantly since the last ice age. Most population centers in the world are right on the coast, and that hasn't really changed for a long time. Therefore, to find old population centers, one must look where the shoreline USED to be, which is now underwater.
Don't be surprised if you start hearing about more and more of these types of discoveries - none of them are Atlantis.
While I do not have any degenerative eye diseases, I have very bad vision (uncorrected, like 20/400, but the 20/? system breaks down at my level). It's corrected to 20/20 right after an eye exam, but over time, it gets worse.
This causes bad posture while working on computers. I generally lean forward while I'm working, to get closer to a monitor. I have used a lot of CRT's, both good and bad, and haven't really noticed any difference between them in terms of vision, but some are better in terms of overall appearance quality.
Now for the punchline. I just bought a Toshiba 5105-S607, with a UXGA+ screen. This is the first screen I have ever used where I can really lean back and read/see what's going on. This may be due to anti-aliased fonts in WinXP, but I think it also has a lot to do with the screen. Drop by a store and scope it out, I think you'll be impressed. I'm really enjoying using a screen I can actually read text on at 1600x1200!
Did the (non-goverment) companies you worked for make money? If yes, then the managers were doing their job. If no, then they weren't. Your personal job satisfaction isn't important to the company, despite what you think. The bottom line is.
From my own personal experience, I can tell you that there are a lot of perfectionists out there, who would prefer to spend every resource a company has making a product exactly right before releasing it. That kind of thinking will drive a company under in the long term (as will the opposite end of the spectrum). At some point you have to accept an inferior solution, because it needs to be accomplished in the short term to acheive longer term goals, despite the cost.
E-mail formatting is a published standard (see whichever RFC it is...). Microsoft has released a product that FAILS to correctly view e-mails of a certain type that adhere to the standard.
Note that you can run any other e-mail reader you choose, and you'll be able to see these e-mails. You can even run a proprietary OS like MacOS and still read these e-mails. Oh yeah, not to mention BeOS, palmOS, or OS/9 (not sure if there are really that many e-mail clients on OS/9 tho). This isn't really a linux only filter, it's a filter for e-mail readers that do not actually render e-mails correctly. It just so happens that MS is the only company/organization that has released an e-mail reader that doesn't adhere to the standard.
This is a bit of backlash against "Embrace and Extend". If MS could write software that worked correctly, there wouldn't be any problem.
SOME of the stuff done is aimed at disabling particular clients, like the WebTV stuff. Maybe that's not cool, but the rest of it is.
Yeah, what he said - also the particle stream
will most likely be spread out over several days.
For example, look at the various graphs at
the Space Environment Center and you can
see that different things hit at different times.
Right now were getting bombarded by the EM and
high energy protons, while the matter from the
coronal mass ejection will not get here for
a few days. The radio blackouts and sensor
dazzling are from the EM (X-rays mostly) and
we're getting that NOW. But the matter from the
coronal mass ejection is hurtling through space
towards earth at some (relatively unknown) speed
that depends on the speed at which it was ejected. THAT's the stuff that generates
drag on satellites, causes the aurora, etc.
Also it's nearly impossible to calculate when
you'll see the aurora, because that depends
a lot on local conditions and a lot of other
stuff that is completely unknown to science.
Best bet is to keep an eye on the
data from the POES satellite, which
has some great plots showing likely auroral
activity.
Spots: ? Looks like they cranked up the contrast
like crazy.
Tubes 1: Pretty clearly barcan dunes in a valley.
Tubes 2: Ditto
Track: Ditto (ho hum)
Vegetation: Another one where it looks like
they cranked up the contrast like crazy - these
actually look like sunspots (?). If they're
actually from Mars, they are lava flows.
Triangles: No clue - need to see in different
light angles
Strange Lines: These are dust devil/tornado
tracks - pretty cool, eh?
T: There are a bunch of these near Valles
Marineris (which is a 10km+ deep version of
these long, blunt-ended vallies. Their
formation is a source of major contention.
Probably a faulted graben feature.
Remember the "face" on Mars? That one was
very effectively debunked with the MGS images.
As long as you show individual images, you
can pretty much see anything you want, but
if you look at them in different light angles,
you can start to piece together what the
features actually are. However, if they
actually showed those (or read the science),
they'd have nothing.
Production of hydrocarbons depends on either
the porosity of the rock or fractures within
it.
By 'drilling' with a laser (really burning),
the high temps instantly seal the sides of
the borehole, negating any porosity and
sealing any fractures in the immediate
vicinity. One could figure out how far
out the sealing would go from the well knowing
the heat dissapation of the laser at the
bottom/sides of the well and the rock type.
You can 'frac' the rock subsequently, and
still produce oil/gas, but almost
certainly not at the efficiency of a well
drilled conventionally.
Bottom line is, for a number of reasons,
this isn't going to replace conventional
drilling in the near or far future. It's
basically an attempt to find *some* use
for all of that money poured into laser
physics by the Star Wars programs of the
'80's. This one just doesn't happen to
be very good.
The technique has some merit for other types
of drilling. Tunneling, scientific exploration, and others come to mind immediately.
Most e-journals are simultaneously released on CD-ROM as well as the internet. That should be the 'permanent' copy that exists in the library. Who cares if the web site goes down?
If you're worried about the archival quality of CD-ROMs, that is a reasonable concern, but there are archival issues with books too that are dealt with by all libraries - they just have to learn some new stuff.
I'm pretty sure that this story 'bends' the truth a bit.
Yes, it should be possible to build a jammer for the GPS signal. However, it is specifically designed to thwart jamming attempts, because, as it says in the article, the signal is relatively low power, but uses some really neat techniques, all rolled up into something called "anti-spoofing" to avoid jamming.
It is, in fact, much harder to jam the GPS signal than it is to jam communication satellite signals.
Yes, in theory, you can jam it. But in order to do so, you need to be cranking out a *lot* of power (since the signal is spread-spectrum), and even if you have that power, you're only going to jam GPS receivers in the immediate area (remember the inverse square law?).
OK - so perhaps they can jam all GPS signals within say 100 meters of their location. Considering the GPS system was designed to allow ballistic missile submarines to locate themselves when the surface to fire missiles, this is not a problem. You're not going to predict where the sub is going to surface to be within 100m of it.
Or let's say you're using this jammer with one of the new 'smart' bombs that use GPS. The bomb is falling towards you being guided by your signal, and 100m away, the jammer causes it to lose 'lock' on the GPS signal. It knew where you were a few seconds before, and it's falling at terminal velocity. So what if it loses lock a fraction of a second before it hits you? It will still ruin your day.
So, to summarize, yes, you could crash planes with this, *if* the FAA ever decides to use GPS for landing purposes (which they haven't yet), *if* you can find a spot within 100m of where the plane is landing to jam the signal (sitting on the runway probably would not be a good idea), and *if* it mattered at all if the plane lost lock on the signal a few seconds before landing.
If you're trying to crash planes, it seems like it would be easier to use a bomb. However, *as usual*, those who don't understand the technology are using it to create false fears among others. I would have hoped that those on/. were too smart to fall for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Lynx is pretty safe...definitely haven't gotten any spyware from it.
Don't sweat it, a debate is not necessarily a flame.
You are absolutely correct, this is easier said than done. However, I disagree that it's completely dependant on the job market. If you don't have any marketable skills, you're going to have a hard time finding a job or negotiating for *anything*. It is YOUR responsibility to develop marketable skills, regardless of your current employment situation. This goes hand-in-hand with the attitude that I outlined above.
If you have, as another poster suggested, a year of income saved up, and/or another job lined up, that's a position of strength. You can afford to negotiate with your current employer, with the knowledge that you can walk away from the table at any time.
If you're being hired in a high-turnover job that requires THEM to train you, you ain't got nothin' to work with. However, if you bring a certain set of skills to the table that the company needs (a common scenerio), that is also a position of strength.
However, in the original post, the point is that your salary and benefits are negotiable, but don't negotiate if you don't have the ability to walk away.
Any business you work for will pay you as little as they can get away with.
It is your responsibility to get as much compensation as possible out of that business.
However you do this is up to you, but always negotiate from a position of strength.
Such things have existed for years in the US.
Here's Houston: http://traffic.tamu.edu/incmap/
Here's Dallas: http://dfwtraffic.dot.state.tx.us/dfwweb/
These don't use 'car counters' (sounds expensive), they simply use the RFID tags that the tollway system uses to automatically charge you when you cruise through at 70 mph. They just set the sensors up on the side of the road (cheap), and send the info in. That's why they can afford to have coverage over the entire city, not just downtown like that slow Denver map.
What would be great is a standardized system to push these maps to LCD screens in your car.
Unfortunately, the decisions of what it's going to do in the future are not made by its experts, it is made by the politicians, which (at least indirectly) are influenced by our democracy.
Why? It all comes down to funding, which comes from the government.
For example, why do you think the shuttle is the way it is (part reusable, part disposable)? Politics. The fully reusable one was too expensive. This article outlines the compromises that were made, and is an overall interesting read.
A quote from the article, "But you're in luck--the launch goes fine. Once you get into space, you check to see if any tiles are damaged. If enough are, you have a choice between Plan A and Plan B. Plan A is hope they can get a rescue shuttle up in time. Plan B is burn up coming back. "
Note that this article was written in 1980.
What are the uses? Spoken like someone who has gotten used to the NON-integration of the world.
I am in a profession that requires a lot of pictures, and often drawing on the pictures and taking notes. Normally, I carry a digital camera and a notebook, and spend many tedious hours downloading pictures and adding comments from my notebook onto my laptop in the evenings. With a handheld like this, with a DECENT camera (forget the CMOS crap that comes with cell phones), it's easy to see how this type of device will make my life easier.
It is possible to take a picture, with written or voice notes and annotate them. With a bluetooth enabled GPS (they do exist), I can also integrate pictures with a GPS location without becoming a tangled mess of wires.
Perhaps its a niche market, but it does exist, and it makes a LOT more sense than having a crappy little camera on a cell phone. However, the point of both of them is to always have a camera with you.
Working as a bartender? A merchant marine? A volunteer? The Peace Corps? Bah. Forget it.
Just go.
Bartender/ski lift operator/au pair/whatever: Go to a fabulous country, have no time to do anything, and get paid next to nothing doing crap work!
Merchant Marines: Little known fact - today's modern container ships only take a few hours to offload - this means that ships spend as little time as possible in port. If you like taking weeks to get somehwere, and spending literally a few hours there, this is they way to go!
Peace Corps: Heh.
Volunteering: Well, you're VOLUNTEERING!
Bottom line is that many of these things are over-romanticized.
IMHO, the best thing to do is to get a backpack, put a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, a tent,
and a towel in it, buy a plane ticket to somewhere, and go.
I was in Turkey at a youth hostel once, and encountered a Dutch guy who was in the middle of a backpacking trip. He started of hitching in the netherlands, had gone through russia, mongolia, china, vietnam, thailand, india, pakistan, and iran, and had just gotten off of the train in eastern Turkey. He was washing washing his spare clothes - a change of underwear.
It doesn't take much money, and you can make a game of trying to find work to supplement your trip. A few thousand will keep you going for months if you're frugal, and you don't have anyone telling you what to do! If you don't like walking, and want to go fast, bring a bike.
Most of all, just have fun and enjoy the experience.
I drove the Volvo that the MIT Media Lab used to collect 'predictive' data for the lane-change detection etc. It was an interesting experience - driving in Boston wearing a small fiber optic video camera taped (!) to some cheap safety glasses, several video cameras pointing every which way, and sensors on the steering wheel, brake pedal, and gas pedal to collect the data.
:) Well worth all of the funny looks I got on I-95.
The theory was that they would use the data to predict when you were *about* to change lanes - and set off an alarm if there were a car in your way. I'd be interested to know if they actually succeeded in doing this.
This wasn't a fully automated process - there was a co-driver who you had to tell when you were going to change lanes, turn, etc., then he would punch the appropriate action into a laptop.
Then again, I got paid $20 for the hour or so it took, so I'm not complaining
I am in the same boat as the author of this article - an experienced Perl programmer who needed to learn some XML stuff.
I found this book to be an outstanding resource that got me up to speed very quickly on both XML in general and that variety of ways that Perl deals with it.
Don't let the small size fool you, it is packed with useful information and well worth the price.
I switched too, for many of the same reasons.
A few notes on OS's:
1) If you 'just check e-mail, web surf, and do office stuff', IT MAKES LITTLE DIFFERENCE which OS you use. This is the 'dumb' user that can't fix ANY problem, whether it's Linux or MS or VMS.
2) If you like pretty and infinitely customizable, Linux or OS X is for you.
3) If you use specialized software that only runs in Windows, Windows is for you.
4) If you ENJOY tinkering with your computer, Linux is for you. I freely admit that I got a peverse thrill when recompiling my kernel, but it finally gets to be once too often.
Bottom line - different users have different needs. Anyone who says that any current OS is the ultimate solution is a liar. For me, the choice of OS is a difficult, heartwrenching choice. I love/hate linux, I like the idea of MacOS X, but I run WinXP. Why? See #3. WinXP has shocked me with how well thought out and stable it is. I thought I would hate it, but I don't. But I still run Linux on other machines, and I still pine for OS X.
If you haven't used Linux or WinXP for more than a few minutes, you deserve to have your comment modded down to -1.
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 08, @07:08PM
from the limbaugh-combos-are-not-in-the-sats dept.
Richard M writes "A Farkistanian researcher, Oika Irom, from the Farkistan University's College of Humanity, claims to have found a link between voting for Republicans and the balance of activity in the brain. It is also claimed that this effect can cause behavioural changes, such as lack of concentration, difficulty with social association, short temper, and enjoying Fox News. These effects are also thought to be, to some extent, nonreversible."
I was gonna say something witty and insightful here, but I can't think of anything. At least I can't figure out a butterfly ballot well enough to vote for Kathleen Harris instead of a dog.
What a one-sided article.
SmarterChild is actually a fanstastic source of information, and even a three year old could see through the ads.
It gives you the fastest access you can find to things like weather, movies, translations, etc.
Try things like:
Me: translate slashdot is cool into italian
SmarterChild: "lo slashdot è freddo"
Me: movies denver, co
SmarterChild: Movies near Denver, CO (80251) on Tuesday, April 16th:
1 Panic Room (R)
2 Ice Age (PG)
3 High Crimes (PG-13)
4 The Sweetest Thing (R)
5 The Rookie (G)
>>> Type "more" for the next set of results.
Me: define nihilism
SmarterChild: Definition for nihilism provided by The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Other important copyright information
NOUN
1. Philosophy a. An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence. b. A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. 2. Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief. 3. The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement. 4. also Nihilism A diffuse, revolutionary movement of mid 19th-century Russia that scorned authority and tradition and believed in reason, materialism, and radical change in society and government through terrorism and assassination. 5. Psychiatry A delusion, experienced in some mental disorders, that the world or one's mind, body, or self does not exist.
ETYMOLOGY
Latin nihil, nothing. See ne. + -ism
OTHER FORMS
ni'hilist - NOUN
ni''hilis'tic - ADJECTIVE
ni''hilis'tically - ADVERB
Try getting information like that anywhere on the net. No web pages to open, just send a text query. SmarterChild actually redefines fast information access, IMHO.
Funny how the fact that this is great source of homework queries for kids isn't anywhere in the article.
Ballard was scooped long ago by Pitman and Ryan. Read their book on a catastrophic flood that filled what is now the Black Sea. They've put a good scientific story together, not the bunk that keeps appearing in this thread.
Archaeology is doing so well because archeologists finally grew brains and started incorporating geology into their work.
For years, archaeologists have thought like this "these people liked to live by rivers, so lets dig around by rivers and see what we find!", when in fact, they should have been thinking like this "these people liked to live by rivers and hung around here about 10,000 yeras ago, lets figure out where the rivers were 10,000 years ago and dig there!".
Sea level has risen significantly since the last ice age. Most population centers in the world are right on the coast, and that hasn't really changed for a long time. Therefore, to find old population centers, one must look where the shoreline USED to be, which is now underwater.
Don't be surprised if you start hearing about more and more of these types of discoveries - none of them are Atlantis.
While I do not have any degenerative eye diseases, I have very bad vision (uncorrected, like 20/400, but the 20/? system breaks down at my level). It's corrected to 20/20 right after an eye exam, but over time, it gets worse.
This causes bad posture while working on computers. I generally lean forward while I'm working, to get closer to a monitor. I have used a lot of CRT's, both good and bad, and haven't really noticed any difference between them in terms of vision, but some are better in terms of overall appearance quality.
Now for the punchline. I just bought a Toshiba 5105-S607, with a UXGA+ screen. This is the first screen I have ever used where I can really lean back and read/see what's going on. This may be due to anti-aliased fonts in WinXP, but I think it also has a lot to do with the screen. Drop by a store and scope it out, I think you'll be impressed. I'm really enjoying using a screen I can actually read text on at 1600x1200!
Did the (non-goverment) companies you worked for make money? If yes, then the managers were doing their job. If no, then they weren't. Your personal job satisfaction isn't important to the company, despite what you think. The bottom line is.
From my own personal experience, I can tell you that there are a lot of perfectionists out there, who would prefer to spend every resource a company has making a product exactly right before releasing it. That kind of thinking will drive a company under in the long term (as will the opposite end of the spectrum). At some point you have to accept an inferior solution, because it needs to be accomplished in the short term to acheive longer term goals, despite the cost.
Spoken like a true Perl programmer, eh?
I wish you guys many happy years together.
E-mail formatting is a published standard (see whichever RFC it is...). Microsoft has released a product that FAILS to correctly view e-mails of a certain type that adhere to the standard.
Note that you can run any other e-mail reader you choose, and you'll be able to see these e-mails. You can even run a proprietary OS like MacOS and still read these e-mails. Oh yeah, not to mention BeOS, palmOS, or OS/9 (not sure if there are really that many e-mail clients on OS/9 tho). This isn't really a linux only filter, it's a filter for e-mail readers that do not actually render e-mails correctly. It just so happens that MS is the only company/organization that has released an e-mail reader that doesn't adhere to the standard.
This is a bit of backlash against "Embrace and Extend". If MS could write software that worked correctly, there wouldn't be any problem.
SOME of the stuff done is aimed at disabling particular clients, like the WebTV stuff. Maybe that's not cool, but the rest of it is.
#!/bin/perl
s/Star Trek: Enterprise/Star Wars Episode 1/g;
s/Theme Music/Jar Jar Binks/g;
if ($comments ne $starwarscomments) { $idbesurprised = 1; }
I don't want to seem overly picky here, but it's actually an X2.6 class flare - the resulting radiation storm is an S3 class event.
For example, look at the various graphs at the Space Environment Center and you can see that different things hit at different times. Right now were getting bombarded by the EM and high energy protons, while the matter from the coronal mass ejection will not get here for a few days. The radio blackouts and sensor dazzling are from the EM (X-rays mostly) and we're getting that NOW. But the matter from the coronal mass ejection is hurtling through space towards earth at some (relatively unknown) speed that depends on the speed at which it was ejected. THAT's the stuff that generates drag on satellites, causes the aurora, etc.
Also it's nearly impossible to calculate when you'll see the aurora, because that depends a lot on local conditions and a lot of other stuff that is completely unknown to science. Best bet is to keep an eye on the data from the POES satellite, which has some great plots showing likely auroral activity.
Spots: ? Looks like they cranked up the contrast like crazy. Tubes 1: Pretty clearly barcan dunes in a valley.
Tubes 2: Ditto
Track: Ditto (ho hum)
Vegetation: Another one where it looks like they cranked up the contrast like crazy - these actually look like sunspots (?). If they're actually from Mars, they are lava flows.
Triangles: No clue - need to see in different light angles
Strange Lines: These are dust devil/tornado tracks - pretty cool, eh?
T: There are a bunch of these near Valles Marineris (which is a 10km+ deep version of these long, blunt-ended vallies. Their formation is a source of major contention. Probably a faulted graben feature.
Remember the "face" on Mars? That one was very effectively debunked with the MGS images. As long as you show individual images, you can pretty much see anything you want, but if you look at them in different light angles, you can start to piece together what the features actually are. However, if they actually showed those (or read the science), they'd have nothing.
Production of hydrocarbons depends on either the porosity of the rock or fractures within it.
By 'drilling' with a laser (really burning), the high temps instantly seal the sides of the borehole, negating any porosity and sealing any fractures in the immediate vicinity. One could figure out how far out the sealing would go from the well knowing the heat dissapation of the laser at the bottom/sides of the well and the rock type.
You can 'frac' the rock subsequently, and still produce oil/gas, but almost certainly not at the efficiency of a well drilled conventionally.
Bottom line is, for a number of reasons, this isn't going to replace conventional drilling in the near or far future. It's basically an attempt to find *some* use for all of that money poured into laser physics by the Star Wars programs of the '80's. This one just doesn't happen to be very good.
The technique has some merit for other types of drilling. Tunneling, scientific exploration, and others come to mind immediately.
If you're worried about the archival quality of CD-ROMs, that is a reasonable concern, but there are archival issues with books too that are dealt with by all libraries - they just have to learn some new stuff.
Yes, it should be possible to build a jammer for the GPS signal. However, it is specifically designed to thwart jamming attempts, because, as it says in the article, the signal is relatively low power, but uses some really neat techniques, all rolled up into something called "anti-spoofing" to avoid jamming.
It is, in fact, much harder to jam the GPS signal than it is to jam communication satellite signals.
Yes, in theory, you can jam it. But in order to do so, you need to be cranking out a *lot* of power (since the signal is spread-spectrum), and even if you have that power, you're only going to jam GPS receivers in the immediate area (remember the inverse square law?).
OK - so perhaps they can jam all GPS signals within say 100 meters of their location. Considering the GPS system was designed to allow ballistic missile submarines to locate themselves when the surface to fire missiles, this is not a problem. You're not going to predict where the sub is going to surface to be within 100m of it.
Or let's say you're using this jammer with one of the new 'smart' bombs that use GPS. The bomb is falling towards you being guided by your signal, and 100m away, the jammer causes it to lose 'lock' on the GPS signal. It knew where you were a few seconds before, and it's falling at terminal velocity. So what if it loses lock a fraction of a second before it hits you? It will still ruin your day.
So, to summarize, yes, you could crash planes with this, *if* the FAA ever decides to use GPS for landing purposes (which they haven't yet), *if* you can find a spot within 100m of where the plane is landing to jam the signal (sitting on the runway probably would not be a good idea), and *if* it mattered at all if the plane lost lock on the signal a few seconds before landing.
If you're trying to crash planes, it seems like it would be easier to use a bomb. However, *as usual*, those who don't understand the technology are using it to create false fears among others. I would have hoped that those on /. were too smart to fall for that.