Amen. For something as simple as crossing the border to Canada and back to see the two sides of Niagara Falls (back in 1997, so that whole terrorist fear thing was not quite the same as it is now), it went like this:
US->Canada: Walk across Canada->US: Get in line, get grilled by angry customs guy at counter about home state, capital, where i was born, birthdate, other general crap "are you a US citizen" questions, etc... He even tried to trick me by telling me I was wrong when I gave him my home state's capital!
All they accomplished was verifying that I knew the capital of the state printed on my driver's license, and delaying me and the other people in line for 15 minutes.
Amen. I signed up through Expert, as well. $70, and now i've got a pure digital satellite signal that beats the shady analog cable in our area, as well as 2-tuner recording, so the tivo can record two things at once, while I'm watching a third!
But you can get it even cheaper-- go search the tivo community forum for somebody with an expert satellite referral number who is willing to give you a portion of their $65 referral credit back. I found a nice guy who gave me more than half of his credit back. Total price for me? ~$30, with a free DVD player, shipping, installation, tri-LNB dish, and directivo.
Worst case, the guy stiffs you and you pay the full $50. No worse off than you were before, but at least somebody got some cash out of it.
All depends on where you started. Mine never gets much lower than the low 50s, even after a solid two-year buildup to a marathon, and more than a decade of running, biking, and swimming. Some people start that low when they're out of shape, and the truly genetically gifted get as low as the mid-30s with training. I think the all-time low is 28.
Consider yourself lucky if you're that low without trying!!
You called us all geeks while simultaneously making up a logarithmic scale to rate your favorite TV shows. Brilliant.
But hey, all name-calling aside, I just liked the show. Opinions are opinions, though-- so I won't bother justifying it anymore than I would try to convince you to adopt my favorite color as your own.
There is a checkbox labelled "reparenting" which is enabled by default. When checked, this causes posts that are children of posts below your threshold to be reparented up and still displayed even though their parent post is no longer visible.
That explains a whole lot of the top-level "reply" posts you see on stories, as well as the complete lack of sense my post makes with its parent gone.
There ought to be some sort of "Parent Missing" indicator, and maybe a link to the low-modded parent, just for the sake of making sense of "adopted" posts like this one.
Holy reparenting, batman! When I initially posted this, it made sense. But that parent post is gone. It's not the first time I've noticed this on/., but it's the first time it's happened to me. The parent post is gone, and my post has been "reparented" up to connect with the parent's parent. Anybody know what gives?
If you're at all interested in PC Gaming on your HDTV, definitely check out AVS forum. ATI sells a ~$35 adapter for their radeon cards that will give you component output. A little bit of tweaking with powerstrip can apparently also give you some "nonstandard" resolutions on your set, with a number of posters showing pics of their setups running resolutions like 1024x768 or 1280x1024, which play much more nicely with games than things like 1920x1080.
I *just* got my adapter the other day, and I haven't had a chance yet to see if I can get anything beyond the generic HDTV resolutions.
Nobody opposes freedom for Iraqis. Some people, however, think that maybe we should have kept on with the diplomacy a bit longer before sending in troops. Who is right? I don't know. At the very least, it's fairly expensive international-relations suicide to go invading stuff on your own without the help of the UN. But suggesting that because they do not advocate war, Germany opposes freedom for Iraqis is ridiculous.
Great atmosphere, great vintage machines (lots of restored vector cabinets, too!), occasional nuts like that trying to break arcade records, and so forth. Go there and give 'em some quarters-- it's roughly the coolest thing you can do while maintaining your geekdom.
Just for the record, Xlink didn't do ANYTHING. A member of Xlink's forum (kinda like you and i are members of slashdot) did it, and posted in their forum about it. This makes xlink about as guilty as slashdot would be if you got arrested for drunk driving tonight.
He does seem to be a little bit paranoid. It looks like a forum member from Xlink's site dl'd their code and posted about it, and so he repeatedly blames Xlink from stealing his code and integrating it into their own. This is like blaming slashdot for me shoplifting. Sure, I'm a member of the site-- but I'm not slashdot! And no, slashdot doesn't have the (metaphorical) candybar I stole.
The whole mess is confusing and sad. I don't really care, one way or the other-- as long as somebody's codebase lets me play MK:DD online, and the Warp Pipe guy quits posting his made-up accusations on their project's front page.
Single-frequency noises are the hardest to locate. We're not well adapted for finding pure sines-- something which leads one to believe that maybe we shouldn't be using our current style of sirens on fire trucks. Or that beep noise for large vehicles going in reverse.
It's the shape of the ear cone and it's different effect on different frequencies depending on which direction they originate from that allows us to distinguish direction. With only one frequency, you lose the benefit of having your brain figure out which frequencies are attenuated/enhanced and mapping that to a direction.
It sounds like you are actually being overcharged for gamecubes.
Today's UK-to-US exchange rate is 1.686. Which means your price list looks like this in dollars:
XBox with DVD remote: $168 PS2: $202 Gamecube: $134.88
So, the UK XBox is cheaper (probably because they aren't selling well over there) and the UK gamecube is around $35 more. In the US, it's cheaper to get a gamecube and a cheap DVD player. In the UK, apparently not.
Your ears are a funny shape. If they were just symmetrical little nubs sticking out of your head, you'd be right. Front/back would be indistinguishable. It is this asymmetry that allows you to determine whether the sound is coming from front to back.
Just talking out of my rear-end, consider that a sound coming from the back left would be blocked on the left side by the edge of the left ear, and on the right side by your entire head. A sound coming from front left would *NOT* be blocked by the "cone" of your left ear, but still blocked by the head on the way to the right ear. This would give you a greater difference in volume and a distinct difference in the character of the sound coming to the left ear (muffled by the cone in one case, clear in the other).
White noise is probably the easiest to find because of its complete coverage of the spectrum. The wider the range of frequencies, the more info your ear has to work with, and the more those complex shapes will bend the different frequencies differently, allowing your brain to make more refined distinctions.
I haven't read the whole thing yet either, (MAN is it long.) but I suspect much of the outrage is due to the proposed spec which may or may not have been implemented exactly. The last slashdot article I saw on this showed a list of the possible values the flag could take:
Retention_State_Indicator Retention Time 000 Forever 001 1 week 010 2 days 011 1 day 100 12 hours 101 6 hours 110 3 hours 111 90 minutes
And that WAS for archival. Meaning that any recording that was not "unrestricted" was going to last a maximum of one week on your tivo/VCR/DVD+R/whatever. And who wants to guess how much TV will be "unrestricted?" And yes, sometimes your recordings would disappear in 90 minutes!!
Anyway-- like I said, I don't know if this made it into the adopted version. But until *everybody* gets through reading that thing (and we all know the slashdot crowd isOh Look! A Puppy!)
You can see why they might be a tad upset that this passed, thinking that something that ridiculous might apply to their recordings. Who knows if it's actually in the final spec, or what license-negotiation hoops Tivo or Samsung or DirecTV or whoever will jump through to protect THEIR investment in recording tech. We'll just have to wait and see.
I know the day my tivo gets castrated like that is the day i'm done with television altogether.
Recycling improves the battery situation significantly. My two biggest gripes are still the weight and the charge time-- not so much the capacity. I'd be happy with a 60-mile range, assuming I could stop and fill up in a minute or two like I do now at a gas station. How long is the charge cycle for a car-sized Li-ion battery? If I drive to chicago, and have to stop 3 times on the 180-mile trip, that's no big deal. If I have to stop 3 times and wait half an hour each time, that's a HUGE deal.
And what does 1000lbs. of extra weight do to the performance and efficiency of a vehicle? There's a tradeoff against the weight of an IC engine, to be sure-- but I think that electric cars still lose here.
If we get better batteries, i'm all for it. Anything that gets us off of systems fixed to one energy source. Hybrids are far and away the most practical solution available now, but fail to wean us off gasoline.
I have no idea, except for that whole mess o' acid that you put in a battery. I was under the impression that batteries were a "do not eat" sort of product. It's not even in the same league as NiCad, though, which persists. I shouldn't have lumped them together like that.
Most of us *don't* need to go 400 miles between refuelings. I occasionally drive the 180 to chicago from indy, but rarely make any longer road trips. Still, there's no "quick fillup" for a battery powered car. If you have to drive farther than one tank, you have to sit and wait out a whole charge cycle before moving on. Swapping batteries at the station (like people do with those fuel tanks for grills) might fix this, but remember-- we're talking about ~1000lbs. of batteries. If they're swappable, they're not going in nice places like wedged under the floorboards and tucked into little spare nooks and crannies.
And 1000lbs. is going to make a MASSIVE dent in the economy and performance of a car. Consider how well your car would perform with all that extra weight.
You got a lead on these "better batteries?" The 1300-lb. battery pack from the old EV1 makes me think we're a long, long way from touching hydrogen.
Come on, man-- batteries take big losses when charging, lose power when they're sitting still not doing anything, and weigh so much you're wasting power just moving your damn half-ton battery pack around. Lead-acid is currently at 35-50wH/kg. Hydrogen is 39kwH/kg. Notice the "k" in the second one? Yes, it's roughly a thousand times more energy-dense than a lead-acid battery*. Li-ion has the *potential* in the future (note, nothing like this is currently available) to increase the current battery energy density by an order of magnitude. But we're three orders of magnitude away from touching hydrogen.
*numbers from here Note also that these are ideal numbers-- ALL of these options will achieve less than this "in real life."
If we find a better one, fan-freaking-tastic. I have no particular love for hydrogen-- we just need a good way to decouple the power source from the power delivery in automobiles, so sources can be swapped out at will as better alternatives develop without having to replace our entire national infrastructure a second time.
Electric's an easy one, though-- if we got good enough batteries, there's already electricity to everywhere.
if you *could* just use the electricity in the car, that would be great. Remember all those attempts at electric cars? Batteries still suck. They weigh a ton. They have staggering losses when charging, continue to lose power over time when sitting still and doing nothing, have low power density, and weigh a damn ton. Consider the last semi-successful commercial electric vehicle, the GM EV1. There were two battery packs available-- an 18.7kwH lead-acid pack that weighed 1310lbs and a 24.6kwH NiMH pack that weighed 1147lbs. Range on those packs? 55-95 miles on the lead-acid, and 75-130 miles on the NiMH. Li-ion would do significantly better, but not enough to make a massive battery pack like this viable. Don't forget that the packs need replacing after a few years, too-- a massive expense and a huge chunk of toxic fun to dispose of. Even if you could build a battery pack that didn't need swapping for the entire lifetime of the car, you'd STILL have 1300lbs. of toxic love to get rid of.
I hate to be the "mod parent up" guy, but this is definitely good info. If the US weren't so terrified of nuclear and refusing to replace outmoded reactors (when was the last time we put in a new reactor?) with far safer designs-- maybe this would have come up before.
They certainly don't care what KIND of fuel they have to sell you. What doesn't exist, however, is any incentive for them to encourage efficiency. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The more efficient stuff gets, the less people have to buy their products.
I don't have a good solution or anything-- just pointing out the problem. A company that sells energy in a more-or-less pure capitalist economy is doing what they're supposed to do for their shareholders if they fight tooth and nail against efficiency. We can't expect them to do otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. For something as simple as crossing the border to Canada and back to see the two sides of Niagara Falls (back in 1997, so that whole terrorist fear thing was not quite the same as it is now), it went like this:
:P
US->Canada: Walk across
Canada->US: Get in line, get grilled by angry customs guy at counter about home state, capital, where i was born, birthdate, other general crap "are you a US citizen" questions, etc... He even tried to trick me by telling me I was wrong when I gave him my home state's capital!
All they accomplished was verifying that I knew the capital of the state printed on my driver's license, and delaying me and the other people in line for 15 minutes.
Hooray for being a US citizen.
Lucky bastard. My compromise ended up at 66. I used to keep the thing set at 59. But hey, it's a small price to pay. :)
Amen. I signed up through Expert, as well. $70, and now i've got a pure digital satellite signal that beats the shady analog cable in our area, as well as 2-tuner recording, so the tivo can record two things at once, while I'm watching a third!
But you can get it even cheaper-- go search the tivo community forum for somebody with an expert satellite referral number who is willing to give you a portion of their $65 referral credit back. I found a nice guy who gave me more than half of his credit back. Total price for me? ~$30, with a free DVD player, shipping, installation, tri-LNB dish, and directivo.
Worst case, the guy stiffs you and you pay the full $50. No worse off than you were before, but at least somebody got some cash out of it.
All depends on where you started. Mine never gets much lower than the low 50s, even after a solid two-year buildup to a marathon, and more than a decade of running, biking, and swimming. Some people start that low when they're out of shape, and the truly genetically gifted get as low as the mid-30s with training. I think the all-time low is 28.
Consider yourself lucky if you're that low without trying!!
You called us all geeks while simultaneously making up a logarithmic scale to rate your favorite TV shows. Brilliant.
But hey, all name-calling aside, I just liked the show. Opinions are opinions, though-- so I won't bother justifying it anymore than I would try to convince you to adopt my favorite color as your own.
There is a checkbox labelled "reparenting" which is enabled by default. When checked, this causes posts that are children of posts below your threshold to be reparented up and still displayed even though their parent post is no longer visible.
That explains a whole lot of the top-level "reply" posts you see on stories, as well as the complete lack of sense my post makes with its parent gone.
There ought to be some sort of "Parent Missing" indicator, and maybe a link to the low-modded parent, just for the sake of making sense of "adopted" posts like this one.
Holy reparenting, batman! When I initially posted this, it made sense. But that parent post is gone. It's not the first time I've noticed this on /., but it's the first time it's happened to me. The parent post is gone, and my post has been "reparented" up to connect with the parent's parent. Anybody know what gives?
If you're at all interested in PC Gaming on your HDTV, definitely check out AVS forum. ATI sells a ~$35 adapter for their radeon cards that will give you component output. A little bit of tweaking with powerstrip can apparently also give you some "nonstandard" resolutions on your set, with a number of posters showing pics of their setups running resolutions like 1024x768 or 1280x1024, which play much more nicely with games than things like 1920x1080.
I *just* got my adapter the other day, and I haven't had a chance yet to see if I can get anything beyond the generic HDTV resolutions.
Nobody opposes freedom for Iraqis. Some people, however, think that maybe we should have kept on with the diplomacy a bit longer before sending in troops. Who is right? I don't know. At the very least, it's fairly expensive international-relations suicide to go invading stuff on your own without the help of the UN. But suggesting that because they do not advocate war, Germany opposes freedom for Iraqis is ridiculous.
Great atmosphere, great vintage machines (lots of restored vector cabinets, too!), occasional nuts like that trying to break arcade records, and so forth. Go there and give 'em some quarters-- it's roughly the coolest thing you can do while maintaining your geekdom.
Just for the record, Xlink didn't do ANYTHING. A member of Xlink's forum (kinda like you and i are members of slashdot) did it, and posted in their forum about it. This makes xlink about as guilty as slashdot would be if you got arrested for drunk driving tonight.
He does seem to be a little bit paranoid. It looks like a forum member from Xlink's site dl'd their code and posted about it, and so he repeatedly blames Xlink from stealing his code and integrating it into their own. This is like blaming slashdot for me shoplifting. Sure, I'm a member of the site-- but I'm not slashdot! And no, slashdot doesn't have the (metaphorical) candybar I stole.
The whole mess is confusing and sad. I don't really care, one way or the other-- as long as somebody's codebase lets me play MK:DD online, and the Warp Pipe guy quits posting his made-up accusations on their project's front page.
Single-frequency noises are the hardest to locate. We're not well adapted for finding pure sines-- something which leads one to believe that maybe we shouldn't be using our current style of sirens on fire trucks. Or that beep noise for large vehicles going in reverse.
It's the shape of the ear cone and it's different effect on different frequencies depending on which direction they originate from that allows us to distinguish direction. With only one frequency, you lose the benefit of having your brain figure out which frequencies are attenuated/enhanced and mapping that to a direction.
Would it be possible to just buy enough more music from yourself to bump your account over $25, and then cash out?
I'm not sure what comission they take, but if it's small, it might be worth it.
It sounds like you are actually being overcharged for gamecubes.
Today's UK-to-US exchange rate is 1.686. Which means your price list looks like this in dollars:
XBox with DVD remote: $168
PS2: $202
Gamecube: $134.88
So, the UK XBox is cheaper (probably because they aren't selling well over there) and the UK gamecube is around $35 more. In the US, it's cheaper to get a gamecube and a cheap DVD player. In the UK, apparently not.
Your ears are a funny shape. If they were just symmetrical little nubs sticking out of your head, you'd be right. Front/back would be indistinguishable. It is this asymmetry that allows you to determine whether the sound is coming from front to back.
Just talking out of my rear-end, consider that a sound coming from the back left would be blocked on the left side by the edge of the left ear, and on the right side by your entire head. A sound coming from front left would *NOT* be blocked by the "cone" of your left ear, but still blocked by the head on the way to the right ear. This would give you a greater difference in volume and a distinct difference in the character of the sound coming to the left ear (muffled by the cone in one case, clear in the other).
White noise is probably the easiest to find because of its complete coverage of the spectrum. The wider the range of frequencies, the more info your ear has to work with, and the more those complex shapes will bend the different frequencies differently, allowing your brain to make more refined distinctions.
Check out http://www.soundalert.com/technology.htm
for a company that makes special wideband-noise fire alarms that are easier to locate in the dark.
Anyway, I'm not an expert, but I can definitely see ways that your brain could distinguish front-back. Anybody got more reliable data than me?
Were all spent with my nose in a book. Several books, usually. And I turned out fine.
Oh, wait-- I'm a HUGE FREAKING DORK.
This guy built one himself.
I don't think it's as groundbreaking as the hype would lead you to believe. That, and I think it predates 2003 by a bit.
I haven't read the whole thing yet either, (MAN is it long.) but I suspect much of the outrage is due to the proposed spec which may or may not have been implemented exactly. The last slashdot article I saw on this showed a list of the possible values the flag could take:
Retention_State_Indicator Retention Time
000 Forever
001 1 week
010 2 days
011 1 day
100 12 hours
101 6 hours
110 3 hours
111 90 minutes
And that WAS for archival. Meaning that any recording that was not "unrestricted" was going to last a maximum of one week on your tivo/VCR/DVD+R/whatever. And who wants to guess how much TV will be "unrestricted?" And yes, sometimes your recordings would disappear in 90 minutes!!
Anyway-- like I said, I don't know if this made it into the adopted version. But until *everybody* gets through reading that thing (and we all know the slashdot crowd isOh Look! A Puppy!)
You can see why they might be a tad upset that this passed, thinking that something that ridiculous might apply to their recordings. Who knows if it's actually in the final spec, or what license-negotiation hoops Tivo or Samsung or DirecTV or whoever will jump through to protect THEIR investment in recording tech. We'll just have to wait and see.
I know the day my tivo gets castrated like that is the day i'm done with television altogether.
Recycling improves the battery situation significantly. My two biggest gripes are still the weight and the charge time-- not so much the capacity. I'd be happy with a 60-mile range, assuming I could stop and fill up in a minute or two like I do now at a gas station. How long is the charge cycle for a car-sized Li-ion battery? If I drive to chicago, and have to stop 3 times on the 180-mile trip, that's no big deal. If I have to stop 3 times and wait half an hour each time, that's a HUGE deal.
And what does 1000lbs. of extra weight do to the performance and efficiency of a vehicle? There's a tradeoff against the weight of an IC engine, to be sure-- but I think that electric cars still lose here.
If we get better batteries, i'm all for it. Anything that gets us off of systems fixed to one energy source. Hybrids are far and away the most practical solution available now, but fail to wean us off gasoline.
"By the way, what's toxic in a NiMH battery?"
I have no idea, except for that whole mess o' acid that you put in a battery. I was under the impression that batteries were a "do not eat" sort of product. It's not even in the same league as NiCad, though, which persists. I shouldn't have lumped them together like that.
Most of us *don't* need to go 400 miles between refuelings. I occasionally drive the 180 to chicago from indy, but rarely make any longer road trips. Still, there's no "quick fillup" for a battery powered car. If you have to drive farther than one tank, you have to sit and wait out a whole charge cycle before moving on. Swapping batteries at the station (like people do with those fuel tanks for grills) might fix this, but remember-- we're talking about ~1000lbs. of batteries. If they're swappable, they're not going in nice places like wedged under the floorboards and tucked into little spare nooks and crannies.
And 1000lbs. is going to make a MASSIVE dent in the economy and performance of a car. Consider how well your car would perform with all that extra weight.
You got a lead on these "better batteries?" The 1300-lb. battery pack from the old EV1 makes me think we're a long, long way from touching hydrogen.
Come on, man-- batteries take big losses when charging, lose power when they're sitting still not doing anything, and weigh so much you're wasting power just moving your damn half-ton battery pack around. Lead-acid is currently at 35-50wH/kg. Hydrogen is 39kwH/kg. Notice the "k" in the second one? Yes, it's roughly a thousand times more energy-dense than a lead-acid battery*. Li-ion has the *potential* in the future (note, nothing like this is currently available) to increase the current battery energy density by an order of magnitude. But we're three orders of magnitude away from touching hydrogen.
*numbers from here Note also that these are ideal numbers-- ALL of these options will achieve less than this "in real life."
If we find a better one, fan-freaking-tastic. I have no particular love for hydrogen-- we just need a good way to decouple the power source from the power delivery in automobiles, so sources can be swapped out at will as better alternatives develop without having to replace our entire national infrastructure a second time.
Electric's an easy one, though-- if we got good enough batteries, there's already electricity to everywhere.
if you *could* just use the electricity in the car, that would be great. Remember all those attempts at electric cars? Batteries still suck. They weigh a ton. They have staggering losses when charging, continue to lose power over time when sitting still and doing nothing, have low power density, and weigh a damn ton. Consider the last semi-successful commercial electric vehicle, the GM EV1. There were two battery packs available-- an 18.7kwH lead-acid pack that weighed 1310lbs and a 24.6kwH NiMH pack that weighed 1147lbs. Range on those packs? 55-95 miles on the lead-acid, and 75-130 miles on the NiMH. Li-ion would do significantly better, but not enough to make a massive battery pack like this viable. Don't forget that the packs need replacing after a few years, too-- a massive expense and a huge chunk of toxic fun to dispose of. Even if you could build a battery pack that didn't need swapping for the entire lifetime of the car, you'd STILL have 1300lbs. of toxic love to get rid of.
> hydrogen->electricity
As surprising as it may seem, options like:
electricity->hydrogen->electricity
radiolysis-
catalyzed hydrocarbons->hydrogen->electricity
are better bets than sticking a battery in as the middle step. Hydrogen is a better battery, however counterintuitive that is.
Until batteries quit sucking, we're stuck.
I hate to be the "mod parent up" guy, but this is definitely good info. If the US weren't so terrified of nuclear and refusing to replace outmoded reactors (when was the last time we put in a new reactor?) with far safer designs-- maybe this would have come up before.
They certainly don't care what KIND of fuel they have to sell you. What doesn't exist, however, is any incentive for them to encourage efficiency. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The more efficient stuff gets, the less people have to buy their products.
I don't have a good solution or anything-- just pointing out the problem. A company that sells energy in a more-or-less pure capitalist economy is doing what they're supposed to do for their shareholders if they fight tooth and nail against efficiency. We can't expect them to do otherwise.