It's true that spending a lot of money can get you a good photography setup, but you really should try something before a significant investment like the above poster. Here are a couple of tricks I've learned by doing astrophotography on a substandard setup:
If your mount isn't ideal or you have a stock tripod for your telescope, your camera will weigh heavy and shake hanging off the scope. One way to help that situation is to simply buy a remote trigger for your camera. The scope won't move enough by itself to cause horrible vibration, but you touching it to hit the shutter will. Wind will also cause your camera/scope to shake so get somewhere sheltered from the wind side if possible.
I would recommend anyone starting off in astronomy to go start off by finding all of the Messier objects. They are a catalogue of galaxies, nebulas, and clusters that can be observed with a modest scope but are quite spectacular.
Good luck, i abhor living in the city and i envy you.
This phenomenon is not surprising. Sure, Popularity begets popularity.
I see several comments pointing to how this shows that popular music is doomed.
Disillusionment about a musical era past aside, in general, why is this bad? Something (whether it's a song, vacuum cleaner, or graphics card) can't become immensely popular if it doesn't have some merit that has widespread appeal. That appeal is never based solely on marketing. In the case of a song, marketing helps, but it must be catchy to some people or it would never sell. Regardless of your own view of a popular song, enough people find it appealing to make it popular.
So, can you blame people for trusting popularity as being one of the factors that affects what they pay attention to? They can always trust that there is some appeal of that item (be it product or song or whatever) if it's popular.
I was migrating from 0.8 to 0.9 RC. Even though it didn't correctly migrate my settings, it didn't trash my profile because it uses a different profile directory than 0.8.
My old profile directory was:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\
The new one is:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
All I had to do was copy things like cookies.txt and cookperm.txt and bookmarks.html into my new profile in the new location.
This is probably not near as good as water for cooling purposes.
An important parameter for a cooling medium is heat conductivity (which directly effects the convective heat transfer coefficient). While there is no mention of this parameter in the spec sheet mentioned above, it can't be that high.
If it were, the chemical would cause the submerged electronic devices in the demo to short out regardless of whether it got them wet. This is because a general rule of thumb is that something thats a bad electrical conductor is a bad heat conductor.
Just my 2 cents (no one ever uses this sig anymore... sad).
As a current mechanical engineering senior at the University of Texas, here has been my experience with grade distribution in my classes:
Oftentimes, test grades in the class average 50-75. In general the tests are challenging and meant to be so. This sometimes amounts to an average class grade at the end of the semester of 60. The professor then applies a curve to bring the majority of grades to B's with a nice spread of A's and C's, and D's and F's for slackers. This is the best scheme because it rates your performance in the class against those of your peers, which is exactly what happens in the real world. Makes sense to me.
This is a great idea and I really don't think it will take away from the experience that I've enjoyed for years. The atmosphere at the Alamo Drafthouse is different from any other theater because it is expected that there will be some disturbance during the show. This isn't to say that it's a roudy place where you can't enjoy your movie (except maybe during Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings), but the experience is much more like watching a movie with a bunch of friends at home.
Given the shear volume of wireless-enabled individuals in Austin, this can only enhance the experience.
Next time I go I'll take my laptop and hack other patrons if they're noisy:)
Miked
Since Visual Studio.NET was only just released, it may not be very apparent how widespread the usage of C# will turn out to be. I'd wager the language will be very widely used to develop new Windows applications. Obviously, particularly those based on.NET.
In my opinion, it could only help the development of Qt based apps once C# developers realize they can easily develop in a syntax they're used to.
Work on this project needs to start now so that when that day comes, the C# developers will have the tools they need. It's a matter of anticipating the needs of future Microsoft-flavored programmers when they make the switch to a superior OS.
Another thing that annoys me greatly is the Real Player (whatever they are calling this version) notification program. It pops up ads and new version notifications near the systray. There is not an option ANYWHERE I can find to disable that function...
The RealOne Player notification is a blatant abuse of the privilege that users give Real by installing there software. It's behavior is unacceptable. It runs in the background and "occasionally" pops up ads and notifications to the user that have been downloaded from the Internet - even when Real player is not open! There is no automatic way or documentation on how to disable this "feature". Worse, if the user manually removes the registry key that launches the program on startup, it is reestablished the next time RealOne Player is used (standalone or in a web browser). This kind of redundancy even in the face of a concentrated effort to remove it is a wonderful example of how out of hand this has become.
BTW, the easiest and best way I've found to disable this particular nasty is to delete the program file completely for the notification service. It has no effect on the use of RealOne Player as far as I can tell (it doesn't even complain about it not being there). The location on my machine is:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Real\Update_OB\evntsvc.exe
It is cleaner than C++. - This is true in some cases, but I don't think its that cut and dry.
In a contest between C++ and Java, I think C++ wins, even in this category. Here's why:
I learned C/C++ in high school and had a fair amount of experience with it. In college, I took a CS class that taught Java as an intro to programming. My experience was that the ease with which my classmates learned the programming basics was not dependant on the language, but on the way it was presented. Ultimately, I think my classmates learned much faster in high school because they were able to jump right into programming basics with little infrastructure (just some cout commands). In my Java course, our FIRST program was a windows program. The problem with this approach is that everyone gets dunked into setting up the infrastructure for a windows program before they even know what they're doing. Even though we had a nice MFC-like package to help us with it, it was VERY daunting to many of my peers with little or no programming experience.
Of course, everyone eventually got over their learning curve, but ended up knowing a language that didn't have the capabilities that they need to have. It seems to me that Java is being applied in ways that it is ill-suited for - namely it can't be implemented for the variety of programming projects that C++ can.
I used to work in a similar environment, and I was pretty happy with the pay setup.
I carried a pager and would get paid everytime it went off. So, a 2 minute trouble shooting call would get me a fee (it was about equal to 2 hours work). Then, if you work on a problem for more than an hour (or even have to go in uggh), you charge your regular hourly rate.
Of course this system means that you can only get paid if you're actually needed during the period of on-call. Otherwise, you're sacrifice of staying in town (not to mention jumping everytime you hear something that even resembles an electronic beep) is worthless.
You can't win em all.
- miked
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that spending a lot of money can get you a good photography setup, but you really should try something before a significant investment like the above poster. Here are a couple of tricks I've learned by doing astrophotography on a substandard setup:
If your mount isn't ideal or you have a stock tripod for your telescope, your camera will weigh heavy and shake hanging off the scope. One way to help that situation is to simply buy a remote trigger for your camera. The scope won't move enough by itself to cause horrible vibration, but you touching it to hit the shutter will. Wind will also cause your camera/scope to shake so get somewhere sheltered from the wind side if possible.
I would recommend anyone starting off in astronomy to go start off by finding all of the Messier objects. They are a catalogue of galaxies, nebulas, and clusters that can be observed with a modest scope but are quite spectacular.
Good luck, i abhor living in the city and i envy you.
This phenomenon is not surprising. Sure, Popularity begets popularity.
I see several comments pointing to how this shows that popular music is doomed.
Disillusionment about a musical era past aside, in general, why is this bad? Something (whether it's a song, vacuum cleaner, or graphics card) can't become immensely popular if it doesn't have some merit that has widespread appeal. That appeal is never based solely on marketing. In the case of a song, marketing helps, but it must be catchy to some people or it would never sell. Regardless of your own view of a popular song, enough people find it appealing to make it popular.
So, can you blame people for trusting popularity as being one of the factors that affects what they pay attention to? They can always trust that there is some appeal of that item (be it product or song or whatever) if it's popular.
I was migrating from 0.8 to 0.9 RC. Even though it didn't correctly migrate my settings, it didn't trash my profile because it uses a different profile directory than 0.8.
My old profile directory was:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\
The new one is:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
All I had to do was copy things like cookies.txt and cookperm.txt and bookmarks.html into my new profile in the new location.
-Mike
This is probably not near as good as water for cooling purposes.
An important parameter for a cooling medium is heat conductivity (which directly effects the convective heat transfer coefficient). While there is no mention of this parameter in the spec sheet mentioned above, it can't be that high.
If it were, the chemical would cause the submerged electronic devices in the demo to short out regardless of whether it got them wet. This is because a general rule of thumb is that something thats a bad electrical conductor is a bad heat conductor.
Just my 2 cents (no one ever uses this sig anymore... sad).
As a current mechanical engineering senior at the University of Texas, here has been my experience with grade distribution in my classes:
Oftentimes, test grades in the class average 50-75. In general the tests are challenging and meant to be so. This sometimes amounts to an average class grade at the end of the semester of 60. The professor then applies a curve to bring the majority of grades to B's with a nice spread of A's and C's, and D's and F's for slackers. This is the best scheme because it rates your performance in the class against those of your peers, which is exactly what happens in the real world. Makes sense to me.
I frequent the Alamo Drafthouse quite a bit.
:)
This is a great idea and I really don't think it will take away from the experience that I've enjoyed for years. The atmosphere at the Alamo Drafthouse is different from any other theater because it is expected that there will be some disturbance during the show. This isn't to say that it's a roudy place where you can't enjoy your movie (except maybe during Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings), but the experience is much more like watching a movie with a bunch of friends at home.
Given the shear volume of wireless-enabled individuals in Austin, this can only enhance the experience.
Next time I go I'll take my laptop and hack other patrons if they're noisy
Miked
It DOES make sense to implement Qt with C#!
.NET was only just released, it may not be very apparent how widespread the usage of C# will turn out to be. I'd wager the language will be very widely used to develop new Windows applications. Obviously, particularly those based on .NET.
Since Visual Studio
In my opinion, it could only help the development of Qt based apps once C# developers realize they can easily develop in a syntax they're used to.
Work on this project needs to start now so that when that day comes, the C# developers will have the tools they need. It's a matter of anticipating the needs of future Microsoft-flavored programmers when they make the switch to a superior OS.
Let the flames begin,
Mike D
Another thing that annoys me greatly is the Real Player (whatever they are calling this version) notification program. It pops up ads and new version notifications near the systray. There is not an option ANYWHERE I can find to disable that function...
The RealOne Player notification is a blatant abuse of the privilege that users give Real by installing there software. It's behavior is unacceptable. It runs in the background and "occasionally" pops up ads and notifications to the user that have been downloaded from the Internet - even when Real player is not open! There is no automatic way or documentation on how to disable this "feature". Worse, if the user manually removes the registry key that launches the program on startup, it is reestablished the next time RealOne Player is used (standalone or in a web browser). This kind of redundancy even in the face of a concentrated effort to remove it is a wonderful example of how out of hand this has become.
BTW, the easiest and best way I've found to disable this particular nasty is to delete the program file completely for the notification service. It has no effect on the use of RealOne Player as far as I can tell (it doesn't even complain about it not being there). The location on my machine is: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Real\Update_OB\evntsvc.exe
In a contest between C++ and Java, I think C++ wins, even in this category. Here's why:
I learned C/C++ in high school and had a fair amount of experience with it. In college, I took a CS class that taught Java as an intro to programming. My experience was that the ease with which my classmates learned the programming basics was not dependant on the language, but on the way it was presented. Ultimately, I think my classmates learned much faster in high school because they were able to jump right into programming basics with little infrastructure (just some cout commands). In my Java course, our FIRST program was a windows program. The problem with this approach is that everyone gets dunked into setting up the infrastructure for a windows program before they even know what they're doing. Even though we had a nice MFC-like package to help us with it, it was VERY daunting to many of my peers with little or no programming experience.
Of course, everyone eventually got over their learning curve, but ended up knowing a language that didn't have the capabilities that they need to have. It seems to me that Java is being applied in ways that it is ill-suited for - namely it can't be implemented for the variety of programming projects that C++ can.
I can't handle this, I need a beer.
I used to work in a similar environment, and I was pretty happy with the pay setup.
I carried a pager and would get paid everytime it went off. So, a 2 minute trouble shooting call would get me a fee (it was about equal to 2 hours work). Then, if you work on a problem for more than an hour (or even have to go in uggh), you charge your regular hourly rate.
Of course this system means that you can only get paid if you're actually needed during the period of on-call. Otherwise, you're sacrifice of staying in town (not to mention jumping everytime you hear something that even resembles an electronic beep) is worthless.
You can't win em all. - miked