Here in Canada most cars are equipped with daytime running lights which engage a low power high beam when the car is running (it increases visibility, even in bright clear days).
And after having these things for roughly 15 years, I *still* have to put up with people flashing their lights at me whenever I drive into the USA. Haven't you ever seen a Canuck before?
The little tidbit in most manuals, however, is that engaging your parking brake (including in automatics) before turning on the car turns off the daytime running lights.
Neither Jeep nor Toyota mention this in their manuals. I found out through trial-and-error that the Jeep lights are triggered by the speedo sender unit - the lights don't come on until the wheels turn, but then they stay on until you shut off the ignition. On my Toyota the lights come on as soon as I put it in gear, whether the E-brake is on or not.
Roughly 90% of my snail mail box is junk mail. Yet I don't see any politicians jumping on bills like these that would outlaw sending bulk or individual "commercial" letters.
The difference is that commercial interests that want to fill your snail-mail box with advertising are actually paying the total cost of delivery. Your cost is limited to whatever portion of your property tax is assigned to trash pickup. Conversely, the delivery cost of commerial email is relatively negligible and the recipient typically picks up at least half of that.
If your snail-mail box was full of advertising that was sent "postage due" then you would see politicians jumping on bills to make commerial snail-mail illegal.
Get them down to one remote - Nice receiver, learning remote - properly programmed, buttons all labeled
These things rarely work for me. Even after finding all the codes to add the DVD, VCR, stereo, etc., the "mode" orientation of the remote drives me crazy. When I press the buttons I often don't know what box is going to react -- I want to change the channel on my digital cable box but since I last used the remote in "TV" mode (for the on/off button) the TV switches away from video-in to RF-in and changes channel. After I switch the TV to video2-in and turn on the VCR and hit "play" I have to reselect the "TV" mode or "Stereo" mode to change volume levels. Most of the time I just leave the "all-in-one" remote in a single mode and keep the other three or four remotes next to the sofa.
What I need, I guess, is a Palm-type remote with the ability to add/remove buttons according to need and to arrange them in pages according to the way *I* think instead of forcing me to work in "modes". Hmm. Maybe I should just buy a Palm and use the IR port.
this probably only works if there is only one "clicker" in the area. Otherwise you'd get your echoes confused with the
others, with embarassing results.
Not really. You're thinking in terms of radar, where azimuth and range are determined by matching a single ping with a single pong. In such systems, multiple sources or multiple path replies are a source of confusion since they add too much information to the process.
If you're trying to paint a sonic landscape, however, you don't want to try and associate a single ping and pong since that would only identify the range to a single reflector in one small portion of your area of interest. Instead, you want to receive as much information about the environment as possible from each ping. Having someone/something else making the ping isn't a problem as long as they don't overwhelm the replies.
As an experiment, try sitting in a place with a fair amount of white noise (such as CPU fans). Now slowly bring your right hand toward your ear with your palm open. The first thing you'll notice is a loss of some higher frequency ambient sounds from the right side. As the hand gets closer, you may notice an increase in reflected noises that originated on your left. Eventually you will be able to judge the distance between your ear and your palm simply by the tone of the noise.
Can people find these same songs for free? Probably. But they're paying for
how much more convenient the paid service is to them than the free version.
Ultimately, the value of something downloaded from the web has less to do with
the dollar cost than with the value of your time. To make a non-internet comparison,
consider the pros and cons of DIY home repairs: you might think that it's always
preferable to fix your own plumbing rather than pay someone else $50/hour to do it for you. But what if you were getting out your tools and your boss called to offer you an overtime shift at $100/hour? Suddenly
the cost of NOT hiring the plumber is higher than the cost of hiring the plumber.
The point made above is quite correct -- convenience has a value, and getting something for $0 doesn't make it "free" if you have to waste valuable time finding it.
Branson might find a way to make the flight profitable and would thereby kill BA/AF's hopes of pushing all of the Concorde folks into the 747 first class section.
The cabin staff have very little to do with BA's refusal to sell the Concorde fleet.
I was referring to the customers. Concorde capacity was 100 passengers at ticket prices hovering around $10,000 round-trip. The last thing BA wants is for Branson to pick up a prestige route with a potential revenue stream of $1,000,000 per day. BA/AF want *their* passengers to take the slower and more cost-effective 747, and the only way to do that is to eliminate supersonic service entirely.
I am paying for raw internet bandwidth and that is what I expect to get. I will not tollerate any filtering or restrictions on the use of my account.
And yet the most common complaint I hear from people is how they paid for lots of bandwidth but they're always the victim of lag and dropped packets. Blocking ports 135-139 would eliminate a substantial amount of the background "noise" that's taking a bite out of your bandwidth.
If someone *needs* to share 135-139 over a public network then they should be using a VPN anyway.
Other than exotics like the U2, what planes routinely fly at the 60000' cruise altitude of Concorde? Most planes I fly on cruise at about 35000'.
Well, the 767/777 routinely fly as high as 41,000'. Lear and Gulfstream both reach into the mid-50's.
Concorde didn't actually spend much time at 60,000. A typical trans-Atlantic flight would start at 45,000 and then slowly climb as fuel weight was reduced, with only the last hour of supersonic flight above 55,000'. In the first half of any transcontinental flight it would be in the way of quite a few aircraft.
FWIW, the U2 is really the least of Concorde's problems as they generally fly between 65,000 and 70,000', well out of reach of Concorde.
Incidentally, the size of the boom is related to the size of the aircraft, military planes are much smaller and hence give much less problems.
The "N" wave is caused by a high-pressure spike at the nose and a low-pressure spike at the tail. A shorter aircraft would have the two extremes of pressure happening much closer together, increasing the effects of the sonic boom. A longer aircraft such as Concorde results in a small but important delay between the two pressure extremes, to the point that they are usually distinguishable as two separate and somewhat reduced booms instead of one large one.
So, when can we throw out the Concord and whatnot and get transcontinental supersonic flight to boot?
For starters, you don't have to "throw out" the Concorde as BA/AF are doing that for you. They even refused to sell one to Virgin Airways as Branson might find a way to make the flight profitable and would thereby kill BA/AF's hopes of pushing all of the Concorde folks into the 747 first class section.
There are two other reasons why you won't see the Concorde flying supersonic over the continental USA, with or without a sonic boom:
1) There are far too many other slow aircraft flying at or near Concorde altitudes. Considering the fuel costs involved in getting to supersonic speeds (max drag between 0.97M and 1.4M), the economics of trans-continental supersonic flight would require sterile airspace for end-to-end clearance. The lobby group for bizjet owners would never let that happen at their expense.
2) Even a reduced shock wave will have destructive powers if the aircraft is required to turn at supersonic speeds - the waves on the inside of the turn are concentrated toward a single point at which the N-wave would be amplified to an unacceptable level. Although it would be possible to structure straight-line routes between city pairs, the odds are pretty good that the flight would be unmanageable in terms of communication and coordination among ATC units.
Few buy that technology for home use now, so why why would these people jump on LED?
The main reason I don't use more CF in my house is that:
1) the ceiling fixtures in the bedrooms and dining room are all on dimmer circuits,
2) the reading lamps are mostly halogen, and
3) of the remaining lights, most are either unsuitable for CF (enclosed, recessed or outside where cold and moisture are a problem) or used so infrequently that CF provides no long-term savings.
There are very few lights I *can* replace with CF. I would expect the LED-based lights to be safe for use on dimmer circuits (whether they actually dim or not) and with any luck they'll be packaged for outdoor use.
The lights I would most like to replace with LEDs are the tail and signal lights in my car and motorcycle. Most of the public transit busses in my city use LED lighting and they are quite bright even in the daylight.
Routers are standalone devices that are meant to operate without user input, so it doesn't make sense to require the user
to manually configure the NTP server.
Either they get their WAN IP via DHCP or it's configured by the network admin staff. If DHCP, why not use the time server value specified in the DHCP lease? OTOH, if someone has to program the IP address, how difficult is it to require them to specify the NTP address as well?
There's simply no reason to require a default value, let alone a hard-coded and immutable one.
And why would you think that? Sure, the percentage of geeks that are gay is less than in some other industries (such as art, design, fashion or hair), but it's been *my* observation that geeks are less likely to be heterosexual than the general population. I think that at least part of the reason is that most geeks are male, and male bisexual geeks are more willing to shed the appearance of heterosexuality and date another male geek (for the geek company) as opposed to male bisexual non-geeks who are more likely to marry a female (for the sake of conformity) and then cruise the gay bars on weekends.
is likely to need an opposite. Two hairdressers don't go together
The difference between hairdressers and geeks is that geeks have a need to share knowledge. A hairdresser may want to escape work when he gets home, but many geeks have more computer hardware at home than at work. The last thing you want is a partner who will constantly gripe about how much attention you give to your computers and how little you give to him. Two geeks can challenge each other, educate each other, understand each other. A geek and a non-geek is a tough match, no matter the gender and sexuality.
if the execs have dumped their stock....then they are probably going to bet against the stock.
The only transactions I looked at in any depth were those of the "Senior VP". He sold 65,000 shares in the last two months, but still has 125,000 to go before he's in a position to start shorting. Still, you would expect the SEC to sit up and take notice when senior managers don't sell any shares for years and then suddenly shed 34% of their holdings overnight.
"Yeah, I tried to get the accounting system to claim those contracts we haven't collected money for as income on our quarterly report but the accounting system wouldn't let me. Now my stock options are worthless and the board is going to fire me."
Two words for you: accrual accounting.
Accrual accounting is an acceptable (and in some cases legally required) accounting practise in which income and expenses become earnings/costs when the invoices are issued, not when they are paid. Under that system, any amounts due when the contracts are signed *should* have been included in income for that quarter.
And considering a power outage in Northern Mexico affected parts of the U.S. I wonder if someone could successfully attack our infrastructure without even attacking a physical point in the U.S., but in Mexico or Canada.
Of course they could. You may have heard of the 1977 "Blackout" of New York. That event was initiated by a lightning strike in Quebec. One blown circuit breaker led to another, and the next thing you know most of the New England power grid was dead for a week.
Instead of downloading the entire kernel, download just the patch file if you are running the previous version.
They should seriously consider moving the mirrors list off of the main website. I can't get to www.kernel.org/mirrors right now, presumably because it's buried in requests for 25Mb downloads.
And the patch is only suitable for people who already have 2.4.20.
It's been six months! The only people who don't have 2.4.20 sources are people who don't compile kernels, and I doubt they'll be wanting 2.4.21 in that case....
Open Group has updated their web site to include Apple into its list of vendors that support the single Unix specification.
So Apple "supports" the idea of a common Unix specification. That's like saying they "support" world peace or they "support" medical marijuana laws. It doesn't mean they are doing anything tangible to advance the supported goal.
Heck, even *I* support the idea of a common Unix specification.
And this wasn't because of computers, we were high school kids who constantly took notes in class, wrote assignments and whatnot; it's just that we all printed rather than using cursive
When I was in grade seven a friend of mine could not write but instead printed everything. That was in 1977. I thought it was interesting, particularly since he printed faster than most people wrote. I thought I'd give it a try and found that I was much more legible. Twenty-six years later I still print or type everything, and like my friend of long ago, I am pretty fast at it. I have no regrets.
What really freaks me out, though, is the number of teenagers who have probably never tied shoelaces. Young kids wear slip-ons and shoes with velcro straps. Older kids have coiled elastic laces. Then there's the floppy-skateboard-shoe stage where the shoes have laces but they are permanently knotted loose enough to just slip on and off. Now basketball shoes come with zippers and skates all use cantilever or ratchet fittings. I guess they'll get Mom to tie their dress shoes when they graduate from college....:-P
Say it is me with my own card, but I've had a bad day and I have a cold and my signature looks nothing like it did when I signed the card. Then what?
I know store clerks don't get training in handwriting analysis, but I'm guessing most bank clerks do. I recently had to sign for a $100,000 money order and commented to the teller "I sign a bit differently each time, so this might not match my card". Her answer was that they don't really compare the signature as a complete entity (because they *do* change constantly), but instead they look for "identifying traits" such as whether or not you loop or join certain letters, drag your pen, tilt your crosses, circle your dots, etc.... IOW, they do handwriting analysis to see if your presented signature and your card have the same traits.
Slashdot Mirror
And after having these things for roughly 15 years, I *still* have to put up with people flashing their lights at me whenever I drive into the USA. Haven't you ever seen a Canuck before?
The little tidbit in most manuals, however, is that engaging your parking brake (including in automatics) before turning on the car turns off the daytime running lights.
Neither Jeep nor Toyota mention this in their manuals. I found out through trial-and-error that the Jeep lights are triggered by the speedo sender unit - the lights don't come on until the wheels turn, but then they stay on until you shut off the ignition. On my Toyota the lights come on as soon as I put it in gear, whether the E-brake is on or not.
The difference is that commercial interests that want to fill your snail-mail box with advertising are actually paying the total cost of delivery. Your cost is limited to whatever portion of your property tax is assigned to trash pickup. Conversely, the delivery cost of commerial email is relatively negligible and the recipient typically picks up at least half of that.
If your snail-mail box was full of advertising that was sent "postage due" then you would see politicians jumping on bills to make commerial snail-mail illegal.
These things rarely work for me. Even after finding all the codes to add the DVD, VCR, stereo, etc., the "mode" orientation of the remote drives me crazy. When I press the buttons I often don't know what box is going to react -- I want to change the channel on my digital cable box but since I last used the remote in "TV" mode (for the on/off button) the TV switches away from video-in to RF-in and changes channel. After I switch the TV to video2-in and turn on the VCR and hit "play" I have to reselect the "TV" mode or "Stereo" mode to change volume levels. Most of the time I just leave the "all-in-one" remote in a single mode and keep the other three or four remotes next to the sofa.
What I need, I guess, is a Palm-type remote with the ability to add/remove buttons according to need and to arrange them in pages according to the way *I* think instead of forcing me to work in "modes". Hmm. Maybe I should just buy a Palm and use the IR port.
Not really. You're thinking in terms of radar, where azimuth and range are determined by matching a single ping with a single pong. In such systems, multiple sources or multiple path replies are a source of confusion since they add too much information to the process. If you're trying to paint a sonic landscape, however, you don't want to try and associate a single ping and pong since that would only identify the range to a single reflector in one small portion of your area of interest. Instead, you want to receive as much information about the environment as possible from each ping. Having someone/something else making the ping isn't a problem as long as they don't overwhelm the replies.
As an experiment, try sitting in a place with a fair amount of white noise (such as CPU fans). Now slowly bring your right hand toward your ear with your palm open. The first thing you'll notice is a loss of some higher frequency ambient sounds from the right side. As the hand gets closer, you may notice an increase in reflected noises that originated on your left. Eventually you will be able to judge the distance between your ear and your palm simply by the tone of the noise.
Ultimately, the value of something downloaded from the web has less to do with the dollar cost than with the value of your time. To make a non-internet comparison, consider the pros and cons of DIY home repairs: you might think that it's always preferable to fix your own plumbing rather than pay someone else $50/hour to do it for you. But what if you were getting out your tools and your boss called to offer you an overtime shift at $100/hour? Suddenly the cost of NOT hiring the plumber is higher than the cost of hiring the plumber.
The point made above is quite correct -- convenience has a value, and getting something for $0 doesn't make it "free" if you have to waste valuable time finding it.
The cabin staff have very little to do with BA's refusal to sell the Concorde fleet.
I was referring to the customers. Concorde capacity was 100 passengers at ticket prices hovering around $10,000 round-trip. The last thing BA wants is for Branson to pick up a prestige route with a potential revenue stream of $1,000,000 per day. BA/AF want *their* passengers to take the slower and more cost-effective 747, and the only way to do that is to eliminate supersonic service entirely.
And yet the most common complaint I hear from people is how they paid for lots of bandwidth but they're always the victim of lag and dropped packets. Blocking ports 135-139 would eliminate a substantial amount of the background "noise" that's taking a bite out of your bandwidth.
If someone *needs* to share 135-139 over a public network then they should be using a VPN anyway.
Well, the 767/777 routinely fly as high as 41,000'. Lear and Gulfstream both reach into the mid-50's.
Concorde didn't actually spend much time at 60,000. A typical trans-Atlantic flight would start at 45,000 and then slowly climb as fuel weight was reduced, with only the last hour of supersonic flight above 55,000'. In the first half of any transcontinental flight it would be in the way of quite a few aircraft.
FWIW, the U2 is really the least of Concorde's problems as they generally fly between 65,000 and 70,000', well out of reach of Concorde.
The "N" wave is caused by a high-pressure spike at the nose and a low-pressure spike at the tail. A shorter aircraft would have the two extremes of pressure happening much closer together, increasing the effects of the sonic boom. A longer aircraft such as Concorde results in a small but important delay between the two pressure extremes, to the point that they are usually distinguishable as two separate and somewhat reduced booms instead of one large one.
No. THIS is what the pelican looks like.
For starters, you don't have to "throw out" the Concorde as BA/AF are doing that for you. They even refused to sell one to Virgin Airways as Branson might find a way to make the flight profitable and would thereby kill BA/AF's hopes of pushing all of the Concorde folks into the 747 first class section.
There are two other reasons why you won't see the Concorde flying supersonic over the continental USA, with or without a sonic boom:
1) There are far too many other slow aircraft flying at or near Concorde altitudes. Considering the fuel costs involved in getting to supersonic speeds (max drag between 0.97M and 1.4M), the economics of trans-continental supersonic flight would require sterile airspace for end-to-end clearance. The lobby group for bizjet owners would never let that happen at their expense.
2) Even a reduced shock wave will have destructive powers if the aircraft is required to turn at supersonic speeds - the waves on the inside of the turn are concentrated toward a single point at which the N-wave would be amplified to an unacceptable level. Although it would be possible to structure straight-line routes between city pairs, the odds are pretty good that the flight would be unmanageable in terms of communication and coordination among ATC units.
The main reason I don't use more CF in my house is that:
1) the ceiling fixtures in the bedrooms and dining room are all on dimmer circuits,
2) the reading lamps are mostly halogen, and
3) of the remaining lights, most are either unsuitable for CF (enclosed, recessed or outside where cold and moisture are a problem) or used so infrequently that CF provides no long-term savings.
There are very few lights I *can* replace with CF. I would expect the LED-based lights to be safe for use on dimmer circuits (whether they actually dim or not) and with any luck they'll be packaged for outdoor use.
The lights I would most like to replace with LEDs are the tail and signal lights in my car and motorcycle. Most of the public transit busses in my city use LED lighting and they are quite bright even in the daylight.
Either they get their WAN IP via DHCP or it's configured by the network admin staff. If DHCP, why not use the time server value specified in the DHCP lease? OTOH, if someone has to program the IP address, how difficult is it to require them to specify the NTP address as well?
There's simply no reason to require a default value, let alone a hard-coded and immutable one.
I read through it, and it's mostly fixes to ACPI, USB and networking drivers.
Now that you've had your 15 minutes of fame on Slashdot you're destined to be a household name like Wil Weaton or Cowboy Neal.
And why would you think that? Sure, the percentage of geeks that are gay is less than in some other industries (such as art, design, fashion or hair), but it's been *my* observation that geeks are less likely to be heterosexual than the general population. I think that at least part of the reason is that most geeks are male, and male bisexual geeks are more willing to shed the appearance of heterosexuality and date another male geek (for the geek company) as opposed to male bisexual non-geeks who are more likely to marry a female (for the sake of conformity) and then cruise the gay bars on weekends.
is likely to need an opposite. Two hairdressers don't go together
The difference between hairdressers and geeks is that geeks have a need to share knowledge. A hairdresser may want to escape work when he gets home, but many geeks have more computer hardware at home than at work. The last thing you want is a partner who will constantly gripe about how much attention you give to your computers and how little you give to him. Two geeks can challenge each other, educate each other, understand each other. A geek and a non-geek is a tough match, no matter the gender and sexuality.
The only transactions I looked at in any depth were those of the "Senior VP". He sold 65,000 shares in the last two months, but still has 125,000 to go before he's in a position to start shorting. Still, you would expect the SEC to sit up and take notice when senior managers don't sell any shares for years and then suddenly shed 34% of their holdings overnight.
Two words for you: accrual accounting.
Accrual accounting is an acceptable (and in some cases legally required) accounting practise in which income and expenses become earnings/costs when the invoices are issued, not when they are paid. Under that system, any amounts due when the contracts are signed *should* have been included in income for that quarter.
And yes, your post was funny all the same....
Of course they could. You may have heard of the 1977 "Blackout" of New York. That event was initiated by a lightning strike in Quebec. One blown circuit breaker led to another, and the next thing you know most of the New England power grid was dead for a week.
On time.
On budget.
Functional.
Pick any two....
They should seriously consider moving the mirrors list off of the main website. I can't get to www.kernel.org/mirrors right now, presumably because it's buried in requests for 25Mb downloads.
It's been six months! The only people who don't have 2.4.20 sources are people who don't compile kernels, and I doubt they'll be wanting 2.4.21 in that case....
So Apple "supports" the idea of a common Unix specification. That's like saying they "support" world peace or they "support" medical marijuana laws. It doesn't mean they are doing anything tangible to advance the supported goal.
Heck, even *I* support the idea of a common Unix specification.
When I was in grade seven a friend of mine could not write but instead printed everything. That was in 1977. I thought it was interesting, particularly since he printed faster than most people wrote. I thought I'd give it a try and found that I was much more legible. Twenty-six years later I still print or type everything, and like my friend of long ago, I am pretty fast at it. I have no regrets.
What really freaks me out, though, is the number of teenagers who have probably never tied shoelaces. Young kids wear slip-ons and shoes with velcro straps. Older kids have coiled elastic laces. Then there's the floppy-skateboard-shoe stage where the shoes have laces but they are permanently knotted loose enough to just slip on and off. Now basketball shoes come with zippers and skates all use cantilever or ratchet fittings. I guess they'll get Mom to tie their dress shoes when they graduate from college.... :-P
I know store clerks don't get training in handwriting analysis, but I'm guessing most bank clerks do. I recently had to sign for a $100,000 money order and commented to the teller "I sign a bit differently each time, so this might not match my card". Her answer was that they don't really compare the signature as a complete entity (because they *do* change constantly), but instead they look for "identifying traits" such as whether or not you loop or join certain letters, drag your pen, tilt your crosses, circle your dots, etc.... IOW, they do handwriting analysis to see if your presented signature and your card have the same traits.