Somebody explain to me how a $6K fuel-cell backup power system is better than...oh, I dunno....three $250 APC's hooked up in series?
I know this is a tangent, but it's sort of interesting, and I just can't keep my mouth shut. You're not supposed to plug a UPS into another UPS (at least the consumer models). A friend at work found this out the hard way. He ran a UPS off of another similar UPS, and one of them (not sure which) overheated to the point that it melted.
Of course, for every story like this, there's a counterexample where somebody gets away with it, and I'm sure someone here will post such a story:) In any case, my friend was officially told by tech support that he had done a bad thing, and they refused to ship a replacement unit.
Yes. And if I were advertising a product on the radio, I'd be pissed as hell. I'm not going to see a dime of the money collected from the taxicab drivers, and I've got fewer people who are going to hear my ad. I've stopped being surprised when the little guy gets screwed by a dumb government decision, but in this case, business is getting screwed too.
If they are compressed using lossy encoding, like mp3, that would reduce its appeal to me, since I prefer my 44.1kHz pcm audio. I'd resent paying for inferior quality data, but that's just me. Oh, and since I don't have Windows or a Mac I can't use IE anyway, so it's all academic.
Hrmph. 44.1kHz just doesn't cut it for me; I prefer my audio at 196kHz, 48 bits per sample, 6.1 channels, and I resent paying for anything less. But then again my computer is a Thinking Machine CM5, which doesn't even come with a sound card, so I guess it's all academic for me, too.
I imagine most people are asking, "Who's Steve Ditko?" I hadn't heard the name until I read this article in the LA Times a few weeks ago. To quote the article, "Reclusive artist Steve Ditko, who created the superhero with Stan Lee then abruptly walked away, is listed in new film's credits."
There is some controversy over exactly how much credit Ditko deserves, but according to the article, he is not only being credited in the film, but also is given credit in recent issues of "The Amazing Spider-Man".
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.
He made this argument while arguing against lengthy copyright terms, but I think the first point applies here: any creative work, such as Star Wars, builds upon the library of existing human work. It's nearly pointless to try to credit every single contributor to that existing compendium of knowledge. I guess it's a judgement call of when you should give credit, but this one feels ok to leave out, to me. (And the actual library will be a trivia factoid for years to come, this way.)
The reason I personally disliked that scene in Episode 2 is that it took place in a physical library at all, instead of being a four second web search. Kenobi doesn't Yahoo, apparently.
How is 90% a failure rate? 100% of all hard drives are going to fail sometime.
To paraphrase Twain, the difference between "90% failure rate in a year" and "90% failure rate sometime" is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.
You're totally misinterpretting Mr. Stallman's beliefs about naming.
Probably.
A modular layer deep in the kernel which can be swapped at will is not really relevant to it.
"Swapped at will?" Not to put to fine a point on it, but this is in an article about the Hurd being delayed an indeterminate amount of time due to just such a swap.
You could ask why XFree86 is not in the name of GNU/Linux, and you'll be told it's because only the GNU and Linux parts were designed towards the goal of a free system.
1) I really don't believe those were the only parts developed towards the goal of a free system, so I suspect I must be misinterpreting your point, and 2) I would suspect I would really be told that you can have a perfectly reasonable Gnu/Linux system without XFree86. The GNU/Linux FAQ seems to imply it's really a matter of giving credit for effort, and not a matter of the philospohical goals.
GNU is the only operating environment designed to be free as in freedom from the very start, which is why Mr. Stallman asks that you properly credit the GNU contributors for their many man-centuries of effort.
Doesn't follow. Mach sure seems like it's free (and thus Hurd can use it), and it seems necessary to enabling the Hurd to exist. I still don't see why the efforts of the developers deserve any less credit for their man-years of effort towards making Hurd possible.
I'm not trying to be arbitrary here; I don't know all the issues, and I didn't know about the planned port to a different microkernel, but it seems like the current Hurd owes a lot of credit to the existence of Mach, in a way simliar to the way Linux-based OSes owes a huge amount of credit to the existence of GNU.
Out of fairness, shouldn't this thing be called Mach/Hurd? (Or Mach/Gnu/Hurd, or Gnu/Mach/Hurd, or whatever....the point is the addition of "Mach") I suggest this for all the same reasons Stallman thinks it should be Gnu/Linux.
who's going to explicitly ask for the three religious channels, the channel where they talk about hot rods, and that one that's just a bad radio station?
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla running on a PC. Never.
Are you sure you're looking? Quite a few people at my company (it is in the Fortune 500) use it, and we're nothing special. It's not the majority of people, or even close, but certainly not zero either.
From the article: "You can not only feel the resulting force, but you can also get a sense of the quality of the object you're feeling -- whether it's soft or hard, wood-like or fleshy."
There's no way I believe that quote wasn't designed for maximum comedic potential.
I also have a 171P, and I too want to chime in with the, "Damn it's cool, and by association, so am I." (If you think I'm trying to brag, rest assured that since my bank account is now empty, the bragging is all I have left.:)
But there is some actual data I'll bring to the discussion: as you shop for an LCD monitor, the specs vary widely. The contrast ratio on the 171P I think is 500:1; I've seen monitors with a ratio as low as 200:1. When actually looking at the monitors, the difference is dramatic. Other stats, including brightness, viewing angle, and response also vary widely model-to-model, too.
I guess the moral is: the variance in specs on LCD monitors is surprising, so you need to absolutely check them out, or you can be disappointed. Additionally, the fact that things like "viewing angle" are important is probably new to the "CRT spec evaluation engine" you have in your head; be sure to make adjustments as needed.
I'd like to address a point some other people have been making about how LCDs are too expensive. Remember, the LCD is effectively bigger than a tube because of the way they measure the size. I have the 17 inch LCD next to my 19 inch CRT, and dammed if the actual viewing area isn't exacly the same. (The specs actually say the 19 inch screen is viewable something like 18.1, but I have my doubts. I need to go home and measure, I guess.) In any case, you should probably do the same: measure your current monitor, and measure any LCD you're considering buying. You might be surprised.
You're probably right. A data point: every time I've attempted to make a Simpsons reference, even if the story has almost no comments when I start to post, my comment is already redundant by the time it shows up. Sorry all.
...the most intelligent thing I can think of is: "Mmmmm...donuts."
Wasn't this on the Simpsons?
on
See Ya .su
·
· Score: 3, Funny
At the ICANN Building in New York City, a meeting of nations is in progress. Russian official: The Soviet Union will be pleased to offer amnesty to
your wayward website. American official: The Soviet Union? I thought you guys broke up. Russian official: Yes, that's what we wanted you to think! [evil laugh]
-- "Simpson Tide", Episode 3G04
Now that the word is out, potential serial killers just need a perl script that generates structured lat/long pairs that mislead the FBI. I guess they're counting on most serial killers to be to crazy to think things out that much.
Everybody knows that the planets are supposed to be named after the Roman gods. That's just the way it is. Here's a list of some of the more common Roman gods. I'm sure some of the Hercules and Xena fans out there can add to this list.
Personally, I like:
Minerva, better known by her greek name as Athena. Just because it sounds cool. She sounds like she might be a hottie, too.
Somnus, the god of sleep. Because of course a planet that far away from the sun must be asleep.
Bacchus, the god of free beer. Just because I like free beer.
This is partially redundant with the link above, but does contain some information about plans for future article topics:
Dear Fellow Perl Programmer,
Since 1996, The Perl Journal has been the definitive publication for and
about Perl programming. Need to know about turning Perl scripts into
binaries? Want to find out more about rapid database prototyping? Need
to turn an RSS feed into HTML? TPJ has always been the place to go.
Better yet, and contrary to rampant rumors, the demise of TPJ has been
greatly exaggerated. Because the Perl community has asked for it, we're
relaunching TPJ as a monthly e-zine to bring you more, better Perl stuff
than ever before.
But we need your help. TPJ is totally reader supported. To deliver TPJ
to you, we need just 3,000 subscribers. Bean counters being what they
are, our bosses won't let us publish the e-zine if we don't have 3,000
subscribers. It is as simple as that. How much will a year's
subscription cost? Only $12--that's just $1 per month! Simply
said, TPJ's future is up to you. Please subscribe now.
So what can you expect to get for your $1/month? More of the great Perl
articles you've come to expect from TPJ. However, we will be broadening
the platform coverage, ensuring that Mac OS X, Windows, and others are
included, in addition to UNIX. And we'll also be broadening the scope in
terms of languages, too--TPJ won't just be Perl only, since we'll be
examining other lightweight languages, both as stand-alone tools and in
how they relate to Perl.
In the first few issues, for instance, you can expect to read about Perl
and rapid database prototyping, how to compile Perl scripts into
binaries, how Perl measures up to C# and Java, what's the big deal with
CamelBones, and more about Perl, XML, and RSS. And that's just the
start! You can also join TPJ columnists Simon Cozens and brian d foy, as
well as book reviewer Jack Woehr.
I'm leaving off the remainder of the mail, since it just has the "how to subscribe" info listed on the URL above.
I hope that make it to 3000; TPJ was a one of my favorites, back in the day.
One theater nearby has a note saying they won't allow kids under six to attend.
I love that policy, and in fact, I'd like to extend it to ALL movies, except rated-G movies shown before 8 at night. And nobody below tweleve gets into an R-rated movie even with a parent.
Partially, it's that I just don't like kids interrupting my movie with an inappropriate reaction. I don't think it's cute when little Johnnie makes fart noises, or cries that he's bored, or does anything at all to distract me from the movie experience. Maybe that's my problem, but I should be able to find a time and place where I'll have a kid-free movie.
But the other part of that policy is that some parents take their kids to inappropriate movies at inappropriate times.
I don't know what the hell is wrong with people these days, but I see more and more R-rated movies where people have brought their small children. One of the first times this happened to me was during the film "Three Days in the Valley". During the violent sex scene between the hit man Spader and his girlfriend Charlize Theron, a small girl (probably about five) cried out, "Mommy, why is he doing that?" It almost would have been funny, except for the fact that you realized a young girl was being traumatized, and her parents didn't care.
Another thing I've seen is parents taking their children to late-night viewings of movies. I've gone to see things like "Toy Story" at the 10pm showing, just because I figure, "No sane parent would take their kids to a 10pm showing, since they won't be home until after midnight." Of course I'm always wrong, even if the kids look to be school-aged and it's during the school year!
Look, I'm not a parent, and I know sometimes parenting is harder than it looks, blahblahblah, but this stuff seems like it should be common sense. If you take your eight-year old to see Blade 2, not only will it annoy me, it's going to warp his world view.
If people started flooding across the border into Canada
Canada? That's no beter; those hosers don't even have freedom of speech. (Just teasing, my buddies to the north. Props to ya, eh?)
Look, if you're in a modern democracy and you don't like the laws, you try to make things better and get the laws changed, not just give up and move away. This is fundamental to the health of the democracy, and although it may at sometimes might seem like an uphill fight, it's a battle worth fighting.
Don't think of it like your current Tivo, where you record shows to watch later in the week; instead, think of it as a video archive machine. I was just going through my old video tapes last night, and was amazed by the things I have on tape that I totally forgot about. Imagine that instead of having every episode of the Simpsons on tape somewhere, you have every episode archived and instantly available on your Tivo. And heck, you would probably put all of your home videos on it; now you can re-watch the birth of your son at the push of a button!
Of course, this probably actually requires more space than 1200 hours (you would want redundancy, so RAID eats some of that, and you would want to record in a higher-quality mode, eating even more.) This is ridiculously expensive today, but I bet that in 5 years, the "Tivo video archive" will be common.
I've wondered about this: how come it seems like the age of big statues is behind us? Mount Rushmore, Statue of Liberty, those kind of things, doesn't seem like people do those much anymore. Yes, I'm aware they're still working on Crazy Horse, but that was started a while ago.
I'd probably go the "Statue of Liberty" route, and make a big chick. Maybe I'd model it after Brooke Burke; that should be worth some poontang points with her.
(Yes, I'm aware using the phrase "poontang points" is worth negative poontang points. But what the hell, in this fantasy, I'm a billionaire, I can pay the slashdot editors to delete this post so she never sees the evidence.)
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody explain to me how a $6K fuel-cell backup power system is better than...oh, I dunno....three $250 APC's hooked up in series?
I know this is a tangent, but it's sort of interesting, and I just can't keep my mouth shut. You're not supposed to plug a UPS into another UPS (at least the consumer models). A friend at work found this out the hard way. He ran a UPS off of another similar UPS, and one of them (not sure which) overheated to the point that it melted.
Of course, for every story like this, there's a counterexample where somebody gets away with it, and I'm sure someone here will post such a story :) In any case, my friend was officially told by tech support that he had done a bad thing, and they refused to ship a replacement unit.
Yes. And if I were advertising a product on the radio, I'd be pissed as hell. I'm not going to see a dime of the money collected from the taxicab drivers, and I've got fewer people who are going to hear my ad. I've stopped being surprised when the little guy gets screwed by a dumb government decision, but in this case, business is getting screwed too.
If they are compressed using lossy encoding, like mp3, that would reduce its appeal to me, since I prefer my 44.1kHz pcm audio. I'd resent paying for inferior quality data, but that's just me. Oh, and since I don't have Windows or a Mac I can't use IE anyway, so it's all academic.
Hrmph. 44.1kHz just doesn't cut it for me; I prefer my audio at 196kHz, 48 bits per sample, 6.1 channels, and I resent paying for anything less. But then again my computer is a Thinking Machine CM5, which doesn't even come with a sound card, so I guess it's all academic for me, too.
This is also discussed on this week's Roger Ebert Movie Answer Man.
so how did they overcome the earth horizon limitations?
Poles.
I imagine most people are asking, "Who's Steve Ditko?" I hadn't heard the name until I read this article in the LA Times a few weeks ago. To quote the article, "Reclusive artist Steve Ditko, who created the superhero with Stan Lee then abruptly walked away, is listed in new film's credits."
There is some controversy over exactly how much credit Ditko deserves, but according to the article, he is not only being credited in the film, but also is given credit in recent issues of "The Amazing Spider-Man".
Lawrence Lessig, in his keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002 at oscon, repeatedly made the four point argument:
He made this argument while arguing against lengthy copyright terms, but I think the first point applies here: any creative work, such as Star Wars, builds upon the library of existing human work. It's nearly pointless to try to credit every single contributor to that existing compendium of knowledge. I guess it's a judgement call of when you should give credit, but this one feels ok to leave out, to me. (And the actual library will be a trivia factoid for years to come, this way.)
The reason I personally disliked that scene in Episode 2 is that it took place in a physical library at all, instead of being a four second web search. Kenobi doesn't Yahoo, apparently.
How is 90% a failure rate? 100% of all hard drives are going to fail sometime.
To paraphrase Twain, the difference between "90% failure rate in a year" and "90% failure rate sometime" is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.
You're totally misinterpretting Mr. Stallman's beliefs about naming.
Probably.
A modular layer deep in the kernel which can be swapped at will is not really relevant to it.
"Swapped at will?" Not to put to fine a point on it, but this is in an article about the Hurd being delayed an indeterminate amount of time due to just such a swap.
You could ask why XFree86 is not in the name of GNU/Linux, and you'll be told it's because only the GNU and Linux parts were designed towards the goal of a free system.
1) I really don't believe those were the only parts developed towards the goal of a free system, so I suspect I must be misinterpreting your point, and 2) I would suspect I would really be told that you can have a perfectly reasonable Gnu/Linux system without XFree86. The GNU/Linux FAQ seems to imply it's really a matter of giving credit for effort, and not a matter of the philospohical goals.
GNU is the only operating environment designed to be free as in freedom from the very start, which is why Mr. Stallman asks that you properly credit the GNU contributors for their many man-centuries of effort.
Doesn't follow. Mach sure seems like it's free (and thus Hurd can use it), and it seems necessary to enabling the Hurd to exist. I still don't see why the efforts of the developers deserve any less credit for their man-years of effort towards making Hurd possible.
I'm not trying to be arbitrary here; I don't know all the issues, and I didn't know about the planned port to a different microkernel, but it seems like the current Hurd owes a lot of credit to the existence of Mach, in a way simliar to the way Linux-based OSes owes a huge amount of credit to the existence of GNU.
Out of fairness, shouldn't this thing be called Mach/Hurd? (Or Mach/Gnu/Hurd, or Gnu/Mach/Hurd, or whatever....the point is the addition of "Mach") I suggest this for all the same reasons Stallman thinks it should be Gnu/Linux.
who's going to explicitly ask for the three religious channels, the channel where they talk about hot rods, and that one that's just a bad radio station?
I take it you've never been to Indiana.
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla running on a PC. Never.
Are you sure you're looking? Quite a few people at my company (it is in the Fortune 500) use it, and we're nothing special. It's not the majority of people, or even close, but certainly not zero either.
First the alarming lead in Zamboni technology, now this!!
Actually, the Zamboni was invented by the son of an Italian immigrant here in the good old USA. In Southern California, surprisingly enough.
(Yeah, yeah, offtopic, but the story's a dup anyways, and all good nerds should know more about Zambonis.)
From the article: "You can not only feel the resulting force, but you can also get a sense of the quality of the object you're feeling -- whether it's soft or hard, wood-like or fleshy."
There's no way I believe that quote wasn't designed for maximum comedic potential.
I also have a 171P, and I too want to chime in with the, "Damn it's cool, and by association, so am I." (If you think I'm trying to brag, rest assured that since my bank account is now empty, the bragging is all I have left. :)
But there is some actual data I'll bring to the discussion: as you shop for an LCD monitor, the specs vary widely. The contrast ratio on the 171P I think is 500:1; I've seen monitors with a ratio as low as 200:1. When actually looking at the monitors, the difference is dramatic. Other stats, including brightness, viewing angle, and response also vary widely model-to-model, too.
I guess the moral is: the variance in specs on LCD monitors is surprising, so you need to absolutely check them out, or you can be disappointed. Additionally, the fact that things like "viewing angle" are important is probably new to the "CRT spec evaluation engine" you have in your head; be sure to make adjustments as needed.
I'd like to address a point some other people have been making about how LCDs are too expensive. Remember, the LCD is effectively bigger than a tube because of the way they measure the size. I have the 17 inch LCD next to my 19 inch CRT, and dammed if the actual viewing area isn't exacly the same. (The specs actually say the 19 inch screen is viewable something like 18.1, but I have my doubts. I need to go home and measure, I guess.) In any case, you should probably do the same: measure your current monitor, and measure any LCD you're considering buying. You might be surprised.
You're probably right. A data point: every time I've attempted to make a Simpsons reference, even if the story has almost no comments when I start to post, my comment is already redundant by the time it shows up. Sorry all.
...the most intelligent thing I can think of is: "Mmmmm...donuts."
At the ICANN Building in New York City, a meeting of nations is in progress.
Russian official: The Soviet Union will be pleased to offer amnesty to your wayward website.
American official: The Soviet Union? I thought you guys broke up.
Russian official: Yes, that's what we wanted you to think! [evil laugh] -- "Simpson Tide", Episode 3G04
Now that the word is out, potential serial killers just need a perl script that generates structured lat/long pairs that mislead the FBI. I guess they're counting on most serial killers to be to crazy to think things out that much.
Everybody knows that the planets are supposed to be named after the Roman gods. That's just the way it is. Here's a list of some of the more common Roman gods. I'm sure some of the Hercules and Xena fans out there can add to this list.
Personally, I like:
This is partially redundant with the link above, but does contain some information about plans for future article topics:
I'm leaving off the remainder of the mail, since it just has the "how to subscribe" info listed on the URL above.
I hope that make it to 3000; TPJ was a one of my favorites, back in the day.
I love that policy, and in fact, I'd like to extend it to ALL movies, except rated-G movies shown before 8 at night. And nobody below tweleve gets into an R-rated movie even with a parent.
Partially, it's that I just don't like kids interrupting my movie with an inappropriate reaction. I don't think it's cute when little Johnnie makes fart noises, or cries that he's bored, or does anything at all to distract me from the movie experience. Maybe that's my problem, but I should be able to find a time and place where I'll have a kid-free movie.
But the other part of that policy is that some parents take their kids to inappropriate movies at inappropriate times.
I don't know what the hell is wrong with people these days, but I see more and more R-rated movies where people have brought their small children. One of the first times this happened to me was during the film "Three Days in the Valley". During the violent sex scene between the hit man Spader and his girlfriend Charlize Theron, a small girl (probably about five) cried out, "Mommy, why is he doing that?" It almost would have been funny, except for the fact that you realized a young girl was being traumatized, and her parents didn't care.
Another thing I've seen is parents taking their children to late-night viewings of movies. I've gone to see things like "Toy Story" at the 10pm showing, just because I figure, "No sane parent would take their kids to a 10pm showing, since they won't be home until after midnight." Of course I'm always wrong, even if the kids look to be school-aged and it's during the school year!
Look, I'm not a parent, and I know sometimes parenting is harder than it looks, blahblahblah, but this stuff seems like it should be common sense. If you take your eight-year old to see Blade 2, not only will it annoy me, it's going to warp his world view.
If people started flooding across the border into Canada
Canada? That's no beter; those hosers don't even have freedom of speech. (Just teasing, my buddies to the north. Props to ya, eh?)
Look, if you're in a modern democracy and you don't like the laws, you try to make things better and get the laws changed, not just give up and move away. This is fundamental to the health of the democracy, and although it may at sometimes might seem like an uphill fight, it's a battle worth fighting.
Don't think of it like your current Tivo, where you record shows to watch later in the week; instead, think of it as a video archive machine. I was just going through my old video tapes last night, and was amazed by the things I have on tape that I totally forgot about. Imagine that instead of having every episode of the Simpsons on tape somewhere, you have every episode archived and instantly available on your Tivo. And heck, you would probably put all of your home videos on it; now you can re-watch the birth of your son at the push of a button!
Of course, this probably actually requires more space than 1200 hours (you would want redundancy, so RAID eats some of that, and you would want to record in a higher-quality mode, eating even more.) This is ridiculously expensive today, but I bet that in 5 years, the "Tivo video archive" will be common.
I've wondered about this: how come it seems like the age of big statues is behind us? Mount Rushmore, Statue of Liberty, those kind of things, doesn't seem like people do those much anymore. Yes, I'm aware they're still working on Crazy Horse, but that was started a while ago.
I'd probably go the "Statue of Liberty" route, and make a big chick. Maybe I'd model it after Brooke Burke; that should be worth some poontang points with her.
(Yes, I'm aware using the phrase "poontang points" is worth negative poontang points. But what the hell, in this fantasy, I'm a billionaire, I can pay the slashdot editors to delete this post so she never sees the evidence.)