Not that impressive, TBH
on
Cool Case
·
· Score: 1
Didn't strike me as anything that hasn't been around for years at http://www.overclockers.co.uk/. For example, the case at the bottom of this page pushes 514CFM as standard.
Yeah, I know. I really liked that touch. TBH I thought that the version above was funnier than mine, and for once the moderators agreed with me. (Well, they would the time I decided my post was the lame one;)
(Washington, AP) Apple Computer, Inc announced today that it is patenting the design of the "apple shape"(tm). Other existing products that resemble the apple shape as used on the company's merchendise are being issued "cease and desist" warnings.
First to come under fire were greengrocers all over the world. Apple Computer's co-founder, Steve Jobs said today: "Apple Computer, Inc. has invested a lot of time and effort in designing the apple shape(tm) and it's simply not fair that these so-called 'fruit retailers' in every country are making a huge profit from what is essentially our design".
Once the competition from orchards is over, Apple Computer plans to move on to products in any way derived from the "apple shape", citing Del Monte as a major competitor.
Reacting to earlier comments from the Pope that "The apple was designed by God, not man" while citing the book of Genesis as proof, Jobs pointed out that "Though our legal team is looking in to these claims, two points seems obvious. Firstly, that the word apple is never mentioned in the book of Genesis, and secondly, that, whatever role he claims to have had in the design, God neglected to patent the apple shape(tm)"
PS - Should have made myself clearer. I know you were talking about putting a tether, not the actual payload, at the same altitude as the shuttle, but it's the same problem: you can't get balloons half as high as the shuttle goes and the shuttle would be moving relative to the tether at thousands upon thousands of miles per hour. At those sorts of speeds even a flimsy rope could split the shuttle in two... after all, a microscopic speck of paint almost smashed a window on one once.
ICBW, but I don't see how you could launch anything into actual earth orbit from a balloon.
As well as having so much altitude that the atmosphere provides negligible drag (which is so high that hydrogen wouldn't get you there anyway... the hydrogen in the balloon would be heavier than the near-vacuous atmosphere around it at orbiter-type-altitudes) you also need considerable transverse velocity -- many thousands of miles per hour -- to orbit, and I don't see how a balloon could ever provide that.
With a shuttle it's easy -- you just roll the shuttle over to it's going at an angle away from the earth when it launches, to give it appropriate amounts of both radial (up away from the earth) and tangential momentum.
So it's a nice idea, but what you describe it going to have to wait until the space elevator (mentioned previously on slashdot)
Oh great, I can't wait until that thing malfunctions and comes sailing down on top of my house... oh wait, my entire town...
Seriously if it's remote control, could they actually get in touch with it anywhere on it's global trip if it happens to go wrong? I know they could keep track of it using the existing radar network and fit a standard aviation transdator and even GPS system on it, but I don't see how they could actually transmit signals from the ground to the thing to control it...
Erm, I don't care about karma or anything (I didn't expect the post to be modded up, and shit, you can mod this down if you like, I've got the stuff to burn, man), but I do worry about the mental state of a moderator who thought that a joke about being able to create arbitrarily small linux boxes by shrinking full-size ones using strong, pulsed magnetic fields was "Offtopic" in a thread about... ooh, strong pulsed magnetic fields.
Fine, you didn't think it was funny, but you actually thought it was so unrelated that you wanted to waste one of your precious 5 mod points criticising it? Wow.
Lol... we must seek out the real Leader of the Debian Project... who must by definition be the man who would least want to do it... indeed, one who refuses to even believe that Debian exists.
Bill Gates?;)
Dave
-- If you think this is a troll you really don't read enough Douglas Adams
I was interested reading the "...in reality most of it is delegated to others..." and "..the only real decisions you get to make directly if I remember correctly is appointing delegates." bits. From reading it it sounds as if Debian is an example of a project being successfully maintained "by a committee" and not under the ultimate control of one guy. Compared to, say, the linux kernel where Linus gets the final say on what goes in and Slashdot, where presumably Taco gets the last word on everything.
Do people agree? Is this really proof that there are other successful formulas besides the "one amazing guy" one, or do those on the inside think that the Debian project would be more streamlined / fast-moving if it was controlled by one person more than a committee? (Or am I just talking crap as usual;) ?
> KDE 2.0 already claims you can do anything > from the keyboard and the object model supports > scripting.
JOOI, does this mean that they've hacked X so you can start it without a CorePointer device? Just that I was trying to start XFree86 4.0.2 the other day with no mouse -- I wanted to see if it was that that was causing a prog to go bananas -- and it seemed damn near impossible. Which I thought was odd, becuase the number pad following a SHIFT+NUMLOCK works just as well....
After seeing all the reviews I'm starting to wonder whether Intel's real reason for bringing the P4 out isn't because it's more efficient, or because they've improved the architecture in any way or made any improvement over the PIII.
Perhaps their only problem was that the PIII kept breaking when they pushed it up to ridiculously high clock speeds. So they moved things about a bit (no idea how, maybe increased the separation distance between the etched components), and possibly made it less efficient, but in the future able to be pushed up to 2, 3, 4GHz or whatever.
If that's right, then it's so not The Way Forward. There's a point when channeling most of your R&D into pushing the same old architecture faster and faster will provide fewer and fewer gains compared to actually designing a better one. I mean, how long is it since the first 64-bit processor now? It made me wonder how important it is for M$ that PCs stay on the 32-bit architecture for as long as possible, because of course it's much more painful for windows users to take full advantage of 64-bit processors (they'd need to get a whole new precompiled OS distribution) than linux users and the like who could recompie everything overnight.
I don't know. Maybe I've been reading too many conspiracy theories...:)
I'm wondering how long it will be before someone receives a lawsuit for keeping web access logs from their site; especially publicly-accessible ones that show which IPs have visited the most / most recently.
Even though the case in question here might be "good" one from our point of view -- which generally seems to be that advertisers and spam are bad (unless you're the one getting paid for it;) -- I worry that the more this snowballs, the sooner it will affect the security of our systems because we're not allowed to keep logs of who's been connecting to them.
funny thing is that the web now has interfaces for NNTP browsing that are in most cases more friendly than most USEnet programs
This is true, and this is why it's difficult to make sweeping over-generalisations like "the web is better than nntp because..." as I did above, because the web is so damn useful and adaptable that it can be twisted round to provide an interface to just about anything. We've got web portals for email; databases; newsgroups; mailing lists; hell, I sometimes log into one of our boxes using an ssh java applet over https. There aren't many other options from a payphone!
And the thing I think is especially good is that it gets so many more people using them than would
have done otherwise. A slight downside is that lots of these portals are getting more "pretty" with larger graphics, etc, which kind of defeats the point of some, but it's worth it to get the things used.
So maybe gopher could have a bit more of a future than we gave it credit for if web gateways such as the ones mentioned in other posts become really popular and common, but somehow I doubt it's going to happen.
Yes, I more-or-less agree with this. I think that gopher is unlikely to make a comeback for for precisely that reason... compared to today's all-singing, all-dancing websites with 50000Mb of graphics or whatever gopher just doesn't look appealing. It looks, well, technical. That, and the fact that you need to have slightly more Clue to be using it in the first place.
Now, I myself am quite happy to use gopher / lynx / nntp / other nice things, but the fact is that however much we want to deny it, the vast majority of internet users are now fairly clueless / computer-illiterate people using the browser -- IE -- that happened to come preinstalled on their windows computer (after days of lessons from their 12-year-old child) and hell, probably OE for email. And I know it's sometimes considered flamebait around here to remind people that masses of people use Win/IE, but they do. And most of these people are never going to use nntp because it's something else that would need to be explained to them, and requires scary things like new programs etc to use, which they don't have time to learn about.
And it's all very well saying "sod them, they don't deserve to be on the net anyway" or such things, but places like slashdot, or better, Yahoo Communities and co., prove that these people are still human, still have interesting contributions to make, and by designing a pretty message board around the web that they can just about work out how to use, you can get many, many more people joining in, and certainly much wider cross-sections of people contributing etc, than you would with a newsgroup. And that's what makes them really "rock the kazbah".
That's why I'm slightly worried that the "bring back gopher campaign" is equivalent to us techies saying "sod today's average internet user, let's deliver content via a (wince) obscure protocol that your average windows luser won't want / know how to access and thus won't be able to benefit from".
Dave
--
I did have a.sig, Sir, but, ummm, the dog ate it.
Well, clearly I am if I think that the actual guy in the oval office won't make a difference to issues such as Napster being shut down, DeCSS being hunted down, carnivore tapping my email and lack of humourous option involving CowboyNeal in the slashdot poll.
The guy at the top isn't going to make a difference to all that; congress could but they're only going to do what they've been doing all along and taking advice from lawyers / the largest corporations / lawyers from the largest corporations.
The President is turning into more of a "face" for America (hints of Zaphod Beeblebrox for HHGTTG fans?) and while it might be slightly embarrassing for US citizens if their top man accidentally mispronounces a foreign diplomat's name wrong or claims he's responsible for something he isn't, it's not going to change the stuff that matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Dave
Dave
I claim that I had the concept first, and cite the length of my post and my typing speed as evidence :)
Dave
First to come under fire were greengrocers all over the world. Apple Computer's co-founder, Steve Jobs said today: "Apple Computer, Inc. has invested a lot of time and effort in designing the apple shape(tm) and it's simply not fair that these so-called 'fruit retailers' in every country are making a huge profit from what is essentially our design".
Once the competition from orchards is over, Apple Computer plans to move on to products in any way derived from the "apple shape", citing Del Monte as a major competitor.
Reacting to earlier comments from the Pope that "The apple was designed by God, not man" while citing the book of Genesis as proof, Jobs pointed out that "Though our legal team is looking in to these claims, two points seems obvious. Firstly, that the word apple is never mentioned in the book of Genesis, and secondly, that, whatever role he claims to have had in the design, God neglected to patent the apple shape(tm)"
Steve Jobs is mad.
PS - Should have made myself clearer. I know you were talking about putting a tether, not the actual payload, at the same altitude as the shuttle, but it's the same problem: you can't get balloons half as high as the shuttle goes and the shuttle would be moving relative to the tether at thousands upon thousands of miles per hour. At those sorts of speeds even a flimsy rope could split the shuttle in two... after all, a microscopic speck of paint almost smashed a window on one once.
As well as having so much altitude that the atmosphere provides negligible drag (which is so high that hydrogen wouldn't get you there anyway... the hydrogen in the balloon would be heavier than the near-vacuous atmosphere around it at orbiter-type-altitudes) you also need considerable transverse velocity -- many thousands of miles per hour -- to orbit, and I don't see how a balloon could ever provide that.
With a shuttle it's easy -- you just roll the shuttle over to it's going at an angle away from the earth when it launches, to give it appropriate amounts of both radial (up away from the earth) and tangential momentum.
So it's a nice idea, but what you describe it going to have to wait until the space elevator (mentioned previously on slashdot)
Dave
Seriously if it's remote control, could they actually get in touch with it anywhere on it's global trip if it happens to go wrong? I know they could keep track of it using the existing radar network and fit a standard aviation transdator and even GPS system on it, but I don't see how they could actually transmit signals from the ground to the thing to control it...
Dave
Fine, you didn't think it was funny, but you actually thought it was so unrelated that you wanted to waste one of your precious 5 mod points criticising it? Wow.
Oh well, takes all sorts to make a slashdot :)
Dave
No special configuration options needed, and in many cases technically counts as overwriting with totally random data. :)
Dave
Lol... we must seek out the real Leader of the Debian Project... who must by definition be the man who would least want to do it... indeed, one who refuses to even believe that Debian exists.
Bill Gates? ;)
Dave
--
If you think this is a troll you really don't read enough Douglas Adams
I was interested reading the "...in reality most of it is delegated to others..." and "..the only real decisions you get to make directly if I remember correctly is appointing delegates." bits. From reading it it sounds as if Debian is an example of a project being successfully maintained "by a committee" and not under the ultimate control of one guy. Compared to, say, the linux kernel where Linus gets the final say on what goes in and Slashdot, where presumably Taco gets the last word on everything.
Do people agree? Is this really proof that there are other successful formulas besides the "one amazing guy" one, or do those on the inside think that the Debian project would be more streamlined / fast-moving if it was controlled by one person more than a committee? (Or am I just talking crap as usual;) ?
Dave
> KDE 2.0 already claims you can do anything
> from the keyboard and the object model supports
> scripting.
JOOI, does this mean that they've hacked X so you can start it without a CorePointer device? Just that I was trying to start XFree86 4.0.2 the other day with no mouse -- I wanted to see if it was that that was causing a prog to go bananas -- and it seemed damn near impossible. Which I thought was odd, becuase the number pad following a SHIFT+NUMLOCK works just as well....
After seeing all the reviews I'm starting to wonder whether Intel's real reason for bringing the P4 out isn't because it's more efficient, or because they've improved the architecture in any way or made any improvement over the PIII.
:)
Perhaps their only problem was that the PIII kept breaking when they pushed it up to ridiculously high clock speeds. So they moved things about a bit (no idea how, maybe increased the separation distance between the etched components), and possibly made it less efficient, but in the future able to be pushed up to 2, 3, 4GHz or whatever.
If that's right, then it's so not The Way Forward. There's a point when channeling most of your R&D into pushing the same old architecture faster and faster will provide fewer and fewer gains compared to actually designing a better one. I mean, how long is it since the first 64-bit processor now? It made me wonder how important it is for M$ that PCs stay on the 32-bit architecture for as long as possible, because of course it's much more painful for windows users to take full advantage of 64-bit processors (they'd need to get a whole new precompiled OS distribution) than linux users and the like who could recompie everything overnight.
I don't know. Maybe I've been reading too many conspiracy theories...
Dave
I'm wondering how long it will be before someone receives a lawsuit for keeping web access logs from their site; especially publicly-accessible ones that show which IPs have visited the most / most recently.
;) -- I worry that the more this snowballs, the sooner it will affect the security of our systems because we're not allowed to keep logs of who's been connecting to them.
Even though the case in question here might be "good" one from our point of view -- which generally seems to be that advertisers and spam are bad (unless you're the one getting paid for it
Dave
funny thing is that the web now has interfaces for NNTP browsing that are in most cases more friendly than most USEnet programs
This is true, and this is why it's difficult to make sweeping over-generalisations like "the web is better than nntp because..." as I did above, because the web is so damn useful and adaptable that it can be twisted round to provide an interface to just about anything. We've got web portals for email; databases; newsgroups; mailing lists; hell, I sometimes log into one of our boxes using an ssh java applet over https. There aren't many other options from a payphone!
And the thing I think is especially good is that it gets so many more people using them than would have done otherwise. A slight downside is that lots of these portals are getting more "pretty" with larger graphics, etc, which kind of defeats the point of some, but it's worth it to get the things used.
So maybe gopher could have a bit more of a future than we gave it credit for if web gateways such as the ones mentioned in other posts become really popular and common, but somehow I doubt it's going to happen.
Dave
Yes, I more-or-less agree with this. I think that gopher is unlikely to make a comeback for for precisely that reason... compared to today's all-singing, all-dancing websites with 50000Mb of graphics or whatever gopher just doesn't look appealing. It looks, well, technical. That, and the fact that you need to have slightly more Clue to be using it in the first place.
.sig, Sir, but, ummm, the dog ate it.
Now, I myself am quite happy to use gopher / lynx / nntp / other nice things, but the fact is that however much we want to deny it, the vast majority of internet users are now fairly clueless / computer-illiterate people using the browser -- IE -- that happened to come preinstalled on their windows computer (after days of lessons from their 12-year-old child) and hell, probably OE for email. And I know it's sometimes considered flamebait around here to remind people that masses of people use Win/IE, but they do. And most of these people are never going to use nntp because it's something else that would need to be explained to them, and requires scary things like new programs etc to use, which they don't have time to learn about.
And it's all very well saying "sod them, they don't deserve to be on the net anyway" or such things, but places like slashdot, or better, Yahoo Communities and co., prove that these people are still human, still have interesting contributions to make, and by designing a pretty message board around the web that they can just about work out how to use, you can get many, many more people joining in, and certainly much wider cross-sections of people contributing etc, than you would with a newsgroup. And that's what makes them really "rock the kazbah".
That's why I'm slightly worried that the "bring back gopher campaign" is equivalent to us techies saying "sod today's average internet user, let's deliver content via a (wince) obscure protocol that your average windows luser won't want / know how to access and thus won't be able to benefit from".
Dave
--
I did have a
> Are you an idiot?
Well, clearly I am if I think that the actual guy in the oval office won't make a difference to issues such as Napster being shut down, DeCSS being hunted down, carnivore tapping my email and lack of humourous option involving CowboyNeal in the slashdot poll.
The guy at the top isn't going to make a difference to all that; congress could but they're only going to do what they've been doing all along and taking advice from lawyers / the largest corporations / lawyers from the largest corporations.
The President is turning into more of a "face" for America (hints of Zaphod Beeblebrox for HHGTTG fans?) and while it might be slightly embarrassing for US citizens if their top man accidentally mispronounces a foreign diplomat's name wrong or claims he's responsible for something he isn't, it's not going to change the stuff that matters.
And this is "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters"(tm)?
;-)