Not really. Most students have the instructor talk them through starting the plane, then sit quietly while he (or she) takes off and flies to a practise area, where the student then gets to try out some simple turns and such. The instructor then lands the plane.
Now, someone who has already some time as a pilot may well get checked out on a simulator before flying a new type of aircraft (particularly true of bigger more expensive aircraft), but a flight simulator (well, possibly excepting the expensive full cockpit 6-degrees-of-freedom motion platform simulators) won't teach you the basics, what it feels like.
(And I've yet to meet a PC-based simulator that responded properly to crossed-controls or let you put it in a spin -- both things I learned early on as a student pilot.)
Boeing is just playing it smart in positioning themselves, at little risk, to take advantage of this if it pans out.
They've done this before: Jerry Pournelle tells the story of the time he, as a Boeing employee, and another fellow were tasked with investigating the "Dean Drive" (a "reactionless" drive that somehow converted rotary into linear motion). They were authorized to present Dean with a check for some multiple thousand dollars (worth far more then than now) if they were satisfied with the demonstrations.
They weren't, and they didn't. But Boeing at least invested enough to have them go check it out.
Nope, that message wasn't "modded up" to 2. Like this one, it was posted at 2, because the poster had a +1 bonus (probably because of a high karma score).
If it were modded, there'd be a reason ("interesting", "informative", etc.)
If MSFT loses too much money in one area (say, subsidizing XBox sales), they have to cover it with either increased revenues from one of their cash cows (like MS Office) or by playing accounting games with the cash reserves they have on hand, so as to meet quarterly revenue targets.
They're being (or were, don't know the current status) investigated by SEC for playing accounting games with cash reserves, so they're less likely to do that, and their cash cows are running into (some, but growing) competition from the likes of Star/Open Office, etc, etc.
The thing is, even though they've got a ton of cash on hand and could probably subsidize X Box sales from now until doomsday, if their quartely revenues don't show sufficient growth (and they've been hard-pressed to do that, lately), investors will start to bail and the stock price will drop. This in turn discourages investors further, makes employee stock options worthless so they'll demand higher salaries, and so on in a downward spiral.
Bill himself no doubt has enough stashed away in other investments that he'll never really hurt in that sense -- except that he really, really hates to lose.
Of course they do. They're acting in front of a blue (or green) screen with no sets and minimal props, and interacting with some piece of masking tape that tells them where to look substituting for the alien that will be added digitally later.
It takes a very good actor to pull off a performance in those circumstances.
(Actually TPM isn't quite that bad in the above regard -- see the "Making Of" documentary on the second disc of the DVD -- but AOTC may well have been.)
If people don't want deep links to items on their web site, they should configure their web server to check the "referer" field before serving such items up, or require password access.
If they're too incompetent/lazy/whatever to do that, too bad: if it's on the web, it's public.
Even in this context, it's an error. "Calorie" is a unit of measurement (see earlier post). It would, however, be quite correct to refer to an "amount of energy" or "amount of heat", and just as wrong to say "a number of heat".
Or, in a complete sentence: "the amount of heat is indicated by the number of calories".;-)
Wow, Xtrek -- those were the days...
on
Netrek
·
· Score: 2
I remember much time wasted after-hours in the workstation room (we just had dumb ASCII terminals on our desks in those days) at work back in early 1987, when Xtrek was I guess about a year old. A lot more fun when your opponents are in the same room. That was X10 in those days. And I think mostly on DEC GPX's (something like a MicroVAX) because we didn't get Suns until later.
I briefly tried porting it to X11 when the company upgraded, but there were to many real-work projects going on and no time.
Re:Does this couse answers some..
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
While the sentiments were probably circulating in fandom circles for a long time, Brodie's question was preceded by Larry Niven's classic short story/essay, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex which appeared in his collection All The Myriad Ways over thirty years ago (1971). (That link points to what is probably a flagrant copyright violation.) Brodie's question is Niven's point four and six.
Sigh, some people just lack an education in the classics;-)
According to the comic books I read, Superman's cape has a pouch/pocket in it where he stores his (highly compressed) Clark Kent clothes.
That way they're always handy for him to change back into his secret identity (and I guess with super powers its easy to get the wrinkles out), and he doesn't have to worry about somebody ripping them off from the phone booth where he changed when he's off fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
Since "calories" is obviously a plural noun, the phrase should be "the number of calories". Even though we can have fractional calories, the grammatical implication is that it's a countable or integer quantity. For those we use "number of" and, in comparisons, "fewer than" (not "less than").
When we're talking about a measured (vs counted) quantity, that's more like a "real" or "float", then you would use "amount of" -- unless of course you mention the units of measure, which sort of integerizes the whole thing (the opposite of C type promotion rules).
Sorry, but type mismatch in English is something that's been bugging me lately.
And the tragedy is, the National Geographic Magazine collection on CD-ROM consists entirely of JPEG pictures of the pages (well, plus some (Win/Mac) indexing software). Okay, the photos are probably what attracts most people to National G, but the articles are damn hard to read.
The folks (Tinker's Guild) that did the complete collection of The Amateur Scientist columns from Scientific American (admittedly a less ambitious undertaking than National Geo.) converted all the articles to HTML (illustrations in GIF). And the indexing software is in Java. Kudos to them.
Really? I've got this old SPARCStation that I just couldn't get Windows running on no how. Booted up and installed fine when I tried Linux (SuSE 7.3 SPARC).
Ditto for a couple of old PPC Macs I have -- even though Win NT 4 claims to support PPC.
Even on x86, I spend far more time futzing with the Windows machines than the Linux ones -- and time is money.
Oh, and as for "you can find Windows admins dirt cheap" -- you get what you pay for. I'd sooner spend the money on an admin (whatever the OS) who knows what he's doing than spend the money on downtime, hacked sites and general cleanup after one of those "dirt cheap" ones.
So, have you made these doc files available to developers of AbiWord, OpenOffice, KOffice, etc? It's hard to fix what you can't reproduce.
Come to think of it, I've got a few files like that too -- old files from MS Word for Macintosh circa 5.0 (ie about 10 years old). MS Word (Windows versions) can sometimes be coaxed and coerced into reading them, but only with the proper filters installed (which aren't by default).
I guess by your rules even Word shouldn't claim it can import Word.
While the Java trademark and JVM are still Sun-controlled, the various Java APIs are standardized by a community process which in fact tends to be dominated by IBM.
Well, you certainly couldn't prove that by their track record: Stac Micro (which you allude to), the DR-DOS/Windows incidents, MS Bob, NSA_KEY, "Netscape engineers are weenies", Clippy, faked videotape evidence in court, et bloody cetera...
The GPL has never been tested in court because every time some company has come up against it, their lawyers have taken a look at it and recommended "settle out of court".
It's very clearly worded (for a legal document) and the result of winning a suit against it would mean losing the rights it grants you.
Ellison was also involved (with Ben Bova) with the god-awful (and mercifully forgotten by most) series Starlost. Ellison's opinion of the final product was such that he insisted they use the nom de plume that he reserves for travesties of his work, Cordwainer Bird.
IIRC he also wrote the story "A Boy and His Dog" that was made into a (somewhat silly) movie.
Preliminary reports say the airplane engine failed. This is an extremely uncommon event, and does not necessarily lead to fatality.I am a pilot and can testify that the events of this death are highly suspicious.
If you're a pilot, then you're probably also aware that light twins (which this was) are often referred to as "doctor killers", because they're typically owned/flown by doctor/pilots who only fly them occasionally, thus don't have the reflexes to deal with an emergency like this.
Light twin on final (low and slow) losing an engine -- leading to asymmetric thrust and consequent yaw/roll moments? And in a snow flurry?
Nothing surprising about crashing under those conditions.
That's not "dying from exposure to nitrogen", that's dying from suffocation -- lack of oxygen.
As the original poster pointed out, we're all exposed to lots of nitrogen every day, doesn't hurt us a bit.
The original article specifically said He entered an airlocked storage lab and died from exposure to nitrogen.. That's just stupid writing on the author's part. The guy died from lack of oxygen, same as if he'd walked out the airlock of a space ship.
(Early in the Shuttle days, a couple of technicians died the same way from entering the engine compartment after it had been purged with nitrogen.)
(And actually, I guess some people have died from exposure to nitrogen -- but at about six atmospheres pressure, from nitrogen narcosis (deep diving SCUBA divers). And even then the immediate cause of death was more likely drowning caused by the narcosis.)
Got 50. Please do not mod me up, otherwise some bozo will mod it back down.
Moderation isn't (shouldn't be) about you, it's about the worth (or lack thereof) of your post to the Slashdot readers as a group.
You post something insightful or informative, I'll mod it up. You post a troll or something misinformative, I'll mod it down. (Or would if I had mod points.) I don't care what your personal karma level is.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Most students have the instructor talk them through starting the plane, then sit quietly while he (or she) takes off and flies to a practise area, where the student then gets to try out some simple turns and such. The instructor then lands the plane.
Now, someone who has already some time as a pilot may well get checked out on a simulator before flying a new type of aircraft (particularly true of bigger more expensive aircraft), but a flight simulator (well, possibly excepting the expensive full cockpit 6-degrees-of-freedom motion platform simulators) won't teach you the basics, what it feels like.
(And I've yet to meet a PC-based simulator that responded properly to crossed-controls or let you put it in a spin -- both things I learned early on as a student pilot.)
Boeing is just playing it smart in positioning themselves, at little risk, to take advantage of this if it pans out.
They've done this before: Jerry Pournelle tells the story of the time he, as a Boeing employee, and another fellow were tasked with investigating the "Dean Drive" (a "reactionless" drive that somehow converted rotary into linear motion). They were authorized to present Dean with a check for some multiple thousand dollars (worth far more then than now) if they were satisfied with the demonstrations.
They weren't, and they didn't. But Boeing at least invested enough to have them go check it out.
Nope, that message wasn't "modded up" to 2. Like this one, it was posted at 2, because the poster had a +1 bonus (probably because of a high karma score).
If it were modded, there'd be a reason ("interesting", "informative", etc.)
Actually it's starting to.
If MSFT loses too much money in one area (say, subsidizing XBox sales), they have to cover it with either increased revenues from one of their cash cows (like MS Office) or by playing accounting games with the cash reserves they have on hand, so as to meet quarterly revenue targets.
They're being (or were, don't know the current status) investigated by SEC for playing accounting games with cash reserves, so they're less likely to do that, and their cash cows are running into (some, but growing) competition from the likes of Star/Open Office, etc, etc.
The thing is, even though they've got a ton of cash on hand and could probably subsidize X Box sales from now until doomsday, if their quartely revenues don't show sufficient growth (and they've been hard-pressed to do that, lately), investors will start to bail and the stock price will drop. This in turn discourages investors further, makes employee stock options worthless so they'll demand higher salaries, and so on in a downward spiral.
Bill himself no doubt has enough stashed away in other investments that he'll never really hurt in that sense -- except that he really, really hates to lose.
Additionally, the actors seemed bored.
Of course they do. They're acting in front of a blue (or green) screen with no sets and minimal props, and interacting with some piece of masking tape that tells them where to look substituting for the alien that will be added digitally later.
It takes a very good actor to pull off a performance in those circumstances.
(Actually TPM isn't quite that bad in the above regard -- see the "Making Of" documentary on the second disc of the DVD -- but AOTC may well have been.)
deep linking
If people don't want deep links to items on their web site, they should configure their web server to check the "referer" field before serving such items up, or require password access.
If they're too incompetent/lazy/whatever to do that, too bad: if it's on the web, it's public.
Aye, and in truth, she was a beauty.
(Sigh, I miss the old names.)
Yep. If it all fits into just one truck, that's hardly Big Iron.
Even in this context, it's an error. "Calorie" is a unit of measurement (see earlier post). It would, however, be quite correct to refer to an "amount of energy" or "amount of heat", and just as wrong to say "a number of heat".
;-)
Or, in a complete sentence: "the amount of heat is indicated by the number of calories".
I remember much time wasted after-hours in the workstation room (we just had dumb ASCII terminals on our desks in those days) at work back in early 1987, when Xtrek was I guess about a year old. A lot more fun when your opponents are in the same room. That was X10 in those days. And I think mostly on DEC GPX's (something like a MicroVAX) because we didn't get Suns until later.
I briefly tried porting it to X11 when the company upgraded, but there were to many real-work projects going on and no time.
While the sentiments were probably circulating in fandom circles for a long time, Brodie's question was preceded by Larry Niven's classic short story/essay, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex which appeared in his collection All The Myriad Ways over thirty years ago (1971). (That link points to what is probably a flagrant copyright violation.) Brodie's question is Niven's point four and six.
;-)
Sigh, some people just lack an education in the classics
According to the comic books I read, Superman's cape has a pouch/pocket in it where he stores his (highly compressed) Clark Kent clothes.
That way they're always handy for him to change back into his secret identity (and I guess with super powers its easy to get the wrinkles out), and he doesn't have to worry about somebody ripping them off from the phone booth where he changed when he's off fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
the amount of calories
Since "calories" is obviously a plural noun, the phrase should be "the number of calories". Even though we can have fractional calories, the grammatical implication is that it's a countable or integer quantity. For those we use "number of" and, in comparisons, "fewer than" (not "less than").
When we're talking about a measured (vs counted) quantity, that's more like a "real" or "float", then you would use "amount of" -- unless of course you mention the units of measure, which sort of integerizes the whole thing (the opposite of C type promotion rules).
Sorry, but type mismatch in English is something that's been bugging me lately.
I'll second what you just said about formats.
And the tragedy is, the National Geographic Magazine collection on CD-ROM consists entirely of JPEG pictures of the pages (well, plus some (Win/Mac) indexing software). Okay, the photos are probably what attracts most people to National G, but the articles are damn hard to read.
The folks (Tinker's Guild) that did the complete collection of The Amateur Scientist columns from Scientific American (admittedly a less ambitious undertaking than National Geo.) converted all the articles to HTML (illustrations in GIF). And the indexing software is in Java. Kudos to them.
I shouldn't feed the troll, but...
Windows supports most hardware
Really? I've got this old SPARCStation that I just couldn't get Windows running on no how. Booted up and installed fine when I tried Linux (SuSE 7.3 SPARC).
Ditto for a couple of old PPC Macs I have -- even though Win NT 4 claims to support PPC.
Even on x86, I spend far more time futzing with the Windows machines than the Linux ones -- and time is money.
Oh, and as for "you can find Windows admins dirt cheap" -- you get what you pay for. I'd sooner spend the money on an admin (whatever the OS) who knows what he's doing than spend the money on downtime, hacked sites and general cleanup after one of those "dirt cheap" ones.
So, have you made these doc files available to developers of AbiWord, OpenOffice, KOffice, etc? It's hard to fix what you can't reproduce.
Come to think of it, I've got a few files like that too -- old files from MS Word for Macintosh circa 5.0 (ie about 10 years old). MS Word (Windows versions) can sometimes be coaxed and coerced into reading them, but only with the proper filters installed (which aren't by default).
I guess by your rules even Word shouldn't claim it can import Word.
While the Java trademark and JVM are still Sun-controlled, the various Java APIs are standardized by a community process which in fact tends to be dominated by IBM.
To be more precise, SUN found out that the body was already in Microsoft's pocket, so they took it back.
Microsoft might be evil, but they aren't stupid.
Well, you certainly couldn't prove that by their track record: Stac Micro (which you allude to), the DR-DOS/Windows incidents, MS Bob, NSA_KEY, "Netscape engineers are weenies", Clippy, faked videotape evidence in court, et bloody cetera...
The GPL has never been tested in court because every time some company has come up against it, their lawyers have taken a look at it and recommended "settle out of court".
It's very clearly worded (for a legal document) and the result of winning a suit against it would mean losing the rights it grants you.
Ellison was also involved (with Ben Bova) with the god-awful (and mercifully forgotten by most) series Starlost. Ellison's opinion of the final product was such that he insisted they use the nom de plume that he reserves for travesties of his work, Cordwainer Bird.
IIRC he also wrote the story "A Boy and His Dog" that was made into a (somewhat silly) movie.
Preliminary reports say the airplane engine failed. This is an extremely uncommon event, and does not necessarily lead to fatality.I am a pilot and can testify that the events of this death are highly suspicious.
If you're a pilot, then you're probably also aware that light twins (which this was) are often referred to as "doctor killers", because they're typically owned/flown by doctor/pilots who only fly them occasionally, thus don't have the reflexes to deal with an emergency like this.
Light twin on final (low and slow) losing an engine -- leading to asymmetric thrust and consequent yaw/roll moments? And in a snow flurry?
Nothing surprising about crashing under those conditions.
That's not "dying from exposure to nitrogen", that's dying from suffocation -- lack of oxygen.
As the original poster pointed out, we're all exposed to lots of nitrogen every day, doesn't hurt us a bit.
The original article specifically said He entered an airlocked storage lab and died from exposure to nitrogen.. That's just stupid writing on the author's part. The guy died from lack of oxygen, same as if he'd walked out the airlock of a space ship.
(Early in the Shuttle days, a couple of technicians died the same way from entering the engine compartment after it had been purged with nitrogen.)
(And actually, I guess some people have died from exposure to nitrogen -- but at about six atmospheres pressure, from nitrogen narcosis (deep diving SCUBA divers). And even then the immediate cause of death was more likely drowning caused by the narcosis.)
True, but sooner or later, all the light even from one of these new bulbs turns into heat -- except for that light which escapes out the windows.
Got 50. Please do not mod me up, otherwise some bozo will mod it back down.
Moderation isn't (shouldn't be) about you, it's about the worth (or lack thereof) of your post to the Slashdot readers as a group.
You post something insightful or informative, I'll mod it up. You post a troll or something misinformative, I'll mod it down. (Or would if I had mod points.) I don't care what your personal karma level is.