> A: you don't need to heat an egg to boiling to cook it.
I will give you that the first part of A is probably true.
However, the volume of an egg is at least half water, probably more like the human body around 80% or more. Remember it turns into a chicken which, like nearly all creatures on the Earth, are mobile sacks of water.
> That brings the time down to 20 minutes - which is what the article says.
FTA: "For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg"
Where did you get 20 minutes from?
It takes 3 minutes to hard boil an egg in water. There's no way your cell phone (or even a few of them) could put enough heat into an egg to make it's temperature go up even a couple degrees. You need to be able to put more heat into the object than the air around it can dissipate.
A well visualized lie and the truth would still be hard to distinguish.
First off, you make the assumption that the interviewer can know the questions to ask. If someone kills their spouse and there are no witnesses, it's any ones guess as to what REALLY happened. Sure, clues can give some indication (or even a good indication), but if the person didn't leave that much evidence, it's not certain that there will be lots of useful questions to ask.
Secondly, lots of what you remember IS "made up". You brain only remembers things it deems statistically significant, the rest you remember as "stuff that usually happens". So you can't really ask a bunch of general question and determine it to be true, whether the person is trying telling the truth or not.
Also, you need to be able to tell what a particular person's brain looks like when it's actually lying. Asking them to state something that is untrue does not necessarily give an accurate profile of how they are when they are really trying to be deceitful.
I agree that "Well, if you make $x per hour then you've really lost" assertions are somewhat bullshit.
Also, if you've ever filled out a few rebates before and it still takes 30 minutes, you've probably got some sort of IQ deficit, or at a minimum very, very poorly organized.
That said, there are still better things I could spend my 5 minutes of filling out rebate form doing, and it's probably worth some amount of money to me. It's just not quantifiable.:)
>> Slightly more ontopic - I've been reading that the mere presence of the fat binaried itunes on a powerpc mac can cause the disk utility not to run - stripping intel code from the binary fixes the problem.
> How is that on topic? This is an article about bugs in the intel processors. How does some obscure possible bug that only affects PPC systems relevant?
Amen brother. I love how PPC fanboys use this fact to bash the Intel transition, while it's a bug in the *PPC* Disk Utility in the first place.
Linus (and others) *do* tweak the kernel API on a regular basis.
I would agree with the original poster in that distributing binary drivers for Linux is essentially an impossiblity. (And it used to be done several years ago, when there were fewer distros and kernel revisions came more slowly.)
The advantage that Windows has over Linux in this case, is there is a backward-compatible driver API from NT to 2000 to XP. If I want, I can install an NT driver on my XP box, and pray that it will work. (And I have successfully done this on several occasions.) On the flip side, would you ever try a newly compiled kernel without also rebuilding the modules? (Good luck with that, I've UNsuccessfully done that on a few occassions.)
Of course, the solution is to get manufacturers to release the source to their drivers. Easier said than done, although I would have to say is probably getting easier.
Just to stick up for, I've had a Linksys troubles in multi-user environments (moving from 5 to 8 users caused the router to crash about every 4 hours, firmware was the newest available).
Though, the problem is mostly that Linksys has some very crappy firmware in some models. I switched to OpenWRT firmware: the load average hasn't topped 0.1 and I've never had a crash.
It seems way more likely that some idiot MS-programmer put this in there so he could show his buddies: Hey look what this WMF file can do... and then forgot about it completely.
An essentially non-authenicated exploit which can only be activated by accessing a WMF file (what user or system does that on a reliable basis) would only look like a "backdoor" to a conspiracy theorist (read: Steve Gibson).
Yeah, it's fun to think just how evil Microsoft really is, but I really doubt this is an example of it.
Also, backdoors would be by definition "intentional", no? Just an attempt to make it sound more evil.
Data on a CD-R/CD-RW is stored in the chemical substrate which is somewhat clear (usually a green or blue tint). The reflective surface provides the means of reading it by reflecting the laser back through it.
When the specs were released, I was disappointed. Had they put both SD and CF, or had put CF and built in Wireless, I would have bought one in a heart beat.
Now the only possibility for Wireless connectivity is SDIO, which is far from elegant and will consume the only SD port.
I would think a touchscreen wouldn't be necessary for most people. It sounds like you should just buy a Zaurus. It's got all of the features you're asking for.
As far as the software goes, I could care less. If it can run Linux, the community will take care of it. Embedded devices have notoriously bad software, with a few exceptions (ie iPod), but even those are very limited as to what you can change about them.
Many small businesses don't have a T1. In many areas, DSL/Cable modems are not even close to reliable as a T1 from a prominent provider. Also, the cost differnce between a T1 and DSL/Cable line is usually quite significant, and most often the DSL/Cable connection will provide much better bandwidth.
In my case, the (2mbps/768kbps) DSL we had was horribly unreliable. We switched to Cable and while it's been reliable enough to use it for VoIP, to buy the voice lines from the Cable company isn't any more expensive if you package the Internet and phone together. (And I wouldn't have to muck with fixing things (or hire someone to do it) if something went wrong.) Additionally, the two times in the past year the Internet has hiccuped (for 15 minutes or so), surprisingly, our POTS lines did not go down with it. And I'm not using up any of my upstream bandwidth to boot.
Our PBX is an Asterisk Box with the POTS lines plugged right into it. I did configure a SIP SoftPhone at home that rings if the business line rings at the office. The switch to VoIP would be easy if we ever decided it was worth it.
All in all, I think we pay $110/mo for a 6mbps down/2mbps up connection (which numerous speed tests confirm that we are actually getting the full bandwidth), plus $15-20 per phone line.
Compare that to $500+/mo for a 1.5mbps T1 which you might need to do reliable VoIP.
>> When you're out shopping, the higher the resolution, the smaller the dots...
> No, higher resolution does not necessarily mean smaller drops. Smaller drop size means smaller drops.
They said dots, not drops. Higher resolution does mean smaller dots. Smaller drops means you can produce different shades of color within each dot.
A common mistake when printer shopping is comparing just DPI. (Not to say the parent poster has done this.) On a monitor, your DPI is around 70-120, but each dot is 1 of 16 million colors (really 3 smaller RGB dots). On many printers, while the resolution can be 1440 DPI, a dot can be only one of 4 colors. Some can do blending on the same dot. Some can produce different shades of one color on one dot.
>> The best way to gauge any printer's photo capabilities is looking at sample prints at the store or on printer company websites.
> Except that these are often highly tweaked images and are sometimes even printed from a demo application that doesn't even use the usual printer driver.
Yes, you're right, this is pure crap. One of my long time wishes is that retail stores would have a set of generic test prints that they would produce on each printer that they carried. That way you could compare apples to apples across a variety of image and text prints.
>> Another important specification for inkjet printers is ink drop size, typically measured in picoliters. The smaller the number, the more ink per square inch can be placed on the paper.
> No, the smaller the drop size, the more dots are needed to lay down an equivalent amount of ink.
Perhaps the author meant you can put a bigger variety of ink in the same area. The important factor of drop size, is that some printers will be able to produce different shades of a particular ink in the same dot using a smaller or larger drop size.
The whole thing does read like a big ad for buying a printer though. Not much useful technical information,
How is web hosting a software subscription? Sure the infrastructure may require some software (ie Plesk, Ensim, etc), but it's not really what you're paying for.
Yes, Microsoft has been thinking about this for a LONG time. Gates wrote about it in his first book "A Road Ahead" and that was puslished in 1995, I think. And I though it was a dumb idea then too.:)
Actually, I'm sure Mormon's (at least LDS Mormons, which are the vast majority) don't necessarily disbelieve evolution. The church's official stance is pretty much, "We don't and won't know for certain." I know some scientists who are Mormons and they definitely believe in evolution and do so not in conflict of their religion.
> Sure, they are chaotic and thus impossible to predict on any usable scale, but that does not mean that they are not deterministic. If there is a soul in there, it would have to interact with the physical body on the level of quarks or something.
I think interaction of sub-atomic particles seem very non-deterministic, no? If the soul were to exist anywhere, why not there? Why does your judgement exclude what you aknowledge to be a viable explanation.
Granted, I don't believe in souls in the Christian sense, and it would be much more difficult to try to get that idea to work.
However, I can't say I am determinist, nor do I find it logical in respect to quantum machanics. How can you determine something when it is definitively uncertain whether it is to occur at all?
Ditto on this for me as well. One PCChips (later coined PCShits) that I had for a Duron 600 was a nightmare. Two friends also got the same board and their experiences were none the better. After two years of BIOS updates, I finally had something that seemed stable, but I was wary of touching it. It was a releif once it stablized since I built the system for my parents and I got calls every few days tell me what the blue screen was saying this time.
I do have a more recent PCChips board, and it is not as bad. A merger with ECS doesn't bolster my confidence in them, though my experience with ECS is limited.
For now I stick to the mid-range Asus, Abit and BioStars and have had good luck.
You might be able to BUILD them for $50 a piece. (Though even this is highly unlikely if it's a government project.) But you sure as hell couldn't distribute them across 60060700 square miles for $50 a pop. Forget about monitoring and maintaining them. Also, ground based transmission makes all sorts of other problems.
AJAX is an abstract concept that describes the use of a pair of technologies, namely JavaScript and XML. It is not a "thing" that can have a vulnerability. JavaScript and XML are ALSO not capable of having vulnerabilities either, since they're just languages. The only things that have vulnerabilites in the computer-related sense are specific pieces of software.
In this case it's a problem with IE for improperly running JavaScript where it shouldn't. Or you could argue it's MySpace's fault for not knowing that IE would run it.
Also can the OCR software USE an 800dpi image? Most of them I've used take only 300dpi images, some only 200dpi. At some point it's not going to matter, and I would say it's probably well below 800dpi.
I would have to say for this post, pretty much any scanner would work.
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> A: you don't need to heat an egg to boiling to cook it.
I will give you that the first part of A is probably true.
However, the volume of an egg is at least half water, probably more like the human body around 80% or more. Remember it turns into a chicken which, like nearly all creatures on the Earth, are mobile sacks of water.
> That brings the time down to 20 minutes - which is what the article says.
FTA:
"For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg"
Where did you get 20 minutes from?
It takes 3 minutes to hard boil an egg in water. There's no way your cell phone (or even a few of them) could put enough heat into an egg to make it's temperature go up even a couple degrees. You need to be able to put more heat into the object than the air around it can dissipate.
A well visualized lie and the truth would still be hard to distinguish.
First off, you make the assumption that the interviewer can know the questions to ask. If someone kills their spouse and there are no witnesses, it's any ones guess as to what REALLY happened. Sure, clues can give some indication (or even a good indication), but if the person didn't leave that much evidence, it's not certain that there will be lots of useful questions to ask.
Secondly, lots of what you remember IS "made up". You brain only remembers things it deems statistically significant, the rest you remember as "stuff that usually happens". So you can't really ask a bunch of general question and determine it to be true, whether the person is trying telling the truth or not.
Also, you need to be able to tell what a particular person's brain looks like when it's actually lying. Asking them to state something that is untrue does not necessarily give an accurate profile of how they are when they are really trying to be deceitful.
I agree that "Well, if you make $x per hour then you've really lost" assertions are somewhat bullshit.
:)
Also, if you've ever filled out a few rebates before and it still takes 30 minutes, you've probably got some sort of IQ deficit, or at a minimum very, very poorly organized.
That said, there are still better things I could spend my 5 minutes of filling out rebate form doing, and it's probably worth some amount of money to me. It's just not quantifiable.
>> Slightly more ontopic - I've been reading that the mere presence of the fat binaried itunes on a powerpc mac can cause the disk utility not to run - stripping intel code from the binary fixes the problem.
> How is that on topic? This is an article about bugs in the intel processors. How does some obscure possible bug that only affects PPC systems relevant?
Amen brother. I love how PPC fanboys use this fact to bash the Intel transition, while it's a bug in the *PPC* Disk Utility in the first place.
Certainly agreed that the most preferrable thing is to release source drivers for Linux.
But when that is not possible (or financially feasable), source is preferrable to nothing at all.
Linus (and others) *do* tweak the kernel API on a regular basis.
I would agree with the original poster in that distributing binary drivers for Linux is essentially an impossiblity. (And it used to be done several years ago, when there were fewer distros and kernel revisions came more slowly.)
The advantage that Windows has over Linux in this case, is there is a backward-compatible driver API from NT to 2000 to XP. If I want, I can install an NT driver on my XP box, and pray that it will work. (And I have successfully done this on several occasions.) On the flip side, would you ever try a newly compiled kernel without also rebuilding the modules? (Good luck with that, I've UNsuccessfully done that on a few occassions.)
Of course, the solution is to get manufacturers to release the source to their drivers. Easier said than done, although I would have to say is probably getting easier.
Just to stick up for, I've had a Linksys troubles in multi-user environments (moving from 5 to 8 users caused the router to crash about every 4 hours, firmware was the newest available).
Though, the problem is mostly that Linksys has some very crappy firmware in some models. I switched to OpenWRT firmware: the load average hasn't topped 0.1 and I've never had a crash.
It seems way more likely that some idiot MS-programmer put this in there so he could show his buddies: Hey look what this WMF file can do... and then forgot about it completely.
An essentially non-authenicated exploit which can only be activated by accessing a WMF file (what user or system does that on a reliable basis) would only look like a "backdoor" to a conspiracy theorist (read: Steve Gibson).
Yeah, it's fun to think just how evil Microsoft really is, but I really doubt this is an example of it.
Also, backdoors would be by definition "intentional", no? Just an attempt to make it sound more evil.
Lockheed, not NASA, provided the Imperial units causing the loss of the $125 million Mars Orbiter project.
t ric.02/
http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.me
Umm, no it's not.
Data on a CD-R/CD-RW is stored in the chemical substrate which is somewhat clear (usually a green or blue tint). The reflective surface provides the means of reading it by reflecting the laser back through it.
Ditto on the CompactFlash and wireless.
When the specs were released, I was disappointed. Had they put both SD and CF, or had put CF and built in Wireless, I would have bought one in a heart beat.
Now the only possibility for Wireless connectivity is SDIO, which is far from elegant and will consume the only SD port.
I would think a touchscreen wouldn't be necessary for most people. It sounds like you should just buy a Zaurus. It's got all of the features you're asking for.
As far as the software goes, I could care less. If it can run Linux, the community will take care of it. Embedded devices have notoriously bad software, with a few exceptions (ie iPod), but even those are very limited as to what you can change about them.
Many small businesses don't have a T1. In many areas, DSL/Cable modems are not even close to reliable as a T1 from a prominent provider. Also, the cost differnce between a T1 and DSL/Cable line is usually quite significant, and most often the DSL/Cable connection will provide much better bandwidth.
In my case, the (2mbps/768kbps) DSL we had was horribly unreliable. We switched to Cable and while it's been reliable enough to use it for VoIP, to buy the voice lines from the Cable company isn't any more expensive if you package the Internet and phone together. (And I wouldn't have to muck with fixing things (or hire someone to do it) if something went
wrong.) Additionally, the two times in the past year the Internet has hiccuped (for 15 minutes or so), surprisingly, our POTS lines did not go down with it. And I'm not using up any of my upstream bandwidth to boot.
Our PBX is an Asterisk Box with the POTS lines plugged right into it. I did configure a SIP SoftPhone at home that rings if the business line rings at the office. The switch to VoIP would be easy if we ever decided it was worth it.
All in all, I think we pay $110/mo for a 6mbps down/2mbps up connection (which numerous speed tests confirm that we are actually getting the full bandwidth), plus $15-20 per phone line.
Compare that to $500+/mo for a 1.5mbps T1 which you might need to do reliable VoIP.
I feel your pain. Thank goodnesss for LCDs.
My parents used to have one of those "ultra-sonic" pest deterents. Yikes, that thing would drive me crazy.
Just to play devil's advocate...
>> When you're out shopping, the higher the resolution, the smaller the dots...
> No, higher resolution does not necessarily mean smaller drops. Smaller drop size means smaller drops.
They said dots, not drops. Higher resolution does mean smaller dots. Smaller drops means you can produce different shades of color within each dot.
A common mistake when printer shopping is comparing just DPI. (Not to say the parent poster has done this.) On a monitor, your DPI is around 70-120, but each dot is 1 of 16 million colors (really 3 smaller RGB dots). On many printers, while the resolution can be 1440 DPI, a dot can be only one of 4 colors. Some can do blending on the same dot. Some can produce different shades of one color on one dot.
>> The best way to gauge any printer's photo capabilities is looking at sample prints at the store or on printer company websites.
> Except that these are often highly tweaked images and are sometimes even printed from a demo application that doesn't even use the usual printer driver.
Yes, you're right, this is pure crap. One of my long time wishes is that retail stores would have a set of generic test prints that they would produce on each printer that they carried. That way you could compare apples to apples across a variety of image and text prints.
>> Another important specification for inkjet printers is ink drop size, typically measured in picoliters. The smaller the number, the more ink per square inch can be placed on the paper.
> No, the smaller the drop size, the more dots are needed to lay down an equivalent amount of ink.
Perhaps the author meant you can put a bigger variety of ink in the same area. The important factor of drop size, is that some printers will be able to produce different shades of a particular ink in the same dot using a smaller or larger drop size.
The whole thing does read like a big ad for buying a printer though. Not much useful technical information,
>> If I write a book and release it on the internet for everybody to download for free, you still can't copy and sell it without my permission.
> Oh yeah? I'll take 10 dollars for the text above this line, or best offer.
Oh yeah?? I'll take $5 for for all the text above THIS line, or trade for a pizza.
How is web hosting a software subscription? Sure the infrastructure may require some software (ie Plesk, Ensim, etc), but it's not really what you're paying for.
:)
Yes, Microsoft has been thinking about this for a LONG time. Gates wrote about it in his first book "A Road Ahead" and that was puslished in 1995, I think. And I though it was a dumb idea then too.
Actually, I'm sure Mormon's (at least LDS Mormons, which are the vast majority) don't necessarily disbelieve evolution. The church's official stance is pretty much, "We don't and won't know for certain." I know some scientists who are Mormons and they definitely believe in evolution and do so not in conflict of their religion.
They do disapprove of the gays, though.
> Sure, they are chaotic and thus impossible to predict on any usable scale, but that does not mean that they are not deterministic. If there is a soul in there, it would have to interact with the physical body on the level of quarks or something.
I think interaction of sub-atomic particles seem very non-deterministic, no? If the soul were to exist anywhere, why not there? Why does your judgement exclude what you aknowledge to be a viable explanation.
Granted, I don't believe in souls in the Christian sense, and it would be much more difficult to try to get that idea to work.
However, I can't say I am determinist, nor do I find it logical in respect to quantum machanics. How can you determine something when it is definitively uncertain whether it is to occur at all?
Ditto on this for me as well. One PCChips (later coined PCShits) that I had for a Duron 600 was a nightmare. Two friends also got the same board and their experiences were none the better. After two years of BIOS updates, I finally had something that seemed stable, but I was wary of touching it. It was a releif once it stablized since I built the system for my parents and I got calls every few days tell me what the blue screen was saying this time.
I do have a more recent PCChips board, and it is not as bad. A merger with ECS doesn't bolster my confidence in them, though my experience with ECS is limited.
For now I stick to the mid-range Asus, Abit and BioStars and have had good luck.
You might be able to BUILD them for $50 a piece. (Though even this is highly unlikely if it's a government project.) But you sure as hell couldn't distribute them across 60060700 square miles for $50 a pop. Forget about monitoring and maintaining them. Also, ground based transmission makes all sorts of other problems.
AJAX is an abstract concept that describes the use of a pair of technologies, namely JavaScript and XML. It is not a "thing" that can have a vulnerability. JavaScript and XML are ALSO not capable of having vulnerabilities either, since they're just languages. The only things that have vulnerabilites in the computer-related sense are specific pieces of software.
In this case it's a problem with IE for improperly running JavaScript where it shouldn't. Or you could argue it's MySpace's fault for not knowing that IE would run it.
Also, it much nicer than suing people, and possibly more effective.
PhoneyWorld. ::sigh::
This is untrue. The age of consent is different in each state. For most it is 16.
Well, large DPIs also take longer to scan.
Also can the OCR software USE an 800dpi image? Most of them I've used take only 300dpi images, some only 200dpi. At some point it's not going to matter, and I would say it's probably well below 800dpi.
I would have to say for this post, pretty much any scanner would work.