How come the site says this then? "Dr Paull said although the signs so far have been positive, it is still too early to say the scramjet experiment has succeeded. The scramjet experiment took place within only the last few seconds of the flight, lasting almost 10 minutes."
(OK - I'm hair splitting, it looks positive, but jumping the gun like this doesn't help anyone if it turns out that everything was just a fluke;-)
Umm, also because the round shape allows for the largest possible object to be fitted through at any orientation for the given surface area.
Say you have a fat workman who represents the maximum size person you require to be fitted down a manhole. Measuring his body in cross-sections you find that the largest diameter across his body is 75cm. A circular manhole that has a diameter of 76cm (giving him a little extra room) has a smaller surface area than a square with sides measuring 76cm. The smaller the surface area, the cheaper the manhole!
Interesting points. I understand where the reviewer was coming from though regarding Nautilus - when I first installed Ximian Gnome I was using a slow machine and Nautilus chewed through pretty much all the memory I had - and then some. At that point I could kill Nautilus and return to my old desktop. However, Nautilus was still set as the default file manager and openenig it would start up Nautilus on the desktop again. The only way to stop it was to remove it from the running programs in the Gnome session list and restart Gnome. Pain in the rear!
Since I upgraded my machine I haven't really noticed it as much. I'm still not a grat fan of it as a file manager though...
The reviewers comments about theme management menu choices seem very sound to me. As a long time user of Linux on the desktop I often find that default menu layouts for Gnome & KDE are confusing and unintuitive.
I'm also less than keen on what I have experienced of Nautilus so far and hearing that turning it off presents a naked desktop doesn't do much for my confidence in this product.
*sigh* I guess I'll be waiting for the next release before upgrading.
The only thing Mitnick is better at than hacking (or possibly eating pizza!) is publicity grubbing. Let's face it, there have been thousands of better crackers, but Mitnick manages to always claim the spotlight. Most people would want to lie low after what Mitnick has been through - but he has a career as "Celebrity Cracker" to maintain.
I liked this quote "The only way I know that this is a Nortel document is to take you at your word, correct?," asked Riley. "How do we know that you're not social engineering us now?" - now *that* guy is thinking correctly!
It sounds like pretty much the same concept and bearing in mind the recent demise of Hailstorm they must find *some* way to recycle all the intellectual capital(??!) they poured into that...
Bizarre - I've had a Yahoo mail account for a couple of years which I use only for forwarding work mail so I can pick it up with my WAP phone and I haven't had a single piece of spam to the account. It does have a pretty obfuscated username (it's not something like dude666 it's more like random letters).
I sometimes wonder whether some people get spam on such services because their username is easily "guessable" by a spambot. I mean something like dude666 is going to be much easier to guess than hwklnmd!
And there we were wondering why Microsoft were so prepared to back down and close their Hailstorm division. Who wants to bet that a good deal of the technology they were researching there shows up in their future gaming plans?
This is something that would *so* fit ThinkGeek's product line. I hope someone from there keeps an eye on the status of this product and gets them in stock when they are finally availabe.
In a bedroom in London to be precise! It was to avoid these sorts of bandwidth problems that Chris got ZDNet to take it over! I thought he had pulled down the old site though, but no! Slashdot have to link to both of them! Oh well;-) He'll weather the storm!
Lines like this One of those clients, Dell, has prodded Quanta to move more of its production to mainland China, where labor and other costs are much lower. in the article are pretty worrying. Anyone who has read "No Logo" by Naomi Klein will tell you that the outsourcing of piecework like this to countries with bad human rights records increases the problem of sweatshop labour.
China in particular has a bad reputation for this sort of thing, abusing both its own people and those of nearby countries that it lays claim to (Tibet for instance). Companies like Quanta in the article are the "acceptable face" of this work. They hire subcontractors who in turn hire their own subcontractors, hiding the problem from their parent companies. However if Dell are asking Quanta to move production to China, I would speculate that they almost definitely know what the end result will be.
If you've got the pile of CD's sitting on a spindle, then how about using two "fingers" to grip the top CD by the edges. I'm thinking of something along the lines of two longish pieces of metal / plastic with a soft plastic / rubber/silicon coating. Set them at about a 20-30 degree angle from the vertical and at a width where they can be lowered down to encompass the spindle of CDs.
Once lowered they close in to grip the top CD. The angle should enable them to close in on only the top CD and lift that off the spindle leaving the others behind.
The main problem I can think of is that they will need to close a different amount for the top CD compared to the lowest CD. I don't know enough about robotics to know whether a pressure feedback sensor can be rigged up to steer this. When it "feels" that it has gripped the top CD it stops closing.
The other problem is that in my experience, CDs on a spindle won't separate from gravity alone. Lift the top one and at least one more will follow with it. Perhaps one would need to go through the spindle manually first and separate all the CDs.
While I think there's a certain logic in your answer, I however find myself wondering whether you haven't missed a point. Perhaps there is a very good reason why at that company they use this particular OS (though I admit the reason probably has more to do with convenience). In such a case, perhaps XP *is* the right tool for the job. In such a case, isn't it the technician's responsibility to ensure that they know how to use the tool? In the example of socket wrenches, you *know* how to use either S.A.E or metric, but one is extremely unsuited to the job. In the case of an OS, they almost certainly can both perform the task equally well, but have different styles of usage. If I am responsible for an IT department, am I going to make an exception in standards for a single person because they can't be bothered to use the tools provided??
(OK, I am mostly playing devils advocate here, but your argument won't always hold water).
Thye have (had?) one of the Russian Sinclair clones in a display case by the stairs at the staff entrance of the National Science Museum in London when I was there (~5 years ago). First time I had ever seen one. I've often thought how much fun it must have been trying to deal with the strange 5 functions / key system that the Spectrum had PLUS having everything in Cyrrilic(sp?)!
A little OT I know, but I saw the episode of Scrapheap Challenge (British TV program where teams compete to build a specified project out of materials found on a scrapheap within 10 hours!) where they have to build a flying machine.
One of the teams built something using a couple of old wings off a crashed plane, an aluminium ladder and some bits of expanded polystyrene (and sh*tloads of gaffa tape). The astounding thing is that they actually managed to get a few seconds flight from it using a tow launch system!
My point (if I have one) is that it seems a little boring if everything gets over analysed before the first test flight. Of course it makes sense to make the machines moderately safe - correct the obvious glitches, build with higher tolerances etc etc. But don't forget that part of the Wright Brothers' pioneering spirit was a "suck it and see" mentality. They must have been both excited and scared on the first test flight. The pilot for the Scrapheap Challenge project *definitely* had the same spirit and it made his flights extremely exciting!
I was thinking "Developments like this really offer tremendous opportunities for creating a family for those who cannot have children the old fashioned way."... and for the machines to harvest our bodies for fuel when they TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!
Slashdot Mirror
How come the site says this then?
;-)
"Dr Paull said although the signs so far have been positive, it is still too early to say the scramjet experiment has succeeded. The scramjet experiment took place within only the last few seconds of the flight, lasting almost 10 minutes."
(OK - I'm hair splitting, it looks positive, but jumping the gun like this doesn't help anyone if it turns out that everything was just a fluke
Umm, also because the round shape allows for the largest possible object to be fitted through at any orientation for the given surface area.
Say you have a fat workman who represents the maximum size person you require to be fitted down a manhole. Measuring his body in cross-sections you find that the largest diameter across his body is 75cm. A circular manhole that has a diameter of 76cm (giving him a little extra room) has a smaller surface area than a square with sides measuring 76cm. The smaller the surface area, the cheaper the manhole!
Sound right??
Nice one! I was searching around on Google for an answer to that one and I couldn't find anything. Thanks for making it so atmospheric too ;-)
Interesting points. I understand where the reviewer was coming from though regarding Nautilus - when I first installed Ximian Gnome I was using a slow machine and Nautilus chewed through pretty much all the memory I had - and then some. At that point I could kill Nautilus and return to my old desktop. However, Nautilus was still set as the default file manager and openenig it would start up Nautilus on the desktop again. The only way to stop it was to remove it from the running programs in the Gnome session list and restart Gnome. Pain in the rear!
Since I upgraded my machine I haven't really noticed it as much. I'm still not a grat fan of it as a file manager though...
The reviewers comments about theme management menu choices seem very sound to me. As a long time user of Linux on the desktop I often find that default menu layouts for Gnome & KDE are confusing and unintuitive.
I'm also less than keen on what I have experienced of Nautilus so far and hearing that turning it off presents a naked desktop doesn't do much for my confidence in this product.
*sigh* I guess I'll be waiting for the next release before upgrading.
The only thing Mitnick is better at than hacking (or possibly eating pizza!) is publicity grubbing. Let's face it, there have been thousands of better crackers, but Mitnick manages to always claim the spotlight. Most people would want to lie low after what Mitnick has been through - but he has a career as "Celebrity Cracker" to maintain.
I liked this quote "The only way I know that this is a Nortel document is to take you at your word, correct?," asked Riley. "How do we know that you're not social engineering us now?" - now *that* guy is thinking correctly!
I can see it now...
Yo! MC Bush in da (White) house!
:-D
It sounds like pretty much the same concept and bearing in mind the recent demise of Hailstorm they must find *some* way to recycle all the intellectual capital(??!) they poured into that...
no, really! From page to page :-D
Bizarre - I've had a Yahoo mail account for a couple of years which I use only for forwarding work mail so I can pick it up with my WAP phone and I haven't had a single piece of spam to the account. It does have a pretty obfuscated username (it's not something like dude666 it's more like random letters).
I sometimes wonder whether some people get spam on such services because their username is easily "guessable" by a spambot. I mean something like dude666 is going to be much easier to guess than hwklnmd!
And there we were wondering why Microsoft were so prepared to back down and close their Hailstorm division. Who wants to bet that a good deal of the technology they were researching there shows up in their future gaming plans?
This is something that would *so* fit ThinkGeek's product line. I hope someone from there keeps an eye on the status of this product and gets them in stock when they are finally availabe.
In a bedroom in London to be precise! It was to avoid these sorts of bandwidth problems that Chris got ZDNet to take it over! I thought he had pulled down the old site though, but no! Slashdot have to link to both of them! Oh well ;-) He'll weather the storm!
Lines like this One of those clients, Dell, has prodded Quanta to move more of its production to mainland China, where labor and other costs are much lower. in the article are pretty worrying. Anyone who has read "No Logo" by Naomi Klein will tell you that the outsourcing of piecework like this to countries with bad human rights records increases the problem of sweatshop labour.
China in particular has a bad reputation for this sort of thing, abusing both its own people and those of nearby countries that it lays claim to (Tibet for instance). Companies like Quanta in the article are the "acceptable face" of this work. They hire subcontractors who in turn hire their own subcontractors, hiding the problem from their parent companies. However if Dell are asking Quanta to move production to China, I would speculate that they almost definitely know what the end result will be.
I love this show.
If you've got the pile of CD's sitting on a spindle, then how about using two "fingers" to grip the top CD by the edges. I'm thinking of something along the lines of two longish pieces of metal / plastic with a soft plastic / rubber /silicon coating. Set them at about a 20-30 degree angle from the vertical and at a width where they can be lowered down to encompass the spindle of CDs.
Once lowered they close in to grip the top CD. The angle should enable them to close in on only the top CD and lift that off the spindle leaving the others behind.
The main problem I can think of is that they will need to close a different amount for the top CD compared to the lowest CD. I don't know enough about robotics to know whether a pressure feedback sensor can be rigged up to steer this. When it "feels" that it has gripped the top CD it stops closing.
The other problem is that in my experience, CDs on a spindle won't separate from gravity alone. Lift the top one and at least one more will follow with it. Perhaps one would need to go through the spindle manually first and separate all the CDs.
While I think there's a certain logic in your answer, I however find myself wondering whether you haven't missed a point. Perhaps there is a very good reason why at that company they use this particular OS (though I admit the reason probably has more to do with convenience). In such a case, perhaps XP *is* the right tool for the job. In such a case, isn't it the technician's responsibility to ensure that they know how to use the tool?
In the example of socket wrenches, you *know* how to use either S.A.E or metric, but one is extremely unsuited to the job. In the case of an OS, they almost certainly can both perform the task equally well, but have different styles of usage. If I am responsible for an IT department, am I going to make an exception in standards for a single person because they can't be bothered to use the tools provided??
(OK, I am mostly playing devils advocate here, but your argument won't always hold water).
Ah yes! Trust the drunken chem major :-D
/. these days!
Actually I realy liked this guy's post - it has a playfulness that's all too lacking on
Thye have (had?) one of the Russian Sinclair clones in a display case by the stairs at the staff entrance of the National Science Museum in London when I was there (~5 years ago). First time I had ever seen one. I've often thought how much fun it must have been trying to deal with the strange 5 functions / key system that the Spectrum had PLUS having everything in Cyrrilic(sp?)!
I'd love to pick up one of those babies!
I'd rather place my money on getting a first edition Megway
http://www.megway.com/
Remember - women drool at the sight of a man on a Megway??
Just 1 week ago, this link:3 /154524 9&mode=thread
/ products/datas heets/mpc.asp
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/1
showcased two micro PC's from Dgital-Logic
http://www.digitallogic.com/english
Which were both fanless and tiny.
Does nobody actually read Slashdot any more? How shoddy can you get??
A little OT I know, but I saw the episode of Scrapheap Challenge (British TV program where teams compete to build a specified project out of materials found on a scrapheap within 10 hours!) where they have to build a flying machine.
One of the teams built something using a couple of old wings off a crashed plane, an aluminium ladder and some bits of expanded polystyrene (and sh*tloads of gaffa tape). The astounding thing is that they actually managed to get a few seconds flight from it using a tow launch system!
My point (if I have one) is that it seems a little boring if everything gets over analysed before the first test flight. Of course it makes sense to make the machines moderately safe - correct the obvious glitches, build with higher tolerances etc etc. But don't forget that part of the Wright Brothers' pioneering spirit was a "suck it and see" mentality. They must have been both excited and scared on the first test flight. The pilot for the Scrapheap Challenge project *definitely* had the same spirit and it made his flights extremely exciting!
I was thinking "Developments like this really offer tremendous opportunities for creating a family for those who cannot have children the old fashioned way." ... and for the machines to harvest our bodies for fuel when they TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ah! I was wondering why Cardiff was picked as the test city for this system...
... now I know why!
;-)
Well, you may not be a programmer, but at least you know how to fsck!
;)