A couple of my old laptops had trackpoints. I tried using them once or twice, but found them infuriating and very unergonomic (muscles tensed but almost no movement is a recipe for disaster) to use. You basically replace the freedom of movement of a mouse with 8 discrete directions, like a joystick. They also interfered with the laptop keyboard, making it much too easy to insert spurious mouse movements in between keystrokes (my "favorite" was its tendency to interpret random movement as a click-and-drag, selecting whole swathes of text to be deleted a the next keypress). So I ended up disabling the trackpoint (luckily there was an option for that in the mouse/trackpad control panel).
And here I find people lamenting its absence from a laptop. It takes all sorts, I guess...
The effect of German and Danish investments in green energy is being drowned out, for the moment, by the price collapse of fossil fuels. That doesn't mean "the green energy revolution has failed". Those investments will continue to pay off over the next 30 years. You can pretty much guarantee that fossil fuels won't stay at their current price points for those 30 years.
As for "pollution isn't caused by the diggers", I refer you to the strip-mining operations that fuel Germany's coal plants.
3D navigation with a mouse is a PITA, so do yourself a favor and find a CAD program that is compatible with a 3D controller (the 3DConnexion controllers, for instance). This made my life a bit easier, at least.
As another poster said, most CAD packages have a terrible UI. Be prepared to spend lots of time.
SketchUp is a pleasant exception, but that's because it has relatively few features. Nevertheless, it's a good starting point. Use it until you run into its limitations, and use the knowledge you've gained to make an informed decision about your next step.
I've recently started using PTC Creo Elements (formerly Pro-Engineer, I believe). It couples a very complicated UI with useless documentation.
I've also used Inivis AC3D. After running into SketchUp's limitations, I tried a number of CAD packages, and this what I ended up with. I wanted an application where I could use at least some of my Adobe Illustrator experience, so I downloaded a couple of programs and tried drawing a simple curved shape (a rocket engine nozzle) in it. AC3D was the only one where I managed to do this within an hour or so. Its drawback is that it doesn't do parametric (Bezier) curves.
when you lose spacecraft because they run out of consumables. What could we have learned if we'd had continuous IR coverage since the launch of IRAS in 1983, instead of a couple of missions each 1-3 years long?
You know, posts like this are why I keep coming to/.. I'd have never come across OpenBeam otherwise, and it looks like a perfect fit for some projects I'm working on.
I've been using a Firefox extension called Leechblock that allows you to set a limit to how much time you spend on a website. When your time's up, away goes the site.
I could open the blocked website in another browser and continue, but a. I only have Firefox and IE installed, and IE is a stock install without any saved passwords, cookies, adblocker etc. so I end up browsing/. without being logged in, which is painful enough that I rarely do it. b. the blocking page serves as a reminder and psychological barrier.
Some time ago, I decided to try creating some models for 3D printing. I'd never used a 3d CAD package before. I do have experience with 2D vector programs, mainly Adobe Illustrator.
So I started by trying several CAD apps. I'd download one and try to create a simple shape (cube, cylinder). - Sketchup is great. You're up and running in seconds. The version I used had one big flaw though: there was no way to enter exact dimensions for an object. So no Sketchup for me. (The latest version may be more capable in this regard, though). I tried several others, including Blender (may have been before the UI redesign). All failed this test. If I can't figure out how to draw a rectangle, you're doing something wrong.
In the end I used Inivis AC3D, which did pass the test.
I've also found that a 3D controller (e.g. the 3DConnexion ones) makes life much simpler than trying to rotate/pan/zoom your object with the mouse. There's no standard gesture for these operations, so each program works differently. This wreaks havoc when you need several programs to create your model (AC3D and Netfabb, in my case).
Engines that can do this are rare: only the recent engines with displacement-on-demand may be able to keep valves closed. All others have mechanical connections all the way from crankshaft to valves, so they have no way to not open a valve.
No, we think that wearing a suit is uncomfortable, expensive and inefficient. It also doesn't accomplish anything. The suit represents everything that's wrong with concepts like fashion. The tie, for instance: it's a useless piece of clothing that doesn't do anything except get in the way, and hasn't done anything for hundreds of years.
Yet it's still seen as an essential item of clothing by people who care for appearance over practicality, and who see nothing wrong with judging people on their appearance. They're the ones who think they're superior. We're just being practical.
GP was talking about "conservation efforts", which is a broader class than just 'climate change or greenhouse gasses'. In this case, the conservation efforts included regulating/banning the use of CFCs which are a major contributor to the hole in the ozone layer. And yes, those efforts were successful.
Not being familiar with the game: was the video included as such with the game? As a cutscene, introduction or whatever?
Or was the video a recorded sequence of gameplay? If this is the case, is it right for the games company to have copyright on what I consider user-generated content? Does Notch now have a precedent to take down Youtube videos of Minecraft constructs?
It's easy to be all neener, neener in this particular case, but IMO we're seeing an abuse of the law here.
I disagree. Microfinance organisations operate in a middle ground between charity and commercial banks. They offer a way to stretch your money. Instead of your $100 donation helping one person with a gift, the same $100 can be recycled dozens of times to help people via loans. It's the 'teach a man to fish' meme put into practice.
Any interest paid on the loan goes toward the operating cost. I don't mind this. In comparison, my commercial bank charges me ~$ 100/year for two accounts, a debit card and a credit card.
Attacks as described in TFS are called saturation attacks. Since the advent of the guided missile, this has always been a big headache for naval designers. Early missile-equipped ships had 2-4 radar directors, each capable of guiding one missile to its target. Navies wanted more, but there are constraints (financial, weight, systems complexity) to the number of directors you can add.
The US Navy was the first to develop a partial solution in the shape of NTU ('New Threat Upgrade'), a system where one director could guide several missiles. This meant that the weakest link was now the missile launchers: even the biggest ships has only two twin-arm mechanical launchers so they were limited to a couple of missile launches per minute.
The whole point of AEGIS was to provide a ship with enough defensive capability to defeat saturation attacks by the biggest threat on the planet: the Russian naval airforce.
This meant using a phased-array radar that could track hundreds of targets, directors derived from NTU that could guide up to 18 missiles at once, and a vertical launch system that can fire more than 30 missiles/minute.
In the end, it becomes a financial problem. A Ticonderoga-class cruiser has 128 missiles on board, that's easily $120M in missile inventory. AEGIS isn't cheap either.
As missiles become cheaper, the calculation changes. The recent Israeli successes with missile defence using missiles that cost $100k instead of $1M shows that Defence departments are well aware of this.
Still, anyone contemplating an attack on US Navy vessels usually has to contend not with one ship, but with a battle group of several of the best-defended ships on the planet, plus potentially an aircraft carrier that carries more firepower than most of the world's air forces.
Moore's law has no bearing on the big-ticket items for ISPs: - cabling. Stringing new cables or worse, digging up the street is never going to be free. If Google is putting in FTTH, they're spending a lot. - subscriber equipment: cramming ever more bandwidth into a phone line means ever more complicated signalling equipment. Using fiber simplifies this (although fiber signalling equipment isn't cheap either), but then you have to lay the cables first, see the point above. - support - administration
A structure large enough to store a sufficient amount of water is very expensive. Dinorwig in the UK uses 60 m^3 of water per second dropping from 500 m altitude to produce 1800 MW. This would empty an oil platform tank in an hour. Less in the North Sea, because it's only 50 m deep on average so you don't get as much potential energy stored in the water. Dinorwig's reservoir is 6.7 million m^3.
Slashdot Mirror
We also need to be reminded that Google's based in Mountain View, CA. (rolleyes)
A couple of my old laptops had trackpoints. I tried using them once or twice, but found them infuriating and very unergonomic (muscles tensed but almost no movement is a recipe for disaster) to use. You basically replace the freedom of movement of a mouse with 8 discrete directions, like a joystick. They also interfered with the laptop keyboard, making it much too easy to insert spurious mouse movements in between keystrokes (my "favorite" was its tendency to interpret random movement as a click-and-drag, selecting whole swathes of text to be deleted a the next keypress). So I ended up disabling the trackpoint (luckily there was an option for that in the mouse/trackpad control panel).
And here I find people lamenting its absence from a laptop. It takes all sorts, I guess...
The effect of German and Danish investments in green energy is being drowned out, for the moment, by the price collapse of fossil fuels. That doesn't mean "the green energy revolution has failed". Those investments will continue to pay off over the next 30 years. You can pretty much guarantee that fossil fuels won't stay at their current price points for those 30 years.
As for "pollution isn't caused by the diggers", I refer you to the strip-mining operations that fuel Germany's coal plants.
3D navigation with a mouse is a PITA, so do yourself a favor and find a CAD program that is compatible with a 3D controller (the 3DConnexion controllers, for instance). This made my life a bit easier, at least.
As another poster said, most CAD packages have a terrible UI. Be prepared to spend lots of time.
SketchUp is a pleasant exception, but that's because it has relatively few features. Nevertheless, it's a good starting point. Use it until you run into its limitations, and use the knowledge you've gained to make an informed decision about your next step.
I've recently started using PTC Creo Elements (formerly Pro-Engineer, I believe). It couples a very complicated UI with useless documentation.
I've also used Inivis AC3D. After running into SketchUp's limitations, I tried a number of CAD packages, and this what I ended up with. I wanted an application where I could use at least some of my Adobe Illustrator experience, so I downloaded a couple of programs and tried drawing a simple curved shape (a rocket engine nozzle) in it. AC3D was the only one where I managed to do this within an hour or so.
Its drawback is that it doesn't do parametric (Bezier) curves.
when you lose spacecraft because they run out of consumables. What could we have learned if we'd had continuous IR coverage since the launch of IRAS in 1983, instead of a couple of missions each 1-3 years long?
You know, posts like this are why I keep coming to /..
I'd have never come across OpenBeam otherwise, and it looks like a perfect fit for some projects I'm working on.
I've been using a Firefox extension called Leechblock that allows you to set a limit to how much time you spend on a website. When your time's up, away goes the site.
I could open the blocked website in another browser and continue, but /. without being logged in, which is painful enough that I rarely do it.
a. I only have Firefox and IE installed, and IE is a stock install without any saved passwords, cookies, adblocker etc. so I end up browsing
b. the blocking page serves as a reminder and psychological barrier.
You should change your desktop background to this
59fps? Why that number? And how does that work with your monitor, which I assume refreshes at 60 Hz?
Some time ago, I decided to try creating some models for 3D printing. I'd never used a 3d CAD package before. I do have experience with 2D vector programs, mainly Adobe Illustrator.
So I started by trying several CAD apps. I'd download one and try to create a simple shape (cube, cylinder).
- Sketchup is great. You're up and running in seconds. The version I used had one big flaw though: there was no way to enter exact dimensions for an object. So no Sketchup for me. (The latest version may be more capable in this regard, though).
I tried several others, including Blender (may have been before the UI redesign). All failed this test. If I can't figure out how to draw a rectangle, you're doing something wrong.
In the end I used Inivis AC3D, which did pass the test.
I've also found that a 3D controller (e.g. the 3DConnexion ones) makes life much simpler than trying to rotate/pan/zoom your object with the mouse. There's no standard gesture for these operations, so each program works differently. This wreaks havoc when you need several programs to create your model (AC3D and Netfabb, in my case).
Engines that can do this are rare: only the recent engines with displacement-on-demand may be able to keep valves closed. All others have mechanical connections all the way from crankshaft to valves, so they have no way to not open a valve.
Would Photoshop CS 6 (or wherever they are these days) still contain code from the 1.0 days?
No, we think that wearing a suit is uncomfortable, expensive and inefficient. It also doesn't accomplish anything.
The suit represents everything that's wrong with concepts like fashion. The tie, for instance: it's a useless piece of clothing that doesn't do anything except get in the way, and hasn't done anything for hundreds of years.
Yet it's still seen as an essential item of clothing by people who care for appearance over practicality, and who see nothing wrong with judging people on their appearance. They're the ones who think they're superior. We're just being practical.
IIRC the second was Catastrophe instead.
GP was talking about "conservation efforts", which is a broader class than just 'climate change or greenhouse gasses'. In this case, the conservation efforts included regulating/banning the use of CFCs which are a major contributor to the hole in the ozone layer. And yes, those efforts were successful.
Not being familiar with the game: was the video included as such with the game? As a cutscene, introduction or whatever?
Or was the video a recorded sequence of gameplay? If this is the case, is it right for the games company to have copyright on what I consider user-generated content? Does Notch now have a precedent to take down Youtube videos of Minecraft constructs?
It's easy to be all neener, neener in this particular case, but IMO we're seeing an abuse of the law here.
I disagree. Microfinance organisations operate in a middle ground between charity and commercial banks. They offer a way to stretch your money. Instead of your $100 donation helping one person with a gift, the same $100 can be recycled dozens of times to help people via loans. It's the 'teach a man to fish' meme put into practice.
Any interest paid on the loan goes toward the operating cost. I don't mind this. In comparison, my commercial bank charges me ~$ 100/year for two accounts, a debit card and a credit card.
Attacks as described in TFS are called saturation attacks. Since the advent of the guided missile, this has always been a big headache for naval designers. Early missile-equipped ships had 2-4 radar directors, each capable of guiding one missile to its target. Navies wanted more, but there are constraints (financial, weight, systems complexity) to the number of directors you can add.
The US Navy was the first to develop a partial solution in the shape of NTU ('New Threat Upgrade'), a system where one director could guide several missiles. This meant that the weakest link was now the missile launchers: even the biggest ships has only two twin-arm mechanical launchers so they were limited to a couple of missile launches per minute.
The whole point of AEGIS was to provide a ship with enough defensive capability to defeat saturation attacks by the biggest threat on the planet: the Russian naval airforce.
This meant using a phased-array radar that could track hundreds of targets, directors derived from NTU that could guide up to 18 missiles at once, and a vertical launch system that can fire more than 30 missiles/minute.
In the end, it becomes a financial problem. A Ticonderoga-class cruiser has 128 missiles on board, that's easily $120M in missile inventory. AEGIS isn't cheap either.
As missiles become cheaper, the calculation changes. The recent Israeli successes with missile defence using missiles that cost $100k instead of $1M shows that Defence departments are well aware of this.
Still, anyone contemplating an attack on US Navy vessels usually has to contend not with one ship, but with a battle group of several of the best-defended ships on the planet, plus potentially an aircraft carrier that carries more firepower than most of the world's air forces.
Moore's law has no bearing on the big-ticket items for ISPs:
- cabling. Stringing new cables or worse, digging up the street is never going to be free. If Google is putting in FTTH, they're spending a lot.
- subscriber equipment: cramming ever more bandwidth into a phone line means ever more complicated signalling equipment. Using fiber simplifies this (although fiber signalling equipment isn't cheap either), but then you have to lay the cables first, see the point above.
- support
- administration
Blanks or no, I wouldn't be wild about being pelted with hot brass falling at terminal velocity.
About 50%, according to a recent poll.
They tried that, but the spacecraft has been in lunar orbit for a while now and the cable got all tangled up.
6 atmospheres is very low for a CAES.
A structure large enough to store a sufficient amount of water is very expensive.
Dinorwig in the UK uses 60 m^3 of water per second dropping from 500 m altitude to produce 1800 MW. This would empty an oil platform tank in an hour. Less in the North Sea, because it's only 50 m deep on average so you don't get as much potential energy stored in the water.
Dinorwig's reservoir is 6.7 million m^3.