For the last year or so there's been an exhibition going around Spain of Alfonso Azpiri's work (for cover art for Sinclair Spectrum, Amstrad CPC etc.) games from the 1980s. Azpiri is a well known comic artist in Spain, so it's been drawing quite a crowd and has had TV coverage. His art was probably the best exemplar of the tape/cartridge box art of the era, and he made artwork for around 200 games. Quite often, the game content would be changed a bit when the programmers saw Azpiri's artwork. (I had the privilege of going to RetroAcción's dinner this year, with Azpiri and some of the pioneers of Spanish games in the 1980s, including the authors of the first commercial Spanish computer game). I also got to meet Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari) at that event, he visited us at the RetroAcción stand (in Euskal Encounter, the 2nd biggest LAN party in Spain with over 4000 gamers).
Here's some information about Azpiri's exhibition: http://www.retroaccion.org/exposicion-spectrum-del-pincel-al-pixel (Del Pincel al Pixel - from the paintbrush to the pixel). It's in Spanish, but there's plenty of images there so you don't really need to read much:-) Azpiri's cover art was well known amongst those who had a Spectrum, Amstrad CPC or MSX (I think there was some of his cover art on C64 games too).
He recently also made cover art for "La Corona Encantada" (The Enchanted Crown), a new game for the ZX Spectrum and the MSX (came out last year, yes, people still write Speccy and MSX games!)
I think a lot of GA pilots forget about the old 'look out the window' type of VFR navigation.
I learned to fly in the late 1990s (when GPS was available widely enough), with a reasonably ancient instructor. A few years later, in 2002, I'd fly a Cessna 140 from coast to coast in the USA, navigating by looking out of the window. It was more fun to do it that way.
I think GPS is pretty useful and it's worth having one on board, but it's always worth every so often doing at least a flight to somewhere fun an hour or two away without using it. One day you might need it, and it really isn't too hard - so long as you keep track of time and can fly an honest heading.
I agree. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way languages are taught in the English speaking world (the UK is just as bad, if not worse, than the US). The usual thing that's said is "[British|American] people can't learn different languages", and later in life, "Adults can't learn a new language". Neither is true.
British and American people can learn a language just as well as anyone else. The problem is partly the way languages are taught in schools (mostly, it's about as fun and interesting as watching paint dry) and the other part of the problem is people (especially the less dedicated students) thinking "I speak English, which is the dominant language, why should I bother learning another language?"
I started learning Spanish in May 2008 (well into my 30s). In six months I had learned more Spanish than I had French in *seven years* of compulsory French at school. At 16, I could not describe what I had done that morning in French. But after 1 year of Spanish, I actually gave a talk in Spanish at RetroEuskal in Bilbao (OK, so I planned pretty thoroughly what I was going to say, but the main thing is - in my 30s I was learning Spanish orders of magnitude more quickly than I was learning French at school).
The difference is, learning Spanish, I have never seen a teacher. It has all been from websites, podcasts, an online subscription to Rosetta Stone for a while, talking with people in Spain on internet forums, online language exchanges - social things and fun things. Not sitting and having to rote memorise verb conjugations, but actually using the language for real. Yes, I did sit down and go through the "boring bits" like learning grammar (because it means you can learn much faster). But even learning the grammar under my own steam from various websites was more fun than being taught at school.
So when I was a kid and should have been able to soak up French like a sponge, I didn't. Why? I admit I wasn't a great student, but the teaching methods were also terrible. People learned French at school in spite of the teaching not because of it. No one I know who studied French at school, even passing the GCSE at 16, can actually really speak any worthwhile French. Even the good students at school who wanted to do well can barely order a meal in French when they are in France on vacation.
Heya Tom it's Bob, from the office down the hall, Good to see you buddy how ya been? Things have been OK with me except that I'm a zombie now I really wish you'd let us in....
The *awesome* Jonathan Coulton made a song called "Re: Your Brains". Find it on YouTube, it's great:)
No they won't. The most security I've seen on a train is the long distance routes in Spain (there's a history of train bombing there by ETA (the Basque separatists) and the 11-M attacks in Madrid). The security consists of an x-ray conveyor for your luggage. It causes a delay of you getting from the station concourse to the actual train of approximately 60 seconds. I only allowed 10 minutes at the station to find and get on the train, and had 9 minutes to spare after passing this security (it's also where your tickets are checked, so even without the X-ray, you'd have about a 60 second delay lining up to have your ticket scanned since the two things are done in parallel).
Compare that to airlines where you need to check in at least an hour in advance, can't carry useful quantities of liquids, can't carry a full size suitcase as hand luggage.
There are plenty of places in the US where high speed trains would work wonderfully though, for example the north east conurbations and California. Just because you can't do it in Texas doesn't mean you can't do it in other places. Just like Texas shouldn't dictate the right wing neocon religious theme for school text books, what is possible in Texas shouldn't dictate what happens in the rest of the country.
The worst, I've found, in Spanish is "wikipedear". I've noted that these neologisms (googlear, wikipediar etc.) only get used in the participle or gerund, never as the usual first/second/third person etc. conjugations (you see things like "Lo he googleado..." but never "lo googlearé" etc.
Just a nitpick - AM and FM would have to be turned off in airplane mode, radio receivers are prohibited in aircraft at the moment (due to radiated energy from the local oscillator which is at similar frequencies to radio navigation aids, indeed the ancient NDB is in the same band as AM radio).
A car is far more dangerous to bystanders, don't forget - 1.5 tonnes of steel make a nasty mess of a pedestrian.
It's quite simple, if you're driving, don't have a glass of wine with your meal. Is it really *that* hard?
In aviation, by law, even if you're only flying an ultralight and you are not putting anyone else in danger it's 8 hours bottle to throttle. By law. Most people who fly light aircraft leave 12 hours. It's just not that hard to say, "No I won't have a beer/wine, I'll have a $SOFTDRINK instead". It just ain't rocket science.
The aircraft he used is a perfectly good aircraft, and is used by Alaskan bush pilots.
Sen. Stevens didn't take the risk, the *pilot in command* took the risk. The pilot in command is the final authority on the safety of the flight. Nobody else. The PIC could have said "no, the weather's too bad", but he didn't.
I wouldn't want to be in any aircraft, new or old, in bad weather in mountains. Given the same circumstances, a plane that was a day old would have been crashed.
If you fly radio controlled electric aircraft, you can see a difference almost year on year. I just bought a couple of new LiPoly packs to replace some older ones that had been through one too many crashes (one had puffed, probably due in part to mechanical damage). The new batteries have more capacity and are no larger than the old ones (gone from 2100mAh 6 cell to 2700mAh 6 cell). For RC aircraft, smaller and lighter is much better so the battery makers are always looking for smaller and lighter, in other words, higher energy density.
While the number of charges is very good, by comparison the 4.2ah 22.2v lipoly for my RC helicopter has a max continuous discharge rate of 30c (about 120 amps) and a peak discharge rate of double that. These new batteries will be excellent for laptops, but improvement in discharge rate is needed for propulsion....
Sounds like Java was the wrong tool for the job. There are other languages designed explicitly for massive concurrency which may have worked out better.
We already *know* that the Chinese government abuses human rights. China abuses human rights. Teenage boys wear hoods. Bears shit in the woods.
On the other hand, the United States claims to be whiter than white, and claims to value freedom and all the rest. Therefore, it is much more significant when you can prove the US government is saying one thing, but in reality is sending people for torture, lying to the electorate, doing things at the behest of energy company executives etcetera.
While I would defend 100% his right to post this video, there is one thing I wouldn't have done (well, two things really) if it were me:
1. Put the 120+MPH bit on YouTube. That's just asking to attract more unwanted police attention. I'd have just posted the last bit (where he admits to 69 and 80 mph, probably what he got the ticket for) and not put the bit where he overtakes the bus. 2. Do 120+ on a busy highway in the first place.
There's a time and place to go hooning, and it's called a very quiet road where no other traffic is, and where you're reasonably sure there are not cops lurking. And if you do get caught and get a ticket for 80 mph, for heaven's sake don't then admit to 120 in a YouTube video!
Seascape, not landscape, and it changes all the time.
The weather changes all the time, the sky changes all the time, the watery bit does everything from being as flat as a billiard table to rather frightening (you must have heard the phrase "mountainous seas". We certainly see a lot on the small island I live on). You get different animals, you can be amazed that there is a bird this far out. Etc.
Given it's a common ARM microcontroller part (I believe a TI OMAP), being able to reflash it won't be a particular challenge since this processor is very common, and there's software freely available that will flash new firmware onto a TI OMAP.
The challenge will be to actually connect to the JTAG pins if the chip is a BGA (ball grid array - all the "pins" (balls) are on the bottom of the chip and not accessible once the chip is soldered to the board) and the JTAG interface isn't connected to the PCB.
Maybe so, but when you were a lad, hardly *anyone* did computers, you had to be seriously geeky to be online. Being online only became ubiquitous around the year 2000.
I strongly doubt either the Prime Minister nor Deputy Prime Minister were online much before 2000, and even then, not in a pervasive manner. Just because you were in 1985, it doesn't mean everyone else was too (was even 0.1% of the population online in 1985?). For the vast majority of the population, it's only people who are kids now who actually grew up with it being pervasively around them. 99.9% of the people over about 30 are "digital immigrants" by and large.
Shame you got rid of it, I'd like one of the larger noisier VAXen (I have a desktop size MicroVAX 3100). I don't run it all the time but I do take it to retro shows (complete with serial terminal) and use it as a file server for a network of Sinclair Spectrums. A larger VAX would be awesome.
Oh take the tin foil hat off. The "no fly zone" (TFR, temporary flight restriction) is very common with all incidents that require lots of low level flying, for example firefighting. You can still overfly the area, just not at an altitude where you're mixing it up with all the helicopters and aircraft that are engaged directly in monitoring the disaster. You can still go as low as 3,001 feet and take as many photos or as much video as you like.
We had our entire customer facing counter network (70 systems) hit by the bad capacitor problem (with machines from Hewlett-Packard). The HP local agent fixed all of the machines, whether failing or not - no questions asked, no trying to wriggle out of it, no saying "the computer's in a place too hot and confined" or any of that bravo-sierra. They stood behind their product and fixed it.
Dell on the other hand, according to the article linked in the older Slashdot posting, tried damned hard to blame the customer and wriggle out of it, even supplying newer defective boards as the fix.
Slashdot Mirror
For the last year or so there's been an exhibition going around Spain of Alfonso Azpiri's work (for cover art for Sinclair Spectrum, Amstrad CPC etc.) games from the 1980s. Azpiri is a well known comic artist in Spain, so it's been drawing quite a crowd and has had TV coverage. His art was probably the best exemplar of the tape/cartridge box art of the era, and he made artwork for around 200 games. Quite often, the game content would be changed a bit when the programmers saw Azpiri's artwork. (I had the privilege of going to RetroAcción's dinner this year, with Azpiri and some of the pioneers of Spanish games in the 1980s, including the authors of the first commercial Spanish computer game). I also got to meet Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari) at that event, he visited us at the RetroAcción stand (in Euskal Encounter, the 2nd biggest LAN party in Spain with over 4000 gamers).
Here's some information about Azpiri's exhibition: http://www.retroaccion.org/exposicion-spectrum-del-pincel-al-pixel (Del Pincel al Pixel - from the paintbrush to the pixel). It's in Spanish, but there's plenty of images there so you don't really need to read much :-) Azpiri's cover art was well known amongst those who had a Spectrum, Amstrad CPC or MSX (I think there was some of his cover art on C64 games too).
He recently also made cover art for "La Corona Encantada" (The Enchanted Crown), a new game for the ZX Spectrum and the MSX (came out last year, yes, people still write Speccy and MSX games!)
The MM thing for Roman numerals doesn't work though, MM means 2,000 not 1,000,000. So that doesn't work as an explanation. My quest continues...
I think a lot of GA pilots forget about the old 'look out the window' type of VFR navigation.
I learned to fly in the late 1990s (when GPS was available widely enough), with a reasonably ancient instructor. A few years later, in 2002, I'd fly a Cessna 140 from coast to coast in the USA, navigating by looking out of the window. It was more fun to do it that way.
I think GPS is pretty useful and it's worth having one on board, but it's always worth every so often doing at least a flight to somewhere fun an hour or two away without using it. One day you might need it, and it really isn't too hard - so long as you keep track of time and can fly an honest heading.
OT, but curious because no one has ever given me a satisfactory answer:
Why did you write $10MM instead of just $10M?
I agree. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way languages are taught in the English speaking world (the UK is just as bad, if not worse, than the US). The usual thing that's said is "[British|American] people can't learn different languages", and later in life, "Adults can't learn a new language". Neither is true.
British and American people can learn a language just as well as anyone else. The problem is partly the way languages are taught in schools (mostly, it's about as fun and interesting as watching paint dry) and the other part of the problem is people (especially the less dedicated students) thinking "I speak English, which is the dominant language, why should I bother learning another language?"
I started learning Spanish in May 2008 (well into my 30s). In six months I had learned more Spanish than I had French in *seven years* of compulsory French at school. At 16, I could not describe what I had done that morning in French. But after 1 year of Spanish, I actually gave a talk in Spanish at RetroEuskal in Bilbao (OK, so I planned pretty thoroughly what I was going to say, but the main thing is - in my 30s I was learning Spanish orders of magnitude more quickly than I was learning French at school).
The difference is, learning Spanish, I have never seen a teacher. It has all been from websites, podcasts, an online subscription to Rosetta Stone for a while, talking with people in Spain on internet forums, online language exchanges - social things and fun things. Not sitting and having to rote memorise verb conjugations, but actually using the language for real. Yes, I did sit down and go through the "boring bits" like learning grammar (because it means you can learn much faster). But even learning the grammar under my own steam from various websites was more fun than being taught at school.
So when I was a kid and should have been able to soak up French like a sponge, I didn't. Why? I admit I wasn't a great student, but the teaching methods were also terrible. People learned French at school in spite of the teaching not because of it. No one I know who studied French at school, even passing the GCSE at 16, can actually really speak any worthwhile French. Even the good students at school who wanted to do well can barely order a meal in French when they are in France on vacation.
Heya Tom it's Bob, from the office down the hall,
Good to see you buddy how ya been?
Things have been OK with me except that I'm a zombie now
I really wish you'd let us in....
The *awesome* Jonathan Coulton made a song called "Re: Your Brains". Find it on YouTube, it's great :)
No they won't. The most security I've seen on a train is the long distance routes in Spain (there's a history of train bombing there by ETA (the Basque separatists) and the 11-M attacks in Madrid). The security consists of an x-ray conveyor for your luggage. It causes a delay of you getting from the station concourse to the actual train of approximately 60 seconds. I only allowed 10 minutes at the station to find and get on the train, and had 9 minutes to spare after passing this security (it's also where your tickets are checked, so even without the X-ray, you'd have about a 60 second delay lining up to have your ticket scanned since the two things are done in parallel).
Compare that to airlines where you need to check in at least an hour in advance, can't carry useful quantities of liquids, can't carry a full size suitcase as hand luggage.
There are plenty of places in the US where high speed trains would work wonderfully though, for example the north east conurbations and California. Just because you can't do it in Texas doesn't mean you can't do it in other places. Just like Texas shouldn't dictate the right wing neocon religious theme for school text books, what is possible in Texas shouldn't dictate what happens in the rest of the country.
The worst, I've found, in Spanish is "wikipedear". I've noted that these neologisms (googlear, wikipediar etc.) only get used in the participle or gerund, never as the usual first/second/third person etc. conjugations (you see things like "Lo he googleado..." but never "lo googlearé" etc.
Interestingly, "cederrón" - which means CD-ROM - is actually in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española ( http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltConsulta?TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=cederr%C3%B3n, so long as slashdot doesn't butcher the URL)
Just a nitpick - AM and FM would have to be turned off in airplane mode, radio receivers are prohibited in aircraft at the moment (due to radiated energy from the local oscillator which is at similar frequencies to radio navigation aids, indeed the ancient NDB is in the same band as AM radio).
A car is far more dangerous to bystanders, don't forget - 1.5 tonnes of steel make a nasty mess of a pedestrian.
It's quite simple, if you're driving, don't have a glass of wine with your meal. Is it really *that* hard?
In aviation, by law, even if you're only flying an ultralight and you are not putting anyone else in danger it's 8 hours bottle to throttle. By law. Most people who fly light aircraft leave 12 hours. It's just not that hard to say, "No I won't have a beer/wine, I'll have a $SOFTDRINK instead". It just ain't rocket science.
The aircraft he used is a perfectly good aircraft, and is used by Alaskan bush pilots.
Sen. Stevens didn't take the risk, the *pilot in command* took the risk. The pilot in command is the final authority on the safety of the flight. Nobody else. The PIC could have said "no, the weather's too bad", but he didn't.
I wouldn't want to be in any aircraft, new or old, in bad weather in mountains. Given the same circumstances, a plane that was a day old would have been crashed.
If you fly radio controlled electric aircraft, you can see a difference almost year on year. I just bought a couple of new LiPoly packs to replace some older ones that had been through one too many crashes (one had puffed, probably due in part to mechanical damage). The new batteries have more capacity and are no larger than the old ones (gone from 2100mAh 6 cell to 2700mAh 6 cell). For RC aircraft, smaller and lighter is much better so the battery makers are always looking for smaller and lighter, in other words, higher energy density.
While the number of charges is very good, by comparison the 4.2ah 22.2v lipoly for my RC helicopter has a max continuous discharge rate of 30c (about 120 amps) and a peak discharge rate of double that. These new batteries will be excellent for laptops, but improvement in discharge rate is needed for propulsion....
Sounds like Java was the wrong tool for the job. There are other languages designed explicitly for massive concurrency which may have worked out better.
We already *know* that the Chinese government abuses human rights. China abuses human rights. Teenage boys wear hoods. Bears shit in the woods.
On the other hand, the United States claims to be whiter than white, and claims to value freedom and all the rest. Therefore, it is much more significant when you can prove the US government is saying one thing, but in reality is sending people for torture, lying to the electorate, doing things at the behest of energy company executives etcetera.
While I would defend 100% his right to post this video, there is one thing I wouldn't have done (well, two things really) if it were me:
1. Put the 120+MPH bit on YouTube. That's just asking to attract more unwanted police attention. I'd have just posted the last bit (where he admits to 69 and 80 mph, probably what he got the ticket for) and not put the bit where he overtakes the bus.
2. Do 120+ on a busy highway in the first place.
There's a time and place to go hooning, and it's called a very quiet road where no other traffic is, and where you're reasonably sure there are not cops lurking. And if you do get caught and get a ticket for 80 mph, for heaven's sake don't then admit to 120 in a YouTube video!
Seascape, not landscape, and it changes all the time.
The weather changes all the time, the sky changes all the time, the watery bit does everything from being as flat as a billiard table to rather frightening (you must have heard the phrase "mountainous seas". We certainly see a lot on the small island I live on). You get different animals, you can be amazed that there is a bird this far out. Etc.
Given it's a common ARM microcontroller part (I believe a TI OMAP), being able to reflash it won't be a particular challenge since this processor is very common, and there's software freely available that will flash new firmware onto a TI OMAP.
The challenge will be to actually connect to the JTAG pins if the chip is a BGA (ball grid array - all the "pins" (balls) are on the bottom of the chip and not accessible once the chip is soldered to the board) and the JTAG interface isn't connected to the PCB.
Maybe so, but when you were a lad, hardly *anyone* did computers, you had to be seriously geeky to be online. Being online only became ubiquitous around the year 2000.
I strongly doubt either the Prime Minister nor Deputy Prime Minister were online much before 2000, and even then, not in a pervasive manner. Just because you were in 1985, it doesn't mean everyone else was too (was even 0.1% of the population online in 1985?). For the vast majority of the population, it's only people who are kids now who actually grew up with it being pervasively around them. 99.9% of the people over about 30 are "digital immigrants" by and large.
Shame you got rid of it, I'd like one of the larger noisier VAXen (I have a desktop size MicroVAX 3100). I don't run it all the time but I do take it to retro shows (complete with serial terminal) and use it as a file server for a network of Sinclair Spectrums. A larger VAX would be awesome.
There are games like Starcraft II that don't have a monthly fee, though. They may not have CC details for players of those games.
Oh take the tin foil hat off. The "no fly zone" (TFR, temporary flight restriction) is very common with all incidents that require lots of low level flying, for example firefighting. You can still overfly the area, just not at an altitude where you're mixing it up with all the helicopters and aircraft that are engaged directly in monitoring the disaster. You can still go as low as 3,001 feet and take as many photos or as much video as you like.
It's how the company addresses it.
We had our entire customer facing counter network (70 systems) hit by the bad capacitor problem (with machines from Hewlett-Packard). The HP local agent fixed all of the machines, whether failing or not - no questions asked, no trying to wriggle out of it, no saying "the computer's in a place too hot and confined" or any of that bravo-sierra. They stood behind their product and fixed it.
Dell on the other hand, according to the article linked in the older Slashdot posting, tried damned hard to blame the customer and wriggle out of it, even supplying newer defective boards as the fix.
Unlikely. How much are they going to lose from hams texting using their own kit? 20 euros a month, total, across the whole country?